Concepts of Hand and Technology

The concept of technology, despite being used only marginally before the twentieth century, developed out of early-modern discourses that marked divisions between art and science—divisions which the hand and the head frequently represented (Schatzberg 2018, 42–54). In 1728, German philosopher Christian Wolff defined the Latin term technologia as the science of what humans produce with their bodies, “especially the hands” (1963, 38). Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, numerous thinkers called upon a concept of the hand to make claims about the role of technology in society. The ubiquity of the hand in these discourses, however, did not give rise to a unified view of technology. The hand—as a conceptual object—served to articulate questions: Does the hand labor or invent, or is the hand, as in Friedrich Engels’s anthropology, both the organ and the product of labor? Does the hand come before or after technology, or do the hand and technology constitute one another? Various thinkers of technology have tended to conceive of the hand by placing it in one of three broad relationships to the head: treating the hand as fundamentally distinct from the head, classifying the hand as a general-purpose tool, or insisting on the inseparability of the hand and the head. Paying attention to the hand as a concept rather than a transparent synecdoche of the broader category of physical labor serves to reconstruct the process through which technology and its conceptualizations codevelop. Humans develop machines in the image of certain concepts of the hand. In turn, these machines organize their designers’ and operators’ hands into new social relationships. Through those now-material relationships, thinkers then grasp technology. The concept of the hand twists and turns in this dialectical process. Following the hand in this way, then, mitigates against the common, essentializing conception of humans and machines that grasps each through their difference from the other. Rather, the coordination of humans and machines according to specific concepts of technology imparts ever-shifting meanings to both. *** Early-nineteenth-century studies of capitalist factory production in England often understood the hand as one controllable, productive element among others—whether human or machine. The hand was understood as separate from, and often subordinate to, the head. In this shared intellectual milieu of the 1830s, Charles Babbage and Andrew Ure both wrote influential managerial texts concerning the correct role of machines in the manufacturing process. The tension between what counted as intellectual versus practical work pervades their writing. Babbage sought to organize manual labor under the strict control of intellectual labor. As an inventor, Babbage was troubled by the “most costly” labor of “draftsmen” and “skilled workmen” on whom he depended to materialize his ideas (1864, 112). Indeed, a disagreement about payment with Joseph Clement prevented his first machine, the Difference Engine, from seeing the light of day. Babbage understood his own intellectual labor as operating at the highest level of a machine. The hands of a spectrum of skilled workers could be called upon at any step in the process of production. Lamenting the limitation of the worker to two hands at most, Babbage took consolation in the fact that “tools or machines of the simplest structure come to our aid” (1832, 14). Against the supposedly limitless capacity of the machine, Babbage’s hand stood in for the limit of the human capacity to labor. Andrew Ure, a Scottish chemist hired as an expert witness to the working conditions of textile factories in England went further. He saw the hand as not just controllable, but eliminable. “Wherever a process requires peculiar dexterity and steadiness of hand,” Ure wrote, “it is withdrawn as soon as possible from the cunning workman, who is prone to irregularities of many kinds” (1835, 19). The guiding principle of manufacture, he went on, was “to substitute mechanical science for hand skill” (20). The accepted nineteenth-century understanding of science as separate from the knowledge of the manual worker helps to explain why a thinker like Ure would view the hand as a replaceable element. “Technology,” in Ure’s account, was one such science; it studied “the combined operation of many orders of work-people, adult and young, in tending with assiduous skill a system of productive machines continuously impelled by a central power” (13). By curtailing the hand to a mechanized science, Ure folded the hand into a theory of the factory and the labor process itself. The division between knowing and making justified a hierarchical order of those who own machines and those who sell their labor to supervise machines. For both Babbage and Ure, the hand could be organized into a labor process that determined how workers should use their hands. For Babbage, who had an eye towards mechanizing manual labor and dividing it from intellectual labor, the hand was merely one of many elements in the process of manufacture. For Ure, attuned instead to the automation of factory labor, the production process promised to render the hand obsolete and unnecessary. *** A second view of the hand, namely as a general-purpose tool, quickly emerged to