SOCIAL-SCIENCE AND SALVATION - RISK SOCIETY AS MYTHICAL DISCOURSE

Dominant perspectives on science and technology fail to come to terms with the continuing role of culture and mythology in mediating percept ions and moral evaluations of technology and its impacts. The need for such an understanding is demonstrated in a critique of Ulrich Beck's important ''Risk Society'' thesis. Failure to acknowledge a mediating cultural variable influencing the time-lag in risk perception leads Be ck to theorizing which deconstructs on close inspection. A similar fla w leaves the contending theory of Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky una ble to explain the social distribution of risk consciousness except th rough recourse to residual and ad hoc explanations. As a solution to t hese problems the paper proposes a late-Durkheimian theory of discours es on technology and risk. This argues that technology is coded as sac red or profane and is narrated as bringing salvation or damnation. Thi s theory is then applied in a re-reading of Beck's Risk Society as an environmentalist manifesto replete with apocalyptic imagery.