技术——作为危险概念之浮现（上）
本人的人类学课程要求的阅读材料的一部分，为了理解方便就顺手翻译了一下，感觉写得挺好的。
基本上就是丢进谷歌翻译弄了一下，然后作了微调，去除了引用部分。全文共18页，先放出来一部分（实际上是因为懒惰所以没一口气翻完）。
中英对照，如果基础够好的话建议直接英文。有些具体细节实在不知道怎么翻，还请多包涵。
（建议用电脑端查看，仅仅看手机端预览的排版就非常可怕而且劝退）
The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept
技术——作为危险概念之浮现
Leo Marx
". . . the essence of technology is by no means anything technological."
- Martin Heidegger
“……技术的本质绝不是任何技术性的东西。”
-马丁·海德格尔
New Concepts as Historical Markers
作为历史标记的新概念
The history of technology is one of those subjects that most people know more about than they realize. Long before the academy recognized it as a specialized field of scholarly inquiry, American schools were routinely disseminating a sketchy outline of that history to millions of pupils. We learned about James Watt and the steam engine, Eli Whitney and the cotton gin, and about other great inventors and their inventions. Even more important, we were led to assume that innovation in the mechanic arts is a - perhaps the - driving force of human history. The theme was omnipresent in my childhood experience. I met it in the graphic charts and illustrations in my copy of The Book of Knowledge, a popular children's encyclopedia, and in the alluring dioramas of Early Man in the New York Museum of Natural History. These exhibits represented the advance of civilization as a sequence of the inventions in the mechanic arts with which Homo sapiens gained a unique power over nature. This comforting theme remains popular today and is insinuated by all kinds of historical narrative. Here, for example, is a passage from an anthropological study of apes and the origins of human violence:
技术的历史是大多数人比他们自身意识到的认识了更多的主题之一。在学界认定它为学术研究的专业领域的很久之前，美国学校就经常向数百万的学生散布该历史的粗略轮廓。我们了解了詹姆斯·瓦特（James Watt）和蒸汽机，伊莱·惠特尼（Eli Whitney）和轧棉机，以及其他伟大的发明家及其发明。更重要的是，我们被引导认为，机械艺术中的创新是，而且很可能是人类历史发展的唯一驱动力。在我的童年经历中，这个想法无处不在。我在热门的儿童百科全书“知识之书”的图形图表和插图，以及在纽约自然博物馆的《早期人类》迷人的立体幻境中都发现了这种倾向。这些展览代表了人类文明的进步，因为它是机械艺术的一系列发明创造，而智人因此获得了凌驾于自然的独特力量。这个令人愉悦的想法在今天仍然很流行，并由各种历史叙事所隐射。比如说，以下是人类学研究中关于猿类和人类暴力起源的文章：
Our own ancestors from this line [of woodland apes] began shaping stone tools and relying much more consistently on meat around 2 million years ago. They tamed fire perhaps 1.5 million years ago. They developed human language at some unknown later time, perhaps 150,000 years ago. They invented agriculture 10,000 years ago. They made gunpowder around 1,000 years ago, and motor vehicles a century ago.
我们这一系的林地猿类祖先行开始塑造石器工具，并在200万年前开始更加持续性地依赖肉类。他们大概在150万年前就已经掌握了火焰。他们在大约15万年前的某个未知时期发展了人类语言。他们在一万年前发明了农业。他们大约在一千年前制造了火药，而一个世纪前制造了汽车。
This typical summary of human history from stone age tools to Ford cars illustrates the shared "scientific" understanding, circa 2010, of the history of technology. But one arresting if scarcely noted aspect of the story is the belated emergence of the word used to name the very rubric - the kind of thing - that allegedly drives our history. The word is technology. The fact is that during all but the very last few seconds, as it were, of the ten millennia of recorded human history encapsulated in this account, the concept of technology - as we know it today - did not exist. The word technology, which joined the Greek root, techne (an art or craft) with the suffix ology (a branch of learning), first entered the English language in the seventeenth century. At that time, in keeping with its etymology, a technology was a branch of learning, or discourse, or treatise concerned with the mechanic arts. As Eric Schatzberg has demonstrated in a seminal essay, the word then referred to a field of study, not an object of study.3 But the word, even in that now archaic sense, was a rarity in nineteenth-century America. By 1861, to be sure, it was accorded a somewhat greater prominence by the founders of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but they also were invoking the limited sense of the term to mean higher technical education. As for technology in the now familiar sense of the word - the mechanic arts collectively - it did not catch on in America until around 1900, when a few influential writers, notably Thorstein Veblen and Charles Beard, responding to German usage in the social sciences, accorded technology a pivotal role in shaping modern industrial society. But even then, the use of the word remained largely confined to academic and intellectual circles; it did not gain truly popular currency until the 1930s.
