Selected Responses to Tom Hughes'
Rescuing Prometheus
Although Hughes admits that the polarities between modern and
postmodern styles are "too sharply drawn to accord with reality," his
personal style seems to be one of defining and maintaining analytical
boundaries of various sorts.
The core of this book is to point out that the large-scale engineering
projects involve not only technical issues but also managerial issues, and
the latter could be far more critical than the former.
I think Hughes is making a bit of an attack on the "post-vietnam"
"counterculture" view of history. These are the folks who began
speaking out in opposition to the Vietnam war, and to the systems
approach to the management of things like wars. Although I find the
word "counterculture" quite evocative, Hughes' description of this
group as the readers of the Whole Earth Catalog seemed strange and
dismissive.
we could tease out whether military involvement in civilian
project is necessarily bad, or whether military shaping of civilian
discourses is also necessarily bad. For it seems that the military
play an ambivalent role in this book, both innovators and
inhibitors.
I have mixed views about this book. The historical factual
information presented about systems engineering by the author was
indeed very interesting and I learned a lot about the birth and
evolution of this discipline in the United States during the 20th
Century. On the other hand the book seemed a little dry to read and I
sometimes had difficulty following the continuity of thought even
within the individual chapters.
We have all heard the story of the military spending five hundred
dollars for a hammer or two thousand for a toilet seat. I wanted to
hear about that toilet seat, or about any other relevant indoor
plumbing issues.
To put it into Latourian terms, he does not see the need to
separate science and culture in order to ensure human happiness.
Rather, he sees the very real need, when considering non-military
projects, to have social and cultural issues to the fore. Perhaps not
so modernist as I first thought.
There is a marked absence of women (or gender discussion) in the
book. There is one woman (in the background) in a single
photograph.
One of the particularly dismaying boundaries that Hughes draws and
defends is the national one. He chauvinistically suggests that "the
remainder of the world stands in awe of the technological
transformations" that Americans have wrought. I would argue that the
"remainder" wonders about a nation that builds nuclear submarines
while allowing people within its borders to die of starvation or from
lack of medical care.
It seems that Hughes's starting point (those disillusioned
post-Vietnamers are misreading the history of technology) cannot be
granted a priori, and that his book would have been well-served by
making this case.
his tone and his identification of military projects as the symbol
of American greatness in the twentieth century is worrying.
It is a little hard to know how to write about this book. It is a bold
statement of faith in the modernist project, detailing and historicising
the idea of systems engineering by detailing four large projects, which
triumphantly prove the value of this new approach. However, it is also a
statement of faith in the engineering system and its institutional backers,
what Hughes calls the military-industrial-university complex...
Briefly, in this book the picture of Thomas Hughes's system
becomes more complicated, dynamic, distributed, and out of control
from any single individual.
I think the main beef I have with Hughes's book is related to
hard-to-pin-down claims like "Americans are reluctant to acknowledge
the countless ways in which military experiences, both in peacetime
and wartime, shape their national character and behavior" (p.141).
Clearly it's statements like this that capture where Hughes is coming
from as a historian, and they suggest a narrowing of research
topics...
His accounts of projects with clever acronyms never discuss the
labor disputes, pollution issues, and the overt sexism of American
Science, Technical and Engineering departments of this time, details
that I find very relevant to the larger story. The details of the
mismanagement of public funds during the Big Dig are glossed over.
Hughes can describe the internal details of large technical
systems, but his analysis ends at the boundaries of those systems.
He seems incapable of providing any sort of social or international
context for his lovingly-portrayed systems.
My head was spinning with all the names, acronyms, intricate
details and odd juxtapositions of personal and objective
information...
Basically, I don't think his picture of a
post-modern management, collaborative and practically nonhierarchical,
comes out very clearly with biographies of inventors and praise for the
military-industrial projects.
I had a hard time pulling a thesis out of Hughes's book.
the arrogance he seems to ascribe to engineers and their
quantitative methods could perhaps also be levelled at city planners,
particularly during the simplistic and devastating attempts at urban
renewal in the 1960s.
Hughes seems intent to catalog all of the great things that we got
out of the cold war, without ever acknowledging that there may have
been some negative consequences as well. All wars are economically
profitable for the winners, that is why they are fought. To me, there
is nothing to admire in this fact.
Before I go on, I have to confess that I did not have the strength
of character to get through the detail of the chapters on military
innovation.
Also I found discontinuity a lot of times when Hughes departed
from the history of systems management and wrote short life histories
of the scientists/generals/managers involved in these projects. I
think it is important to write these histories but I did not like the
way they were randomly written.