The Technical Imagination: Argentine Culture’s Modern Dreams

In what Beatriz Sarlo calls six episodes, ranging from the proto-science fiction of Horacio Quiroga and the apocalyptic urban surrealism of Roberto Arlt through the development of mass media, tales of inventors and inventions, and an entertaining tour of weird science and medical quackery, The Technical Imagination examines how technology entered the popular imagination in 1920s and 1930s Argentina. Often wry, but always sympathetic, and dispensing erudition with a light touch, Sarlo shows how the products of modern technology (radio, the telephone and telegraph, movies, and rudimentary forays into television, among other phenomena) announced an unprecedented break with the past while also provoking an ironic recrudescence of age-old superstitions. Although the new technologies helped to shape notions of modernity at all levels of Argentine society, Sarlo focuses particularly on the working-class amateur inventors of Buenos Aires, and on how their inventions-even when they failed, as they frequently did-point to what can be recognized today as the reorganization of an intellectual hierarchy, and thus of an era’s, and a culture’s, intellectual history.