从石器时代的工具到福特汽车的人类历史的典型摘要说明了2010年左右（学界）对技术历史的一致的“科学”理解。但是，这个故事的一个令人难以忘怀的方面是，一个词迟到的出现，并且这个“名称”，即所谓的这个“东西”，据称推动了我们的历史。这个词就是技术（Technology）。事实是，囊括了数千年人类历史记录中，除了最后几秒钟之外，“技术”这一概念从未出现。 “技术”一词在希腊语的根源，是有techne（一种艺术或手工艺）和后缀词ology（一种学习的分支）之间进行了结合，并且最早在17世纪进入英语之中。当时，按照其词源，技术的意思是与机械艺术有关的学习，论述或论文的一个分支。正如埃里克·沙茨伯格（Eric Schatzberg）在其开创性论文中所证明的那样，该词当时指涉的的是研究领域，而非研究的对象。但是，即使从相对于现在的古老意义上讲，该词在19世纪的美国还是很罕见的。可以肯定的是，直到1861年，麻省理工学院的创始人在某种程度上延展了其意思，但是他们也援引了有限的含义来表示高等技术教育。至于现在已经很熟悉的技术的意思，集体性技艺 (the mechanic arts collectively)，它直到1900年左右才在美国流行，当时一些有影响力的作家，尤其是Thorstein Veblen和Charles Beard回应了德国在社会科学中的使用，赋予技术在塑造现代工业社会中的关键作用。但即使到那时，该词的使用仍主要限于学术界和知识界。直到1930年代，它才真正地在普罗大众之间流行起来。
But why, one might ask, is the history of this word important? The answer, from the viewpoint of a cultural historian, is that the emergence of a keyword in public discourse - whether a newly coined word or word invested with new meaning - may prove to be an illuminating historical event. Such keywords often serve as markers, or chronological signposts, of subtle, virtually unremarked, yet ultimately far-reaching changes in culture and society. Recall, for example, Tocqueville's tacit admission, in Democracy in America, that in order to do his subject justice he was compelled to coin the (French) word individualisme, "a novel expression to which a novel idea has given birth"; or Raymond Williams's famous discovery, in writing Culture and Society, of the striking interdependence (or reflexivity) in the relations between certain keywords and fundamental changes in society and culture. Williams had set out to examine the trans formation of culture coincident with the advent of industrial capitalism in Britain, but he found that the concept of culture itself, along with such other pivotal concepts of the era as class, industry, democracy, and art, was a product of - indeed had been invested with its new meaning by - the very changes he proposed to analyze. Not only had those changes lent currency to the concept of culture, but they had simultaneously changed its meaning. I believe that a similar process marked the emergence of technology as a key word in the lexicon we rely on to chart the changing character of contemporary society and culture.
