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Technology, Technique, and the Body

IN A GARY LARSON cartoon, a number of dogs are tinkering with building hardware at
laboratory workbenches. The caption explains that they are striving to improve canine
life by mastering the Doorknob Principle. What makes this funny is partly the idea of
pooch scientists standing on their hind legs, manipulating screwdrivers and even
microscopes. It recalls the long-discarded notion that we humans are the only tool-using
animals. It points indirectly to the unique versatility of the human hand, with its
range of grips, and the relative specialization of other creatures' paws and claws.

There is something even stranger than Larson's image, though. Other animals have a
surprising ability to manipulate human technology. Not all understand what people do
with things, but they develop ways to work with human-made objects, and they
transmit this knowledge socially. At the dawn of industrialization, the rats of
early-nineteenth-century London, with no direct auditory or visual cues, had long known
that water flowed through the lead pipes servicing houses. When sufficiently thirsty,
they gnawed right through them. Unfortunately, by the 1830s the pipes sometimes
contained gas; the holes left by the disappointed rodents added to the risk of
explosions. (Rats also loved the wax covering early matches, brought them back to
their dens, and ignited the phosphorus with their teeth, causing still more fires.)

Bears in Yosemite National Park have learned to twist open screw-top jars of peanut
butter, to break into food lockers with a combination of paw and snout, and to raid
Dumpsters through supposedly protective slots. Bears cooperate to defeat other
human technology; sow bears appear to send cubs into branches to dislodge carefully
cached food, and young bears learn from observation how to break open automobile
doors and penetrate the flimsy barrier separating the backseat from the food the
owners thought they were protecting in the trunk. According to park rangers, who call
the practice clouting, bears recognize specific brands and models, for example Honda
and Toyota sedans, that are most vulnerable to attack, and use similar techniques on
each model. When a particular model and color yield a rich cache of food, bears begin
to attack similar vehicles every night. Mother bears show cubs how to pry open rear
side doors by bending the door frame with their claws until it becomes a platform for
reaching the backseat and trunk partition. Bears also brace themselves against
neighboring cars to break the windows of vans more readily.

Zoo officials "never use the word can't and orangutan in the same sentence,"
according to the comparative psychologist Benjamin Beck, a specialist in animal
survival skills. A young orangutan in the San Diego Zoo became famous for unbolting
the screening of his crib, removing the wires, and moving through the zoo nursery,
unscrewing lightbulbs. According to Beck, an orangutan, unlike other great apes,
understands what a tool like a screwdriver means in the human world and given the
opportunity could use it to take its cage apart and escape. Other orangutans have
learned to distinguish the faint sounds made by electrified barrier systems and to
escape when they detect that the power is off.

It should not be surprising, then, that dogs also learn the Doorknob Principle. An
innocent resident of Takoma Park, Maryland, was allegedly mauled by a Prince
George's County police dog in her own bed after it was sent in to look for a burglar in
her basement apartment. It had gained access by turning a doorknob, which the
woman has since replaced by a latch. Bizarre as these anecdotes appear, they make
an important point. Those who create things, whether doorknobs or gas pipes, can
only begin to imagine how they will be used. If we define technology as a modification
of the environment, then we must recognize the complementary principle of
technique: how that modification is used in performance. New objects change
behavior, but not always as inventors and manufacturers imagine. And changes in
behavior of people, as of bears and dogs, inspire new hardware, which in turn
engenders more innovations.

TECHNOLOGY = TECHNIQUE?

