Discourse Networks 1800/1900

Kittler, Friedrich. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Trans. Michael Metteer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990.

In “The Afterword to the Second Printing,” Kittler summarizes his project in Discourse Networks as follows:

What remain to be distinguished, therefore, are not emotional dispositions but systems. Information networks can be described only when they are contrasted with one another. The source, sender, channel, receiver, and drain of streams of information, Shannon’s five functions, in other words, can be occupied or left vacant by various agents: by men or women, rhetoricians or writers, philosophers or psychoanalysts, universities or technical institutes. Whereas interpretation works with constants, the comparison between systems introduces variables. If the latter pursues historical investigations, then “at least two limiting events” are indispensable, for which either systemic differentiation or communicational technique can be considered criteria. (370)

Such explains his nonlinear approach to history and the isolation of two historical epochs around the turn of the nineteenth century and the turn of the twentieth century. By excluding the middle, as it were, Kittler is able to treat Romanticism and Modernism as two distinct systems characterized by different agents – or, in Kittler's terms, variables – in the makeup of the social and media network. Discourse Networks is, at base, non-hermeneutic. Instead, it takes hermeneutics, or a genealogy of hermeneutics, as its object, seeking the conditions of possibility for statements in two distinct historical epochs. Above all, Kittler treats media – both the material devices and the social organizations surrounding them – as a network that, in Foucauldian terms, gives to people what they can say.

An annotation for this book could never really do justice to the detail and complexity of Kittler’s work, so I’ll limit myself to only a few observations about psychophysics, the typewriter, and the emergence of minimal material units in modernity. Whereas in the time of Goethe the word was guaranteed a fullness of meaning and reference by the maternal voice based on an entire system of education and socialization organized around maternal instruction, by the time of Nietzsche letters have become free agents. With the implementation of new technologies of writing, the relationship between words and letters changes. No longer are words the “translators of prelinguistic meanings,” no longer are they associated with the fullness of Voice: they are now merely selections of characters, inscriptions of technical media—specifically the typewriter: “spatially designated and discrete signs—that, rather than increase in speed, was the real innovation of the typewriter” (193).

“In the discourse network of 1900, discourse is produced by RANDOM GENERATORS. Psychophysics constructed such sources of noise; the new technological media stored their output” (206). For Kittler, the research of Hermann Ebbinghaus in psychophysics meant the end of the dream of the discourse network 1800. In effect, Ebbinghaus single-handedly tore asunder the relationship between signifier and signified, showing that sense or meaning had really no bearing on mnemonic technique. The result of Ebbinghaus’ work in psychophysics is a discovery of “the naked, elementary existence of signifiers” (209). In terms of efficiency, meaning actually becomes a disturbance in the process of transmission and storage (211). The new media of modernity – typewriters, phonographs, cinema – are indifferent selectors. They simple record, store, and transmit whatever phenomena they are designed to select, irrespective of meaning or sense. “The discourse network of 1900 is a dice game with ‘serially ordered discrete unities’” (213).

“A medium is a medium is a medium. As the sentence says, there is no difference between occult and technological media. Their truth is fatality, their field the unconscious. And because the unconscious never finds and illusory belief, the unconscious can only be stored” (229). Kittler notes that the emergence of random generators in psychophysics and in other cultural fields involves a tendency toward increasing speed. Hands cannot keep up with dictation, and eyes cannot keep up with the increased flow of signifiers. The only things that can store such a glut of information are new technological media. Kittler focuses on the two great media inventions of Edison: film and the gramophone. (It seems strange that Kittler continually refers to Edison’s phonograph by the name of Berliner’s gramophone. I don’t know what to make of this.) For Kittler, these inventions mark a radical shift in the discourse network 1900 in that they inscribed real phenomena and not merely symbolic registrations. And since “technologically possible manipulations determine what in fact can become a discourse,” a whole new set of variables entered the discourse network 1900: sound and image were now discursive; they entered the realm of representability, terminating a centuries-long stay in the Gutenberg Galaxy (232).

