El pensamiento sobre la técnica en México [Thinking about technology in Mexico] ed. by Irving Samadhi Aguilar Rocha and José Francisco Barrón Tovar (review)

Reviewed by:

• El pensamiento sobre la técnica en México [Thinking about technology in Mexico] ed. by Irving Samadhi Aguilar Rocha and José Francisco Barrón Tovar
• Israel G. Solares (bio)

El pensamiento sobre la técnica en México [Thinking about technology in Mexico] Edited by Irving Samadhi Aguilar Rocha and José Francisco Barrón Tovar. Mexico City: Bonilla Artigas Editores/Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, 2022. Pp. 271.

This volume is a collection of contributions to the colloquium "El pensamiento sobre la técnica en México," held in September 2020. It collects the works of the scholars in eleven chapters, with an introduction by the editors and a preface by Javier Oscar Blanco. The chapters are organized chronologically, starting in the sixteenth century and ending in current times.

As with many books based on conference papers, the topics and methods differ widely, and the chapters vary drastically in extension and overall quality. Chapters 1, 10, 11, and 12 define themselves as philosophical essays on the uses of technology in the Mexican space defined broadly, dealing with baroque machines, tortilla production, and digital technologies in the classroom. Chapters 2 through 9 are analyses of the thinking of José Gaos, Emilio Uranga, José Revueltas, Octavio Paz, Samuel Ramos, Fabián Giménez Gatto, and Naief Yehya. There is no concluding chapter.

The main temporality of the book is the twentieth century, and the strongest contributions are the core chapters focused on Samuel Ramos, Emilio Uranga, and José Revueltas. The chapter by Eloy Caloca Lafont analyzes the thinking of Samuel Ramos in the 1930s and his criticisms of maquinismo, as a danger of the conquest of the machine over human life but also as part of the expansion of the United States into the world. The chapters by José Francisco Barrón and Irving Samadhi Aguilar uncover the thinking of Emilio Uranga and his reflection on the properties of the machine, between death and life, between the animal and the artificial, and between the given and the produced. These chapters show how a Mexican writer, in the years of the "Mexican miracle" (the 1950s), reflected on the aesthetic characteristics of reproduction differently from Walter Benjamin, taking the dead needle of the phonograph as the leading example of reproduction. The contribution by Sergio Lomelí and Tamara Valencia depicts the technological implications of the thinking of communist activist and writer José Revueltas and his comments on the fetishization of technical rationality and how pervasive it was in both the capitalist and the socialist spheres. Along with the pieces on José Gaos and Octavio Paz, these chapters provide an appealing narrative about the thinking on technological knowledge in Mexico and the dialogue and parallels with similar movements around the globe, during the emergence of an industrial national space.

The Mexican national space is the articulating axis of the book, but a systematic and coherent reflection on what it means to study the thought [End Page 690] on technology in Mexico is missing throughout the volume. The introduction states that the book focuses on "how Mexican intellectuals and authors in Spanish that resided in Mexico have thought about technology" (p. 17, emphasis mine). Residence is the main link of union between the thinkers and "the singularity that we call Mexico," but the authors' analyses have minimal connections. To be sure, the book provides a very faint genealogy of the thought about technology in Mexico, but it fails to explain the meaning and implications of locating thought on technology inside changing national boundaries.

For historians of technology and technological thought, the book provides valuable contributions on intellectuals and their views on technology in the first half of the twentieth century and places them in the general global reflections on machines, cities, and automation of those years. Finally, together with recent historiography on technocratic visions and technology diffusion in Latin America, it points to the need for more scholarship on the history of technological thought during the end of the primary exports era and the beginning of industrialization in the region in the short twentieth century.

Israel G. Solares

Israel G. Solares is assistant researcher at the Institute of Research on Applied Mathematics...