The publication last year of the volume, edited by Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, Does Technology Make History? (which answered its own question with an emphatic NO), conclusively staked out a clear position among practitioners in the history of technology. Henceforth, regardless of what Alvin Toffler, Al Gore, or the Discovery Channel might say, real, professional historians and technology analysts reject theories that attribute a role for technology that is autonomous from social, cultural, political, economic, gender, and racial forces, and indeed we affirm without reservations that technological change is intimately dependent on human agency. So long to the technological juggernaut of the industrial or information revolutions, sayonara to the locomotive of progress, and to the choice between being the steamroller of technological change or the pavement. Despite a clear tendency to fly into the teeth of popular ideology, historians of technology stand firm in insisting that actions performed by human artifacts carry human intentionality.

Few scholars have problems with this formulation (though we often have difficulty convincing undergraduates of its wisdom), but it leaves us in a quandary about the value of our own field. Do we dissolve the relevance of the history of technology if we view human artifacts as mere media for culture, politics, gender, and the like? In other words, do we turn technology into just a mere reflector of social relations and the like, with water vessels, for example, shaped and materially determined by social relations and cultural values? The Aztec water jar would therefore be clearly a artifact of a highly evolved, polytheist, warrior-caste society while a Limoges pitcher would be the product of a half-artisanal, half-industrial society with a large genteel element. If this is the case, then the history of technology can be done almost on autopilot. One would explicitly state his or her general view of the world in a given context, then read artifacts to confirm one's preconceptions about a society--sort of a reverse-archeology. This might be a very useful heuristic device, for it would show how non-transcendent and intimately dependent on context technology is, nicely demonstrating, for example, the folly of introducing Iowa State's Green Revolution grains into third world societies.[1] Nonetheless, this complete-contingency theory of the making of technology risks fomenting a sort of techno-tribalism, where each culture or context develops its own technics and cross-cultural exchange is impossible.

But we know this to be false. One needn't naïvely advocate a global electronic village to recognize that transportation, communication, information, and manufacturing technologies have become vehicles for rendering the world into a growing sameness. Gas pumps, telephones, clothes irons, and radios, as well as factory floors and human-computer interfaces look pretty much the same the world over. We must therefore ask whether those commonalities are inherent in the technologies themselves, whether they are the products of conscious human choice and implemented according to configurations of power, or whether they are simply determinate outcomes of oddly indeterminate or chaotic processes. If we define these commonalities as the inevitable consequences of the one best way of doing things, we again come perilously close to reintroducing a determinism, this time driven by ostensible laws of economic or scientific "progress.". Chaos or indeterminacy theory risks giving us either fatuous guesswork or vacuous post-modernism.

But if we insist that they are the result of human choice and agency. we have to make it clear that not all possibilities are open at any given time, that more than cultural, economic, and political constraints are operative. There are, of course material and physical constraints: the amount of heat that the combustion of a cubic meter of methane yields is the same, whether in sixth-century Damascus or contemporary Shanghaï. That means, of course, that if one wishes to burn methane for a heat source, one will use roughly similar methods across eras and cultures. Contrary to the strong programme for the social studies of science proposed by Bloor[2] or Latour's recent attempt to do away with the distinction between human and non-human actors,[3] I believe it is clear that humans act clearly within an historical context, while the laws of physics themselves might be viewed as transcendent.

I am not by this explanation, I hope, sliding into a profound pit of paleo-modern Popperian positivism. I offer a distinction here between what "the world" is and what we make of it. Indeed, even the most avid post-structuralist would not deny that Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 (or more significantly, that the Nazis exterminated millions of Jews); the controversy arises in how those facts are fitted into analytic and, for the purposes of popular diffusion, narrative frameworks. Resolute Heidiggerians or extreme social constructionists[4] might argue that what something really is doesn't matter, that since all we know is what we perceive and we do that through culturally- and socially-shaped eyes, it is we who in practice construct the world. The danger of an epistemological solipsism here is obvious, I believe. Nonetheless, with the rise of cultural studies within our profession as a whole such questions necessarily come to the fore. One can be a strong constructionist in literary criticism, art or cultural history, and in the history of ideas, where (at least according to the structuralists) the rules of language form the constraints on the construction of meaning--the paraphrase Gertrude Stein about Oakland, "there is no [out]there, there." But can we do so with technologies? Can we argue that a machine or structure can be built entirely according to the constraints only of imagination and social relations? The spiritually-driven builders of the Medieval cathedrals whose high-apses caved in on their parishes would have to say no, and so would we.