The Question Concerning Technology

Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology.” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Garland, 1977.

- “Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it” (4).
- If we regard technology as neutral, we are blind to its essence.
- Two common statements regarding technology:

1. Technology is a means to an end.
2. Technology is a human activity.

- Technology is a contrivance or, in Latin, instrumentum.
- “Wherever instrumentality reigns, there reigns causality” (6). Four causes:

1. causa materialis: matter out of which
2. causa formalis: shape into which
3. causa finalis: the end to which the material or form is put
4. causa efficiens: that which brings about the effect

- “What technology is, when represented as a means, discloses itself when we trace instrumentality back to fourfold causality” (6).
- Causa, from Latin cadere (to fall), translates Greek aition, that to which something else is indebted (7).
- The four causes are responsible for that which lies ready before us. The four ways of being responsible bring something into appearance. Being responsible is this starting something on its way into arrival (9).
- Poiesis: a bringing-forth. Physis: arising of something from out of itself. Physis is poiesis in its highest sense (10).
- The essence of technology has everything to do with revealing. “The possibility of all productive manufacturing lies in revealing. Technology is a way of revealing. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth. (12)
- Technikon: that which belongs to techne, skills and activities of craftsmen, arts of the mind, fine arts.
- Techne, according to Aristotle, opens up; it reveals that which does not bring itself forth. For Heidegger, “It is as revealing, and not as manufacturing, that techne is a bringing-forth” (13).
- “What is modern technology? It too is a revealing.” “The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging, which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such” (14).
- Setting-upon as expediting: it unlocks and exposes; it drives toward maximum yield, minimum expense. For instance, coal is stock-piled; it is on call; challenged for heat; ordered to deliver steam to keep a factory running. (15)
- “The revealing that rules throughout modern technology has the character of a setting-upon, in the sense of a challenging-forth.” Ways of revealing: energy: unlocked, transformed, stored up, distributed, switched.
- On the standing-reserve in modern life: “Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering” and “it designates nothing less than the way in which everything presences that is wrought upon by the challenging revealing” (17).
- “Modern technology as an ordering revealing is, then, no merely human doing” (19).
- Enframing: “We now name that challenging claim which gathers man thither to order the self-revealing as standing reserve: ‘Ge-stell’ [Enframing]” (19). Enframing is fundamentally a calling-forth, a gathering so as to reveal. Gestell is a common German word, meaning a kind of apparatus, e.g. a bookrack, also a skeleton. “Enframing means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing reserve” (20). The implication of Enframing is that man in the technological age is challenged forth into revealing (21). At another point Heidegger says that Enframing is “the way in which the real reveals itself as standing-reserve” (23).
- This definition of Enframing has an important implication for Heidegger: “The merely instrumental, merely anthropological definition of technology is therefore in principle untenable And it cannot be rounded out by being referred back to some metaphysical or religious explanation that undergirds it” (21).
- The essence of modern technology is already in mathematical physics, which precedes it: “The modern physical theory of nature prepares the way first not simply for technology but for the essence of modern technology. For already in physics the challenging gathering-together into ordering revealing holds sway” (22).
- Destining: sending-that-gathers which first starts man upon a way of revealing, “Enframing belongs within the destining of revealing” (25).
- “The destining of revealing is as such, in every one of its modes, and therefore necessarily, danger.” “The destining of revealing is in itself not just any danger, but danger as such.” (26)
- Taking everything as standing-standing reserve, man comes to take himself also as standing-reserve. The consequence of this, and being in italics emphasizes its importance, is that “nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e., his essence” (27).
- “What is dangerous is not technology […] The essence of technology, as a destining of revealing, is the danger” (28).
- “The essence of technology is in a lofty sense ambiguous. Such ambiguity points to the mystery of all revealing, i.e., of truth” (33).
- In the end, Heidegger suggests that above all it is necessary to continue questioning technology: “For questioning is the piety of thought” (35).

