What is technology?

Unravelling a great idea

Andrs Vaccari PhD Candidate Dept. of Philosophy, Macquarie University Sydney, Australia
Presented at Ute Culture: The Utility of Culture, Annual National Conference of the Cultural Studies Association of Australia. University of Melbourne. 3-7 December, 2002.

The metaphorical universe of technology has progressively come to embrace nearly all facets of human activity: the making of tools, procedures and techniques, tying your shoelaces, making a nuclear weapon, to machines, methods of storage, forms of social organization, and finally language, writing, and all forms of symbolic communication. In philosophy and anthropology, technology has become a fundamental part of the definition of the human, so much so that it is enough to find a tool next to skeletal remains to identity them as such. This hungry signifier has progressively come to engulf all facets of human activity: agriculture, manufacture, tools, building, artefacts, social organizations, techniques of the self, and forms of symbolic exchange such as speech and writing (see Figure 1). It has colonised the concepts of language, reason and culture. For example, Jean-Francois Lyotard begins The Inhuman by asking: what is the human in humanity? Humans are the only animals that
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undergo such an extended period of latency, as a result of the premature birth of the human infant. That children have to be educated proceeds from the fact that they are not completely led by nature, not programmed. The institutions which constitute culture supplement this native lack (1991:3). Culture, in the form of an extended apparatus of pre-existing social, symbolic, and institutional realms, is what makes humans functional, speaking, meaningseeking creatures; that is, what makes humans human. In the words of Carl Mitcham, social formations share with technical objects that paradoxical status of becoming to some degree independent of the maker, ... standing over against and apart from the maker and able to exert influence on the world independent of the intentions of that maker (1994:174-5). It follows that what makes us human is the inhuman. The appearance of artefacts, techniques and the dawn of the human are one and the same moment. Even the very structure of our bodies, as Leroi-Gourhan has argued, is the result of a long history of technological incorporation (see Leroi-Gourhan, 1964 [1993]). Throughout our discussion the term technology gathers certain events by way of connections that might seem natural to us, but which remained scattered and meaningless in the experience of the actors concerned. And likewise, some connections that certain people took for granted might seem to us curious, strange or astonishing. Technology is arguably one of the most problematic and consequential of all modern ideas, and one that resonates with enormous cultural weight. The idea remains a distinctly western phenomenon. Although for many centuries

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other cultures remained ahead of Christendom in what regards technical knowhow, no other culture would grant on technology such significance, nor develop such curious myths around it. Technology and myth have been deeply entwined from the beginning. I take myth in what Pierre Bourdieu (1998:34) calls the strong sense of the word, [as] a powerful discourse, an idea which has social force, which obtains belief. The inverted commas around technology signify the idea and its history. Technology has come to embrace techniques, machines, tools, containers, archives, symbol systems and other incommensurable components. The term can variously acquire connotations of thing, presence, structure or force. It has swallowed up notions with longer histories, such as art, ingenuity, technique, craft, contrivance, cunningness and deceit. Technology is a monstrous amalgam of meanings and histories. In its earliest recorded history, the Greek notion of techne (variously rendered as skill, craft, art, or cunning) was closely related to a group of other terms such as metis, sophia, mechane and their respective variants (see Figures 2 & 3). In Homers epics, for example, sophia and techne are synonyms (Wheeler, 1998:28). Before the fifth century BCE, techne used to carry a range of magical connotations, as is evident in the mythology of the Greeks and its enchanting poetics of technics. Technical skill denoted divine powers and foresight, as well as referring to the manual crafts, such as building, pottery, carpentry, weaving and all forms of manufacturing requiring specialized knowledge of, and an

