Photo by Rick Wicker: Ahayu:da:, Zuni war god statues meant to be returned to the earth to decompose, returned to the Zuni in 1986 after a century of negotiations with the Denver Museum.

Note: If you haven’t read this summary of David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous, you might not be able to make as much sense of this post. If you’re interested, read that here: https://blogs.ubc.ca/mdia300/archives/411

Are Our Objects Inanimate?: Making and Animism

A wide array of philosophical and media-theoretical projects have addressed the agency of objects or the vitality of matter. The object of this paper is to reconcile Tim Ingold’s ideas of correspondence and currents of matter outlined in Making with David Abram’s Indigenous understanding of animism grounded in ecological reciprocity. To understand the seams and convergences between these two modes of thought is to answer the question: how does making affect objects and animateness? For the purposes of this paper, I will use the words “objects” “materials” and “matter” somewhat interchangeably to refer to natural or human-made things that we would consider inanimate.

Abram’s argument that “…we are human only in contact, and conviviality with what is not human” (Abram 10) rests on the understanding that our modern world of human-made objects and structures does not, at least as strongly, invite our senses into a reciprocal field of engagement with the world of non-human agents around us. To animistic cultures, that agency held by stones or rivers exists distinctly because they are more-than-human; that is to say, because they possess a certain otherness. They are so totally different and apart from us and our understanding that they can act as distinct agents with outside secrets and knowledge for us to learn as humans (Abram). An object made by a human, it seems, lacks this distance from human understanding. There is no mystery as to why a toaster exists in a kitchen, what its purpose is and why it does the things it does. It was made by humans, for humans, to fill a human purpose. A toaster can teach us nothing beyond our own mode of human thought.

But of course, all human-made things are, in some way or another, made out of the natural world. Our homes came from breathing trees, our pottery from the earthen banks of shimmering rivers. Even an object as inscrutably complex as an iPhone is, down to its every atom, composed of raw, natural material that once held a place in a more-than-human ecology. Even animistic cultures of the past and present certainly make all sorts of things and live in structures of their own design. Where, then, would Abram draw the line in the sand between our new ecosystem of near-exclusively human-made objects and the more-than-human world of nature? What happens, for instance, to our dynamic, reciprocal relationship with a tree when we cut it down and fashion it into a house?

In The Spell of the Sensuous, Abram does not see making as a clear-cut dead end for the otherness of human-made objects: “… our human-made artifacts inevitably retain an element of more-than-human otherness … [which] resides most often in the materials from which the object is made” (Abram 65). He argues, for instance, that the organic swirling grain of a tree trunk in a telephone pole, because it was not devised by humans, retains some element of dynamism that responds to our senses. Because his case for animism arises from the reciprocity of perception itself, Abram doesn’t argue for distinctions between “animate and inanimate phenomena, only for relative distinctions between diverse forms of animateness” (90). Discerning the ‘animateness’ of objects cannot, then, be a matter of drawing lines. To Abram, all human made objects, though lessened in their “more-than-human otherness,” all respond reciprocally to our senses and are thus all animate. Each have their own unique agency, some more responsive than others. What kinds of distinctions, then, can we make between these forms of animateness?

Ojibwe languages, for instance, categorize many objects along with human-made artefacts as persons (Harvey 34). The plethora of cultures that understand the world in ways that could be deemed animistic is inumerable, and conceptions of which objects are or are not animate shifts drastically from culture to culture. Even more puzzling, some cultures to whom objects are viewed as persons do not even view all animals as being persons or quite as having the same depth of animateness. An example of this phenomenon comes from none other than Tim Ingold himself. In an early work on ecology, he noted that to many arctic hunting societies, “dogs – along with other domestic animals – have no ‘other-than-human’ guardian, and hence they have no free-soul…” (The Appropriation of Nature, 255). Though certainly bizarre from our perspective, this example would seem to embolden Abram’s answer to the question of why human-made objects are not considered to have the same kind of animateness as natural ones. To these cultures, even an animal can lose its otherness to humans, and so become much akin to a human-made object. By growing up around humans and human lands, by fulfilling human goals and working for human purposes, these animals no longer possess an agency distinct from that of a human, no longer stand freely as mysterious foreign agents with their own unique knowledge to teach us.

So, how exactly are we changing the animateness of an object (or an animal, for that matter) when we make it into something that fills a human purpose? It isn’t gone completely, and as Abram points out, it can retain some visual dynamism, but as noted with the Ojibwe languages, even totally human-made objects can be viewed as persons which are still vividly and responsively animate. Perhaps, then, it depends on how an object is made. This is where, at last, we can bring in Ingold to understand objects and making. 