但是，也许有人会问，为什么这个词的历史很重要？从文化历史学家的角度来看，在公共话语中突然出现的关键字词，无论是新造的单词还是突然具有新含义的单词，就可能是具有启发性的历史事件。此类关键字通常充当微妙的，但事实上尚未在当时被标记的，具有时间次序的路标，最终标记了影响深远的文化和社会变化。回想一下托克维尔在美国民主中的默许（tacit admission, 暂时不确定这是什么），为了达成他的主观正义，他被迫创造了“个人主义”（individualism）一词，并表示“一种新颖的表达催生了一个新颖的想法”；或者是雷蒙德·威廉姆斯（Raymond Williams）在撰写《文化与社会》(Culture and Society) 时著名发现，即某些关键字与社会和文化的根本变化之间的关系具有惊人的相互依存性（或反身性）。威廉姆斯曾着手研究与英国工业资本主义的到来相伴的文化转变，但他发现文化概念本身，以及该时代的其他重要概念，如阶级，工业，民主和艺术，是他所分析的文化转变的产物（当然这些概念也被注入了新的含义）。这些转变不仅使文化概念流行起来，而且同时改变了它的含义。我相信，类似的过程标志着技术这一关键词在词典中的出现，可以被我们用来绘制当代社会和文化变化特征。
But how, then, are we to identify the specific changes that prompted the emergence of technology - the concept, the word, the purported thing itself? My assumption is that those changes, whatever they were, created a semantic - indeed, a conceptual - void, which is to say, an awareness of cer tain novel developments in society and culture for which no adequate name had yet become available. It was this void, presumably, that the word technology, in its new and extended meaning, eventually would fill. It would prove to be preferable - a more apt signifier - for the new agents of change than any of its precursors, received terms such as the mechanic (or useful or practical or industrial) arts, or invention, improvement, machine, machinery, or mechanism. In a seminal essay of 1829, Thomas Carlyle had posed a vari ant of my question: if one had to sum up the oncoming age in a word, he asked, what might it be? His unequivocal answer was: machinery. "It is the Age of Machinery," he wrote, "in every outward and inward sense of that word."5 During the next half century, however, machinery - like the alter natives just mentioned - turned out to be unsuitable. But why? Why did technology prove to be preferable? To answer the question, we need to identify the specific character of the concurrent changes in the mechanic arts not only the changes within those arts, but also the changes in the interrelations between them and the rest of society and culture.
但是，我们如何才能识别出促使技术出现的具体转变，即概念，词语，所声称的事物本身？我的假设是，无论这些改变是什么，都造成了语义上的，当然也是概念上的空洞，也就是说，我们意识到了社会和文化中某些新颖的发展，而尚无适当的名称。正是这种空洞，以至于技术一词在其新造和扩展的含义中最终将被填补。“Technology”一词，相比于任何先于其存在的词语或者其所汲取意义的词语，诸如mechanic（or useful or practical or industrial）arts机械（或者实用，实践或者工业）艺术，或invention发明，improvement改善，machine，machinery或mechanism（这三者在中文里都是机械，但有些微的不同，后文会通过英文区分）。在1829年的开创性论文中，托马斯·卡莱尔提出了一个我的问题的变体：如果有人必须用一个词来概括即将到来的时代，他会问，这可能是什么？他的明确回答是：机械machinery。他写道：“这是机械时代，从这个词的外部和内部意义皆是如此。” 然而，在下半个世纪，machinery一词，就像刚才提到所有词语选项，被认为是不合适的。但为什么？为什么technology一词更可取？为了回答这个问题，我们需要确定与机械艺术同时发生的变化之特征，不仅仅是这些艺术内部的变化，而且还要确定它们与社会其他部分和文化之间的相互关系的变化。
As for the hazardous character of the concept of technology, here I need only say that I am not thinking about weaponry or the physical damage wrought by the use of any particular technologies. The hazards I have in mind are conceptual, not physical. They stem from the meanings conveyed by the concept technology itself, and from the peculiar role it enables us to confer on the mechanic arts as an ostensibly discrete entity - one capable of becoming a virtually autonomous, all-encompassing agent of change.
