by Kapp Singer
There’s a Yiddish saying about the futility of counterfactuals: “If grandma had wheels, she would be a wagon.” A historian of science in the 1990s might not have gotten the joke. Scholars at the time developed a peculiar habit of referring to organisms as technologies. Soon, the field teemed with fly technologies (Kohler 1994), dog technologies (Todes 1999; 2002), mouse technologies (Haraway 1997), cell technologies (Landecker 1999; 2007), horse technologies (Greene 2004), and more (Mukharji 2018).
Why use technology to characterize something as distinctly un-technological as life itself? A tempting answer is that we have long imagined fauna this way. Western thinkers since Descartes have taken a mechanistic view of animals (the philosopher thought of his dog, Monsieur Grat, as an automaton). Mechanism was a way for these thinkers to comprehend the inner workings of life. If an animal was a machine, then its proverbial gears could be studied (Riskin 2016). The goal for historians of science, however, was not to describe how organisms worked. Rather, they called organisms technologies to highlight their status as scientific tools. This view arose in the late 1980s as historians of biology turned their attention to the use of so-called “model organisms”—genetically standardized animals like fruit flies—in laboratory research. Their new histories showed that apparently universal biological truths like inheritance patterns were in fact highly dependent on scientists’ organism of choice (Ankeny and Leonelli 2018; Creager 2022).
To describe how researchers fashioned these organisms into biotic laboratory equipment, scholars often turned to the word technology. The word came into vogue in the mid-1980s as the history of science underwent its “practice turn,” a movement focused on the social and material aspects of science. In this scholarship, technology became a useful shorthand for a wide range of research materials.
In many ways, this is the story of an academic trend. It also is a window into the political, economic, and scientific changes which defined the end of the twentieth century. The 1980s and 1990s saw the acceleration and corporatization of biotechnology. Biology displaced physics as America’s Big Science and became increasingly computational. As counterculture gave way to cyberculture and the promises of Silicon Valley loomed large, a more general techno-optimistic spirit reigned (Bud 1993, ch. 9; Kevles 1997; Hallam 2013; Turner 2006). By describing organisms as technologies, historians adopted the spirit of this era. Their scholarship reflected the world that biotechnology was creating, one in which no aspect of life escaped our desire to shape it.
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Technology entered the history of science far from the biological laboratories of the twentieth century. In 1984, Steven Shapin published an article on the seventeenth-century natural philosopher Robert Boyle’s pneumatics experiments. Boyle’s discoveries about the behavior of vacuums, Shapin argued, were not accepted as self-evidently true. Rather, Boyle had to work hard to “secure universal assent” among his peers in order to establish these “matters of fact” (1984, 483). To do this, Boyle “utilized three technologies.” The first was a “material technology,” which described the air-pump Boyle used to create a vacuum; the second was the “literary technology” of the standardized scientific journal through which Boyle communicated results to people who could not physically witness his experiments; and the third was a “social technology,” Boyle’s Royal Society, where scholars could attest to his experiments’ validity (484).
Shapin knew that his use of “technology” was unorthodox. He wrote that his use of the word “may appear jarring” but explained that “by using ‘technology’ to refer to social and literary practices, as well as to hardware, I wish to stress that all three are knowledge-producing tools” (512n6, emph. orig.). Shapin’s differentiation of these “three technologies” would soon become extremely influential. In 1985, he and his collaborator Simon Schaffer expanded the paper into their monumental Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, a book that would become one of the most cited books in the history of science and inspire countless studies on the practical work of scientific knowledge production (see Golinski 2005).
This focus on the material and social aspects of scientific practice soon gained a foothold in the history of biology. Robert E. Kohler’s 1994 book Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life, which exemplifies this turn, took up Shapin’s notion of the “three technologies” to examine Thomas Hunt Morgan’s early-twentieth-century work on fruit fly genetics. Expanding on a paper from 1991, Kohler showed that the production of genetic knowledge in Morgan’s lab at Columbia—like Boyle’s experiments in pneumatics—was influenced by several kinds of “technologies”: the social and rhetorical relations between scientists, as well as their research materials.[1] To do so, he adopted Shapin and Schaffer’s terms, describing “Organisms as Technology,” as one introductory heading in the book reads (6). Morgan’s flies, he wrote, had been so “dramatically designed and constructed” that they “most resemble spectrophotometers, bubble chambers, ultracentrifuges, and other physical instruments” (6). This was more than a case of coincidental fit between theory and object: Kohler’s choice of subject suited his goal of treating organisms as technologies.