challenge the first. Unlike Babbage and Ure, thinkers of this type denied the possibility of mechanically eliminating the hand. Karl Marx critiqued the theories of Babbage and Ure in his discussion of the social division of labor in Capital, Volume 1, first published in 1867. Divisions between skilled and unskilled labor, as advocated by thinkers like Babbage, facilitated the cheapening of labor-power because the simplification of tasks expands the pool of suitable workers for a given position (Braverman 1998, 318). Additionally, a system of production that deprioritizes the hand, let alone one that goes so far as to suggest its practical elimination, removes the worker from holistic knowledge of the organization of production. “The specialized worker produces no commodities”—complete and saleable finished products—and is confined to fragmentary participation in production’s various processes (Marx 1976, 475). Once the role of the hand, man’s “natural instrument,” becomes mechanized, the worker becomes an observer of a process that was previously within his own domain of knowledge (495). In a discussion of John Wyatt’s 1735 invention of a spinning machine “without fingers,” Marx argued that just as living beings are studied for “their own instruments of production for sustaining their life,” as Darwin did, so too should the “productive organs of man in society” be studied (493). Agreeing with Marx on this point, the French philosopher of science Georges Canguilhem claimed that ethnographers and philosophers were closer to understanding machines than the engineers who made them were. Such a study of machines, Canguilhem argued, was already to be found in the work of the French paleontologist André Leroi-Gourhan, French philosopher Alfred Espinas and the German philosopher Ernst Kapp (2008, 93n50–52). Kapp, who inaugurated the philosophy of technology, had argued in 1877 that the hand comes before the mechanical tool because all tools are made in the hand’s image. The hand makes and uses a tool, which looks and functions like the hand itself. According to Kapp, the hand’s “substantial involvement in the production of the material after-image” made the hand logically—and really—prior to the tool ([1877] 2018, 35). Connected to its human operator by a closed hand, the hammer, for example, extends the arm both in form and function, never achieving independence from it. Describing the steam engine as the prototypical machine, Kapp wrote that “the idea could not have been far from the minds of [its inventors] James Watt and Robert Stephenson that they might allow their own bodies to stipulate for them the law and the norm for the mechanical structure of their machines” (101). Such an analysis followed from Kapp’s insistence that the “unconscious” is embedded in the material and symbolic activities that connect the body and technology (121–149). In this view, the invention of a technical object or system always precedes scientific knowledge of its application. The hand, taken as a tool in itself, became for Kapp the natural starting point of this process. Kapp began with the hand as a way to analyze tools, but prehistorians, ethnologists, and philosophers of the deep past began with tools as a way to analyze the hand. For prehistorians of the twentieth century, “the liberation of the hand” from locomotive duties and the making of tools grounded definitions of the human. In an introductory essay to Jacques de Morgan’s 1921 Prehistoric Man: A General Outline of Prehistory, French philosopher Henri Berr posed a rhetorical question: “How far back does it go, this hand which so strangely increases the powers of a privileged species?” (1924, ix). His answer was: as far back as homo faber. For Berr, the invention of the first tools occurred alongside “the invention of the hand,” ushering in human history (v). The prehistorian’s view of the hand as the starting point for invention reversed that of Kapp while retaining the sense of the hand as a general-purpose tool. This broad conceptual frame, then, permits analyses from either end of the temporal relation that it suggests—beginning from the hand or the tool. *** A third category of thinkers views the head and hand as inseparably linked. In this view, technologies can only emerge through that relationship between head and hand. Whereas thinkers like Ure aimed for the hand’s elimination and those like Kapp insisted on the hand’s persistence in the process of technological development, this third group argued that technologies conceived in blindness to the hand failed to understand the purpose of technology as such. Key thinkers in this category are André Leroi-Gourhan and Martin Heidegger. Martin Heidegger approached the problem of the hand in his attempt to answer the phenomenological question of being. The intimate relationship between the productive activity of the hand that works through tools is, for Heidegger, a locus for being in the world. The world inhabited by human beings both reveals and conceals itself through the relationship of the hand to its environment (1962, 95–107). In 1951 he lectured, “Apes, too, have organs that can grasp, but they do not have hands. The hand is infinitely different from all grasping organs—paws, claws, or fangs—different by an abyss of essence” (1968, 16). For Heidegger, the abyss of essence