至于技术这一概念的危害，在这里我只想说我不是在考虑使用任何特定技术造成的武器装备或物理损害。我想到的危害是概念上的，而非物理上的。它们源于概念技术本身所传达的含义，并源于它使我们能够将机械艺术作为一种表面上离散的实体来赋予其艺术的特质-一个能够成为几乎自主的，包罗万象的变革推动者。
The Mechanic Arts and the Changing Conception of Progress
机械艺术与进步观念的转变
By the 1840s, several of the developments that contributed to the emergence of the concept of technology had become apparent in America. They fall into two categories, ideological and substantive: first, changes in the prevailing conception of the mechanic arts, and second, the material development of the machinery itself, and of the institutional setting from which it emerged. As a reference point for both kinds of change, and for early traces of the semantic void that eventually was to be filled by the concept of technology, here is the peroration of a ceremonial speech delivered by Senator Daniel Webster at the dedication of a new section of the Northern Railroad in Lebanon, New Hampshire, on 17 November 1847:
到1840年代，促成技术概念出现的几项发展在美国变得显而易见。 它们分为意识形态的和实质性的两大类：第一，机械艺术的普遍观念的变化，第二，机械本身的物质发展以及由此产生的制度环境。 作为这两种变化的参考点，以及最终被技术概念所填补的语义空缺的早期痕迹，以下是参议员丹尼尔·韦伯斯特在1847年11月17日对新罕布什尔州黎巴嫩北部铁路新桥段建设完成的致辞：
It is an extraordinary era in which we live. It is altogether new. The world has seen nothing like it before. I will not pretend, no one can pretend, to discern the end; but everybody knows that the age is remarkable for scientific research into the heavens, the earth, and what is beneath the earth; and perhaps more remarkable still for the application of this scientific research to the pursuits of life. The ancients saw nothing like it. The moderns have seen nothing like it till the present generation solid land traversed by steam power, and intelligence communicated by electricity. Truly this is almost a miraculous era. What is before us no one can say, what is upon us no one can hardly realize. The progress of the age has almost outstripped human belief; the future is known only to Omniscience.
这是我们生活的非凡时代。这是全新的。以前世界上从未见过这样的事情。我不会假装，没人能假装知晓其结局。但是每个人都知道，对于研究天堂，大地以及地下的事物而言，这个时代是非凡的。对于这项科学研究在追求生活中的应用而言，也许仍然非常引人注目。古人从未见过。直到当下一代的土地可由蒸汽动力横渡，智慧通过电力进行交流（电报），现代人才看到了类似这样的东西。确实，这几乎是一个奇迹时代。没有人能说在我们面前的是什么，没人能意识到。时代的进步几乎超越了人类的信念。未来会怎样只有无所不知的神才能知晓。
Perhaps the most significant ideological development that the emergence of technology eventually would ratify, as implied by Webster’s grandiloquent tribute to the progress of the age, is a new respect for the power of innovations in the useful arts to transform prevailing ideas about the world. When he singles out the railroad and the telegraph as embodiments of the progress of the age, he in effect confirms a subtle but important modification of the received Enlightenment view of progress. To be sure, the idea of progress had been closely bound up, from its inception, with the accelerating rate of scientific and mechanical innovation. By the time of Webster's speech, however, the idea oí progress had become the fulcrum of a comprehensive worldview effecting the sacralization of science and the mechanic arts, and creating a modern equivalent of the creation myths of premodern cultures. Two centuries earlier, the concept of progress had served, in a com mon place, literal sense, to describe incremental advances in explicitly bounded enterprises like the development of new scientific instruments say, for example, the microscope or telescope. But as more and more specific instances of progress of that sort occurred - progress in that particularized, circumscribed sense of the word - the reach of the idea gradually was extended to encompass the entire, all-encompassing course of human events. By the time of the French and American revolutions, in other words, history itself was conceived as a record of the steady, cumulative, continuous expansion of human knowledge of - and power over - nature. Thus the future course of history might be expected to culminate in a more or less universal improvement in the conditions of human existence.
韦伯斯特对时代发展的雄辩宣称，技术的出现所导致的最重大的意识形态发展，是人们对实用艺术创新力量的新型崇拜改变了当今世界的观念。当他特别提到铁路和电报作为时代进步的体现时，他实际上肯定了一种从启蒙运动的进步观点而来的微妙但十分重要的修正。可以确定的是，从一开始，进步思想就与科学和机械创新的加速发展紧密地联系在一起。然而，在韦伯斯特发表演讲之时，进步思想已然成为了一种全面世界观的支点，这种世界观影响了科学和机械艺术的圣化，并创造了与前现代文化的创造神话相近的现代观念。在两个世纪之前，进步的概念通常用字面意义来描述明确界定企业的渐进式进步，例如新型科学仪器的开发，例如显微镜或望远镜。但是，随着越来越多的此类具体情况的发生（即在字眼的特定，限定的意义上的进步），概念的囊括范围逐渐扩大，涵盖了人类事件的整个过程。换句话说，到法国和美国革命之时，历史本身被认为是人类对自然的认识和对自然的掌控的稳定，累积，持续扩展的记录。因此，未来的历史进程将被预测为人类生存条件不断的普遍改善。
But the radical thinkers who led the way in framing this master narrative of progress - Condorcet and Turgot, Paine and Priestley, Franklin and Jefferson - did not, like Webster, unreservedly equate human progress with the advance of the mechanic arts. They were committed republicans, political revolutionists, and although they celebrated mechanical innovation, they celebrated it only as the means of achieving progress; the true and only reliable measure of progress, as they saw it, was humanity's step-by-step liberation from aristocratic, ecclesiastical, and monarchic oppression, and the institution of more just, peaceful societies based on the consent of the governed. What requires emphasis is the republican thinkers' uncompromising insistence that advances in science and the mechanic arts are valuable chiefly as a means of arriving at social and political ends.