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apprenticeship process in, techniques, tools and materials. Yet techne remained distinct from physical labour, and connotes a way of thinking and a pattern of intellectual behaviour (Wheeler, 25), the mental capacity manifest in technical activity. Thus the term also embraced activities such as medicine, astronomy, navigation, arithmetic and rhetoric. Both metis and techne are intimately related, and sometimes used as synonyms. In mythology, Metis is a Titaness who is devoured by Zeus. Shortly after Athena, goddess of war and patroness of technai, is born from Zeus head. Says Everett Wheeler: Although primarily a word of Homer and the epic tradition, metis is a thought process which implies a complex but coherent body of mental attitudes, combining flair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance and opportunism with various skills and experiences acquired over time. Metis principally emerges in shifting, disconcerting, and ambiguous situations, where precise calculation and rigorous logic either fail or lack time to operate (25). One important context in which these terms are found is the vocabulary of war, where techne, metis and sophia come to stand for the various skills involved in stratagems and tactics. In early writings on war both technasma (trick, artifice) and technazein (to use cunning, to contrive) can be translated as stratagem. Another important group of words related to techne are those variants of mechane (see Figure 4), the etymological source of words such as machine and mechanism. For the Greeks, mechane had a more physical, material

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connotation. For example, in Aristotles (apocryphal) Mechanics, it is technes manifestation, the practical knowledge summoned by the necessity to achieve results contrary to nature (847a 15). The etymology of machine presents us with a rich palimpsest of meanings. It comes from the Dorian Greek mchan, Attican mchan, via the Latin mchina, meaning primarily instrument for lifting heavy weights, but also fabric, structure, frame, trick, instrument, contrivance (Barnhart, 1988; Klein, 1967). By around the late fourth century BCE, the meaning of techne begins to become secularised (Wheeler, 28). The Sophists, for example, claim that the technai can be taught to everyone. Technology acquires its modern use in the nineteenth century; but its historical and philosophical conditions of possibility can be traced to the renaissance and early modernity (and, of course, to the actual technics, the tools, crafts, techniques, etc.) I argue here that the conditions of possibility for the notion and practice of modern technology began to emerge in the seventeenth century, gathering previous historical continuities. Descartes was a symptom of this shift, which was not a radical rupture as much as a realignment of technics to specific historical forces (which, naturally, are not external to technics, but technics is itself already contained in them as a shaping force). The term modern is redundant here, since technology is already modern. One of the historical strands leading to technology (as opposed, perhaps, to technics) is the scientific revolution, which is characterized by this intense traffic and dialogue between natural philosophy and the crafts. Before

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the seventeenth century, terms like arts, crafts and industry are more appropriate. An analytical route into technology would try to seek an unvarying logical essence, and is likely to invoke, in the words of Leo Marx, a bloodless abstraction that represents no particular person or thing, no specific skill, vocation or other institution (Quoted in McKenzie 2002:xi). Others have tried a more empirical approach, compiling many disparate senses and uses, to produce a kind of cultural snapshot. Norman Vig offers a good definition of this kind: [Technology is:] (a) a body of technical knowledge, rules, and concepts; (b) the practice of engineering and other technical professions ; (c) the physical tools, instruments or artefacts resulting from this practice; (d) the organization and integration of technical personnel and processes into large-scale systems and institutions ; and (e) the 'technological condition', or character and quality of social life resulting from the cumulation of technological activity (1988:10) Vigs definition is useful as it attempts to map a heterogeneity of meanings. However, we are still left with the feeling of bloodlessness. Any examination of technology at any point in time quickly leads us into external factors: economic, social, cultural, historical. It would be useless to try to purify technology and drain it of its blood. What defines modern technology is not an internal shift in meaning, but the complex of which it is a part. Central to technology (as opposed to technics, crafts, arts and all the other meanings it has swallowed) is the logy of technics: the storage, distribution and reproduction of knowledge, the way this knowledge is conceived, codified, and represented. For millennia this process took place

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through associations of apprenticeship and training (guilds, for example, or hereditary lines) with a relatively limited geographical and temporal reach. It remained mainly an oral tradition, and even up until the fifteenth century treatises on technical matters were few and far between. (We must not confuse, then, the divide between technics and technology as one between speech and writing.) The difference is not between mental knowledge and habitual or contingent practice; all technical activity implies knowledge, is knowledge unfolding in the world. What defines modern technology is the form that this knowledge takes: the universalization of the rational account of techne, the imposition of standards, new demands on the way knowledge of machines and procedures is managed, stored, shared and institutionalized. (Or, rather than universalization, it would be more accurate to speak of internationalization). Some of the major breakthroughs in the storage and distribution of knowledge were themselves technological: writing, diagramming, the printing press, new representational techniques, mathematical formalisms and conceptual tools. Other factors were more social: the spread of the western European empire, the establishment of postal services and trade routes, the rise of universities and technical colleges, and other factors relating to the institutionalization of engineering and the technological arts as professions. Somewhere along the line, we must add to any historical account of modern technology the development of a certain self-consciousness, a progressive unification of domains. We can see the beginnings of this coherent articulation in Agricolas De re metallica (1557). And perhaps LEncyclopdie of