He argues in Making that humans are not the only ones to make with things in the world. Ingold sees no categorical difference between the slow dripping of water that forms a stalagmite and the mining of a quarryman that cuts a block of marble into a statue (Making, 22). To him, at the deepest level, both are simply examples of matter changing matter, of course with wildly differing levels of complexity. Humans are simply one of many agents that engage in the constant growing and changing of matter in the world. Making, then, would seem to be a way that humans engage in the reciprocal field of interaction between different more-than-human agents, not reject it. 

Although I have so far used the word agency to describe a not-necessarily-animistic way of understanding the ways that objects seem to “act” independently of us, Ingold would certainly take issue with this terminology. Contrary to thinkers like Jane Bennet, he argues “…humans do not possess agency; nor, for that matter, do non-humans. They are rather possessed by action” (Making, 97). In other words, when explaining how objects, natural or human-made came to be, it is more accurate to talk about things growing and changing in response to things around them, rather than enacting a pre-concieved intention onto them. Ingold would argue there is another word that we should use instead of agency: correspondence. I would argue there are two: correspondence and reciprocity. Ingold and Abram both have a word for this back-and-forth, cyclical relationship we have with things, where we respond to their form and qualities and they respond to our actions and so on until things have grown and changed.

Ingold’s term refers to the relationship between humans and objects, and Abram’s refers to the relationship between objects and their surrounding ecology. Both of these, to an animistic culture, are keys to why certain objects are or are not considered more responsively animate than others. In looking for a single trait or quality that an object does or doesn’t possess–in looking for ‘agency’–we have missed the essence of how objects make things grow and change in the world. It isn’t the result of a trait that allows them to exert some sort of will onto something, but instead the result of a certain kind of relationship with that ‘something’– a correspondent one, or a reciprocal one. Both are ways that an object can be deeply animate. 

To understand how Abram has come to the conclusion that many of our human-made objects have lost a depth of animateness, we must begin with the the time before we interact with objects–before they are turned into human-made things–to see how they already act in reciprocity with the world around them.

A stone is perhaps the proverbial “inanimate object,” the example most commonly given in contrast living things. A stone, most would say, is an inert, unresponsive thing, simply waiting for a human to kick it or throw it or make it into something useful. But perhaps we are blinded by our lack of attentiveness. If you look carefully, you may notice that a stone is not in fact unresponsive, but is a world of interaction–erupting with indecipherably complex entanglements of species of moss and lichen, teeming with factions of marching ants to whom that stone is a towering lookout, hiding beneath its base a dark world of isopods kept safe as they feast on fallen leaves. The stone exists in reciprocity with such a sprawling array of wildly different beings it would be near impossible to count them. 

Perhaps we are also blinded by our narrow view of time. Every stone in a river has a billion-year life story, perhaps more wild and harrowing than any of our human histories. Churning for eons in the fiery maw of the earth itself, erupting into the open air, transforming from blazing red to solid black, only to be bludgeoned to bits by centuries of wind and rain, caught then in a million-year dance with the rushing erosion of river currents, transfigured over millenia from flowing magma to jagged rock to smoothened stone. The lifetime of reciprocal relationships that stone has had with moss or wind or water outnumber the relationships in your life by orders of millions. This is what Ingold is referring to as the currents of matter–a process of constantly flowing, changing and intermingling in reciprocity as materials grow and transform. For these billions of years even before we had evolved, these objects lived vivid “lives” in reciprocity with the world of more-than-human things around them. This, I would argue, is more than grounds enough to view them as deeply, responsively animate.

Let us move onward, then, from before humans encounter an object to the moment a human makes with it. Ingold’s primary project in Making is rejecting the idea that making means imposing our pre-concieved designs onto objects. He argues, “the most [a maker] can do is to intervene in worldly processes that are already going on, and which give rise to the forms of the living world that we see all around us” (Making, 21). Just as Abram sees the animateness of an object in those aspects of its materiality that were not devised by humans, Ingold argues that we must work with that more-than-human materiality of an object in order to correspond with it. This reciprocal way of working and making wherein we respond to an object and it in turn responds to us allows what we might call the “agency” of an object to enact itself, rather than destroying it to act only for human purposes. That is to say, we correspond with the unique animateness of an object when we make with it. That specific animateness perhaps changes once it is made. “Finished” objects are no longer mysterious beings ‘living’ in reciprocity with a more-than-human ecosystem, and because their purpose has become primarily human, they have lost most of their otherness to us. Still, it is in what remains of their natural materiality, textures and forms that they maintain some sense of being animate. They can still, at times, surprise us, or seem to act against our will. 

Perhaps, then, some depth of animateness in our objects was maintained for most of human history, even though we made new things with them. They now existed for human purposes, but because we had yet to master machines and manufacturing, they had to be made in direct correspondence with their unique more-than-human qualities, and the otherness of the textures and shapes of nature were thus still very much intact. Moreover, many objects and structures would continue to serve not only humans, and left free to interact with the non-human forces of the elements. Their place in the ecosystem and the natural currents of growth and decay were worked with rather than fought. 

