Technology, Modernity, and the Possibility of Historical Understanding

Abstract

This paper traces the meaning of technology in Arendt and Foucault’s work, their historical analyses of technology, and the way that their notions of technology’s role in modernity influence their historical methods. I argue that whilst the two political thinkers approach the idea of technology from different perspectives, there is also substantial overlap in the way that they conceive of technology – often critically – as a wide-ranging set of practices of power interlocked with particular modes of knowledge. This helps to properly situate some aspects of their work that converge, for instance their analyses of what Foucault calls ‘biopolitics’. But their different conceptions of the historical character of technology, and its relationship to modernity, also create divergence: their concepts of ‘technology’ suggest different ways of thinking through the nature of historical continuity and discontinuity and the degree of access that we have to meaningful histories.