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Diderot and DAlembert, with its exhaustive taxonomy of Les Sciences, Les Arts Libraux, et Les Arts Mchaniques (almost exactly one century after Descartes death) can be considered the first monumental crystallization of this motif. Also central to this rising self-consciousness is the understanding of technology as a progressive and collective affair. Technology enters in alliances to modernist conceptions of history and the social organization of knowledge. This is part of a whole process of ascription of value to technology, which would lead in modern times to the tremendous emotional, mythical and imaginary dimensions of this idea. The technical arts had to be rescued from the social stigma of manual labour; a new breed of enlightened managers had to recognize the value of rationalization, accounting and implementation of these arts in war, the workshop and factory floor. And lastly, one of the main differences between the Greek conception of techne and modern technology is in the conceptions of matter or substance. It is not a coincidence that modern technology is accompanied by a conception of matter as mechanical; for the Greeks, the raw matter and procedures of techne entailed dimensions that escaped rationalization. Both Platos divine craftsman and Aristotles nature had to work with pre-existing qualities and potentialities of substances; although these two philosophers conceived of this craftsmanship in quite different terms. Technical activity was for them also goal-oriented. The end or purpose directed the technical or manufacturing process and imbued it with its meaning. This is one of the reasons why there are no treatises of techne

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in the ancient corpus (weve mentioned the only exception: Aristotles Rhetoric). There are plenty of writings on mechanics and machines, yes. But techne itself cannot be considered separate from its ends. Despite this doubtlessly significant metaphysical component, the shift to modern technology can only be understood by taking into account a considerable number of other factors. The rise of capitalism is often cited as one of the most important of these factors. As Sawday notes, the creation of automata is contemporaneous with the appearance of a phenomenon we more usually associate with the nineteenth centurythe specialization of labour into discrete tasks. In the manufacturing of mechanical devices, human industry itself had begun to be reconstituted as a mechanical process, an ordered sequence of functions (186). The rise of industry concurrently shaped notions of technology, beginning with the adoption of the actual term. By the early eighteenth century this term came to mean: A discourse or treatise on an arts or arts; the scientific study of the practical or industrial arts (Mitcham, 1994:130). Jacob Bigelows Elements of Technology (1831) is the first work to use the word in its title. This term, which Bigelow claims he found in some of the older dictionaries, is applied to describe the principles, processes, and nomenclatures of the more conspicuous arts, particularly those which involve applications of science (in Mitcham, 131). An important force behind the idea of modern technology is the acceleration of the technical dimensions of life, the experience of technological change. Vig notes: until recently technological conditions were relatively stable for long periods and did not radically alter the individuals role or sense of

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being over the course of a lifetime (1988:10). By the eighteenth century, the technical plane began to be regarded as a discrete and separate force, a concrete historical presence. It became allied with the ideologies of progress, becoming, for instance, a major indication of the relative degree of cultural development of different civilizations. In Machines as the Measure of Men, Michael Adas follows this dimension in the history of early European overseas expansion. He says that travellers and missionaries began to take pride in the superiority of their technology and their understanding of the natural world (1990:6). Formerly, the chief standard of judgment had been religion, Adas maintains. But by the mid-eighteenth century, scientific and technological gauges were playing a major and at times dominant role in European thinking about such civilisations as those of India and China and had begun to shape European policies on issues ranging from racism to colonial education (3). More specifically, the figure of the automaton played an important role in the mechanization of labour, as an intimate connection was forged between the machines of the philosopher and those of the entrepreneur. The mechanical simulations of eighteenth century mechanists were associated with efforts to mechanize human gestures in the context of industrial management (Schaffer, 1999:127). In the case of Jacques Vaucanson and many others, philosopher and entrepreneur combined in the same person. There is no easy way to extricate his famous mechanical flute player and defecating duck from his reforms in the textile industry. Vaucanson also attempted to build a moving anatomy for the fatally ill and technology-obsessed Louis XV, the king who had appointed him Inspector of Silk Manufacture. Vaucanson wanted to build a human-shaped