The Technological Society

Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. Trans. John Wilkinson. New York: Knopf, 1973.

Ellul begins with a strange argument: the machine comes before technique. Although he draws extensively on Marcel Mauss to develop his concept of technique, this notion runs counter to the latter’s understanding of “techniques of the body.” The contradiction begins to make sense, though, if one considers that Ellul is not making a claim about the origins of technique but rather the state of affairs following the industrial revolution. For Ellul, the machine is “deeply symptomatic: it represents the ideal toward which technique strives” (4). The machine comes before technique, then, in the sense that it is the model that organizes technique. It is the goal of all technique, or, as Ellul puts it: the machine is “pure technique” (4). Thus, the machine is the perfection of technique, and it is the role of technique to produce society as a machine: “Technique integrates the machine into society. It constructs the kind of world the machine needs and introduces order where the incoherent banging of machinery heaped up ruins” (5).

A central idea for Ellul is that in modern life technique has become autonomous. It is not merely applied science. It is not a set of practices among others. Technique is rather an “ensemble of means” (19) characterized by self-direction (79), self-augmentation (85), and geometrical progression (91). Ellul develops this definition of technique as a revision of Mauss’ concept of technique. For Ellul, Mauss’ definition holds only for sociological analysis of primitive societies and is insufficient to explain modern technique. For one thing, Ellul argues that modern techniques are usually not manual. The operations of machines are not manual but instead require secondary manual labor. Interestingly, prefiguring the premise of The Matrix, Ellul speculates that the volume of secondary manual operations will increase faster than the volume of technical operations, essentially relegating humans to positions of subservience to the machine.

Ellul begins to define technique by searching for points of commonality among the great diversity of individual technical operations. He seeks the tendencies and principles shared by all techniques, and goes on to argue, “what characterizes technical action within a particular activity is the search for greater efficiency” (19). Ellul is quick to point out, however, that it is no longer a matter of technical phenomena seeking the most efficient means relative to other technical operations. Now the question is of “finding the best means in an absolute sense, on the basis of numerical calculation” (21). In this sense, the notion of efficiency is basically synonymous with the machine, and it would seem that Ellul’s understanding of technique is totalizing and tautological: pure technique is characterized by absolute efficiency: the machine is pure technique: the machine is the model of absolute efficiency. But this seeming tautology begins to make sense when one considers that Ellul believes that technique always has an aspect of magic in it. Part of the goal of all technique is strictly unknowable, either because it is spiritual and thus cannot be measured in material terms or because it involves material phenomena over a long period of time. In a way, then, it makes sense that Ellul would posit a totalizing definition of technique, because the phenomenon itself aspires to the beyond.

Ellul offers an extended account of the historical development of technique, extending from ancient Greece to the modern Western world. He makes several gross generalizations that perhaps explain why his account of technology is often dismissed by cultural historians and theorists of technology. But, in the end, this historical account is unnecessary for his argument, or, rather, not necessary in this form. A more responsible and informed account could still be developed based on his (more important) concept of technique. Among the most blatant errors, Ellul claims that Christian society from the 10th through the 14th centuries was a-capitalist and a-technical (contrast Lynn White, Medieval Technologies).

An interesting consideration: Ellul believes that there is a necessary linking together of techniques: “Each new machine disturbs the equilibrium of production; the restoration of equilibrium entails the creation of one or more additional machines in other areas of operation.” In this sense, Ellul understands technological self-augmentation as a continual process of striving for equilibrium through the very means that disrupt equilibrium. Also interesting, in a move that prefigures Foucault’s chapter on “Right of Death and Power over Life,” Ellul makes the claim that technique is essentially “biopower” (though he doesn’t use this term), saying that technique holds control over life, orders it and makes it grow. And lastly, Ellul has an interesting section where he considers the totality of modern industrial life as developing on the model of the concentration camp (cf. Agamben, Homo Sacer).

