Objects Don't Have Desires: Toward an Anthropology of Technology beyond Anthropomorphism

Abstract

“Postdualist” approaches, such as the material turn in the humanities and social sciences, represent understandable reactions to the humanist and idealist traditions in Western thought, but tend to be deluded by a focus on individual artifacts rather than on the global, material relations on which their existence depends. The attribution of agency and even desires to abiotic objects, championed by posthumanist researchers such as Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, is cognate to the category mistakes recurrently identified by social theorists as fetishism and anthropomorphism. Paradoxically, given their subversive ambitions, proponents of the new concern with materiality and artifactual agency are offering an ideology that ultimately buttresses the capitalist world order by ignoring the materiality of world trade and the causality inherent in the artifact of money. The concerns with distributed agency also tend to displace responsibility and accountability from humans to artifacts. Moreover, in converging with a deep genealogy of ideas that blur the boundary between nature and artifice, the material turn depoliticizes technology by naturalizing it. The article proposes a new anthropology of technology that acknowledges the reliance of modern technology on asymmetric global resource flows orchestrated by money and the fictive reciprocity of market prices. [material turn, posthumanism, fetishism, technology, postdualism].