Hubris and Hybrids: A Cultural History of Technology and Science (review)

Mikael Hård's and Andrew Jamison's cultural history of technology and science covers about five centuries, with a strong focus on the twentieth. The major topic is what the authors call "cultural appropriation" of science and technology, which they define as "the discursive, institutional, and daily practices through which technology and science are given human meaning" (p. xiv).

The book is organized into four parts, each consisting of three chapters. The first part covers "The Roots of Technoscience" and focuses on the scientific revolution in early modern Europe, the industrial transformation, and what the authors call "sites of enlightenment and innovation." The second part, "The Machine in the Mind," focuses on meanings and identities linked to technology in the twentieth century. Here, the first two chapters deal with differences of cultural appropriation in the United States, Germany, and Sweden, and in China, Japan, and India, while the third covers appropriations of science and technology in twentieth-century arts and design (including futurism, impressionism, industrial design, architecture, urban planning, photography, film, and science fiction). Part 3, "Machines and Knowledge in Action," presents specific fields of cultural appropriation of technology: mobility, communication and information, and public health and personal hygiene—fields which the authors regard as "material manifestations" of a twentieth-century "culture of time and space" (p. 172). The last part, "Coping with Technoscience," provides an account of technological criticism and environmentalism after World War II, as well as a short conclusion.

The authors' point of departure is the perception "that human societies have not always taken on new technologies and new scientific findings in ways that are 'appropriate.'" They consider hubris as fundamental to the innovative spirit. This hubris needs to be controlled "through successful processes of cultural appropriation" (p. xiii). Their book thus is meant "to lay the foundation for what we call a cultural assessment of technology and science" (p. xiv). The foundation Hård and Jamison provide is twofold. First, they develop a theoretical framework for writing cultural history of technology and science by considering and distinguishing the discursive, organizational, and practical level of analysis. On the discursive level, semantics, grammar, and language are of interest; on the organizational level, movements, institutions, and rules and laws; and on the practical level the focus is on behavior and identity, routines, and procedures and customs. Hård and Jamison intend to develop new "story lines" and tell new, "dialectical stories of hybridization" (p. 4) which combine production-centered views on technology with perspectives of the appropriation of technology and its consequences.

Second, they apply the concepts "hubris" and "hybrids" as a kind of grand interpretive scheme to the history of technology and science. According to Hård and Jamison it was a kind of hubris that inspired many of those who took part in the so-called scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. It was also a kind of hubris that inspired the so-called Industrial Revolution. And in much the same way it is a kind of hubris that leads contemporary governments to invest enormous amounts of money in fields like "life sciences," information, and communication.

The authors call the twentieth century an "age of hubris," and they link this hubris to the rise of "discursive frameworks" or "mind-sets" like mechanism, quantification, utility, and natural law, which took on hegemonic importance in Europe. In a culture such as China's, in contrast, "there was little incentive and even less opportunity for scientific-technical hubris to become socially significant" (p. 136). The concept of "hybrids" marks a fundamental feature of humans, institutions, or objects, which was a precondition for the rise of hubris. Hybrids combine old and new, "the human and the nonhuman, the technical and the social" (p. xiii). "What remained separate in other places—the lifeworlds of the scholar and the craftsman—were combined in the hybrid identity of the experimental philosopher" in early modern Europe (p. 127). An early...