Double Ages

Why is that each of the Industrial Ages identified by the technological innovation school (Mensch, Perez, Freeman, Soete etc) is marked by major innovations which are not considered to be among the mainstays of the period, but which do play a great role in it, to the point where they leave just as much of a stamp on popular memory as the dominant industrial process of that Age?

Gerhard Mensch in Stalemate in Technology: Innovations Overcome the Depression (1975) - which seems to be the founding book of the innovation school - repeats and attempts to prove what Kondratiev had claimed at the very outset of the whole debate on periodization, namely that crucial inventions are bunched in the troughs at the end of the long wave, only to become full-fledged “innovations” during the upswing of the next one, when entrepreneurs are able to secure major capital investments for the new technology. No doubt this is true in certain respects: the classic example is the microprocessor chip, invented in 1971, two decades before the great expansion of the IT sector. But is the claim that inventions pile up during the periods of stagnation not a tautology, to the extent that stagnation is defined precisely by the lack of fixed-capital investment? And even more importantly: Is that claim even true for the basic innovations that define each period?

Consider Watt's steam engine, invented in the early 1770s and first brought into industrial use in 1776, widely associated with the Industrial Revolution. It spreads across the UK and the world over the next 50 years, but in that time, the dominant industrial process is in fact textile production by water power. Coal and steam define the following period, marked by the emergence of the steam locomotive and the railways. Similarly, the Bessemer process was invented in 1855 and was being used industrially by the 1860s, at the height of the second Kondratiev, twenty years before the first industrially feasible electric motors came into use at the end of that long wave. Steel and electricity define the third industrial age. In both these cases, the major "innovations" of a given age are invented and put into production during the preceding one.

Most crucially for what interests me, assembly-line mass production was not only invented in 1908 during the first decade of “Age of Steel and Electricity,” but it clearly became very widespread in the United States (and undoubtedly in Germany too?) in the 1920s and 30s. Yet at the same time, it is not wrong to describe the period 1940-1990, or the fourth Kondratiev, as Fordism. Finally, the digital computer, as well as the entire edifice of cybernetics and modern control theory, was invented and brought into production at the very outset of the so-called “Age of Fordist Mass Production,” with such wide-ranging applications that the first entirely automated oil refinery was already finished in 1959 (cf. the opening chapters of the brilliant book by David Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation, 1984). Yet no one would propose 1940-89 as the era of digital computers and telecommunications!

All of this is hardly unknown to the innovation-school theorists. Columns 4 and 6 of the excellent “Tentative sketch of some of the main characteristics of successive long waves” by Freeman and Soete, shows very clearly the coexistence of two paradigms, one hegemonic and the other in the course of elaboration. (I scanned the pages and pasted them into a single image, click "original" at the bottom for full size; this table is fantastically useful, column 7 is also very good for the relations between successive paradigms). What's not attempted by them, however, is precisely the most interesting thing: an analysis of the political, social and cultural conflicts created by the coexistence of two technological regimes, one hegemonic and the other, powerfully insurgent.

Carlota Perez doesn't solve the problem when, against every other theorist of the Kondratievs, she proposes a Fordist mass-manufacturing period stretching from 1908 to 1971, with a decisive crisis in the middle (1929-45). Her focus on a regulation crisis is great, for sure, and it aligns her work with that of Aglietta (even if she barely references him). But the result of her periodization, it seems to me, is to completely distract attention from the incredible tension between the stabilized mass-production regime and the rising power of cybernetic control technology in the postwar period, all the way to the 1970s. One can, of course, distinguish between first and second-order cybernetics, as we have tried to do with fairly good results. Nonetheless, the underlying technological development is continuous and our distinction would also risk blurring what seems to me like a continuous conflict running throughout the postwar period.

What I'm suggesting is that a cultural history of technopolitical paradigms should take the decisive coexistence of two technological layers as the source of basic dynamics in each period. Indeed, to judge by the present period one could no doubt consider three layers, one residual, one hegemonic and one insurgent (though I am not really able to identify right now what that rising "next layer" may be). I have never seen this kind of thesis developed anywhere, by the way, so if anyone has, please do tell.

What put the bug in my ear was David Noble's Forces of Production and the brilliant book by Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media and Corporate Space (2003). The first gives a perfect summary of the development of operations research, computers, cybernetic control theory and above all, numerical control technology during the postwar mass-production boom. The second, a much more complex theoretical work covering basically the same period, shows how corporate organizational form, architecture and aesthetics continually evolved to match the potentials of control theory and digital computing. Using these, it becomes very interesting to see the history of the fourth Kondratiev (mid-30s to mid-80s, or 1940-1989 if you prefer) as a tumultuous struggle between the Keynesian stabilization of the mass-production regime within national frameworks, and the corporate quest to burst the geographical envelope entirely and use the combination of automated production and intensive supply-chain management to create a fully integrated global market.

That is the kind of study that I want to do. I think it could help to locate the decisive conflicts of the present, and to show what the major issues will be as we enter the decline of the fifth Kondratiev, which for ecological reasons may also be the major crisis of industrial capitalism as a whole.