Gramophone, Film, Typewriter

Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Gramophone, Film, Typewriter is, in many ways, an elaboration of Kittler’s work on media technologies in Discourse Networks 1800/1900. The methodology is essentially the same and his conclusions are as well. The major difference involves the use of Lacan’s tripartite structure of symbolic, imaginary, and real to describe the phenomena selected by the media of typewriter, film, and gramophone, respectively. Kittler refers to these technologies as the ur-media of modernity, the analog media that would be integrated into a single technology following the invention of Turing’s universal machine.

Kittler’s story of modern media technologies begins with Edison’s phonograph. The phonograph inscribes more than simply symbols or images. It inscribes with indifference: “The phonograph does not hear the way ears do that have been trained to immediately filter voices, words and sounds out of noise; it registers acoustic events as such” (23). The invention of the phonograph marks a break with the age-old European traditions of music and verbal language. It registers not symbols or ratios but frequencies as such—pure vibrations. Kittler traces the invention of the phonograph back to the phonautograph developed by Edouard Léon Scott. The name of Scott’s device, the phonautograph, literally means, “writing sound out of itself,” which is exactly the quality that Kittler wants to emphasize. What the phonautograph “writes” is something unperceivable by the human eye and strictly unwritable by any human activity: it writes “hundreds of vibrations per second” (27).

Kittler gives perhaps the most convincing argument for the necessity of metaphorical thinking in historical research:

Reasoning by analogy is of considerable importance to science; indeed, in as far as it is the principle of induction it may well form the basis of all physical and psychophysical sciences. Discoveries frequently start with metaphors. The light of thinking could hardly fall in a new direction and illuminate dark corners were it not reflected by many spaces already illuminated. Only that which reminds us of something else makes an impression, although and precisely because it differs from it. To understand is to remember, at least in part. (30)

These claims function both as justification for Kittler’s particular brand of discourse analysis and as a gateway to understanding the types of historical claims that he will make about the phonograph. In order to understand these connections, it is necessary to recall Kittler’s repeated phrase, “so-called man.” For Kittler, “man” was something of a meaning effect made possible by the discourse network 1800 and its emphasis on inner experience. In modernity what remains of “man” is only the historical meaning effect as such. Kittler shows that the qualities that once defined “man” are at base technical characteristics: thought as information processing; memory as data storage; and various faculties of data transmission. A provocative inversion explains this well: “If the phonographic disk had self-consciousness, it could point out while replaying a song that it remembers this particular song. And what appears to us as the effect of a rather simple mechanism would, quite probably, strike the disk as a miraculous ability: memory” (31). Kittler goes on to outline a number of analogies between the phonograph and the brain. New experience is similar to the initial inscription on a phonographic disk; it cuts a groove at a particular speed and leaves an impression. When the phonograph needle or the brain retraces the original pathway it encounters less resistance, an effect that distinguishes the new experience from the original impression, resulting in an effect that we call memory. In another analogy, Kittler points out that by increasing or decreasing the speed of a phonograph, we get more or less fuzzy impressions of sound. He likens this variability of speed to the effect of concentration in recalling mental images. Perhaps the more or less focused memory images are the effect of the speed at which brain cells retrace the altered neural pathway. Based on this “always possible transformation of movement into thought,” Kittler describes the brain as “a conscious phonograph” (33).

Technics and Civilization

Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt, 1934.