Allucquère Rosanne Stone has recently offered us an elegant way to address this dilemma by distinguishing between the real-word physicality of an object and the myriad discursive representations of it.[5] The former exists in conventionally-understood space and time, the latter in an immaterial, conceptual--but vitally and centrally meaningful--"space," which is socially and culturally constructed. The two lives of a technology can be at harmony with each other, in which case, one has a fairly solid closure of meaning, or they can be at odds, in which case they spawn a dialectical contradiction that drives a process of material and conceptual reshaping. My point here, and my departure from Stone's view, is that one life sets limits on the other: imagination, either in invention or in social meaning, finds its limits in the physicality of the world.

So we arrive at one very clear heuristic purpose for the history of technology, that of demonstrating the limits of interpretation. This is important, given the general low standing accorded to historians of technology in most major history departments.[6] By making this sort of theoretical contribution to our colleagues, we could, perhaps, convince them that we do more than just reify artifacts. We can very neatly offer boundaries where the free flow of interpretations run headlong into the hard facts of artifacts, but we must also recognize that in history itself, we can also see the rhetorical manipulation of those boundaries being used as a mode for pursuing political agendas. In popular (and even more, political) discourse, technological determinism and its inverse, limitless human agency, are rhetorically mobilized for political, economic, or social ends, with the actual limits on each very skillfully finessed.[7] Gaullists followed both of these strategies in France during the 1960s with respect to nuclear power. On the one hand, "nucleocrats" argued politically that nuclear power constituted an inevitable step forward in technological evolution (note the mobilization of a Darwinian rhetoric), yet at the same time, as nationalists they argued that the superior culture of France would yield better reactors than those that the banally utilitarian Americans would build. Publicists for the emerging nuclear establishment could deftly play both sides of the dichotomy between human agency and determinism, arguing both for the inevitability of nuclearization and the strategic necessity for its purposive adoption.[8]

This suggests that the line between what is materially determined and what is subject to human agency (be it collective and cultural, or individualistic) is a highly contested one, and that rhetorical constructions of "truth" can skillfully manipulated to misconstrue those boundaries. Thus we have here the first aspect of the history of technology that makes it unique and worth doing: it offers an examination of the material set of referents which are often troped in political rhetoric, yet it simultaneously allows a fair measure of the truth claims of both historical actors and historians.

Technological change works through time in unique ways as well, for it is not simply additive, like building blocks to higher knowledge (a common paradigm in the prosaic narrative of popular histories of science), but materially determinative over time. Tom Hughes nicely identified this characteristic when he developed the notion of momentum: once a socio-technical system is in place, it gains not only an obduracy, but it forecloses options and focuses change in the future.[9] I once argued, only half in jest, in a seminar at La Villette in Paris that once a society reached closure on the design and meaning of the domestic washing machine as the dominant mode of laundering, that device took on a disciplinary power. I am now more convinced that it does: its functioning is based on an infrastructure of piped water, electricity and the financial solvency required to get it,[10] sufficient space, and a certain pattern of clothes purchasing and wearing to make it economic.[11] The design of the domestic washing machine is based on the assumption that its utilization rate is well less than ten percent: a higher rate would rapidly wear it out. Should the price of electricity skyrocket and force people to seek the services of more efficient commercial laundries, too bad: practices with one technology preclude the shift to another.

Nobody alive today is probably more astute to the ways that specific technological designs "demand" and pre-ordain later choices than Bill Gates. Standards--the most glaringly under-examined facet in the history of technology--are specifically mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, and once a standard, by whatever means, becomes dominant, woe be to those who do not meet it, and fortune to those who not only do, but who control it as well. It is well known that Microsoft cleverly used changes in the "standard" DOS operating system to attain a leading position in the spreadsheet and word-processing market. Once the installed base of a technological system is so large that the cost of its replacement is unacceptably high, one can say that a specific technology--actually the social groups behind it--has gained a historically determining power. We know, for example, that the urban sprawl facilitated by automobilization has made the automobile a necessity and more, that contemporary American social geography and the configuration of economic power and social interests around the automobile industry preclude many forms of mass transit. Similarly, the power of Paris has long been inscribed in the French transportation system; under Louis XIV, all roads led to Paris, under Napoléon III all rails led to Paris, and under Mitterrand, all bullet trains led to Paris: to advocate a decentralized transportation system at this point would be absurd, though it might sell well politically with the provincials. In other words, the configuration of the transportation system has been an effective means for Parisians to perpetuate their hegemony over the rest of France. No doubt, as Cecil O. Smith has indicated, they did this often by arguing that what were actually political and social choices were technical necessities.[12]