但是，引领建构这种进步叙事框架的激进思想家，Condorcet和Turgot，Paine和Priestley，Franklin和Jefferson，和Webster不同，毫无保留地拒绝将人类的进步与机械艺术的发展等同起来。他们是共和党人，是政治革命家，尽管他们赞扬机械创新，但他们赞扬机械创新仅限于作为实现进步的手段。在他们眼中，真正且唯一可靠的进步衡量标准是人类逐步摆脱贵族，教会和君主制的压迫，并在政府的同意下建立更公正，和平的社会。需要强调的是共和党思想家们坚定不移的坚持认为，科学和机械艺术的进步作为达到社会和政治目的的主要手段是有很宝贵的。
By Webster's time, however, that distinction already was losing much its force. This was partly due to the presumed success of the republican revolutions, hence to a certain political complacency reinforced by the rapid growth of the immensely productive and lucrative capitalist system of manufactures. Thus, for example, Senator Webster, whose most influential constituents were factory owners, merchants, and financiers, did not regard innovations in the mechanic arts as merely instrumental - a technical means of arriving at social and political goals. He identified his interests with those of the company's directors and stockholders, and as he saw it, therefore, wealth-producing innovations like the railroad represented a socially transformative power of such immense scope and promise as to be a virtual embodiment - a perfect icon - of human progress.
然而，到韦伯斯特时代，这种区分已经在很大程度上失势。这部分是由于共和党的革命成功，带来了具有巨大的生产力和利润回报的资本主义生产体系的迅速发展，而增强了某种政治上的自满情绪。因此，例如，韦伯斯特参议员影响最多的支持者的是工厂所有者，商人和金融家，他们并不认为机械艺术的创新仅仅是工具性的，而是实现社会和政治目标的技术性手段。韦伯斯特将自己的利益与公司董事和股东的利益相提并论，因此在他看来，诸如铁路之类的创造财富的创新代表了相当巨大范围内的社会变革力量，并有望成为人类进步的虚拟的体现和完美的标志。
Thus the new entrepreneurial elite for whom Webster spoke was to a large extent relieved of its tacit obligation to carry out the republican political mandate. Consider, for example, the Boston Associates - the merchants who launched the Lowell textile industry. They, to be sure, were concerned about the inhumane conditions created by the factory system - and they surely wanted to be good stewards of their wealth - but they assumed that they could fulfill their republican obligations by acts of private philanthropy.8 They believed that innovations in the mechanic arts could be relied upon, in the long run, to result in progress and prosperity for all. Their confidence in the inherently progressive influence of the new machine was reinforced, in their view, by the distinctive material tangibility of the machines - their omnipresence as physical, visible, sensibly accessible objects. In the ordinary course of their operations, accordingly, the new factories and machines unavoidably disseminated the ideology of social progress to all who saw and heard them. As John Stuart Mill acutely observed, the mere sight of a potent machine like the steam locomotive in the landscape wordlessly inculcated the notion that the present was an improvement on the past, and that the future promised to be so wondrous as to be "known," in Webster's high-flown idiom, "only to Omniscience”.