Mumford divides his analysis of the machine age into three overlapping periods: eotechnic (1000-1750), paleotechnic (1750-1900) and neotechnic (1900-2000). The date markers of these periods seem a little too neat, but if one considers that Mumford stresses the lack of decisive breaks between these periods and their important interpenetrations, such neatness becomes less objectionable. Also, it should be noted that Mumford is writing at a very different time with different standards for academic writing. The book lacks careful citation, footnotes and endnotes. Its main concern is not so much to function as a reference guide to the field of technological history, which Mumford was laying the foundation for, but instead to illuminate a part of history hitherto ignored: the relationships between society, culture, and technology. In order to draw out these relationships, Mumford draws on a number of different fields ancillary to technology, including art and aesthetics, psychology and philosophy, ecology, ethics, and economics. Through this holistic approach Mumford makes the claim that the seeds of the industrial revolution can be seen as early as the Middle Ages, and specifically in the monastic ordering of time.

Mumford begins with an extensive consideration of the ordering of time in medieval monasteries and the implications that it had on the organization of society. As he notes, “the clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours, but of synchronizing the actions of men” (14). For Mumford, seconds and minutes are not a priori units of time but instead given by the clock, the products of a mechanical function. The clock gave society seconds and minutes. It ripped time out of the hold of Eternity and introduced “time keeping” as an independent variable. The notion of “time keeping” should be considered literally. What the clock introduced was a way to keep time—to possess it as a quantity to be ordered and manipulated. Time was no longer something lived. It was separate and measurable, of the order of mathematics and science rather than religion. The far-reaching implications of this severing of time from natural human activity lead Mumford to claim, "The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age" (14).

Other characteristics of the eotechnic age beyond the introduction of mathematical time include the predominance of handicraft and the manufacturing of tools. Mumford describes the eotechnic age as a “water-and-wood complex” (11) characterized by water mills and windmills as sources of power and the use of wood as a primary building resource. (Schivelbusch cites the division between eotechnic and paleotechnic phases at the beginning of his work on the railroad and similarly concentrates on sources of power and building resources.) The paleotechnic age is characterized by the introduction of coal as a source of power and iron as a new building material. Machine tools and mass production come to replace tool manufacturing and handicraft, and new practices of standardization replace uniqueness and difference in manufacturing. Finally, the neotechnic phase is characterized as an “electricity-and-alloy complex” (110).

The Railway Journey

Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986.

In “The Mechanization of Motive Power,” the first chapter of The Railway Journey, Schivelbusch offers a glimpse into his methodology by starting not with the invention of the railroad but with the history of fuel resources. As he explains, the exhaustion of wood resources caused by the mass deforestation of Western Europe in the eighteenth century served as perhaps the main incentive for the development of industrial capitalism because it forced social leaders and engineers to develop new resources simply to maintain the same standard of living. The exhaustion of wood resources created two problems. Wood was not only a fuel source but also the main material for building structures. As such, diminishing wood supplies created a need for both new fuel sources and new building materials: Thus it was scarcity that led to the use of coal and iron. This notion that technological development proceeds along the lines of basic cultural needs anticipates the approach to the railroad in the sense that, for Schivelbusch, the railroad is not an isolated, inevitable, or neutral development but instead a phenomenon integrally related to and influential in the shifting modes of temporality and spatiality in the 19th century.

Central to Schivelbusch’s understanding of the railroad is the idea that the topos of the 19th century was “the annihilation of time and space” (10). The ideological underpinnings of this topos are the aims of industrial capitalism to increase, expand, and make more efficient commerce. Land travel, according to Schivelbusch, was the weak link in the expansion of industrial capitalism because it could not be intensified beyond a very low level (7). Traditional forms of land travel, such as horse-drawn carriages, had to conform to the irregularities of the terrain and were constrained by the exhaustion of draught animals. The technology that emerged to overcome these constraints was the steam engine. First developed in the late eighteenth century, the steam engine developed rapidly from the large and unwieldy low-pressure engines of Newcomen and Watt to smaller, more fuel-efficient high-pressure engines, such as that developed by Oliver Evans (3). The advantage of the steam engine was that, unlike draught animals, which were always still a part of nature, the burning of coal was artificial energy capable of prevailing against nature: “The mechanical motion generated by steam power is characterized by regularity, uniformity, unlimited duration and acceleration” (9). The ability to prevail against nature meant that new forms of mechanical power were able to remake space—mechanical power “created its own new spatiality” (10). No longer would the terrain be a series of obstacles. It would instead submit to the logic of steam power. If the road would not rise to meet them, steam engines would raise new roads.