In many European languages the same term-la technique; die Technik-describes both
things and practices. One of the most incisive and influential critics of technology,
Jacques Ellul, argued powerfully that modern humanity is enmeshed in such
omnipresent, interlocking technological institutions that technology and technique are
inseparable. Ellul begins his most important work, The Technological Society, by
insisting, against Lewis Mumford, that the machine is only a result of technique, not
its source. Mumford established historical periods based on energy-hydraulic, coal,
electrical; Ellul sought to understand the spirit behind the power sources and
machinery. For him, technology was the product of the ancient Near East; in Western
antiquity and medieval Christianity, it was always subordinated to other principles.
Even the Renaissance and the seventeenth century pursued humanistic universality
rather than technical proficiency; many supposedly practical books of this period lose
the modern reader in digression and speculation. The universal application of
technique began only with the eighteenth century and the French Revolution.
Mechanization was only one consequence of "systematization, unification, and
clarification," equally reflected in the suppression of customary law by the Napoleonic
Code. History and philosophy as we know them emerged as intellectual techniques. In
fact, Ellul argues, industrialization followed rather than preceded these intellectual and
cultural transformations. With the rapid industrial development of the nineteenth
century-which Ellul does not attempt to explain-came a new relationship of technique
to society: "a reality in itself, self-sufficient, with its own laws and determinations."
Political control of technique is an illusion. It is irreversible, "beyond good and evil,"
not merely morally neutral but "the judge of what is moral, the creator of a new
morality" and thus of "a new civilization." Humanity has become "a slug in a slot
machine," setting it in motion without controlling its outcome.

Ellul's arguments are trenchant, brilliantly argued, and often persuasively illustrated.
His focus on mental processes and habits as the foundations of technology is
especially apt. And Ellul probably would agree that other organisms, including bears
and dogs, become subject to the same technological regime. But there is strong
evidence for the power of technique well before the revolutionary era. In fact, for
better or worse, the dominion of technique is an ancient one. For Ellul, the Greeks
simply despised technique and exalted pure theory. He cites Archimedes' destruction
of the models that he used to construct his theories, once he had demonstrated his
proofs geometrically. He also suggests that Greek ideals of harmony and moderation
held back the development of technique. But there is no opposition between aesthetic
ideals and the development of techniques. Experience and skill are hardly neglected in
the Hippocratic writings in favor of abstract thought.

Ellul also underestimated the power, even "autonomy" in his terms, of military
technology before the eighteenth century. Swordsmanship and other martial arts were
cultivated and transmitted by generations of medieval and Renaissance masters. But
only in early modern Europe did the distinction between technology and technique
become apparent. Between 1594 and 1607 Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange,
showed how technique could transform technology. Matchlock muskets were heavy
and dangerous. Soldiers had to hold their weapon in one hand and a lighted fuse in
the other. While some hunting weapons already had spiral grooves in their barrels for
greater accuracy, this delicate rifling needed more careful loading and maintenance
than rough and dirty military field conditions could afford. Thus the military musket
was inaccurate as well as awkward to handle. Maurice's genius was to see that
organization and synchronized motion could make the crude musket an effective
weapon. Inspired by an idea of his cousin William Louis, he assigned another cousin,
Maurice's adjutant Johann, to break down the cycle of preparing, loading, aiming, and
firing muskets into discrete steps. Johann of Nassau had a series of forty-three plates
engraved, each illustrating one stage. It was no longer enough for drillmasters to
teach the operation of the musket. Soldiers now had to be able to march forward,
rank on rank, as they prepared the weapons for firing when they advanced to the
front rank, then countermarch to repeat the process. Only with precision and strict
discipline could they avoid serious injury to themselves or their comrades. But once
the process-the technique-was mastered, the troops could lay down repeated,
formidable volleys. An intense field of simultaneous fire could be effective, even with
many shots going wide of the mark. Maurice and Johann's manual, Weapon Handling
(1607), with its elegant illustrations by Jacob de Gheyn, transformed battle
throughout Europe, especially through the victories of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden
two decades later. The press was a technology, and the printer's art a technique,
that accelerated the diffusion of countless others.

Here was technological synchronization three hundred years before Henry Ford. Some
readers will insist that the musket itself, as a technology, somehow dictated the
technique of drill. Certainly, battlefield experience determines which innovations
spread and which are abandoned.

