BlackHat's Journal: We're functioning automatic/ And we are dancing mechanic

I wrote a mini-review of MIT Press's The Intellectual Appropriation of Technology Discourses on Modernity, 1900-1939, Hård and Andrew Jamison (Eds.), a little over a year ago when I got a copy on a whim. Flipping thru it again [and many other fine tomes] while looking for themes and ideas for this series ['Notions on Nations'] this section popped out as having some additional insight to another beast in the garden. So, I saved it for these ending few quotes.

In the collision of ideas and ideologies, in the late 19th century, there was a birth to a new set of forces both social and political. Before I put in the quote I must mention that the title still strikes me as funny from our[/.'ers] point of view. Appropriate our works, please! BUT READ OUR EFF'ING DOCS FIRST, YA N3W8S!!!

Quote:
The advent of Americanism marked a discontinuity in the European process of modernization. To keen observers before World War I, and to everyone after the war, the United States was the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world. Americanism, therefore, could not be dismissed easily. With Taylorism, Fordism, standardization, interchangeable parts, mass consumption, mass entertainment, the scientific professional, the social sciences, and the giant corporation, Americanism, perhaps, deserved to be called a new project of modernity. Generally speaking, the French intellectual establishment responded favorably to this new modernity, while reactions in Germany and England were mixed or negative.

Why was Americanism appropriated so differently in the three countries? For analytical purposes, the intellectual appropriators of technology and science can be divided into two groups: engineers and natural scientists presenting their knowledge practices to the public, and literary intellectuals writing on technology and science. In what follows, we will concentrate on the technologists.

A review of how engineering discourses were constructed historically shows that the greatest contrast was that between Britain and the continental countries, the professional organizations having been paramount in Britain and the state on the continent. More specifically, whereas the French style of engineering was shaped by the relationship between the state and the education system, British nineteenth-century engineering was shaped through interaction between industry and the professional associations, the state and the education system being relatively unimportant. In Germany the relationship between industry and education was decisive (Halvorsen 1993).

In the United States and Britain, technological occupations constructed themselves "autonomously" around the notion of "the professional," which in the twentieth century was reconstructed as the scientific professional. In France and the German states, academic engineering education was established about 100 years earlier than in the Anglo-Saxon countries. The occupation of engineer was constructed by the state as part of an explicit strategy of modernization. In twentieth-century England and America, engineering and natural science education tended to merge. In nineteenth-century France and Germany, they were institutionally separated. Academic engineers were educated in technological universities, natural scientists in "ordinary" universities. Unable to borrow persuasive power from the state, twentieth-century American and English engineers entered instead into a dependent relationship with natural science, drawing professional power from the notion of "applied science." The French and German engineers had less autonomy in regard to the state, more in regard to natural science.

The main difference in content between the Anglo-Saxon and the continental engineering discourses is neatly reflected in terminology. French and German language distinguish between "technology" and "technique." The distinction is analogous to the distinction between "epistemology" and "knowledge." "Technology" is the science of "technique." The Anglo-Saxon "applied science" discourse had no need for such a distinction. The science of technique was science. The technology-technique distinction therefore disappeared from the English language -- and instructive example of how language and thought are shaped by academic institutionalization.

In the United States the concept of "applied science" was transferred from one field to another as part of the spread of professionalism in "the progressive era." Medicine was the pioneer in denoting its practices "applied science," but engineering followed closely (Wiebe 1967; Kimball 1992). In engineering, applied sciences triumphed first within the practices of the historical role, then, with Taylorism, within those of the managerial role.

A main reason why the British and American engineering fields differed is that, in their struggle for professional legitimation, the British and American engineers competed with different knowledge practices. The alliance with science came late in England. "Engineer" was a loose category that covered all sorts of practical men, from great entrepreneurs to humble technicians. "Rule of thumb" had served British industry well in the nineteenth century and was hard to unseat. Starting with the establishment of the Imperial college in 1907, serious efforts were made to overcome a perceived lack of scientific competence in British industry. These efforts were, however, subject to what might be termed the academic bias of British culture. To be attractive on the job market, the engineers had to comply with the gentlemanly lifestyle ideals of the hegemonic Oxbridge liberal education. The English academic engineers therefore generally chose to call themselves scientists rather than engineers. British twentieth-century engineering education became grossly dualistic. Practical technological work tended to remain in the hands of engineers with little formal training, while a growing mass of overtly theoretically educated "applied scientists" struggled to unseat the humanistically educated Oxbridge men as candidates for prestigious positions in British industry.

