The History of Knowledge Approach and the Difference between Science and Technology

David Gugerli

Paul Forman's recent attempt at separating modern and postmodern narratives has not only led to a preposterous debate on occasion of the 50th anniversary conference of the Society for the History of Technology. Forman claimed that the "postmodern reversal of primacy between science and technology" - allegedly occuring around 1980 - has been both a shift from modernity to the postmodern, as well as a shift from theory to practice. During that shift, "historians of technology, as a group, chose ignoration of science, i.e. the exclusion of science from their purview and their histories."
This led to a harsh reaction of the leading historians of technology. While it is obvious that the history of technology always claims to primarily deal with technology, "ignoration of science" must have sounded very hard to them. It was, however, simultaneously a true and a wrong assertion. Historians of technology always had to deal with science, at least whenever they tried to draw a line between science and technology. And, indeed, there have been endless struggles to separate technology from science, engineers from scientists, followed up by countless debates trying to distinguish either between practice and theory, or abstract from the tangible. These discussions served the interests of professional pressure groups both in engineering and in academic history. This distinction between science and technology was used by engineers to deal with the superiority claims of scientists, and it was used by professional historians of technology as a means to self-assure their small, marginal and indeed neglected community against the self-importance of historians of science. The game has been played now for more than a century. Each side taking part in the battle has declared itself as the winning team. Forman's queer review might be the first time one side gives in.

However, this capitulation happens in the wrong moment. While there is no need to continue an analytically fruitless debate, it seems to be a much more promising endeavor to abandon the claims of primacy all at once. I will argue in my short intervention that the history of knowledge approach can serve that end. The genealogy of knowledge, the stategies of representation of knowledge, the forms of circulation of knowledge, as well as the manifold roles which actors of knowledge have played in the past are forming an exciting array of research fields which avoid the reification of a difference which was never very productive.