New technologies and new forms of spatiality also meant new forms of consciousness. Schivelbusch draws on several contemporary accounts of the railroad that express concern about the “loss of experience” associated with the annihilation of space between departure and destination (19, 38). Such concerns were short-lived, however. Schivelbusch points out that, quickly, older forms of transportation, such as carriage riding, became upper-class leisure activities and that soon it was no longer mechanical travel but animal travel that was experienced as unnatural. Nevertheless, new mechanical forms of travel created a sense of anxiety: increased speed meant that the railroad threatened instant death.

Whereas previous modes of transportation were characterized by a distinction between the route and the means, the railroad was a single transportation machine. Roads and canals made both technical and commercial distinctions between route and means. On the technical side, roads and canals could be established without consideration of the types of vehicles they would accommodate. On the commercial side, there was no consolidation of toll ways and carriage companies. Franz Realeaux explains the accomplishment of the railroad nicely: the joining of rail and wheel meant that the railroad effectually “joined carriage and road into one machine” (19). For Schivlebusch, the joining of route and means was decisive in another sense: “the development of the railway completes the detachment from nature initiated by the discovery of steam power” (20). The unnatural character of the railroad was twofold: the steam engine generated uniform mechanical motion and that motion was transformed into movement through space by the combine machinery of wheel and rail. This allowed the railroad to overcome both the irregularity of the terrain and the friction between wheel surface and road surface. In a sense, the railway was merely an extension of the steam engine—the steam engine remaking space in its own design.

Throughout the book Schivelbusch outlines the experience of 19th century travelers. He makes an interesting point about the relationship between the railroad and the telegraph system: “The landscape appeared behind the telegraph poles and wires; it was seen through them” (31). In another interesting section, Schivelbusch outlines the role of the railroad in the creation of standardized time zones (39-44). Interestingly, what later became the four continental U.S. time zones were from the 1880s to the 1910s simply railroad times. Local times would often differ from one another and from the railroad time standards. A final point of interest is a reference to Hans-Theis Lehmann, who argued that in the 20th century the voice was dissociated from its natural place by the emergence of microphones, radio, and phonography (48). The second half of the book draws extensively on Benjamin and Freud to address issues of shock, trauma, neurosis, etc. associated with the development of modern technologies.

Medieval Technology and Social Change

White, Lynn. Medieval Technology and Social Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Medieval Technology and Social Change runs counter to the general assumption that the Middle Ages involved a stagnation or regression in human development. White divides his study into three areas of innovation in medieval Europe: the development of mounted shock combat with the introduction of the stirrup; the agricultural revolution made possible by the plough, the discovery of horse-power, and the introduction of three-field crop rotation; and the development of machine power in the later Middle Ages. In each case, White shows that new technologies, whether military, agricultural, or otherwise, had far-reaching impacts on cultural institutions and social organization.

The book is extraordinarily detailed and well researched. White draws from research in a number of different disciplines, including archeology, anthropology, philology, and social, constitutional, and legal history. The book overflows with footnotes and includes over 40 pages of endnotes. At times, the shear accumulation of historical detail can be overwhelming, especially when tracing the introduction and diffusion of the various medieval technologies through their appearance in artifacts throughout Europe and Asia.

