Abstract
I have a long-standing relation with the noun “technoscience.” In recent years, I have been concerned with its evolution and connotations, since the period when I first thought it up. This chapter presents a survey of the various uses, transfers and significations of the term. It makes a twofold claim (i) technoscientific research and development are conducted by a plural subject in need of a moral conscience; (ii) the study of technoscientific objects requires a methodological and operational materialism.
Augmented version for this volume of an essay first published in French (Hottois G. La technoscience: de l’origine du mot à ses usages actuels. In: Goffi J-Y (ed) Regards sur les technosciences, Vrin, Paris, pp. 23–38, 2006). Translation by John Stewart, University of Technology Compiègne.
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Notes
- 1.
My science-fiction novel Species Technica (2002a) written in 1981 but published 20 years later, is evidence for this.
- 2.
On the occasion of an invitation from the University of Brussels of Dominique Lecourt who had just published a book devoted, one might say, to the imaginary dimension of technoscience (Lecourt 1996).
- 3.
Published in 2004 under the title Philosophie des sciences, philosophies des techniques (Hottois 2004a).
- 4.
- 5.
In a voluminous anthology Philosophy of Technology the editors Robert C. Sharff and Val Dusek attribute the paternity of the term “technoscience” to Bachelard, from whom Latour is supposed to have borrowed it (Sharff and Dusek 2003: 85).
- 6.
Heisenberg’s “Nature in contemporary physics” includes a section on technology and constantly emphasizes the strong link between science and technology, as well as the transformation of a science that aims at representation into a science that is active and operational. The role of theory in this science-technology no longer concerns reality itself, but the interactions of the scientist with the real world. This text includes a radical re-evaluation of technology in its relation to science.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
The Postmodern Condition (1979) contains no occurrence of “technoscience.”
- 10.
“But the victory of capitalist technoscience over the other candidates for the universal finality of human history is another means of destroying the modern project while giving the impression of completing it.” (Lyotard 1986: 18).
- 11.
It is not exceptional that a philosophical reflection on technology brings one back to a philosophy of nature. But in the case it is a concept of nature which is profoundly transformed. From the viewpoint of technoscience, “rendering technological or operational” and “naturalizing” are complementary aspects of one and the same process.
- 12.
See the reference to the field of STS that Lyotard (1986: 21) associates with “the discovery of the subject’s immanence in the object it studies and transforms.”
- 13.
A university located in Saint-Denis, near Paris, and created in the aftermath of the political events of May 1968, where Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Alain Badiou, taught as well.
- 14.
For example, recently again, in La revolucion tecnocientifica by Javier Echeverria (2003).
- 15.
- 16.
On the model of “cosmogony,” pragmatogony is a narrative recounting the genesis of pragmata (both things and public affairs, as well as matters of concern and of interest).
- 17.
“Through technoscience – defined for my purposes here, as a fusion of science, organization and industry – the forms of coordination learned through ‘networks of power’ (see level n°9) are extended to inarticulate entities. Nonhumans are endowed with speech, however primitive. (…) While in this model, the tenth meaning of sociotechnical, automata have no rights, they are much more than material entities; they are complex organizations.” (Latour 1999: 203–204)
- 18.
Mary Tiles and Hans Oberdiek write that faced with the entanglement of science and technology, “it makes more sense to talk, as Bruno Latour does, of techno-science.” (1995: 90) However, some doubts are occasionally expressed regarding the paternity of this term. Raphaël Sassouer attributes the invention of “technoscience” to Lyotard in 1982, but observes that its paternity remains an object of dispute (1995: 24).
- 19.
Founded in 1975 and often designated by the acronym 4S.
- 20.
Published three times a year, it goes back to the end 1980s. The latest news is that it ceased publication in 2004, being replaced by online information (http://www.4sonline.org/technoscience)
- 21.
It is primarily in Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty that Ihde finds the resources for a critique of Science as “theoretical,” as well as the elements for an approach to science which emphasizes its dependence with respect to concretely situated perception and praxis: the Lebenswelt in Husserl, the phenomenology of perception and the body in Merleau-Ponty, and the technically equipped preoccupation of Heidegger from which theoretical objectivity is derived. One finds there sketches of the “reincorporation” or “re-embodiment” of science. See his Technics and Praxis (1979).
