The Technical Imagination: Argentine Culture's Modern Dreams (review)

In this study written over a decade after her landmark essay on the intersection of avant-garde art and literature and the culture of modernity in Argentina, Una modernidad periférica: Buenos Aires, 1920 y 1930 (1988), the celebrated cultural critic Beatriz Sarlo further explores the grip that technology, in its myriad forms, held on the popular imagination of an Argentine public pulled onward by the frenzy of the new. Sarlo argues that the fascination with technology and the eagerness to engage with it across all sectors of the population, not simply the elite, had to do precisely with its egalitarian possibilities in a society as class-stratified and class-conscious as early twentieth century Argentina. Technology's impact involved not only economic modernization and urban change, but also "a matrix . . . [for] imaginary constructions" (p. 3). In this process, the participation of what Sarlo terms "the popular sector" shows how "poor people's knowledge had come to be fodder for an imagination that was not exclusively literary" (p. 2).

Acknowledging the crossover between the knowledge and practices of the lettered elite with those of the working class, Sarlo divides her study in two parts entitled "Letters" and "Histories" where she examines literary and journalistic texts and the social interactions with science and technology. Two initial chapters focus on the writers Horacio Quiroga and Roberto Arlt. Quiroga, who set up home laboratories and dabbled in agrarian engineering, likewise wrote stories featuring motion pictures, craftsman "primitives of technology," and the genre of the scientific report. Arlt, a working-class self-taught writer who debuted in the popular press, depicted, for the first time, an industrial Buenos Aires, "a cubist collage whose chaotic beauty was an affront to moral sensibilities [and] aesthetic organization" (p. 40) and matched the vision of his contemporary, the reformist architect Wladimiro Acosta. Like Quiroga, Arlt too tried his hand at invention (literally and in literature) and exhibited a penchant for the occult. Their literary portrayal of science and technology reflect a more generalized popular enthusiasm, which can be gauged by the success of magazines and newspapers such as Crítica, El Mundo, and Ciencia Popular, analyzed in Chapter 3. Addressing a wide readership, the popular press promoted the idea that anyone, regardless of their educational background, could be a contributor, innovator, and inventor, and saw the technological future as "something more to be desired than feared" (p. 76).

This wider commerce between society and technology is the focus of the second part. One chapter, devoted to the phenomenon of "inventors," contrasts its participatory qualities with the closed milieu of "science." Invention, often practiced by self-taught do-it-yourselfers, revealed both a keen desire for upward mobility and a new kind of poetic imagining. Among the prominent results of such inventive activity, the radio, cinema, and television and the degree of access to each capture Sarlo's imagination in Chapter 5. In Sarlo's analysis, despite class conflict, "[at] this stage of radio broadcasting and reception, the airwaves were a democratizing force" (p. 110), something that was not equally true of cinema, where "amateur filmmaking . . . remained confined to 'comfortable mansions.'" The higher cost and technical difficulty that made film less accessible also applied to television, which despite optimistic experimentation, remained a distant fantasy, or, as Sarlo puts it, was "not quite [t]here" (p. 126). The final chapter turns to the activities of doctors, clairvoyants, and quacks as "[o]ld obsessions of traditional culture . . . met new urban discourses [such as] theosophy, parapsychology, popularized psychological and even psychoanalytic ideas" (p. 128). Although this chapter might appear slightly out of place, Sarlo argues that technology had spurred the belief that everything was possible, including miraculous cures and medical wonders, clairvoyance and disembodied communication, both here and in the hereafter. And without ignoring the proliferation of fraud, Sarlo sees here "ancient wisdom . . . being recycled in a democratic way" (p. 131) and the "obscure zone of parapsychological wonders . . . which...