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automaton that could replicate all animal functions. He expressed interest in the properties of rubber (or cahuchu as the Amazonians called it), which the French expedition of Charles Marie de la Condamine had brought back from South America. It would have been the perfect material for fashioning the veins and arteries of the machine, but it was hard to control, and the machine was never built (Wood, 37-54). The illustrations of the Encyclopdie perfectly encapsulate this meeting of capitalism and the automaton. Here the workers are pictured as docile automatons who carry out their scientifically determined tasks with the efficiency and joylessness of machines (William Sewell, in Schaffer 126-7). The immanent machine of Lhomme became an abstract machine that traversed workshops, industries, military training, ideologies of production and philosophies of nature. The immanence that Descartes assigned to the artnature continuum became a fundamental assumption, tacit or otherwise, in the management and coordination of living and machine components. As Alan Snider writes, machines, humans and societies were all pronounced subject to abstract laws of power, control, and force and to a controlling scientific rationality (2000:310). Again, the Encyclopdie captures another aspect of this process: a drive to make techniques perfectly visible, so that they could apparently be reproduced anywhere and everywhere (Schaffer, 126). A textbook on man-machine systems, written in the early 1980s, clearly states this assumption: Engineering systems can be made compatible with human characteristics and limitations only by means of quantitative analysis and

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experiment, and only when the behaviour of both man and machine can be described in comparable terms (Sheridan & Ferrell, 1981:3). This seemingly mundane dictum crystallizes more than three centuries of history. The asymmetry, however, remains unspoken: these comparable terms will be machine terms. It was not until the nineteenth century, the golden era of measuring and standardization, that the industrial body-machine became formalized and institutionalized in control techniques, management practices and empirical biology. Human work was measured by machine standards, quantified and plotted, so that it could be shaped into a mechanism and fitted into larger systems of production and administration. The rewriting of the human body as machine was, in the words of Manfred Stanley, a process of subjugation by metaphor (1978:136). Frederick W. Taylors program of scientific management, which kicked off the field of efficiency engineering, was a momentous achievement of this project. But the body-machine was everywhere. Deleuze and Guattari describe the context of the nineteenth century in these terms: During the nineteenth century a two-fold elaboration was undertaken: of a physicoscientific concept of Work (weight-force, force displacement), and of a socioeconomic concept of labour-power or abstract labour (a homogeneous abstract quantity applicable to all work, and susceptible to multiplication and division). There was a profound link between physics and sociology: society furnished an economic standard of measure for work, and physics a mechanical currency for it (1987:490). Deleuze and Guattari make these observations in the context of the States capture of the war machine. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this appropriation took place by submitting the war machine to the Work-

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model of the construction site and factory, and the general conditions of capitalist organization (490). The relations between automata, automation, mechanization and the war machine are strong, and can also be traced to early modernity, to the armies in which Descartes served, for instance, which were incorporating new methods of discipline and training that mechanized human action. Meanwhile, the machine never ceased its allegorical work. Its symbolic power spread to new places, developing novel elements and nuances. In some versions the automaton became an ominous double, incarnating technological power over the living, but also revealing a tragic side: the impossibility of controlling death and the organic (Im thinking in particular of the stories of E. T. A. Hoffman, which anticipate a panorama of the Gothic possibilities of machinery). In the eighteenth and nineteen centuries, Europe developed an intense dramatic and literary fascination with marionettes, puppets and automatons; for example, in the work of J. W. von Goethe, Heinrich Kleist, Rilke and others (Segel, 1995). After the discovery of electricity and its role in living things, the figure of the automaton underwent another change. The exemplary automaton narrative of the modern period is Mary Shelleys Frankenstein, or Prometheus Unbound (1816), a celebrated tale on the perils and possibilities of technology. Frankensteins monster represents the full extent of the poetical transformation of the automaton, and the culmination of the Faustus and Prometheus traditions.

