Alf Hornborg

Lecture 080520 13-16, Geocentrum, Villavägen 16, Norrlandssalen II

The Power of the Machine

My main argument in The Power of the Machine is that the modern concept of technology is a cultural category. It refers to what is technically feasible to achieve at a given time and place, but remains largely oblivious to the extent to which a local increase in technological capacity is a matter of shifting resources from one social category to another within global society. I apply the notion of `fetishism´ to suggest that the apparent generative capacity of machine technology is an instance of how the attribution of autonomous productivity to material artefacts can serve to conceal unequal relations of exchange. The unequal exchange underlying machine technology can only be revealed by exposing, beyond the monetary price tags reified by conventional market ideology, material asymmetries in the net flows of biophysical resources gauged in terms of alternative metrics such as energy, matter, embodied land (ecological footprints), or embodied labour. The mechanical power of the machine is thus an expression of the economic and ideological power through which it is sustained. Ultimately, what keeps our machines running are global terms of trade.

David Harvey Justice, nature and the Geography of difference
David Harvey (1996) articulates the immensely important but difficult ambition to bridge the divide between local particularities of experience, on one hand, and universalizing understandings of global socio-ecological processes, on the other. Much of the contemporary work in humanities and social sciences tends to focus on the former, to the exclusion of the latter. Harvey concludes that social science can and should try to account for how local experience is recursively related to global socio-ecological processes. A promising approach is to focus, as he does, on money as a social and cultural institution that generates `space-time´ as simultaneously an objective, political-ecological framework and a subjective
experience (e.g., of `time-space compression´). Money is the very vehicle by which ideas about reciprocity and relations of exchange are translated into material processes capable of transforming not only human societies and technologies, but the entire biosphere. In looking at how different kinds of money can generate different kinds of material processes (or kinds of `space-time´), we come closer to an understanding on what is required for us to actually make progress in our (rhetorical) pursuit of sustainability. I would add that technological "time-space compression" is founded on global relations of "time-space appropriation".

Alf Hornborg