How We Learned to Forget the Bomb: Socially Organized Denial in Contemporary American Nuclear Consciousness

• In Event: Sociology of Culture Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): 4. Sociologies of Denial & Crisis

Abstract

In this research I ask how, socioculturally speaking, we have managed to effectively forget that nuclear technologies and the threats that they pose exist. Using interpretive historical sociology as my methodological framework and drawing heavily from Jacques Ellul’s theoretical work on technique, propaganda and the technological society, develop an account of the emergence and evolution of what I term American nuclear consciousness. I identify three clear periods of this consciousness, Confronting (1945-1962), Inhabiting (1963-1989), and Forgetting (1990-2015), and discuss an emergent fourth whose character is not yet altogether established. I link the most salient forms of propaganda ascendant during each period with a specific and characteristic structure of feeling proper to the era. Focusing on the period of Forgetting, I argue that what distinguishes it is a form of socially-organized denial derived from the inversion of propaganda as an expression of technique; today, technique itself serves as its own propaganda. To illustrate this argument I present the findings of recent fieldwork done in several museums consecrated to the representation of the history of nuclear technology This research joins the long sociological conversation about the structural consequences and subjectifying effects of technology on social reality.

Author

• Walter Goettlich, Johnson County Community College