title: Technologies of Enlightenment: Knowledge, Time, Identity and Colonisation
Creators: name: Combe, Thomas Peter
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: intellectual history
subject: technology
subject: Enlightenment

description: During the era of Enlightenment, technology emerged as a central figure in European thought. It served as a driver of historical progress, as a product and facilitator of scientific endeavour, and as a marker of a peculiarly European civilisation and modernity. The role of physical machines and other products of the ‘mechanical arts’ has been pivotal to this story. There is, however, another way in which we can understand the nature of technology and its significance in Enlightenment thought. I argue in this thesis for a bifurcated notion of technology. It firstly encompasses the optical devices, the industrial mechanisation, and the timekeeping technologies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I argue, however, that we can also productively use the concept of technology to refer to the non-material tools and techniques of enlightened Europeans. By this I mean the methods for organising knowledge, the modes of representation used to convey people and history, and the instructions that guided the eyes of natural historians and the assessment of peoples and phenomena that came within their gaze. This distinct but complementary notion is what I refer to as a technology-of-mediation. It describes the processes by which the European worldview was constructed. It refers to the mediation of ideas of nature, time, history, and identities within European thought. I seek evidence of these technologies-of-mediation through a series of what we might consider case studies: exemplars of the type of mediation I am describing within European intellectual history. The mediation of European ideas about the nature of the cosmos and of political communities, and of the transforming correspondences between them, is explored in a discussion of metaphors of representation such as Thomas Hobbes’ ‘artificiall’ body politic and the clockwork universe. The argument is made that these mechanical representations were sensible because of the shift towards a new mechanical philosophy occurring in the seventeenth century which reconfigured the natural world as both knowable and useful. Both metaphors elevated human agency as central to history and destiny, and this newly assembled vision of nature and time found a uniquely powerful expression in the historical charts of Joseph Priestley and Adam Ferguson developed in the second half of the eighteenth century. These charts were tools for representing history, but they were also tools for representing comparative human progress and as such they bolstered the influential stadial theories of the Scottish Enlightenment. While the primary focus of the research is the various attitudes within European thought that I describe as technologies, the thesis culminates in a discussion of the implications of these attitudes—these technologies-of-mediation—beyond Europe in the extremes of colonialism’s reach. In reading a set of ‘hints’ provided to James Cook ahead of his first Pacific voyage, I will argue that these instructions operated as a type of script, a tool for projecting the identities of the rational, enlightened and scientific men aboard the Endeavour, and for constructing the identities of the New Holland ‘natives’ by guiding the evaluation of their responses. It is in the articulation of the distinction between these two identities that the ‘hints’, and the other technologies I have described (of which the ‘hints’ are an historical product), operate as technologies-of-civilisation. Establishing the features and boundaries of civilisation is central to the story that runs throughout this thesis. In considering these technologies-of-civilisation I seek to contribute to existing scholarship on the intellectual history of the Enlightenment. The argument presented also, however, speaks to the legacies of Enlightenment thought that continue to reverberate in current debates. In the trend to ‘decolonise’ historical narratives, and in the anxiety to reclaim a mastery over nature slipping away through the effects of climate change, we can see the ways in which technologies-of-civilisation are shaping our vision of both the past and future.