The American engineering profession was somewhat more homogeneous. Engineering and "applied science" melted together in a common discourse. The engineers borrowed persuasive power from the rhetoric of natural science, but without giving up their identity as engineers. Engineering professionalism did not primarily develop in rivalry with the liberal arts. During the progressive era, American educational institutions introduced the social sciences (Ross 1991). Marginalist economics. sociology, political science, anthropology, and psychology developed perspectives that would, if they had not been answered, have questioned the managerial competence of the American engineer. The result was Taylorism.

Despite the fact that it has been widely criticized, condemned, and ridiculed on both sides of the Atlantic for almost a century, there is a widespread feeling among historians and others that scientific management gives a clue to long-term developments in twentieth-century history. Three lines of argument may be distinguished.

The oldest line of claims that scientific management "solved" the problem of class in capitalism. A recent and influential formulation is found within the French school of "Regulation." This school claims that the scientific management of Frederick Winslow Taylor, along with Henry Ford's assembly line and "five-dollar day," constituted a twentieth-century "mose of accumulation" that was fundamentally different from nineteenth-century liberal capitalism. On the one hand, Taylorism and Fordism induced a class compromise at the level of production. Workers gave up their skills and their control over the labor process in exchange for steadily rising real wages. On the other hand, the increasing scale of production and the dependency on a domestic market, typical of this mode of accumulation, created a functional need for Keynesian and corporatist political regulation of the economy.

The industrial practices of Taylor and Ford functionally induced the modes of regulation typical of capitalism during the period of rapid economic growth in the 1950s and the 1960s. The argument presupposes that Taylorism and Fordism were efficient management strategies that actually raised productivity above what was possible with other strategies. In the 1980s, the relative stagnation of the American economy relative to the Japanese and German economies led a number of writers to question this assumption. (See, e.g., Piore and Sabel 1984.)

A second line of argument claims that scientific management was important, not as a factor in production, but as a factor in the formation of ideology. Taylorism helped make the new professional middle class politically powerful. Faced with the late-nineteenth-century stalemate between the economic capital of bourgeoisie and the political capital of the working class, the new professional middle classes used their cultural capital, based on science and technology, to construct a discourse that spoke of modernizing society through the "visible hand" of science, replacing class identity by meritocracy. This discourse of modernization was to gain hegemony in twentieth-century politics. Taylorism played a crucial part in its construction by addressing the problems in the key arena of the factory, establishing a privileged "scientific" point of view from which both labor and capital could be criticized.

The above two lines of argument might be termed the Marxist line and the neo-Marxist line. Without neglecting these aspects, we would argue that the importance of scientific management is best grasped from a third angle. Drawing on Foucaultian themes, one could say that scientific management appropriated industrial organization within a new discourse. From the previously discrete discourses of science, technology, and organization, Taylor abstracted an "essence," thus unifying them into an epistemologically continuous discourse. Since the appearance of scientific management, it has been common for people to think of science, technology, and industry as being ruled by a single rationality, which is at the same time "instrumental" and scientific.

Within political life, Taylorism probably had its most profound and direct impact on communism. The enthusiasm of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin for scientific management is well known. Industrial labor under Soviet socialism was a far cry from the young Karl Marx's ideals of humanizing work, and scientific management had something to do with that. However, the social constructionist approach to Taylorism suggests that its prime impact is not to be found on the factory floor. What is at stake here is really the whole concept of the planned economy. Marx analyzed capitalism in great detail, but said little about socialism. In the 1890s the aging Friedrich Engels and the young Karl Kautsky began to speak about the emerging giant corporation as a possible model for socialism.