In order, however, for the language of technical necessity to become a compelling public rhetoric, there has to be a predisposition within a public to accept the ostensible "dictates" of progress, and in my opinion, it is here that the very real and specific power of technology lies. In a sense, technology is not merely things, but (at least in the current era) the foundation of an ideology of progress, a rhetoric of necessity, and a grammar of socio-technical structuration. When sufficiently reified, it can be rhetorically transmuted into the sort of reductionist force in the material world that structuralists attribute to language in the discursive world.

At the same time as it statically structures a rhetoric of necessity, reified technology can be built into a starting point for a heroic narrative of progress and human or national destiny. A generation ago, Leo Marx explicated the trope, the elision between the language of the overland pioneers and that of the mechanics.[13] Particularly when looking at artifacts from the great American world's fairs in the nineteenth century, it is not terribly complicated to see the shift from Daniel Boone to Henry Ford as the representative avatars of American "progress" across a key century. (If one were to talk about the politics of display in technology one could link Bill Cody to Walt Disney, the Wild West Show to EPCOT, to address the issue of cultural diffusion[14]).

As any number of commentators have noted, narrative frameworks are a common device used to structure coherent possible realities.[15] By this token, we have to note that the sophisticated models of causation and analysis so dear to scholars are commonly eschewed in popular mentalities as master narratives are used to construct national histories and life stories.[16] (This is perhaps behind the debate among historians about the approachability of avant-garde scholarship, as for political and intellectual reasons a number of social-science and post-modern historians reject narrative structures[17] Historians of technology face a particularly grave dilemma here, as a popular, Darwinian variety of evolutionary narrative seems to be the unshakable paradigm for understanding technological change, reinforced by assumptions about competitive advantage, heroic invention, economies of scale, evolutionary bottlenecks, and even reverse salients.[18] Despite arguments that are far more sophisticated than linear narratives of heroic progress, a number of Dexter Prize winners such as Thomas Hughes and Walter McDougall, and indeed, even two of the panelists here today, have offered histories of technology that are often read simply as narratives.[19]

This conundrum is actually helpful for historians of technology, and it allows us to make a unique interpretive claim over history more generally: while we might bemoan a grave misunderstanding in the popular mind about the process of technological change, we can also view technological narratives as a variety of hegemonic political discourse and thus use the disjuncture between language and reality to shed new light on the politics and culture of an era. For example, under the rubric of corporate claims about "the inevitable consequences of progress," especially in information technology, dozens of American firms and divisions within firms have been downsized when, in truth, cost simply had to be reduced in order to maintain attractive earnings/price ratios on Wall Street after a tidal wave of new money entered equity markets in the 1980s. Most of the cost savings came not from the introduction of new technology, but from more rigorous working conditions, cheaper debt expenses, outside contracting, and relocation to cheaper labor markets. The hegemony of technological rhetoric has been such that few have questioned its actual dissimulative function.

These observations make possible the imperial claim I am aspiring to demonstrate in my current research project: that a facile, consensus-building rhetoric of technological progress replaced a politics of class in twentieth-century France. France entered the twentieth century riven by class conflicts, despite a decline in social friction between the old aristocratic and the new industrial élites. Hence, a new consensus had to be developed during and after the crisis that ran from 1906 (the year of the great miner's strike) to 1920 (the end of the revolutionary postwar strike wave) if class warfare were not to mean the demise of the system. The solution was simple, yet it took until 1947 to take root: to replace the politics of class with the politics of technologically-based productivity growth so that both of the major classes could benefit. The aesthetics of scientific certitude, finesse, précision, and Cartesian top-down planned rationality would replace those of organic, intimate, sensual, and experiential knowledge. The new post-class ideology would mobilize the rhetoric of merit--already well established through the Bonapartist tradition--in order to gain popular consent for a newly legitimated élite.