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Descartes himself was incorporated into the lore of automata. In the eighteenth century a story circulated that he had constructed a mechanical companion, a female doll whom he named after his illegitimate daughter Francine. During a trip across the Holland Sea, he slept with the automaton in her box by his side. The captain and crew grew terrified of the doll, and one night they threw the automaton overboard. The story reads like something out of Hoffman, and encapsulates some key elements of automaton lore: associations with devilry, forbidden knowledge, and the female; the doomed and tragic desire to preserve life through technological means. During the industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century, the Western imagination began to assign technology a central role in its dreams and nightmares. The machine entered experience in the shape of iron, coal, textile and steam machinery. While machines of various kinds, and also workshops and factories, have accompanied the development of humankind from an early stage, it is not until this time that they acquired such a wide range of meanings (Hill, 1998:45). As inhabitants of an urban landscape where technology is ubiquitous, it might be hard for us to grasp the enormous impact the sight of early industrial machinery had on contemporary observers, and the amazing responses they elicited in the cultural imagination. In the year 1865, for example, an observer recorded his impressions of a steam locomotive: I cannot express the amazed awe, the crushed humility, with which I sometimes watch a locomotive take its breath at a railway station, and think what work there is in its bars and wheels ... What assemblage of accurate and mighty faculties in them; more than fleshy power over melting crag and coiling fire, fettered and finessed at last into the precision of watchmaking; Titanian hammer-strokes beating, out of

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lava, these glittering cylinders and timely-respondent valves, and fine ribbed rods, which touch each other as a serpent writhes, in noiseless gliding, and omnipotence of grasp; infinitely complex anatomy of active steel, compared with which the skeleton of a living creature would seem, to a careless observer, clumsy and vilea mere morbid secretion and phosphatous prop of flesh! (Ruskin, in Jennings 1985:305). The first Machine Age marked the arrival into the scene of contraptions of a singular mystery and majesty (Leiss, 1990:37). Another case: the most imposing exhibit at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876 was a Corliss steam-engine weighing 680 tons and standing thirty-nine feet high (36). In the experience of the fair-goers this remarkable appliance, like some mythological creature, was endowed with life and all its movements construed as gestures. The machine emerged as a kind of fabulous automaton part animal, part machine, part god (Kasson, in Leiss, 36). We owe to English thinker and statesman Thomas Carlyle the first recorded reference to an Age of Machinery, in an essay written in 1829: Were we required to characterize this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical or Moral Age, but above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of the word (1971:64) By the time of Carlyles pronouncement, the term machine had come to subsume a large variety of significations well beyond its ordinary technical sense. Social institutions, economic and scientific endeavours, even metaphysics and art would be marked, according to Carlyle, by mechanisms and systems, by an interest in materiality and outward appearance, and by the great art of adapting means to ends (64). According to Leo Marx, in his classic

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study The Machine in the Garden (1964), the shift in language begins to occur in the 1780s and 1790s, and affects a range of terms, including engine, machine, manufacture and industry (166). But what is remarkable about Carlyles essay is how, [p]laying upon all possible connotations of machinery, Carlyle turns it into the controlling symbol for a new kind of culture (170). A peculiar mythology developed around machines, which entered metaphorical frameworks such as Master/Slave, Spirit/Matter, Heavenly/Demonic and Death/Life. In the words of Richard Badham, machines acquired a symbolic role previously more associated with natural or religious symbols (1991:6). Although specific forms of machinery (like steam-engines or locomotives) came to play specific roles as torch-bearers of progress, the abstract noun (the Machine) gained a new usage, made to carry a burden of implication, thought, and feeling far beyond that borne by a simple reference (Leo Marx, 191). Marx also writes that one of the remarkable things about Signs of the Times is the clarity and cogency with which Carlyle connects the machine as object (a technological fact) and the machine as metaphor (a token of value) (173). Technological metaphor seeped into other areas of life, appearing as a forceful symbol of the forces of mechanisation and new forms of social life, even invoking a spiritual state, a kind of ontological emptiness unique to modern urban existencei. As Carlyle said: For all earthly, and for some unearthly purposes, we have machines and mechanic furtherances; for mincing our cabbages; for casting us into magnetic sleep (64).