If animateness, then, is the ability to act against or other than human purposes in correspondence, and to be free to engage with and be changed by things that are not human in reciprocity, then we may be able to find the true downfall of the animateness of objects with the industrial revolution. 

Machines, factories and production chains allowed us the domineering control to truly destroy the ‘agency’ of an object. We could, down to the most minute detail, mass produce identical, rigidly designed products hyper-engineered to serve exclusively human purposes. No longer did we have to go out into the more-than-human landscape to gather material, and attend to the material qualities of the object in correspondence with our bodies. No longer were our objects a collaboration between human and material. We create entire labyrinthine networks of mechanical apparatuses, intricate machines and global supply chains, taking unfathomable amounts of space and energy to reject the innate, natural qualities of materials and force them to rigorously human-centric, functional forms. After all, what is the ultimate goal of mass-produced objects but to exist as perfect, isolated extensions of human agency? This anti-animate quality is the explicit goal of mass-produced and manufactured designs; to replace correspondence and reciprocity with extension and prosthesis. Abram outlines this precisely: “To the sensing body these artifacts are, like all phenomena, animate and even alive, but their life is profoundly constrained by the specific “functions ” for which they were built. Once our bodies master these functions, (…) we must con­tinually acquire new built objects, new technologies, the latest model of this or that if we wish to stimulate ourselves” (Abram 64). 

This new kind of human-made object, no longer other to human beings, no longer formally or texturally reminiscent of the organic, no longer serving any aim other than our own human will, have turned from vibrant more-than-human beings to extensions and prostheses of ourselves. As Abram argues, we may not perceive mass-produced objects through our senses as entirely inanimate, but we can certainly say that the practices of making that reject Ingold’s model of correspondence lessen to drastic extents the depth, vibrancy and agency of objects. Perhaps in a culture that views objects only in terms of what they can do for us rather than what they can do themselves, we have completely lost any remnant of the relationship with objects that makes them feel animate. I am, however, not entirely convinced.

There is some small part of you, and I, and perhaps every human being that experiences even mass-produced objects as having a personality, and can even feel empathy for them. Even, perhaps, your proverbial uncle Steve, who certainly has never heard of animism or any such ‘hippie nonsense’, might still give his beat-up old car a name. You, too, likely still consider the agency of objects, only when the TV refuses to turn on, when the shower “decides” it will be far hotter than you would like it or when the lawnmower seems to have no interest in starting. Indeed, even in our post-enlightenment consumer societies filled with mass-produced objects, we still have some strange impulse to view them as having agency. And, of course, we know, rationally, that they aren’t really alive. But we aren’t just hallucinating–we’re acknowledging a real relationship. Though objects are not “alive” as we would use the word, they can have a relationship to humans in which we negotiate with their seeming agency. This is an extension of Ingold’s correspondence, and what Abram might argue is core to how animist cultures experience the world. 

It seems, then, that our mass-produced objects regain those correspondent or reciprocal relationships with us and the world only when they are not functioning as intended; when they are old, broken down, rusting, mossy, dilapidated. Only when objects won’t do what we want are we are forced to acknowledge them as being able to act against us, or to interact with things other than us. And this is precisely what we seek to destroy. Our constant labour in the later stages of the lives of our new consumer objects is to “maintain”– to fix, to clean, to weed, to repair. To “maintain” a human-made object is to ensure that it does nothing that is not an extension of human will, and that it can interact with nothing that is not human. But this revulsion to old and abandoned things seems misguided. 

Have you ever come upon an abandoned plot of grass? You might notice how much more is going on there. Hundreds of species of flowering plants, worlds of insects, networks of pollinators—rustling with raccoons, swirling with birds, buzzing with bees–a breathing, bustling, growing, changing world of living things. In being freed from constant weeding and clearing, polishing and upkeep, our objects can at last wake back up to the reciprocal fields of more-than-human agents around them–and finally begin to do things other than what humans want them to. To us, perhaps a car that can no longer drive is unable to do anything. But a car abandoned on the side of the road now does countless more things than it could do as an extension of human agency. It blooms with grass and moss, erodes in response to wind and rusts with rain. It now houses squirrels and hosts entire civilizations of insects. It can now do all sorts of things. It now interacts and responds to a whole world of beings, instead of existing as slave to one.

An object, then, is viscerally animate for the vast eons of time before humans encounter it, existing in reciprocity with all of the other beings and forces in the ecosystem. It then gains a new kind of ‘animateness’ during the brief time it grows and changes in correspondence with a human maker. This “decay,” as we would call it, is the third stage of animateness for an object, but perhaps “growth” is more fitting a word. Our objects lead many new “lives”, years after us, free to engage reciprocally with a world of diverse relationships once again. 

