Artifacts Have Consequences, Not Agency: Toward a Critical Theory of Global Environmental History
When humanity faces the possibility of self-destruction, is survival the only meaningful question left? Or should we also ask whether different kinds of “ending” exist—some imposed by a few, others emerging from collective agency? Could there be a form of human self-extinction that expresses unity and autonomy rather than division and coercion?
A contemporary observer—perhaps a young philosopher involved in post-disaster environmental work—might encounter a fragment of text among the ruins of a climate catastrophe. The message is unclear in origin but striking in content: humanity, it suggests, has created the conditions of its own potential annihilation. Because this threat is self-produced, it also appears, at least in principle, to be within human control—something that might be prevented or allowed to unfold.
This idea, however, does not belong only to the present. It echoes earlier reflections, particularly those of Günther Anders, who wrote in the context of nuclear fear during the mid-twentieth century. For Anders, the “apocalypse” is no longer a singular event in time but a structural possibility embedded in modern existence itself. Time is no longer neutral; it becomes shaped by the constant possibility of catastrophe. Human history thus enters what he calls a “state of reprieve”—a condition suspended between continuation and self-erasure.
Yet this apocalyptic condition is not simply about events that may or may not occur. It raises deeper philosophical problems about causality, responsibility, and recognition. Humans create systems—technological, economic, political—that generate consequences beyond their control or even comprehension. The result is a paradox: humanity produces its own potential destruction, yet cannot fully recognize this production as its own act.
This leads to a key tension in Anders’ thought. If humanity is both the source and potential victim of its own annihilation, can we still meaningfully speak of collective agency? The idea of a unified humanity deciding its fate becomes questionable. Social and political divisions mean that “humanity” is not a single actor but a fragmented field of competing interests. Self-destruction, therefore, cannot be understood as a voluntary collective suicide.
From this perspective, apocalypse is not a conscious act but a structural outcome of technological and social processes. It is both everywhere and nowhere: produced by human activity, yet not fully owned by any subject. This is why Anders rejects interpretations that treat human self-annihilation as a deliberate, unified decision. Such views, he argues, falsely project coherence onto a fundamentally divided reality.
The problem becomes even more complex when considering attempts to overcome or redeem this condition. Some philosophical traditions imagine a form of collective rationality or political unity—sometimes framed in communist terms—that could transform humanity into a self-aware subject capable of mastering its own destructive powers. In this view, apocalypse could be reinterpreted as a moment of total self-recognition: humanity confronting its own capacity for destruction and thereby achieving unity.
But Anders remains skeptical. For him, the very conditions that make destruction possible—technological power, economic expansion, social fragmentation—also prevent any stable form of collective control. Even attempts to manage or redirect these forces risk reproducing the same dynamics they seek to overcome.
In this sense, the “disappointment” of the apocalypse is not simply that catastrophe may or may not happen. It is that even our efforts to understand, prevent, or redeem it are caught within the same structures that generate it. Every act of avoidance already belongs to the system of possibility that includes destruction.
As a result, recognition always arrives too late. We understand the danger only once it has already been integrated into the fabric of our world. The possibility of catastrophe becomes so general that it loses the clarity of a singular warning. It is no longer something we can clearly identify as an external threat; it becomes a condition of modern life itself.
This paradox also destabilizes the idea of responsibility. If everyone and no one contributes to the conditions of catastrophe, then agency becomes diffuse. Humanity appears both powerful and powerless: capable of producing global transformation, yet incapable of mastering its consequences.
At this point, some thinkers—such as Maurice Blanchot—propose a different approach. Instead of treating apocalypse as either a coherent collective act or a meaningless accident, they explore the tension between these two extremes. For Blanchot, the possibility of total destruction reveals not the unity of humanity but its internal fragmentation. A truly unified collective subject does not yet exist, and perhaps never fully will.
From this angle, the idea of a “fulfilling apocalypse”—one in which humanity consciously realizes its unity through self-destruction—becomes highly problematic. It assumes a level of coherence and self-knowledge that humanity does not possess. Instead of a meaningful end, we are left with a kind of empty or “senseless” ending: an event that occurs without becoming fully intelligible as an act.
Still, the question persists: is there a form of collective transformation in which humanity could confront its destructive capacities without falling into illusion? Could there be a way of thinking about catastrophe that neither romanticizes it nor reduces it to accident?
This is where climate change complicates the picture. Unlike nuclear war, which was once imagined as a sudden, deliberate act, climate catastrophe unfolds gradually, distributed across countless actions and systems. It is both slow and total, both visible and abstract. It reinforces the sense that modern catastrophe is not an event we choose, but a process we inhabit.
