Envisaging the Future through the Lens of Dualism: Unearthing the Fetishism of Technology in Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future

The article examines Kim Stanley Robinson's novel The Ministry for the Future (2020) as an example of how the commonsensical modern distinction between the material and the social pervades mainstream deliberations on technological solutions to problems of sustainability. To expose the fetishism of modern technology, founded on the unwarranted ontological distinction between nature and society, we need to retain an analytical dualism that distinguishes between those aspects of hybrid phenomena that are contingent on sociocultural processes and those that are not. Modern technologies since the Industrial Revolution can be understood as socio-material or socio-natural strategies for transferring resources between different parts of the capitalist world-system. A socio-metabolic reconceptualization of technological progress implies fundamental rethinking of Marxist theory. In grounding these considerations in a close examination of how a popular writer takes the cultural concept of “technology” for granted in envisaging a future beyond climate change, we may grasp the extent to which the predicament of the Anthropocene is being both generated by and conceptualized in terms of dualist cultural categories deriving from the Enlightenment.