that separates the animal with an organ that grasps from the human with a hand is the activity of thinking and speaking. Heidegger’s hand thus emanates first and foremost from a distinction between humans and animals—a distinction noted by Jacques Derrida for revealing Heidegger’s lack of knowledge about zoology (1987, 173–174). Heidegger’s hand is thus abbreviated by his account of what counts as essentially human activity. As soon as the work of the hand is mechanized—for example, once the typewriter replaces handwriting—“the essential rank of the hand” is withdrawn ([1942–43] 1992, 85). As a result, truly human technical activity becomes, for Heidegger, limited. André Leroi-Gourhan, who had been trained as a paleontologist and ethnologist, turned to the deep past instead of transhistorical essence, though he was also concerned about the diminishing importance of the hand as a result of automated machines. Unlike Heidegger, Leroi-Gourhan developed his understanding of the hand through an evolutionary account of techniques and their development according to different forms of human social life. Humans are unique in that they make themselves “again and again available for new forms of action” ([1964] 1993, 246). Leroi-Gourhan, who was no stranger to zoology, argued that speech emerges in the process of the hands and the face becoming free to interact with and make sense of the world. On the regression of the hand, he wrote, “The dwindling importance of the makeshift organ that is our hand would not matter a great deal if there were not overwhelming evidence to prove that its activity is closely related to the balance of the brain areas with which it is connected” (254–255). The reduced use of the hand in the activity of the human maker would lead to the reduced use of the brain in the activity of the human thinker. Though Leroi-Gourhan’s hand is integral to intellectual activity, as in Heidegger, and is referred to as an organ, as in Kapp, Leroi-Gourhan did not view technologies as essentially tied to a human ideal or simply as extensions of the body, but rather as emergent from “a coherent succession of bodily gestures or actions” (Schlanger 2026, 213). Both these gestures and the tools that emerge with them stand, in Leroi-Gourhan’s framework, at the apex of making and thinking. Here, the hand provides the conditions of possibility for technology and language. *** The history of the concept of technology enfolds various concepts of the hand, each of which reveals differing ideas about the process of invention, the organization of labor, and the human. Following the concept of technology through the concept of the hand allows us to interrogate technology’s conceptualization historically instead of celebrating or rejecting technology and its numerous expressions wholesale. Such an investigation might rectify an imbalance to which Eric Schatzberg has pointed: In endeavoring to understand technology scholars tend to elevate “theory over practice, discourse over materiality, principles over applications” (2018, 236). In seeking to rectify that imbalance, however, we must avoid making a hasty turn to simplified or nostalgic understandings of the hand. Schatzberg, for example, urges us “to reclaim craft,” defined as manual skill and cognitive judgment, “as an essential element of technology” (235). However, a concept of technology that is attached to craft must include an analysis of craft’s organization across divisions of labor—more specifically, between the head and the hand. It is worth asking, then, what the craft of any ubiquitous technology produced today actually is. What is the craft of an integrated circuit? How is labor organized into the global-scale production of a computer chip that is orders of magnitude smaller than a fingernail? At what point is craft involved, and whose craft is it? If we want to answer these questions, Marx’s demand for “a critical history of technology” remains relevant. We must address technologies as material expressions of the way in which society is organized and then evolutionarily analyze their roles in sustaining that society (1976, 493–494). Merely redefining our concept of technology to accommodate its formerly principal features will tell us very little. If technology, as a concept, seems to be divorced from the hand, then our job is to understand why technologies appear that way. This essay is part of a JHI Blog forum, “The Conceptual History of Technology.” Rae Bruml Norton is a PhD candidate in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She specializes in the history of technology and media theory and is working on dissertation that charts the development of the computer mouse in the late twentieth century. Her research investigates how engineers in the emerging field of human-computer interaction reconstituted relationships between intellectual and manual labor. Edited by Zac Endter and Jonas Knatz Featured image: Operator inserts an etched-circuit card of epoxy-glass into an Army Fieldata tape transport built by Ampex. Image reproduced in Electronics, April 28, 1961, p. 77. Acknowledgements: Thank you to Charli Muller, Eva Cilman, and Helen Fishman; to Nathan Schlanger for encouraging me to read Henri Berr; and to Catherine Malabou for pointing me to “Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand.”