Jocelyn Holland, a lecturer in comparative literature at Caltech and a specialist in the intellectual heritage of 18th- and 19th-century Germany, has released a new publication from Brill. In her volume, Theory’s Practice: Reflections on Technology in Germany Around 1800, Holland illustrates that, despite the common belief that the term “technology” only gained theoretical significance in the late 19th century, substantial shifts in how some thinkers viewed technology were already occurring in Germany by the late 18th century.
This perspective on technology does not align with present historical accounts regarding the evolution of theoretical discourse on technology in the West. “Scholars who write extensive histories of technology, who adopt a broad perspective, often overlook the specifics,” Holland remarks. “With this book, I aimed to refine this narrative by closely examining several crucial decades. I demonstrate that there are multiple ways in which individuals attempted to transition from the practical aspects of technology to broader inquiries about its essence.”
“If you were to inquire of someone in the mid-18th century to define technology, their response might be something like: ‘A technology serves as a compendium, a lexicon of technical terminologies assembled from various crafts,’” Holland elaborates. “However, in the final years of the 18th century, individuals were striving to synthesize all these disparate elements, all these nouns and verbs, that pertained to the execution of traditional crafts.”
“Around the 1770s, technology started being taught as a distinct subject at universities,” Holland clarifies. “Individuals were also composing technology manuals and formulating comprehensive systems of technology that could encompass a broad spectrum of practical knowledge and expertise. Language posed a significant challenge because, as one might imagine, the guild structure that governed artisans’ work safeguarded particular secrets. Craftspeople passed down oral traditions, which were not necessarily shareable with outsiders. Those attempting to write comprehensively about technology faced genuine obstacles; for instance, they might encounter 10 different terms for the same implement depending on the context.”
The authors of systems and instructional manuals pertaining to technology were, inevitably, required to approach it from a different angle, she notes. “Once you are compelled to consider issues of organization and classification, how to categorize various craft practices and items, you begin to need a more theoretical viewpoint from which to contemplate the material,” Holland explains.
This initiative in Germany was tied to a broader intellectual pursuit across Europe at that period, focusing on classification. Just as Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus was developing taxonomies of flora and fauna to systematically arrange the natural world into related categories of similar species, the German thinkers discussed in Theory’s Practice were endeavoring to create logical frameworks for organizing tools and methods. Indeed, one individual whose writings Holland interprets in her book is Johann Beckmann, the author of the significant Guide to Technology, who also paid a visit to Linnaeus in Sweden.
Holland approaches her research with a profound admiration for language and what it can reveal about historical contexts that we can no longer experience. “I feel a certain nostalgia for the decline of specialized technical language,” she reflects. “I enjoy encountering very specific terms that have become less prevalent in speech or writing than they once were.”
Holland finds particular resonance with the period stretching from the late 18th century into the early decades of the 19th century partly due to her research on literary authors from this time who possessed a keen sensitivity to language. “When every word counts, there exists a markedly different appreciation for language than what we often observe today,” Holland states.