The concept of the planned economy was, however, not worked out until World War I. The inspiration came from the wartime economy and from scientific management. Wickard von Moellendorf, who coined the word Planwirtschaft (planned economy) in 1917, was a Taylorist engineer and a high ranking wartime planner (Hardach 1977: 58). What scientific management added to socialism was the vision of scientific planning. The rational unity of organization, technology, and science made possible a crude form of Marxism which dismissed all that fell outside this trinity to an unreal veil to be removed by revolution. With Taylorism, socialism could be reduced to positivism.

We are not saying that scientific management caused all this. The dream of encompassing technology and work within science was fore-shadowed in Enlightenment philosophy and was hinted at by Francis Bacon. The trinitarian vision of synthesis would have blossomed in the twentieth century even if Frederick Taylor had never existed. But Taylor was the first man to convince the world that such a synthesis had in fact been achieved. Most of Taylor's concrete recommendations were rejected by his successors; however, his basic insistence that there existed one best way of managing industrial production, and that this way could be identified by applying the methods of natural science to the field of management, remained common assumptions among both friends and foes of twentieth-century modernization. --Jakobsen, Anderson, Halvorsen, & Myklebust.

New improved classic News olde:
Un-moved by Dyke attack. Sounds fishy to me.

Old and busted war. Hey Rummy! *They* seem to find enough targets. Security has been tightened across the Afghan capital, Kabul, following Sunday's bomb explosion outside the offices of an American security firm. Nato-led peacekeepers say at least three Americans and three Afghans died in the blast, claimed by the Taleban.

Police in New York have arrested a US citizen and a Pakistani national on suspicion of plotting to blow up a subway station. The New York police chief said the two men had surveyed one of the alleged targets close to the venue of next week's Republican Party convention. Police chief Raymond Kelly said they had a clear intention to cause damage and kill people, but had no explosives. ...and... They were among 5,000 cyclists who stopped traffic around Madison Square Garden, where the Republican convention will be held. ...and ... But the commissioner said it was "clear they had the intention to cause damage and kill people... They did not immediately have the means to do it." Mr. Bowie? If you could be so kind;

They'll split your pretty cranium, and fill it full of air/ And tell that you're eighty, but brother, you won't care/ You'll be shooting up on anything, tomorrow's never there/ Beware the savage jaw/ of 1984/

Darfur has had the fly-ins for the photo ops. But did anyone think to bring a little food and water with them? Naw. They just stood around, in glowing white linen, and made vague hand gestures. Although even that may have been the flies.

technocrat.net is shaping up nicely. Looks like BP is settling on hard-science and emergent tech-jams. I expect it will all pick up [comment wise] as more people add it to their daily rounds.

Free and not dead press.

OYAITJ:
44297 : My 10 commandments slag theme ended, as I had expected, and on time [ie "3 day" news item. So, I'm sick and prophetic, deal], Shit load of broken Yahoo links, this-- Lord Heseltine, the former deputy prime minister, yesterday led a group of Tory and Labour politicians in calling for a full-scale judicial inquiry into why Britain went to war against Iraq. In a rare intervention after Tony Blair's appearance before the Hutton inquiry, Lord Heseltine said the narrow focus of the Hutton inquiry showed the need for a full judicial inquiry into the "flimsy" evidence used as a basis for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. , Weapons manufacturers have been requested not to display cluster bombs at next month's military equipment exhibition in the London Docklands because they are considered "inappropriate" for the UK market. The Guardian has been told that the decision to hide the trade in such lethal anti-personnel devices is being enforced despite the fact that British and US forces used them extensively in the invasion of Iraq. Invasion? Every fuckin day, baby. Every day, and few more bits that still work.
Tahkcalb at the icon, his arms wide open. Yahoo and the tiger's boy, his shorts down.

Texttoon:
Fumetti : A stock photo of Truman holding the 'Dewey Wins' misprinted newspaper. The headline has been replaced by; "Nepotism defeats truth, again!" and a caption; "US Election Results for 2004"