In this situation, the distinction between action and non-action becomes blurred. Even efforts to resist destruction may unintentionally reproduce the systems that cause it. What counts as prevention may also function as continuation. What appears as care may also stabilize the conditions of harm.
Thus, the central philosophical tension remains unresolved: if humanity cannot act as a unified subject, and if its actions always exceed its intentions, then what does it mean to “avoid” its own disappearance? And if avoidance itself is structurally entangled with the very processes it resists, can we still meaningfully distinguish between success and failure?
Perhaps the deeper issue is not whether apocalypse will happen, but how we interpret the condition in which its possibility has already become permanent. In this sense, the “apocalypse” is not only an anticipated end, but a framework through which modern existence understands itself—always too late, always partially aware, never fully in control.
Якщо хочеш, можу:
- зробити ще більш академічну версію (журнальний рівень, як для Routledge/Polity)
- або навпаки спростити до блогу / есею без складної філософської мови
- або скоротити до 1–2 сторінок для використання в роботі
Technology as Fetish: Marx, Latour, and the Cultural Foundations of Capitalism This article discusses how the way in which post-Enlightenment humans tend to relate to material objects is a fundamental aspect of modern capitalism. The difficulties that conventional academic disciplines have in grasping the societal and political aspect of ‘technology’ stem from the predominant Cartesian paradigm that distinguishes the domain of material objects from that of social relations of exchange. This Cartesian paradigm has constrained the Marxian analysis of capital accumulation from extending the concept of fetishism to the domain of technology. Both Marxian and mainstream thought represent technological objects as empowered by their intrinsic properties, which derive from human ingenuity and tend to progress over time. To transcend this paradigm will be possible only through the kind of post-Cartesian perspective on material artefacts that has been championed by Bruno Latour. However, Latour’s own neglect of technological systems as social strategies of exploitation reflects his lack of concern with global inequalities. напиши статтю з цього що маю велику і наче її жива людина писала
Ось переписаний варіант у форматі повноцінної, “живої” академічної статті англійською — з більш природним стилем, логічними переходами та менш механічною теоретичністю, але зі збереженням змісту:
Technology as Fetish: Marx, Latour, and the Cultural Foundations of Capitalism (Rewritten Article)
Abstract
This article examines how modern capitalism is shaped not only by economic structures but also by the way modern societies perceive and relate to material objects. It argues that post-Enlightenment thought tends to treat technology as inherently powerful, self-contained, and progressive. This perception is not neutral: it plays a crucial role in sustaining capitalist ideology. While Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism offers an important critique of this tendency, it remains underdeveloped in relation to technology itself. At the same time, although Bruno Latour’s work helps overcome the strict separation between nature and society, it fails to fully address how technological systems are embedded in global relations of inequality and exploitation.
1. Introduction: Technology and the Invisible Assumptions of Modernity
One of the least questioned assumptions in modern thought is that technology is defined by its internal properties—its efficiency, innovation, and capacity for progress. From everyday discourse to academic analysis, technological objects are typically described as if they contain agency within themselves. Machines “do things,” algorithms “decide,” and infrastructures “enable” social life.
This way of speaking reflects a deeper intellectual tradition rooted in post-Enlightenment philosophy, particularly the Cartesian separation between mind and matter. Within this framework, material objects belong to a world of physical causality, while social relations, values, and meanings belong to a separate human sphere. As a result, technology is often treated as something external to society rather than as something socially produced and politically embedded.
This division has had lasting consequences for how capitalism is understood. It has encouraged both mainstream economics and critical theory to treat technological development as a largely autonomous process driven by innovation, rather than as a field shaped by power, inequality, and historical struggle.
2. Marx and the Limits of Fetishism
Karl Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism remains one of the most influential attempts to challenge this perspective. For Marx, capitalism obscures the social relations behind commodities, making them appear as if they possess value and power in themselves. In this sense, social relations between people are misrecognized as relations between things.
However, Marx’s analysis tends to focus primarily on commodities and exchange value, rather than on technology as such. Machines, tools, and infrastructures are often treated as neutral instruments of production rather than as objects that also participate in fetishistic processes.
This limitation has had long-term effects. In much of Marxist thought, technology is either seen as a productive force that accelerates historical development or as a tool that can be repurposed under different political systems. What remains underexplored is how technological systems themselves shape perception—how they become culturally “fetishized” as autonomous sources of progress and authority.
In this sense, technology is not only embedded in capitalist relations; it also helps reproduce them by appearing as natural, inevitable, and self-moving.