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Every epoch has wondered about machines in their own way, in the light of their own preoccupations and circumstances. And each wave of technical innovation has brought its own narratives, images, metaphors. The Western romance with technology can be told through the various machines this culture has fallen in and out of love with. The Information Age represents the third coming of the Machine. A second Machine Age was ushered in after World War II, a renewed burst of technological dreaming after the decline of the modernist faith in technology. Reyner Banham, a historian of architecture, describes it as an era where miniaturization, transistorisation, jet and rocket travel, wonderdrugs and new domestic chemistries, television and the computer seemed to offer more of the same, only better (1960:10). Thus, each Machine Age promised to deliver what the previous one had not. But the post-modern age is not so much the Age of Machinery as that of its effects and powers, which have grown in inverse proportion to their size. Teleperception, digital imaging, surveillance systems, automated decision-making, reproductive technologies, nanotech and biotech. No longer the rusty, sooty mammoths of old, machines have become magical objects again, nodes supporting invisible networks, interfaces, external extensions of memory and other mental and physical faculties. Correspondingly, the image of the machine becomes more intensely abstract, and takes the character of a sign (a kind of hyper-symbol). Joseph Tabbi describes this virtual phase of technological culture as one where individual beliefs and desires externalise themselves in technological inscriptions, and consciousness is delegated to symbolical systemsthe hard

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memory of archives and computer networks, for example, or to processes of economic growth and commodity exchange which are not thought, but which in their essential abstraction have the form of thought (9-10).

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Technology
Also (but not equivalent): techne, technique, technics, technicity.

manufacturing building and architecture making archiving counting accounting storing measuring irrigation time-keeping navigation cartography mining, agriculture, and all similar forms of environmental intervention the crafts (carpentry, masonry, textiles, etc.) and the arts (music, painting, etc.) pictorial representations tools machines artefacts containers skills clothes weaponry and war skills (war machines, ways of thinking, arts, etc.) the domestication of plants and animals information storage, distribution and reproduction (oral and recorded) writing, speech, and all forms of symbolic exchange social organization material culture techniques of the body and the self religious/ritual techniques and artefacts procedural or technical reason scientific and other instruments biomechanics, bionics, and biotechnologies

Figure 1: Meanings of technology

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Techne () Indo-European root *tek (shape, make). Sanskrit taksan (carpenter, builder), taksati (he forms, constructs). Hittite takkss- (to join, build)

Ancient Greek Techne (): Tichtein (): Technicos (): Technon (): Techton (): Also Technao: Technasma: Technazein: Cheirotechnes: Entechnos: Skill, craft, art, cunning. Pl. technai, the arts. To bear, bring forth, produce. Pertaining to art, or made by art. Child. Carpenter, builder. To contrive, to execute skillfully. Trick, artifice. To use cunning, to contrive. Artisan, handicraftsman. Artistic, skilled.

English Technic (1612), technical (artificial,1617). Also, text, textile, texture, technocracy, technocrat, architect, architectonic, tectorial, and other variants. By 1676, technology is a treating of arts or workmanship. The New World of English Words (1706): a description of Arts, especially the Mechanical. Jacob Bigelows Elements of Technology (1831): A word he says he found in some of the older dictionaries is applied to describe the principles, processes, and nomenclatures of the more conspicuous arts, particularly those which involve applications of science. Some English Variants: Technic, technical, technica, technicality, technically, technicalness, technician, technicist, technicon, technics, technique, technism, technologic, technological, technologist, technology. (OED, 1891). Tech, technetium, technetronic, technic, technica, technical, technicality, technically, technician, technicism, technicist, technisize, technico-, Technicolor, technics, technicum, technique, technism, techno-, technocracy, technologic, technological, technologically, technologism, technologist, technologize, technology. (OED, 1989). Other variants include tectorial and tectonic (respectively, To put a roof on, covering and Pertaining to building or construction.) E.g., in biology: tectibranch, tectrices, tectaria.

Figure 2: The evolution and meanings of techne.

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Techne into Latin Texere To weave. (Spanish tejer, to weave, to knit; and tejido, woven fabric, textile). Tegere To cover, put a roof on. (Source of Sp. techo). Also tectum, Roof, house. Ars, artis Craft, trade, profession. From I-E root *ar-, put things together, join, fit; also source of Gr. rthron, limb (hence Eng. arthritis, arthropod, etc.) Artifex, -icis Artificialis Artus Master, artist, actor. (masculine). Of the arts. Joint. By metaphorical extension, division, part. (Diminutive: articulus.) Articulre Divide into joints. To speak distinctly.

