From Standards' Expectations to Acquiescence: Specifications, Values, and the Super-Normal EEG at US WWII

Since the late nineties, the history of war drafts has been seen as a moment where technologies of subjectivity became connected to technologies of the self (Rose 1999). This paper is an attempt to further explore how military neurology dealt contingently with these subjectivity strategies and how the introduction of new technologies such as electroencephalographs (EEG), although primarily concerned with standardization processes, helped to shape and modify the framework within which these two kinds of technologies intermingle. Standardization thus appears, accord-ing to Leigh-Star’s (1990) notion of “phenomenology of conventions,” as a necessary canvas: one that allows making sense of the response of groups and group dynamics in this field but cannot be fully controlled by organizational planning. Basically, I explore how the failure to fit standards produced by a specific technological environment can be re-interpreted through new categories that contingently instill (positive) content into people that could be qualified as unfit. This ap-proach also clarifies the conceptual landscape that makes possible a better understanding of the difficulties that military neurologists found in making differences among emergent group stand-ards and groups based in objectively selected criteria.