At the turn of the century many French workers not only questioned the reformist agenda of redividing the economic pie between the working class and the bourgeoisie, they contested the very claim of the bourgeoisie to have any share at all.[20] This radically egalitarian meaning ascribed to the democratic revolutionary tradition was, as William Sewell and others have shown, a tradition within French working-class political discourse which explains the home-grown anarchism of part of the French working class.[21] By the start of war in 1914, the more conciliatory element of labor leadership had only recently gained control of the movement. The threat of repression and the consequent acquiescence of the radicals to the war and the appointment of reformist leaders to the government quieted labor unrest until 1917.[22] In the spring of that year, a motley assemblage of war workers--made up largely of women, military conscripts, and immigrant "guest" laborers--struck against both working conditions and the war itself and thus (albeit with fits and starts) began the revolutionary upsurge that shook Europe until 1920, when repression finally reestablished élite control.[23]

The wiser heads among the modernists in France well understood that repression would not assure long-term political and economic stability, and that the old politics of class had to be replaced with a more forward-looking and less fricative consensus.[24] Italy was soon to discover, as Germany did a decade later, the language of fanatic nationalism as a way to transcend or end-run the discourse of class; in France, modernists chose a language of technological progress that would lead, they claimed, to national renewal. In a sense, they revived the technocratic, positivist, and Saint-Simonian language of Bonapartism, giving it the aesthetic and seductive iconography of consumer goods, yet bizarrely grafted to the old-style provincial machine politics that plagued the Third Republic. One very vocal modernist, Ernest Mercier, France's best-known electrical power magnate, recognized the gridlock politics of the Republic and called for rule by a technocratic elite, but few listened.[25]

An ideology of progress was not an incredible political agenda in the interwar era, yet it failed to gain hegemony, largely because the older, small- and family-run business crowd was pretty self-satisfied and enjoyed greater power than big business, and because in most respect, the small-output quality-production style of French industry yielded stable profits and steady employment.[26] Nonetheless, the modernists did offer a credible future-narrative for French technological "progress."[27] It embraced a state-guided and in part publicly-financed industrial research and development bureau within the Ministry of Industry, state sponsorship for a standards-setting agency like that set up by Herbert Hoover during the Harding Administration, greater state support for technical education, and a plethora of eye-popping extravaganzas for new technology, from auto shows to home fairs. The referents were fairly obvious: mass-production technology which had supposedly won the war (as opposed to a shortage of young German soldiers!), and a Fordist approach to developing a mass consumer market in sync with mass production. A wave of productivity missions to the US and the glowing reports presented upon return turned the volume of Fordist admiration up several notches.[28] In addition, inventing the French housewife and technologically modernizing the home for her (all while insisting that she supply France with more soldiers) palliated returning veterans who felt threatened by women doing their jobs during the war and undoubtedly sent the message that salaries would be high enough so that working class women would not have to work.[29]

The images deployed by modernists in the 1920s, from those of domestic appliances to power plants, bespoke a critique of the old order, chiding them for their conservative ideology, which invited social conflict, when by contrast, modernism could make allies of former enemies. Indeed, modernist businessmen elicited the support of reformist trade unionists and socialists such as Jean-Louis Bréton and Hyacinthe Dubreuil in their battle of images.[30] Leaving Communists in an isolated adoration of the Soviet Union--the Communists Party split form the Socialists in 1920, and the red union split off in 1923--and criticizing traditionalist business for its production-inhibiting `malthusianism,' leaders of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) and elements of the Socialist Party allied with modernist businessmen to promulgate an image of symmetric technologized environments: the productivist rationalization and Taylorization of factories, and the modernization of homemakers' domestic tasks.[31] Technology as liberator from material want and physical drudgery became a dominant sign system for the emerging modernist coalition, but the signs remained hollow, static, and without concrete referents. Indeed, modernists had no scenario for implementing their visions, as political power and economic policy control remained in the hands of the Center-Right. Rationalization was limited to a few leading-edge industries such as electric power and automobiles, and the politics of rationalization were merely discussed within small circles of experts.[32]

The interwar era in France thus saw only a proposal for marriage between consumerism and productivism. Trade shows, expositions, and managerial revolution literature remained signifiers without material referents--consumers and traditional businessmen tended to look but not buy--, yet as images, they were also promulgated as critiques. Not only did most French businessmen remain reluctant to embrace the new visions and the modernist milieu they implied, popular standards of living remained too low to support more than rudimentary consumerism.[33] At the same time, however, the Communists began scripting a productivist-consumerist scenario based on the heroic Soviet successes under Stalin. Until 1935, that prospective story was, of course, the agenda for social revolution. For the French Communist Party (PCF), in the USSR, Stakhanovite workers joyfully worked under `comrade managers' to build a workers' material paradise, replete with massive steel mills and hydroelectric projects.[34] In the interwar era, the PCF thus also began to use its version of heroic technology to critique capitalism, but once the PCF consented to support the reformist Popular Front coalition in 1936, its images again lacked scripts.

