Alf Hornborg
Professor emeritus
Artifacts have consequences, not agency: Toward a critical theory of global environmental history
Author
Summary, in English
This article challenges the urge within Actor-Network Theory, posthumanism, and the ontological turn in sociology and anthropology to dissolve analytical distinctions between subject and object, society and nature, and human and non-human. It argues that only by acknowledging such distinctions and applying a realist ontology can exploitative and unsustainable global power relations be exposed. The predicament of the Anthropocene should not prompt us to abandon distinctions between society and nature but to refine the analytical framework through which we can distinguish between sentience and non-sentience and between the symbolic and non-symbolic. The incompatibility of posthumanist and Marxist approaches to the Anthropocene and the question of agency derives from ideological differences as well as different methodological proclivities. A central illustration of these differences is the understanding of fetishism, a concept viewed by posthumanists as condescending but by Marxists as emancipatory.
Department/s
- Human Ecology
Publishing year
2017
Language
English
Pages
95-110
Publication/Series
European Journal of Social Theory
Volume
20
Issue
1
Document type
Journal article
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Topic
- Other Social Sciences
Status
Published
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISSN: 1461-7137