The Concept of Technology in Late 18th-Century Germany

Jocelyn Holland, professor of comparative literature at Caltech and an expert on the intellectual history of 18th- and 19th-century Germany, has written a new book published by Brill. In the work, Theory's Practice: Reflections on Technology in Germany Around 1800, Holland shows that although the term "technology" is widely thought to have become an object of theoretical interest only in the late 19th century, significant changes in how some individuals conceptualized technology were already underway in Germany in the late 18th century.

This manner of thinking about technology does not fit into current historical narratives about how theoretical thinking about technology developed in the West. "People who write broad histories of technology, who are taking the long view, sometimes gloss over the details," Holland says. "What I wanted to do with this book was to fine-tune this history by taking a close look at a few important decades. I show that there are various ways in which people tried to move from the nuts and bolts of technology toward more general questions about what technology is."

"If you were to ask somebody in the middle of the 18th century to describe technology, they would say something like this: 'A technology is a compendium, a dictionary of technical terms compiled from many different crafts,'" Holland explains. "What people in the last decades of the 18th century were trying to do, however, was to organize all these little bits and pieces, all these nouns and verbs, that were used in reference to the practicing of traditional crafts."

"What happened around the 1770s is that technology began to be taught as a specific course at universities," Holland explains. "People were also writing handbooks of technology and developing systems of technology that could encompass a wide range of practical knowledge and skill. Language was a huge problem because as you can imagine, the guild system that kept artisans in a particular field in charge of their own work had its secrets. There were oral histories that craftspeople handed down, and they weren't necessarily allowed to share this information with outsiders. Those who were trying to write comprehensively about technology encountered real difficulties because, for example, there might be 10 different terms for the same tool when used in different contexts."

The people writing systems and teaching manuals about technology were inevitably forced to think differently about it, she adds. "Once you start having to reflect on problems of organization and order, how you classify various craft practices and objects, then you need a more theoretical vantage point from which to think about the material," Holland explains.

This effort in Germany was connected to a larger interest within Europe at the time, that of classification. Just as Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus was creating taxonomies of plants and animals in an effort to organize the natural world into related classes of similar species, the German intellectuals Holland treats in Theory's Practice were trying to create logical categories for arranging tools and techniques. Indeed, one figure whose writings Holland translates in her book is Johann Beckmann, author of the influential Guide to Technology, who also visited Linnaeus in Sweden.

Holland comes at her study from a deep love of language and what it can tell us about historical worlds we no longer inhabit. "I have a bit of nostalgia for the loss of specialized technical language," she reflects. "I like to encounter very specific words that are no longer spoken or written as much as they used to be."

Holland experiences special resonance with the period from the late 18th century into the first few decades of the 19th century in part because of her work on literary writers in this era who were so attuned to language. "When every word matters, there is a very different sensitivity toward language than we often experience today," Holland says.