- 22.
- 23.
Séris assumed that Ellul inspired me, since he refered principally to Le signe et la technique (Hottois 1984a). But his view is not unambiguous: in one place (1994: 215) he credited me with of the authorship of the term (“The neologism ‘technoscience’ forged by G. Hottois”), But elsewhere (1994: 373) he seemed to attribute it to Ellul (“‘Technoscience’, the ‘elegant’ neologism, based on the corresponding adjective, invented by J. Ellul”). Ellul’s Preface to Le signe et la technique unfortunately contributed to distort the meaning and the scope of this book, perverting it in the direction of technophobia.
- 24.
United States Government Printing Office, Washington, 1945.
- 25.
The fact that R&D enterprises enter the stock market, the creation of the NASDAQ (National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations), the importance of patenting, all express this evolution.
- 26.
Echeverría insists strongly on this aspect that, together with private funding, he considers a major characteristic of technoscience as distinct from Big Science. In this evolution, the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) acted as a precursor (Echeverría 2003: 71; 105; 146).
- 27.
Profit, media narcissism, power, secret, various personal advantages…., and having recourse to means such as mercenary motives, dissimulation, cheating, faking, etc.
- 28.
“soft chemistry’ (chimie douce) is a phrase coined by French chemist Jacques Livage in the 1970s. It refers to the investigation of chemical reactions conducted at ambient temperature and low pressure. It includes sol-gel chemistry and bio-inspired chemistry.
- 29.
Echeverría emphasizes the structurally conflictual nature of the subject of technoscience. These conflicts cannot always be reduced to peaceful controversies and debates; there are also oppositions and incompatibilities in modes of life, in very concrete interests and social projects, which can become physically violent. (Echeverría 2003: 176)
- 30.
Echeverría recalls that at the start of the Human Genome Project its first director, James Watson, decided to allocate 5% of the budget to research on the ethical, legal and social implications of the Project (2003: 139).
- 31.
As Matrix for Materiality, the subtitle of the aforementioned collective work edited by Idhe and Selinger (2003) suggests.
- 32.
It was initially published in French in Jean-Yves Goffi, Ed. (2006).
- 33.
Lambright was Professor of “Public Administration and International Affairs, and Political Science” at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University (NY). In the course of the 1970s previous to the substantial use of the term by Lambright (1976), I have managed to find several publications (Caldwell 1970; Erber 1970; Rosenthal 1973; Micklin 1973) containing occurrences of the noun “technoscience” (a dozen) in works on social, political or environmental sciences that are more or less politically committed. “Technoscience” appears as an autonomous noun designating a Western reality which is the object of anxiety and criticism. The term either evokes a bunch of environmental concerns (Caldwell, Rosenthal, Micklin), or a bureaucratic concern for the appropriate management of science and technology, or urban planning (Erber). It is not impossible that one or other of these authors used the term at the very end of the 1960s. But to recap, these previous uses of “technoscience” and “technoscientific” were aimed at “coloring” a discourse with a number of suggestive connotations, rather than setting forth a new – and yet to be thought – concept. Let us also point out the first occurrence in Danish of a term – “Teknovitenskap” – that was later translated into English as “techno-science,” in Edgar N. Schieldrop (1956), “På skilleveien i dette angstens og håpets århundre” (“A Century of Fear and Hope at the Crossroads”): a speech pronounced at the Danske Ingeniørforenings on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of Niels Bohr, and translated in Mechanical Engineering in 1959. Here is the translated context of this occurrence: “At this critical stage we are bound to ask if the human race, with the vast power techno-science has placed in its hands, really understands how watchful it must be if the world is not plunged into a disaster surpassing all our nightmares.” It is an interesting hapax that remained at the time without influence as far as we know.
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Hottois, G. (2018). Technoscience: From the Origin of the Word to Its Current Uses. In: Loeve, S., Guchet, X., Bensaude Vincent, B. (eds) French Philosophy of Technology. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 29. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89518-5_8
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