This article is about the question of social agency in the animation of things, and about how this problematic has been conceptualized in Marxist and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) approaches to human-nature-technology relations. Notwithstanding many obvious differences, we note that each tradition was founded on a radical shift to a relational ontology, a world of relations and processes and not things-in-themselves, and that each has developed, partly as a consequence of this move, analytically useful ways of investigating and talking about the work that things do, or appear to do, in the world. By relating the ANT category of non-human actors to the Marxist concept of dead labor, and by revisiting Marx's own dialectics of technology as embodied in his figure of the ''living machine'' in Capital, we explore the different implications of these approaches for our understandings of the nature, materiality, and the efficacy of social agents. We argue that ANT's reconfiguration of agency as a collective social and technical process-a process wherein the ''nonhuman'' can have very real social effects-can be deepened and given some political efficacy only if we take seriously the ontological problems of causality, accountability, and the directedness of social relations (and things) which ANT, and its wider, still evolving ethos among the social sciences and cultural studies, would have us forestall.

This paper is about the role of technology in the transformation of space, and the ways in which these changes are represented. These processes are explored principally through critical analysis of the work of Harvey and Lefebvre; more specifically, I contrast the place of technology as expressed through their varied emphases on the annihilation of space, and the production of space. The dramatic restructuring of space and time in recent decades, associated with new high-speed geographies of production, exchange, and consumption, has been theorized against the backdrop of a ‘shrinking world’, The popular conception of the world shrinking to a global village is generally seen as the product of technological advances in telecommunications, transportation, and ‘information’. For Harvey, these innovations arc seen as the means through which capital has freed itself from spatial constraints. By placing the ‘collapse of space’ jargon alongside Marx's phrase, the annihilation of space by time, these spatial metaphors serve Harvey as shorthand for the complexities of time-space compression; the shrinking world is seen as a midpoint between a regime of accumulation and a mode of representation. I argue that, although these metaphors help to theorize the relativity of space—as the global impinges on the local—they only do so by obfuscating the relative space of everyday life, and the increasingly technical means through which it is produced. Through an interpretation of Lefebvre's discussion of technology in The Production of Space, I suggest how the role of technology in the transformation of space is not limited to those globalizing processes through which the world has been made increasingly interconnected in space and time. So too, technology has been critical to the domination of conceived space over lived space as social relations are spatialized at the scale of experience. As a foundation for these arguments, the social relations of technology and technological change are theorized through the incorporation of ideas from the social studies of science and technology and from critical human geography.

This study examines the role of photography in the Atomic Energy Commission's representation of nuclear weapons testing during the 1950s. Pictures of fireballs and mushroom clouds functioned as part of an explicit AEC strategy to reduce the public to spectators. These photographs were designed to take the place out of the landscape — unlike the contaminated places near America's nuclear proving grounds, the pages of popular magazines were not subject to radioactive fall out. The seemingly neutral observations of the camera obscured the morphologies it appeared to represent. These arguments are developed primarily in terms of the militarization of space in Nevada, including a new geography of nuclear armament; the “story” of bomb testing produced though interaction of popular media with AEC objectives; and the social‐theoretical context of photography, representation, and spectacle as politically malleable processes.

In 1869, John Wesley Powell led an expedition down the Green and Colorado Rivers through the Grand Canyon, the last “great blank space” on the map of the continental U.S. In the work of filling in the continental map, Powell and others in an emerging community of government scientists in Washington anticipated a new set of concerns over productivity, order, and the limits of natural resources—including land itself—in the arid lands of the West. This article examines the historical geographical processes through which Powell’s maps of an unexplored region gave way, in roughly a decade, to his maps of proper land use, epitomized by his 1878 Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, which is still conventionally recognized as a foundational piece in American environmental thought. Focusing on the work of the Powell Survey (1869 – 1879), as well as Powell’s lesser–known work as a special commissioner for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (1873 – 1874), the article situates the maps, censuses, and expert advice produced during Powell’s early career as part of a wider traffic of knowledge linking Washington to the western territories. The article develops a broadly materialist geographical analysis to explore how the production of knowledge about people and place on the Colorado Plateau articulated with the westward geographical expansion of systems of value and signification. It thus raises questions about the relations between environmental values, on the one hand, and the scientific and political work of valuing environments, on the other.

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