The technological imaginary: bringing myth and imagination into dialogue with Bronislaw Szerszynski's "Nature, Technology and the Sacred"

Abstract

Bronislaw Szerszynski’s Nature, Technology and the Sacred offers a fresh look into the historical, cultural and political implications of technology-use in our contemporary situation. By challenging the standard interpretation of the secularisation thesis, the text opens the door to a new kind of postmodern ordering of the sacred, which includes our ever developing perception of the environment and our ongoing usage of technology. In my dialogue with the text, I suggest that Szerszynski’s argument could have been furthered by exploring the role played by both imagination and myth in creating the postmodern sacred which he describes in the text. I argue that by giving consideration to Friedrich Dessauer’s Christian theology of technology and the mythical imagination of contemporary science fiction literature and film, a more explicitly religious dimension of technology can be allowed to emerge, in the form of the technological imaginary.