Call for Papers 

Technique: Alternate Histories of Expertise and Experiment

Guest editors Jennifer Jahner and Jessica Rosenberg invite abstract submissions to a forthcoming special issue ofpostmedieval entitled “Technique: Alternate Histories of Expertise and Experiment.” Interested contributors should submit abstracts of 250 words by October 1, 2023 to jahner@hss.caltech.edu or jrosenberg@cornell.edu, proposing either an essay, interview, or “skill share” (described below).  

Though they share etymological roots in the Greek concept of technē, the terms “technology” and “technique” evoke subtly different histories of science, art, and their interaction. Within histories of technology, explorations of technique have typically remained subsidiary to larger narratives of methods and machinery, subsumed under more contingent discussions of style, craft, and individual predilection. This special issue asks what theoretical and practical paradigms emerge when we focus on genealogies of technique: on ways of doing and making rather than on the “success” of the object itself. By inviting contributors to consider techniques rather than technology, instruments rather than instrumentality, this special issue looks to engage longer and more capacious histories of making use that challenge the temporal, geographic, and cultural underpinnings of the technological. Accordingly, the issue aims to assemble a global comparative history of technology – as traced across the paths of particular techniques – in order to help us collectively rethink the political, ethical, and aesthetic consequences of making use of nature and of one another.

Through this focus on technique, we encourage contributors to reflect on theories and practices of meaningful use before modernity. Accordingly, we welcome contributions that approach the intersection of art and nature through an attention to particular techniques and the forms of their circulation: those small-scale, contingent, and often improvised ways of knowing that fuel everyday life but often fall outside of official histories of either literature or science. Themes may include:

·       habit, custom, and the power of repeated experience (following, for example, Latin usus or Arabic tarjiba in their expansive meanings)

·       experimental, collaborative, and material practices, especially embodied forms of knowledge.

·       the possibilities and limits of “technique” as a category for thinking about epistemic and artistic traditions outside of Europe

·       the politics and pragmatics of technology transfer, including problems of linguistic and cultural translation; the force of local knowledge; and the work of secrecy, in the context, e.g., of guild structures, gossip, and tacit knowledge.

·       the collision and interaction of vernacular ways of knowing “how to” with institutionalized forms of knowledge

·       technique and questions of style. How would we tell a literary and aesthetic history of technology, and how might such an account reperiodize modalities of use and exploitation? 

Submissions may explore various different facets of the procedural imagination at work in premodern cultures or the survival of premodern techniques alongside and within modern technological cultures. We welcome contributions drawing from a range of fields, including but not limited to literature, history of science, and art history, and any geographical and cultural contexts. Interested contributors should send an abstract that describes their proposed topic, theme, texts, and/or materials and identifies their proposed format. We are soliciting work in the following genres:

·       Long-form articles of 6,000 to 8,000 words, Articles might take a range of critical, theoretical, or methodological approaches to accounting for premodern techniques and their conceptual and historical significance.

·       Skill-shares. Contributors may submit their own how-to texts, from recipes to biohacks, “secrets” to stylistics. We encourage creative, experimental, and theoretical interpretations of procedural thought and its idioms. Submissions may be in a format of the author(s)’s choosing, incorporating text and image, between 1000-3000 words.

·       Interviews. The issue will feature several interviews that focus on histories and contemporary iterations of premodern “technique.” Interviews featuring interdisciplinary, transcultural, and/or comparative perspectives are especially encouraged.  

Image credits: (1) Everard Digby, De arte natandi libri duo (London, 1587); (2) Courtesy of Enid Baxter Rice.