Throughout the rest of the 1990s and early 2000s, the organism-as-technology idea spread. In 1997, Daniel Todes published a paper on Ivan Pavlov’s laboratory work, which he expanded into his 2002 book Pavlov’s Physiology Factory: Experiment, Interpretation, Laboratory Enterprise. Drawing on Shapin and Schaffer as well as Kohler, Todes described the emergence of a new kind of industrial-scale knowledge production that relied on “dog-technologies”: canines surgically altered so that materials could be injected into their stomachs, and so that their digestive enzymes could be collected, studied in isolation, and sold to other laboratories (2002, esp. 96, 256). By this point, historians had firmly established that organisms could be understood as “knowledge-producing tools” (Shapin 1984, 512n16). Even those who did not explicitly call organisms technologies nonetheless focused on their use as laboratory instruments (e.g., Rheinberger 1997; Gaudillière and Löwy 1998; Schrepfer and Scranton 2004).
Meanwhile, a distinct idea of technological life was evolving that went far beyond the notion that flies or dogs could be used as laboratory instruments. This approach, which emphasized a much deeper union between organisms and technology, grew out of cybernetics, the elusive and influential science of “control and communication in the animal and machine” (Wiener [1948] 2019). Initially developed to improve the performance of World War II anti-aircraft gunners, cybernetics understood organisms and machines as part of a closed system united by the flow of information. More than a technical approach to weapons design, cybernetics offered a broad philosophical program for reading the interrelations of nature and society that quickly became influential across the postwar social sciences, humanities, and science fiction (Kline 2015).
A key figure in the humanistic embrace of this program was Donna Haraway, who began writing in the mid-1980s about the figure of the cyborg, a portmanteau for “cybernetic organism,” as a representative figure of postmodernism and posthumanism (1985, 65). By the late 1990s, Haraway had published numerous works that used cybernetic ideas to analyze the “implosion of subjects and objects, culture and nature”—a phenomenon that, according to her, characterized twentieth-century science (1997, 43). Of particular note is Haraway’s Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse (1997). Sweeping and provocative, the book focused on the OncoMouse, a laboratory mouse genetically engineered for cancer research that became the “first patented animal in the world” (79). This mouse, Haraway observed, “is simultaneously a metaphor, a technology, and a beast living its many-layered life as best it can” (83). More than a scientific tool, the OncoMouse figured as a symbol of life’s eroding boundaries.[2]
Curiously, scholarship on model organisms was largely blind to the discourse on cyborgs. Although Haraway was asking similar questions to historians like Kohler and even engaging heavily with Shapin and Schaffer, historians of biology rarely cited her boundary-pushing writing. This divergence largely persists today. Brad Bolman recently noted the “still tendential connections” between the history of biology and multidisciplinary work like Haraway’s, which is typically filed under “science studies” or “STS” and draws on work in anthropology, sociology, philosophy, gender studies, and other allied fields (Bolman 2022, 7).
A notable exception was Hannah Landecker’s 2007 book Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies (based off her 1999 dissertation), which marked an important turning point in the historiography of biology. Landecker traced the history of tissue culture across the twentieth century, arguing that the ability to manipulate cells in vitro changed our conception of mortality, individuality, and the nature of life. Endlessly propagating cell lines altered the meaning of death, and the rise of genetic recombination eroded the “boundaries of species integrity” (2007, 19). This work united the literature on model organisms in the history of science with that on the cyborg in science studies. Citing Kohler and Haraway alongside each other, Landecker was interested both in how living matter was modified toward scientific ends and in how such modifications affected our conceptions of the self.
More significantly, she used technology not only as a capacious analytical category, but also as an actors’ category. In other words, the historical actors she examined themselves described life as a kind of technology. In her dissertation and book, Landecker quotes an 1890 letter from the German biologist Jacques Loeb in which he described cells as a “technology of living substance” (1999, 18; 2007, 1). By invoking this remark, Landecker argued that scientists thought about “living matter through the framework of life as technology” before the era of biotechnology per se began in the 1970s (2007, 2). However “jarring” Shapin’s (1984, 512n6) broadening of the concept of technology might have appeared to historians of science, it was apparently not anachronistic: scientists had described life as technological long before historians of science turned their attention to fruit flies.
If only things were so simple. Further examining Loeb’s remark, we find that the English word “technology” does not tell the whole story. In the original German, Loeb wrote of his work manipulating cells, “Man würde am wenigstens zu einer Technik der lebenden Wesen gelangen können.” Landecker adopts Philip Pauly’s translation of this statement from his 1987 biography of Loeb: “Man can at least succeed in a technology of living substance” (Landecker 2007, 1, 239n1; Pauly 1987, 5, 51). But Pauly’s translation is misleading. As Eric Schatzberg (2006) has shown, in the 1890s the German Technik had not yet been made semantically equivalent with the English technology. It was not until after 1900 that the word began to be rendered as technology, principally via Thorstein Veblen’s translations of Germanophone political economy into English. Before this, technology in the Anglophone world denoted a field of study like the other -ologies, something like “the science of the practical arts” or “technical education,” and Technik was variously translated as “industrial arts,” “technic,” and “technique” (490, 493, 496). With this in mind, a more appropriate translation of Loeb’s letter might be, “One could at least arrive at a technique of living substance.” In other words, Loeb was describing a process performed upon cells, rather than the ontology of the cells themselves.