因此，韦伯斯特所代表的新的企业家精英在很大程度上免除了其履行共和党政治任务的默示义务(tacit obligation)。举例来说，波士顿联营公司（Boston Associates），即发起洛厄尔(Lowell）纺织工业的商人，可以肯定他们担心工厂制度所创造的非人道条件。他们当然想成为自己财富的好管家，但他们认为自己可以通过私人慈善行为履行共和义务。他们相信，从长远来看，可以依靠机械艺术的创新来为所有人带来进步和繁荣。在他们看来，机器材料的独特有形感增强了他们对新型机器固有的渐进式影响的信心，因为他们无所不能，它们是物理的，可见的，可感知的物体。因此，在他们的日常经营过程中，新的工厂和机器不可避免地向看到和听到他们的所有人传播了社会进步的意识形态。正如约翰·斯图亚特·密尔（John Stuart Mill）所敏锐地观察到的那样，仅仅看到一台强大的机器，例如风景秀丽的蒸汽机车，就无语地灌输了这样一种观念，即现在是对过去的改进，而未来则有望，像韦伯斯特常说的，如此奇妙地“只有全能之神才能知晓”。
But in the 1840s the blurring of the distinction between mechanical means and political ends also provoked an ideological backlash. To a vocal minority of dissident artists and intellectuals, the worshipful view of mate rial progress was symptomatic of moral negligence and political regression. Thus Henry Thoreau, who was conducting his experiment at the pond in 1847, the year Webster gave his speech, writes in Walden:
但是在1840年代，技术作为手段和政治目的之间的模糊区分也引发了意识形态上的强烈反抗。对于少数持不同政见的艺术家和知识分子来说，对物质进步的崇拜观点是道德过失和政治回归的征兆。 因此，在1847年即韦伯斯特发表讲话的那年，在池塘进行实验的亨利·梭罗在瓦尔登写道：
There is an illusion about … [modern improvements]; there is not always a positive advance …. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.
关于……[现代改善]有一种幻想；并不总是会有积极的进展……。 我们的发明不会成为漂亮的玩具，这只会使我们的注意力从严肃的事情上转移开。它们只是为了达到不改善的目的的改进手段。
And in Moby Dick (1851), Melville, after having Ishmael, his narrator, pay tribute to Captain Ahab's preternatural intellect and his mastery of the complex business of whaling, has the crazy captain acknowledge the hazards he courts by placing his technical proficiency in the service of his irrational purpose: "Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely, all my means are sane, my motive and my object mad."
在《白鲸记》（Moby Dick，1851年）中，梅尔维尔（Melville）让叙述者伊什梅尔（Ishmael）向亚哈船长（Ahab）的超自然才智和对复杂捕鲸业务的精通致敬之后，这位疯狂的船长认识到他将自己的技术能力用于达成非理性目的之危害： “现在，在亚哈心中隐约的感受到，我（亚哈）的一切手段都是理智的，我的动机和我的目标是疯狂的。”
This critical view of the new industrial arts marks the rise of an adversary culture that would reject the dominant faith in the advance of the mechanical arts as a sufficient, self-justifying, social goal. Indeed, a more or less direct line of influence is traceable from the intellectual dissidents of the 1840s to the widespread 1960s rebellion against established institutions, from, for example, Thoreau's 1849 recommendation, in "Civil Disobedience," to "Let your life be a counter- friction to stop the machine" to Mario Savio's 1964 exhortation to Berkeley students: "You have got to put your bodies upon the [machine] and make it stop!" From its inception, the countercultural movement of the 1960s was seen - and saw itself - as a revolt against an increasingly "technocratic" society.
这种对新兴工业艺术的批判性观点，标志着一种拒绝先前的机械艺术发展主导信念，即不将机械艺术视为充分自明的社会目标的敌对文化。当然，我们可以追溯到从1840年代的政见不同的知识分子，到1960年代大范围的对既有教育机构的叛乱这一条线，说明该文化的某种程度的影响，例如，梭罗（Thoreau）在1849年的《公民抗命》中的建议，到“让你的生活成为一种停止机器的对抗摩擦力”， Mario Savio在1964年对伯克利大学学生的劝诫：“您必须将身体置于[机器]之上并使其停止！”从一开始，人们就将1960年代的反文化运动视为反抗日益增长的“技术官僚”社会。
未完待续~
