Power of the Machine

Alf Hornborg is professor and chair of the Human Ecology Division at Lund University, Sweden

There is more to culture than meets the eye, that product of cultural processing designed to overlook that 'more'; that 'more' being the allegedly natural and objective foundations of our life in common with all its iniquities and inanities. This is the message of Hornborg's astonishing book, bound to spur the social-scientific community to take another hard look on their own seemingly self-evident concepts and hidden from view assumptions. The book crowns years of study and thought which went deeper than even the most earnest and acute self-scrutiny of anthropologists and economists went thus far. Very seldom is describing the publication of a book as revolutionary event as apt. Hornborg's oeuvre stands a chance to revolutionise not only the paradigm of the theory of modern society, but the way we divide human actions from their precultural conditions and so called 'unanticipated consequences.'

• Chapter 1 PrefaceChapter 2 Introduction: The Machine as EmperorPart 3 Part 1: Technology and Unequal ExchangeChapter 4 Chapter 1: Technology and Economics: The Interfusion of the Social and the MaterialChapter 5 Chapter 2: Cornucopia or Zero-Sum Game: The Epistemology of SustainabilityChapter 6 Chapter 3: The Thermodynamics of Imperialism: Towards an Ecological Theory of Unequal ExchangeChapter 7 Chapter 4: Ecosystems, World Systems, and Environmental JusticeChapter 8 Chapter 5: Conceptualizing Accumulation from Spondylus Shells to Fossil FuelsChapter 9 Chapter 6: Use Value, Energy, and the Image of Unlimited GoodChapter 10 Chapter 7: Language and the Material: Probing our CategoriesChapter 11 Chapter 8: Symbolic Technologies: Machines and the Marxian Notion of FetishismPart 12 Part 2: Money, Modernity and PersonhoodChapter 13 Chapter 9: Money, Reflexivity, and the Semiotics of ModernityChapter 14 Chapter 10: Ecology as Semiotics: A Contextualist ManifestoChapter 15 Chapter 11: Exchange, Personhood, and Human EcologyChapter 16 Chapter 12: The Abstraction of Discourse and Identity: A Case StudyChapter 17 Afterword: Culture, Modernity, and Power: The Relevance of AnthropologyChapter 18 ReferencesChapter 19 Index