But techniques do not create themselves, and neither operators nor their supervisors
initially understand the full possibilities of devices. Ellul wrote in the shadow of a
modernism that still sought a single best way to do everything, and for which (as the
architectural critic David Heathcote recently remarked of the British official-planning
mentality of the 1960s) "design is the search for the Platonic ideal and ... variety is
symptomatic of an unsolved problem." Ellul was right to underscore the constraints of
technique, but wrong to deny its creative and improvisational side. In fact the two
complement each other. Just when a technique seems to have proved itself inevitable
and universal, an individual may develop and spread an alternative method.
Organizations and professional groups codify best practice. Gifted individuals from time
to time challenge the textbooks, often failing but sometimes revising them.

TECHNIQUES OF THE BODY: MARCEL MAUSS

Ellul, like most analysts of technology, believed in a radical discontinuity between the
industrial world and nonindustrial societies. An older French contemporary, the
anthropologist Marcel Mauss, illuminated a side of technique that Ellul thought was
too restrictive and unrelated to modern societies: the role of physical habits, which
Mauss called body techniques. Ellul was correct in arguing for a concept of technique
that included mental and social practices, but he ignored how important simple body
techniques can be even in complex societies.

Mauss introduced the idea of body technique almost casually, in an article in a French
psychology journal published in 1934. He identified a set of human practices as
"effective" and "traditional," and at the same time "mechanical, physical, or physico-chemical."
These were the ways people learned to do things with their bodies. These
patterns of motion were not haphazard; they were produced and inculcated by an entire society.
They formed a framework of conduct. He coined the word "habitus" for these socially produced
behaviors, which varied systematically "between societies, educations, proprieties and
fashions, prestiges." Prestige was, for Mauss, essential to human body technique.
Children imitate the actions of their elders, especially those with formal authority. The
learning of body techniques is at once social, psychological, and biological. Mauss
gave examples from the dances and rituals of the native peoples of Australia and New
Zealand. But some of his most interesting cases are taken from the early-twentieth-
century history of sports, and from his own experience.

Mauss remembered learning to swim first, then to dive. He also recalled being taught
to dive with eyes shut, opening them only after immersion. By the 1930s, when his
study of body techniques was published, children were expected to accustom
themselves as early as possible to keeping their eyes open in the water, controlling
the instinctive tendency to shut them. (The aversion to opening one's eyes in the
water is now considered to be learned; swimming authorities encourage parents to
begin instruction in infancy, when moving in water is still innately delightful.)
Swimming, like other techniques, was an apprenticeship, but not a static one. Mauss's
generation had learned to swim the breaststroke, with the head above water; by the
1930s, variations of the crawl had prevailed. No longer did swimmers swallow water
and spit it as though they were "a kind of steamboat." Yet Mauss acknowledged that
he still could not swim otherwise.

Walking was subject to more subtle but still discernible techniques. In the Great War,
Mauss recalled, the Western Allies moved differently. The Worcester Regiment, as a
token of its valor fighting beside the French infantry in the Battle of the Aisne (he
probably meant that of 1914), received special permission to be accompanied by a
band of French buglers and drummers. The desired panache failed. For almost half a
year, "the regiment had preserved its English march but had set it to a French
rhythm.... When they tried to march in step, the music would be out of step, with
the result that the Worcester Regiment was forced to give up its French buglers." And
as recently as World War II, an American observer found British troops "looser-jointed
than we are, with freer knee action," and French soldiers with "a long loping swing
that seems to use the shoulders to push ahead with." Were these stylized expressions
of each nation's civilian steps or the choreography of long-forgotten sergeant-majors,
enshrined in drill manuals?

Of course soldiers are drilled by noncommissioned officers who build morale partly by
teaching these distinctive motions. Their exercises produce what William H. McNeill, in
his study of dance and drill, has called "muscular bonding," the solidarity of rhythmic
synchronization. Both national armies and civilians march to different drummers. Mauss
began to notice that American and French women also walked differently, and that
even in French society, upbringing influenced gait noticeably.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Our Own Devices by Edward Tenner Copyright © 2003 by Edward Tenner
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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