The Unreliable Nation

Abstract

Natures and technologies have long been central to the making of modern nations. Only recently, however, have scholars seen nations as sites where the very understandings of the “natural” and the “technological” were articulated, contested, and remade in the interests of the nation. This book examines the role of technological failure in crafting both national identities and the distinctive natures that support them. Focusing on the mid-twentieth-century attempt to extend reliable radio communications to the Canadian North, it explores how a group of Canadian defense scientists sought to visualize, map, and catalog the connections between a distinctive natural order of ionospheric storms, auroral displays, and magnetic disturbances on one side, and the particularly severe communication failures that cut the North off from the rest of the nation on the other. Through that project and its related efforts, they gradually transformed machine failures in hostile environments, from the Arctic to outer space, into a defining characteristic of Canadian identity at a time of national redefinition. Tracking those efforts through continental defense strategies, engineering practices, clandestine maps, and material cultures, the book argues that the real and potential failures of machines came to define the nation, its Northern nature, its cultural anxieties, and its geo-political vulnerabilities during the Cold War. More broadly, it argues for technological failures as key sites for linking historical technologies and historical natures, and for writing the histories of “other” nations during the Cold War.

Untitled

“…В экспериментальных моделях на грызунах показано, что локальное нейровоспаление, вызванное у матери эндотоксином липополисахаридом (ЛПС) грамотрицательных бактерий на ранних сроках беременности, приводит к гибели у потомства нейронов черной субстанции, синтезирующих дофамин. Снижение численности нейронов сопровождается повышенным содержанием в мозге плодов таких провоспалительных цитокинов, как ИЛ-6 и фактор некроза опухоли (ФНОα) [18]. Подобные патологические изменения в черной субстанции наблюдают у человека при развитии болезни Паркинсона.…”

“…Определено, что у глухих детей с кохлеарными имплантами обучение игре на музыкальном инструменте развивается способность различать мелодический рисунок и ритм, а также воспринимать оттенки эмоциональности в речи [18].…”

“…During his lifetime he was vizier to King Djoser and architect of Djoser's Step Pyramid complex at Saqqara. His legendary abilities include poet, mathematician, astronomer, architect and physician, and in his medical treatise he regarded disease and injury as naturally occurring, not punishments sent by gods [18].…”

‘One-Day-Wide’ Canada: History, Geography, and Aerial Views at Trans Canada Air Lines, 1945-1955

“…15 More recently Edward Jones-Imhotep has argued that the realities of the early Cold War and hostile Canadian environments made certain components of technological orders appear unreliable, highlighting once again the limits of geography as a marker of national ability and subsequently allowing instability and unreliability to become part of high-modern "technological nationalism." 16 Emerging technoscientific challenges, especially those in "new" environments such as the Arctic and upper atmosphere, made Canadian distances and Canadian communications more difficult to reconcile inside high-modern nationalist discourse and had to be therefore united by the rhetoric of technological failure.…”