‘The Goddess Technology is a polyglot’: a critical review of Eric Schatzberg, Technology: critical history of a concept

Abstract

The modern concept of technology, we argue, is not the product of an exclusively Western and intellectual genealogy, as proposed by Eric Schatzberg in Technology: Critical History of a Concept. Instead its emergence must be understood as the product of a worldwide ferment, polyglot dialogue and heterogenous conceptual traditions, a global assemblage whose local manifestations took shape concurrently in multiple centers. The forms taken by this new philosophy of the nature of material action cannot be understood separately from the geopolitics of industrialization, imperialism and modern nation-building. As a concept or worldview, technology is a way of thinking inseparable from praxis. An intellectual history of the idea divorced from the politics and potency of technological action on the ground conveys a false innocence about who and what counts in history of technology, and lends itself to misleadingly simple models of knowledge transfer. Here we analyze the cases of technocracy in imperial and post-war Japan, and the evolution of technology concepts in China from late imperial to Maoist times, to suggest more inclusive approaches to tracing the history of this modern keyword.