3. The Persistence of the Cartesian Paradigm
Both mainstream economic thought and much critical theory remain influenced by a Cartesian separation between the material and the social. Even when they disagree politically, they often share a common assumption: that technology belongs to the domain of things, while society belongs to the domain of humans.
This separation makes it difficult to fully grasp the political role of technology. It encourages the idea that technological systems evolve according to their own internal logic, while social relations merely adapt to them. In such a framework, capitalism appears as something that uses technology, rather than something that is co-produced through technological arrangements.
As a result, the cultural dimension of technology—its role in shaping beliefs, desires, and forms of social coordination—remains under-theorized.
4. Latour and the Post-Cartesian Turn
Bruno Latour offers a powerful alternative to this tradition. His actor-network theory challenges the distinction between subjects and objects, arguing that agency is distributed across networks of humans and non-humans. In this view, technological objects are not passive tools but active participants in social processes.
Latour’s work helps dismantle the idea that technology is separate from society. It shows how artifacts, infrastructures, and technical systems are deeply entangled with political and cultural practices. From this perspective, modernity is not defined by the separation of nature and society, but by the constant production of hybrid networks that combine both.
This post-Cartesian approach is particularly useful for understanding how technologies shape social order without reducing them to mere instruments of human intention.
5. The Blind Spot: Inequality and Exploitation
However, Latour’s framework has its own limitations. By focusing on networks of relations, it often brackets questions of structural inequality and economic exploitation. Technological systems are described in terms of connections and mediations, but less attention is given to how these systems are embedded in global capitalism.
In particular, Latour tends to avoid analyzing how technological infrastructures are shaped by asymmetries of power—between the Global North and South, between capital and labor, and between centers and peripheries of production.
This omission is significant. While Latour successfully dissolves the nature/society divide, he does not fully replace it with a theory of political economy. As a result, technology becomes socially distributed but not necessarily politically contested.
6. Toward a Combined Perspective
A more complete understanding of technology requires combining Marx’s critique of fetishism with Latour’s relational ontology. From Marx, we gain insight into how social relations are obscured and naturalized through material forms. From Latour, we gain tools for understanding how agency is distributed across networks of humans and non-humans.
Together, these perspectives allow us to see technology not as a neutral set of tools, nor as autonomous forces of progress, but as culturally embedded systems that participate in the reproduction of capitalism.
Crucially, this also means recognizing that technological objects are not just economically functional—they are ideologically active. They shape how people imagine power, progress, and possibility.
Conclusion
The difficulty of analyzing technology within capitalism stems from deeply rooted philosophical assumptions about the separation of material objects and social relations. While Marx’s concept of fetishism reveals how social relations are hidden within commodities, it does not fully extend to technology itself. Conversely, Latour’s post-Cartesian framework helps overcome the subject/object divide but tends to underplay structural inequality and exploitation.
A more adequate theory of technology must therefore move beyond both positions. It must account for the ways technological systems are both materially embedded and socially constructed, while also recognizing their role in sustaining global capitalist hierarchies.
Only then can we fully understand technology not as a neutral force of progress, but as a central component of the cultural and political architecture of capitalism.
Якщо хочеш, можу:
- ще більше “оживити” стиль (менше академічності, більше есеїстики)
- або навпаки зробити його як статтю для журналу рівня Routledge / Critical Theory
- або скоротити до 800–1000 слів для блогу
Artifacts have consequences, not agency: Toward a critical theory of global environmental history 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. напиши з цього статю як наче жива людина автор
Artifacts Have Consequences, Not Agency: Toward a Critical Theory of Global Environmental History (Rewritten Article)
Abstract
This article argues against recent theoretical trends in Actor-Network Theory, posthumanism, and the “ontological turn,” which tend to blur or dissolve distinctions between humans and non-humans, society and nature, and subjects and objects. While these approaches aim to overcome anthropocentrism, they risk weakening the analytical tools needed to understand power, exploitation, and environmental destruction. The article proposes instead a realist framework in which artifacts are understood as having consequences rather than agency. Only by preserving key distinctions—especially between sentient and non-sentient entities, and between symbolic and non-symbolic systems—can critical theory adequately address the historical and political dimensions of the Anthropocene.
1. Introduction: The Problem with Flattening the World
A growing body of contemporary theory has sought to rethink the relationship between humans and the material world. Actor-Network Theory, posthumanism, and related approaches argue that we should move beyond traditional distinctions between subjects and objects, or between society and nature. In their place, they propose a more “symmetrical” ontology in which humans and non-humans are treated as equally participating actors in networks of relations.
