ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that postdualist approaches such as the material turn in the humanities and social sciences, although representing understandable reactions to the idealist traditions in Western thought, 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. In converging with a deep genealogy of ideas that blur the boundary between nature and artifice, the material turn depoliticises technology by naturalising it. The chapter 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.