Also relating to craft, making, cunning, ingenuity: apparatus, utensilium, astutia, commentus, dexteritas, faber, affaber, peritia, vafer, versutus.

Source of English: article, art, artist, artificial, artifice, artifact, articulate, articulation, arm, artisan, artless, artificer, inertia, and other variants. Possibly also artillery.

Figure 3: Techne enters Latin as ars.

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Mechane ()
Indo-European root *mogh- and *megh-; Germanic maxan, to have power, hence English may, make and might. Greek Device, machine, contrivance. Also: mechos (),means, expedient. Mechanema, mechanaomai, mechanetikos (inventive, clever), mechanai, polymechanos, mechanemata, eumechanos. Latin Mchina Mchinri Machine, engine, fabric, device, trick. contrivance. (From Doric mchan, Attic mechane). To contrive, to plot. Also, mchinatio, scheme, plot, fraud, intrigue.

Variants

Middle French (9th to 15th Centuries) A variety of words relating to the manual arts (mecaniqual, mecanique, mecaniser, mecaniquement), with connotations of low, vile (mecaniquet, mecaniquerie), and of intrigue, scheme, plot (machinerie, machineux, machineor, machinance, machinatif).

English 1549 : 1673: Machine: Any structure or contrivance. First recorded in the sense of apparatus for applying mechanical power to do work. Mechanics, mechanical, mechanism, mechanicism, machine, machinator, machinery, machination (fraud, intrigue), machinist, machinism, machinic, and other variants.

Source of:

Figure 4: Mechane, variants and evolution

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Bibliography
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McKenzie, Adrian (2002) Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed (London & New York: Continuum). Mitcham, Carl (1994) Thinking Through Technology: The Path Between Engineering and Philosophy (The University of Chicago Press). Sawday, Jonathan (1999) Forms Such as Never Were in Nature: the Renaissance Cyborg, in E. Fudge, R. Gilbert & S. Wiseman (eds.), At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period (UK: MacMillan Press). Schaffer, Simon (1999) Enlightened Automata, in W. Clark, J. Golinski & S. Schaffer (eds.), The Sciences in Enlightened Europe (The University of Chicago Press). Sheridan, Thomas B. & Ferrell, William R. (1981) Man-Machine Systems: Information, Control and Decision Models of Human Performance (The MIT Press). Snider, Alan (2000) Cartesian Bodies, in Modern Philosophy 98, 299-319. Stanley, Manfred (1978) The Technological Conscience (The Free Press). Tabbi, Joseph (1995) Postmodern Sublime (Cornell University Press). Vig, Norman J. (1988) Technology, Philosophy and the State: An Overview, in M. Kraft & N. Vig (eds.), Technology and Politics (Duke University Press). Wheeler, Everett (1988) Stratagem and the Vocabulary of Military Trickery (E.J. Brill Publishers). Wood, Gaby (2002) Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (Faber and Faber).
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For example, nearly a decade before Carlyle, the poet and mystic William Blake, wrote: For Bacon and Newton, sheathd in dismal steel, their terrors hang Like iron scourges over Albion. Reasonings like vast Serpents Enfold around my limbs, bruising my minute articulations. I turn my eyes to the Schools and Universities of Europe, And there behold the Loom of Locke, whose Woof rages dire, Washd by the Water-wheels of Newton: black the cloth In heavy wreaths folds over every Nation: cruel works Of many wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic, Moving by compulsion each other; not as those in Eden, which, Wheel within wheel, in freedom revolve, in harmony and peace. (In A Vision of Albion, Jerusalem, publ. 1820; 1994:293-294)

Blakes lines are packed with technological imagery, which carries, without exception, negative connotations. There are references to a machines raw materials and its products (dismal steel, iron scourges) and to its form (wheels, cogs). Notably, Newton is associated with the water

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clock, and Locke with a mechanical tool. Note also the demonization of this machinery, which is opposed to those in Eden. Curiously, Paradise itself is also portrayed in mechanistic terms, although this machine is a heavenly one, revolving in freedom, harmony and peace.

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