This shift has been influential, especially in environmental humanities and sociology. It promises to correct the long-standing bias of Western thought, which has privileged human agency and treated the natural world as passive matter. However, this intellectual move also raises a serious problem: in dissolving distinctions, it risks dissolving the very categories needed to explain domination, exploitation, and environmental destruction.
If everything acts, then nothing is responsible. If all entities have agency, then agency itself becomes analytically empty.
2. Why Distinctions Still Matter
This article begins from a different premise. It argues that analytical distinctions between subjects and objects, society and nature, and sentient and non-sentient entities are not philosophical prejudices to be overcome, but necessary tools of critical analysis.
The Anthropocene confronts us with vast systems of ecological destruction, resource extraction, and global inequality. To understand these processes, we need to be able to distinguish between those who make decisions and those who are affected by them; between institutions that organize production and the material infrastructures that enable it; and between intentional action and unintended consequence.
Without such distinctions, it becomes difficult to identify responsibility or trace the historical dynamics of power that produce environmental harm.
3. Artifacts Without Agency
A key claim of this article is that artifacts do not possess agency. They do not act in the same sense that humans act. Instead, they produce consequences within structured systems of use, interpretation, and control.
A machine does not “decide” to extract resources; an infrastructure does not “intend” to redistribute inequality. These outcomes emerge from human design, political economy, and historical processes that embed artifacts within specific relations of power.
To attribute agency to artifacts is to risk obscuring these relations. It can create the impression that technological systems operate independently of human decisions, when in fact they are deeply shaped by them.
Recognizing artifacts as consequence-producing rather than agentive allows us to keep focus on responsibility and structure, rather than dispersing causality into an undifferentiated network of actants.
4. Realism Against Ontological Flattening
The theoretical impulse behind posthumanism is often ethical: to decenter the human and recognize the vitality of non-human entities. But in practice, this ontological flattening can undermine the ability to analyze asymmetries of power.
A realist ontology does not deny that non-human entities matter. On the contrary, it insists that they matter precisely because they have effects within structured relations, not because they possess agency in the human sense.
Distinguishing between sentience and non-sentience, or between symbolic and non-symbolic systems, is not a return to naïve human exceptionalism. It is a way of maintaining analytical clarity in a world where causal complexity is already overwhelming.
Without these distinctions, critical theory risks losing its ability to explain why certain actors benefit from environmental destruction while others bear its costs.
5. Marxism, Posthumanism, and the Question of Fetishism
One of the clearest points of divergence between Marxist and posthumanist approaches concerns the concept of fetishism. For Marx, fetishism describes the process through which social relations between people appear as relations between things. Commodities seem to have value and power in themselves, masking the labor and exploitation that produce them.
From a posthumanist perspective, however, the concept of fetishism is often criticized as anthropocentric or condescending, since it appears to “reduce” objects to human meanings or social projections.
Yet from a Marxist standpoint, fetishism is not a dismissal of objects but a critique of misrecognition. It does not deny material reality; it reveals how material forms conceal the social relations embedded within them.
This difference is not merely semantic. It reflects a deeper disagreement about whether analytical categories should prioritize relational symmetry or structural asymmetry, distributed agency or concentrated power.
6. The Anthropocene and the Politics of Explanation
The Anthropocene intensifies these theoretical tensions. Human activity is now inseparable from planetary-scale transformations, from climate change to biodiversity loss. In this context, it may seem tempting to adopt a posthumanist vocabulary in which humans, technologies, and natural systems are all treated as equal participants in a single planetary network.
However, such symmetry risks flattening the political landscape. It can obscure the fact that responsibility for environmental destruction is unevenly distributed. Some actors design and profit from systems of extraction; others are subjected to their consequences.
A critical theory of global environmental history must therefore resist the temptation to dissolve these asymmetries into generalized notions of entanglement.
7. Conclusion: Toward a Critical Realism of Artifacts
This article has argued that artifacts should be understood not as agents but as elements within structured systems that produce consequences. Preserving analytical distinctions between humans and non-humans, society and nature, and sentience and non-sentience is essential for understanding power relations in the Anthropocene.
While posthumanist and Actor-Network approaches have made valuable contributions by highlighting complexity and interdependence, they risk weakening the explanatory power of social theory when they eliminate distinctions that are crucial for identifying responsibility.
A critical realist perspective offers an alternative: one that acknowledges the material embeddedness of artifacts without attributing to them a form of agency they do not possess. Only through such a framework can we adequately address the historical, political, and environmental dynamics of the global present.