White begins by considering the history of the horse in battle. He outlines three stages of the relationship between humans, horses, and technologies: 1) the charioteer; 2) the mounted warrior; and 3) the rider equipped with stirrups. Each of these stages corresponds to a different type of battle and to different organization of society: “The horse has always given its master an advantage over the footman in battle, and each improvement in its military use has been related to far-reaching social and cultural changes” (1). The stirrup had an enormous impact on mounted combat: “The stirrup, by giving lateral support in addition to the front and back support offered by pommel and cantle, effectively welded horse and rider into a single fighting unit capable of a violence without precedent.” The stirrup allowed the rider to deliver a blow not so much with his own muscle power but with the force of the charging stallion, or as White puts it, the stirrup “joined man and steed into a fighting organism” (38). The introduction of the stirrup had far reaching implications for the organization of Europe in the Middle Ages. It created what White refers to as mounted shock combat, a form of combat more violent and effective than any prior in history. But its effects extended beyond the battlefield as well. Mounted shock combat was very costly. It required support and organization, and, in effect, an entire support industry arose around the new military technology. The horse and knights required training and armor. The horses needed large supplies of food. In order to sustain the new form of warfare, new modes of manufacturing equipment and producing food were necessary.

White begins with the revolution in agriculture, outlining the development of the heavy, the horseshoe, and the three-field system of crop rotation. “The plough was the first application of non-human power to agriculture” (41). The primitive scratch plow was not particularly effective at turning over the soil, so cross-ploughing was necessary, meaning fields were generally squarish in shape. The scratch plough was especially ineffective in northern Europe where soils tended to be heavier and moister than in eastern and southern Europe. For northern Europe a new type of plow was needed, and what developed was the heavy plow, a “weapon against the soil” involving a heavier knife and pulled by a team of oxen (43). It is interesting that White continues to use combat terminology throughout the book whether dealing with military or agricultural technologies. For example, heavy ploughs attack the soil with sufficient violence that cross-ploughing is no longer necessary. With the heavy plough, fields tended to become longer, horizontal strips of land. In the 9th and 10th centuries, the development of a new horse harness and the nailed horseshoe made the horse more than simply a military asset, it was now an agricultural and economic asset as well. With these inventions the horse could be used to do work previously done by the ox. Horses could now be used for ploughing fields (which they could do at greater speed and with greater force than oxen) and could also be used for land transport, specifically enabling more effective wagon transport (66-67). This increase in transportation meant that peasants, workers, and goods could travel greater distances, and it tended to encourage urbanization. The three-field system of crop rotation emerged in the 8th century, and its impacts were rapid and widespread. The new system increased a peasant’s productivity by one-half, distributed the labor of ploughing, sowing, and harvesting more evenly throughout the year, and diversified crops, which reduced the threat of famine (72).
“The later Middle Ages, that is roughly from A.D. 1000 to the close of the fifteenth century, is the period of decisive development in the history of the effort to use the forces of nature mechanically for human purposes. What had been, up to that time, an empirical groping, was converted with increasing rapidity into a conscious and widespread programme designed to harness and direct the energies observable around us” (79). The vertical water wheel, a possibility in Hellenistic times, gained widespread use around the tenth century. Around the same time, the tidal mill also came into use. Shortly after, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, people turned to the air for power, with the result being the invention of the windmill. From the windmill, White moves on to consider medieval experiments with steam power and hot air pressure, research in expanding gases and vapors that led to the creation of rockets. In a clever line about the invention of cannons, White points forward to later developments in compressed energy: “The cannon is not only important in itself as a power-machine applied to warfare: it is a one-cylinder internal combustion engine, and all of our more modern motors of this type are descended from it” (100). The major innovation in this direction required only that a piston be substituted for ammunition.

White argues that the crank is the single most important mechanical devise next to the wheel, in that it allows for continuous rotary motion to be transformed into reciprocal motion. For a long time, as White points out, people tended to recoil from the prospect of this reciprocal motion. The psychological reason that White elaborates is interesting. He suggests that continuous rotary motion is typical of inorganic matter and that reciprocal motion is a type found in living things. At core, then, the avoidance of crank power seems to be associated with something like the uncanny effect of seeing a quality of the living in the nonliving (104, 115). Out of this mechanism of reciprocal motion came one of the most important ordering devices of modern life: the mechanical clock (117-128).