This anachronism reveals much about how historians of science conceptualized history, technology, and life itself in the late twentieth century. Fifteen years ago, Lorraine Daston observed that the history of science had moved closer to the field of general history in the 1980s and 1990s. As a result, historians of science began to fear “the besetting sin of anachronism,” becoming “deeply skeptical about descriptions of past science in terms of present science” (2009, 805–6). In Daston’s view, this drove a wedge between the history of science and science studies, the latter of which tended to accept scientific categories at face value. “Simply put,” she argued, “the more historical the history of science became the less the science it studied resembled the prepackaged subject matter of science studies” (810–11).
Daston’s characterization here is somewhat of an oversimplification.[3] As Landecker and Pauly’s mistranslation demonstrates, new academic conventions did not stop scholars from grafting present categories onto historical phenomena. Admittedly, this is one translation error, and I don’t wish to suggest carelessness on the part of Pauly or Landecker. Rather, this anachronism evidences the conceptual instability of technology—what Schatzberg has described as “a bastard child of uncertain parentage, the result of a twisted genealogy cutting across multiple discourses” (2018, 14). Such instability allowed technology to float across disciplinary lines. While the history of science and science studies held distinct views about technological life—the former focused on the instrumental value of organisms for laboratory work, whereas the latter used the concept of the cyborg to describe the changing status of life qua technology—these views were not so neatly separable.
The conceptual instability of technology also had a more pernicious effect. In adopting this word to describe living matter, historians of biology reproduced the outlook of the biotechnology industry. These histories of “living technologies” project backwards a view of reified life that only came into being in the last decades of the twentieth century. They imply that the telos of modern biology arced toward the careful engineering, patenting, and selling of living matter for profit.
This instrumentalism had its antecedents. As Georges Canguilhem wrote of the effects of Cartesian thought, “the theoretical mechanization of life and technical utilization of the animal are inseparable” ([1952] 2008, 84). During the industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century, this notion birthed the idea that “labor power” was a product of the so-called “human motor” (Rabinbach 1992, 2). For historians of science, however, organisms were technologies not because they “converted energy into mechanical work” like a steam engine (2), but rather because they were analogous to other materials used in laboratories, like a microscope. As much as they were objects of study, they were tools for creating knowledge.
In this way, historians of science in the 1990s simultaneously reproduced and reformulated a much older notion of mechanical life. Invoking technology shifted the emphasis from the functioning of organisms to their potential for manipulation. This reformulation reflected a moment of rising technophilia, when mid-century anxieties about what Günther Anders called “the obsolescence of the human” were supplanted by a more general optimism about the world that scientists and engineers were building. The resulting histories read almost like a palliative: If flies, cells, workers and rivers were already technological at the century’s beginning, then we had little to worry about as we barreled toward the century’s end.
This essay is part of a JHI Blog forum, “The Conceptual History of Technology.”
Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Erika Milam and Angela Creager for their comments on earlier versions of this essay.
[1] Kohler wrote that his goal was to “identify the material, moral, and social technologies” that defined the “work culture” of fruit fly genetics (5). Kohler substituted “moral” for Shapin and Schaffer’s “literary” here, for in addition to the material fly technology, he wanted to highlight the “moral economy” of the laboratory—its unwritten rules that “define[d] the mutual expectations and obligations” of the scientists (12). Confusingly, Kohler never articulated the difference between “moral” and “social” technologies, and in fact used them interchangeably throughout the book. His use of “moral technology” is in reference to E.P. Thompson’s concept of “moral economy,” which Shapin himself had previously used to discuss Boyle’s work (13).
[2] At this time, a third distinct strand of the organism-as-technology idea emerged in work by historians of technology and environmental historians who became interested in how animals like horses were used to enhance labor productivity. There is not space here to discuss this, but an example can be found in Russell (2010).
[3] For a longer critique, see Peter Dear and Sheila Jasanoff’s response to Daston (2010).
Kapp Singer is a PhD student in the History of Science at Princeton University.
Edited by Zac Endter
Featured image: Theo Jansen’s kinetic sculpture Strandbeest (Beach Animal), photographed by Robbert van den Beld, September 12, 2014. Cropped and edited. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. CC-BY-2.0.