Indeed, the failure of the Popular Front, despite its traditional appeal to social solidarity and its occasional references to technology-as-social solution,[35] can be ascribed to its lack of a program as a prescription for progress. Based in sentiment more than programs and promulgating images of technological prosperity without content or coherent means, the Popular Front could do little to put France's economy back together. State-financed heroic dam projects in the Rhône basin--reminiscent of TVA--required years of construction time to benefit consumers, and their employment effects were minimal. The régime wished to increase the size of the economic pie as an alternative to warring over its division, but failing such, it fell amid class contention. The Center-Right, with improvisational policies for re-establishing business' power and preparing France for war, also failed after 1938. The interwar era in France thus witnessed a dialectical sort of contradiction between an increasingly compelling notion of technical progress (albeit in a strictly voyeuristic mode for many people) and banal, traditional practices. A crisis would set in motion the quest for a new synthesis.

France's defeat in 1940 was broadly viewed as not only a military affair, but as an indictment of an entire class and social system. As a result, the traditional élite was forced into retreat after the war. A leading wartime resistance study group wrote,

The `armistice with honor' posed the problem clearly to our people because it had been preceded by the failure of almost the entire ruling elite. After 150 years of rule, our bourgeoisie, who controlled the army, the political system, and industry admitted its sterility and could conceive of national renewal only in defeat.[36]

In addition, the Depression and war had clearly left France in dire material conditions; she was woefully short of capital, labor, and resources. Modernists therefore began to write the scenario for a French renaissance. On the advice of Stalin, the PCF rejected a revolutionary strategy and became part of the modernist coalition--at least for a short time, creating a brief opening during which new institutional structures could be built.[37] The political preconditions for a modernist business and labor coalition were set, and the modernization scenario emerged as a combination of nationalizations and planning. The three unlikely personalities heading these efforts were General de Gaulle, the virulently nationalist president, Jean Monnet, the technocratic father of the plan, and Marcel Paul, the Communist Minister of Industry.

As I argued in my book on Électricité de France,[38] the technocratic, progress-talking agenda of class collaboration, deference to expertise, and centralized capitalism overseen by high corporate officials and state technocrats began to take root in economic institutions in the 1950s, but politically had to wait first for the deep Cold War to pass, which it did by 1960, then to lose its nationalist coloration with the retirement of De Gaulle in 1969. After the political earthquake of 1968--itself perhaps a response to the disjuncture between a progress talk directed toward technology-based freedom and a sense of impending institutional claustrophobia--the political class settled into a serene technocratic consensus on growth politics. The old class rhetoric would be mobilized occasionally by a dying Communist Party or nostalgic socialists, but talk of the iron law of wages was easily eclipsed by that of the locomotive of progress.

As in the US, which had its indigenous version of corporate liberalism in the 1960s, France has been unable to develop a new future-narrative to replace that of technology-based growth. France has its share of progress-talkers, like Al Gore and Alvin Toffler, but they sound just as naïve there as they do here.[39] In both countries, the prospective narrative of a national revival based on new technology finds myriad skeptics among those who have seen that, like the industrial innovations of the interwar era, the fruits of innovation flow less to society as a whole (indeed, innovation often means unemployment), and more to those who own or run the major corporations.[40]

France's experience in the twentieth century underlines the importance of the history of technology for historical studies as a whole. Time constraints did not permit me to show how the hard, real-world designs of objects were both the product of cultural, economic, and political conjunctures and the material causes of new ones--the politics of parking and mass transit in Paris would offer a fine example--but I believe you will trust me to assert that below the large sweep of political visions and technocratic plans, inherently political artifacts built the material foundation for a profound transformation of French political culture. In the 'teens and '20s, the disjuncture between progress talk and daily practice initiated a rupture in French politics, in part because notions of freedom and prosperity were so seductive. After the Second World War, the system delivered enough to lead to a closure in the political culture of technocratic republicanism. With closure comes an end of debate, thus rendering French politics its peculiar lack of profound dissent. Politics have died, and "technology"--I say this ironically--has killed them.