Panelists
Carroll Pursell
M. Norton Wise
Stuart W. Leslie
Ronald R. Kline
David Edgerton
Reply
Paul Forman
Chair and Organizer
Eric Schatzberg, University of Wisconsin-Madison
From the founding of SHOT into the 1980s, the relationship between science and technology was one of the principal historiographic issues discussed in the society’s journal and at its meetings. Since the 1980s, however, explicit discussions of the science-technology relationship has become less prominent in SHOT, although empirical studies have continued to address this issue. A new article by Paul Forman, however, has thrust this issue back to the forefront. Forman’s article contains a bold reformulation of the debate over the science-technology relationship, in which he argues that the cultural primacy of science over technology that prevailed in modernity has been replaced by the cultural primacy of technology over science in postmodernity. But more important for the SHOT community, Forman’s long and ambitious paper contains a major challenge to SHOT’s science-technology historiography. Forman argues that the society’s perverse quest for autonomy from the history of science has blinded its members from recognizing the cultural shift to the primacy of technology. Forman makes his case through an analysis of a number of key figures in SHOT historiography, claiming that their work demonstrates not just a misunderstanding of the science-technology relationship but rather a systematic neglect of science.
This proposed session will address and respond for Forman’s critique. The session is not meant to consist primarily of SHOT insiders defending the society, although some defense is certainly to be expected. Rather, the principal aim of the session is to assemble a diverse set of historians who will take Forman’s article as an opportunity to reframe what has become a stale debate over the science-technology relationship. The session includes five prominent historians who will comment on Forman’s article: 1) a past president of SHOT who participated in the early years of the society, 2) a historian of science whose work has dealt with both scientific practice and industrial culture, 3) a historian of both science and technology who has been active both in SHOT and in the History of Science Society, 4) a historian of technology who has worked on both the technical and cultural history of the intersection of science and technology, 5) a historian of technology from Britain where the organization of the history of science and technology is quite different than in the United States. Each panelist will give a comment on the article, followed by a reply from Paul Forman.
It is difficult to imagine that a stale debate will be vitalized by a such an obtuse start.
Forman’s elegant but intensely wrongheaded proposition is–at one and the same time–a lament for the decline in status of the history of physics, a quarrel with the materialism of our contemporary society, and a reminder of the intellectual elitism that long troubled the history of science.
So, once again, we get a hierarchy of the things that are worth study, and no one should be surprised to find that our subject matter is linked to the debasement of postmodern culture.
And the fact is that science is alive and well. It’s just that we are spending the money on biochemistry and the human genome project instead of super-colliders–maybe the last remnant of the modernist agenda.
It would be wonderful if our anniversary celebrations opened new lines of thinking for future scholarship, but this one is a sad labyrinth of disappointment.
Comment by bsinclair — July 27, 2007 @ 12:23 am
When Mel Kranzberg passed the T&C baton in 1981, he assured me that I need not “run in exactly the same direction” as before, even as he insisted that one thing should remain just the same. “An editor,” Mel told me, “should never allow an author to make a fool of himself.” Surely every editor must understand this, but, somehow, the editor of History and Technology failed his obligation with respect to Paul Forman’s article in the current issue of his journal.
Partly he did so by publishing a narrative that is tendentious, repetitive, and beset with errors of fact. Partly he did so by not taking a blue pencil to the sniping at honorable men and women.
But far more importantly he did so by not putting up a red flag wherever the documentation does not begin to provide evidence for what’s in the text, in particular the aspersions cast on SHOT based on little more than a superficial sample of material published in Technology and Culture and elsewhere by a disparate group with SHOT connections. (Indeed, Forman himself confesses to “my very limited reading.”) He has cast these aspersions even as a rich and relevant body of source material lay within his immediate grasp. I’m referring to the Kranzberg Papers held by the Archives Center of the National Museum of American History, Forman’s employer. Forman should have been told right off that he could not publish his accusations about SHOT’s “ideological character,” about “unspoken understandings”–about, yes, a conspiracy–unless he could cite evidence of such from primary sources.
(The Kranzberg Papers comprehend virtually all the correspondence relating to T&C from the mid-1950s to the mid-1990s. They also comprehend Kranzberg’s SHOT secretarial correspondence and that of several of his successors, as well as the papers of SHOT presidents, and much else, hundreds upon hundreds of archival boxes.)
Forman should have been advised that his evidence for there being “a consensus among historians of technology to keep science out–and where it could not be kept out to put it down” was woefully insufficient. Instead, he was allowed to fantasize about a handful of conspirators making certain that the “ignoration” of science would become a “disciplinary ideology,” and he was also allowed to fantasize about these same conspirators imposing an anti-determinist orthodoxy aimed at insuring that an “ever shrinking sector of the discipline [would be] inclined to take the essence of technology as something technological..
If he had spent any time at all in Kranzberg’s correspondence, Forman would have realized how utterly untenable is his claim that Mel intended “to recruit constituencies with primarily presentist interests, what [sic] is reflected in the omission of history from the title of the society’s journal.” Untenable? I can hardly count the ways. Mel recruited anybody he could. And even had he wanted to steer his journal in a particular direction by publishing material reflective of only one perverse “ideological character”— anti-science, anti-determinist, presentist, aimed at “constituencies with only marginal interests in history” —he could never have done so.
Even if SHOT’s founding generation had all shared in an “animosity” towards science, there would have been no way to impose any sort of “official posture” on the new society. Rarely if ever blessed with a backlog, Mel had to publish just about anything he got that was not an embarrassment. Why is this important? Simply because he had no opportunity, even should he have sought it, to try and impose a “disciplinary orthodoxy” by means of what he would or would not publish. The sole necessity was to find enough material that referees would deem respectable to fill 200-some pages every three months.
Even without firsthand knowledge of the editorial situation, this should have been obvious just from reviewing a list of the best articles published in T&C, its Usher Prizewinners. Until the 1980s, nearly all of these would be called internalist, in the old-fashioned sense of the term─to Mel’s confrere Bob Multhauf, this meant “historical” rather than “sociological.” (More recently
this has changed somewhat, but there is simply no evidence that the current editor has made a mark as sort of a social-constructionist pied piper because of strictures laid down in Technology’s Storytellers, as he is depicted by Forman: “Following Staudenmaier, historians of technology generally, and as a corporate body, have . . .”).
On what evidence, Forman should have been asked, do you make pronouncements about what is “generally believed” by the society’s members? Forman’s article gives scant indication that he has read much of what historians of technology have written. And there is no indication whatever that he has checked the archival record, which, in almost limitless volume, runs counter to all of his conspiratorial imaginings.
On its fiftieth anniversary, nothing could be more valuable to SHOT than a candid assessment of what it has attained and failed to attain. What Paul Forman has been enabled to broadcast, however, is abusive, shallow, and (I cannot say it better than Bruce Sinclair) a sad labyrinth of disappointment.
Comment by bob post — August 3, 2007 @ 3:59 pm
I published a long article by Paul Forman in HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY, along with four responses, one of them extremely critical, the other three far less so. I had no involvement whatsoever in the organization of a session on this paper for SHOT’s 50th anniversary meeting. I am not on the Program Committee that accepted that panel, nor did I try to influence its decision in any way.
I welcome debate on this article in the pages of the journal, and would be delighted to dedicate a special number of HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY to further critical evaluation of its argument by the scholarly community..
Comment by jkrige — September 2, 2007 @ 9:46 pm