Luckhurst and the American Technological Sublime

I'm working on a short essay on Earth Abides to post later, but until then, here's another sample from the Luckhurst text:

"Leo Marx crystallized the integral role of the machine in the formation of American Republican identity. The central section of his Machine in the Garden samples public discourse from the 1830's and 1840's, particularly as the railroad pushed the frontier West into so-called wasted land. In a direct reposte to Carlyle's prediction of spiritual calamity in the Machine Age, Timothy Walker elided technological with democratic extension, Mechanism bringing liberation from demeaning labor and Enlightenment to the wilderness. Exponents of the railroad always invoked the shedding of light across dark lands, a classic legitimation of colonial expansion via the progressive movement of technologized modernity. David Nye observes: 'in the American imagination first there is an empty space traversed by a grid of surveyor's lines, followed by the dramatic imposition of human will on this space.' The development of the 'American technological sublime' deliberately 'does not endorse human limitations,' thus empowering an awesome sense of mastery. It out-sublimes the sublime of Nature, as it were. By the late nineteenth century, these spectacles were 'becoming part of a hegemonic system in which the nation merged with its most impressive technological and natural works' (51)."

-Roger Luckhurst, Science Fiction

I'm not gonna lie: there's something about the idea of the imagination being filled with the "empty space traversed by a grid of surveyor's lines, followed by the dramatic imposition of human will on this space" that is incredibly fascinating and at the same time mildly horrible for me. I've read about how American sf is permeated with a lust for a frontier and a sense of entitlement to that frontier (a Christian ethic of predestination probably plays a huge part in this), but until reading the Luckhurst text, it never occurred to me to connect that with technological development and society as a whole. This past school year I've been taking political philosophy classes that discussed the development, influence and consequences of capitalism, but any mention of technological developments were always set in a political frame. Even the one instance where we talked about the potential political and cultural ramifications of human cloning was geared toward the idea of topics that should be discussed in politics. 

What Luckhurst touches on goes further than politics: he's talking about the psychological impact of technology on a culture. Sf goes over this quite a bit in various forms, but as far as cultural history goes, a theory that proposes a link between cultural change and technological development as a primary influence on the psychological development of a community, is incredibly interesting to me. And maybe it should have been obvious, because it does seem that way now that I've had it presented to me, but it wasn't. I've loved nineteenth century fiction for years because I identified with the sentiment behind it -- the difficulty of adjusting to a rapidly changing world, I mean. I'm still baffled by the fact that we've created things like cars, or doors, or cellphones. Literature that explores the 'fascination and trauma' we experience in a world drastically and rapidly changed by advances in technology is especially interesting to me because of this disassociation I often have from the things that make up my American human life in this point in history. I have always associated that fascination, though, primarily with literature and not as a cultural or social phenomena.

What is this thing Nye calls the "American Imagination"? Am I really a part of this tradition, influenced in subtle and pervasive ways to believe that I am one of the elect and that all territory, on our planet or in the universe, is there to be taken, is there to be bent to my will? I'm not sure, but it is food for thought.