All of these stages, as Ingold would argue, belong to the same process–that shifting, growing, changing, metamorphic nature of our world, of which we are briefly but another small part.  There is only one sliver of a moment in that vast life history of an object where it is not free to change. It is that tiny span of time when an object is “finished.” This is when it stops responding, shifting and growing, when it exists only for a human purpose, when its meaning is purely human. This, this tiny, fleeting moment is when an object loses its depth of animateness. It has been our goal, in industrial consumer society, to drag that sliver of time out as long as humanly possible–to make an object that never malfunctions, never decays and never changes. We aim for every object not to be another changing, free agent, but an eternal extension of ourselves.

It would seem, then, that our relationship to our creations is much like an abusive partner–never letting them change and grow, cutting off their relationships to everything else around them. And, in our culture, we might say this relationship is entirely justifiable–they’re just objects after all. But like all abusive relationships, they are toxic to both parties involved. We now live in a new ecosystem–a new interconnected network of made of human-made things–but we have learned nothing from other successful ecosystems. In seeing the material world of nature as a set of resources to be transformed to exclusively execute our will, we create an ecosystem waiting to die. We create a field of things that are optimized but not adaptable, seemingly permanent but not renewable, and that do not correspond with or account for the more-than-human forces that will inevitably destroy them. Unlike natural ecosystems which are shaped into delicate equilibrium by the ‘agency’ of countless different forces, our reclusive human-made world allows for only our own. 

Wild as they are, natural ecosystems have a multi-billion year track record. Let us not forget this. Let us not forget that our modern ecosystem of industrialized objects and structures markedly does not. Like every empire in human history, this new empire can fall far sooner than we think. And when it does, like every human empire, it will be eaten by those more-than-human ecosystems, swallowed by trees and grass and moss. 

We have always made with objects. That does not set us apart from animistic and Indigenous cultures, who learned to live alongside ecological relationships for time in memoriam. It does not set us apart from all the other agents in the ecosystem–wind and rain and earth, plants and animals–who all contribute to growth and change. Making is to engage and express creativity in the wildly intertwined currents of change in the world. It is only when our creations are too domineering, too permanent, too unsustainable, that they upset, overwhelm and overtake these currents–and ready them for collapse.

We have learned that animateness is not a singular trait or a one-track spectrum, but a relationship of reciprocity or correspondence between objects, humans and non-humans that shifts and changes throughout the ‘life’ of a material. This quality of animateness is never quite lost, only made monotonous and unresponsive by human-centric mass-production.

If we have any desire to stick around, we must learn to make in correspondence with these animate qualities of the world. We must learn to make attentively; pay attention to what a material can teach us about itself, rather than forcing it to do precisely what we want. We must, as Abram says, attend to “the wild, earth-born nature of the materials” (22). We must also leave the door open for our creations to be changed by the world around them, and to be influenced by beings other than ourselves. We must create things that are free to change, to die, to be eaten by the world and be used by something new. As is the basic tenant of animism as a practice–we must have some respect for the things around us. 

Perhaps we must do this because objects are not so different from ourselves. We arose from the same currents of ever changing, ever shifting matter. We will soon return to them. We might not be animists, but perhaps there is wisdom to be learned from animist cultures. As Abram notes, “The “body” – whether human or otherwise- is not yet a mechanical object in such cultures, but is a magical entity, the mind’s own sensuous aspect, and at death the body’s decomposition into soil, worms and dust can only signify the gradual reintegration of one’s ancestors and elders into the living landscape, from which all, too, are born” (15). 

Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human world. Pantheon, 1996.

Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art & Architecture. Routledge, 2013.

Harvey, Graham. The Handbook of Contemporary Animism. Acumen, 2013.
Ingold, Tim. The Appropriation of Nature. University of Iowa press, 1986.

Written by Daniel Schatz

Background on Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), was a French Philosopher who focused heavily on Phenomenology. This field of philosophy, founded by Edmund Husserl and popularized by thinkers like Martin Heidegger seeks to gain knowledge of the world not through scientific inquiry, but through investigating our own lived experience; the way we consciously perceive the world through our bodies and senses.

Merleau-Ponty studied at École Normale Supérieure in Paris. It was here he met his contemporaries Simone de Beauviour and Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom he would go on to co-edit a magazine called Le Temps Moderne. These three would fall out in the mid 1950s over differing opinions in radical Marxism. Merleau-Ponty is most known for his integration of Marxism, Psychoanalysis and Gestalt psychology into Phenomenology. 

Some of his greatest inspirations include, Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Max Scheler, and Edmund Hesserl. Husserl being one of Ponty’s professors at École Normale Supérieure.

Ponty’s major theoretical published works from his lifetime include The Structure of Behaviour (1942) and Phenomenology of Perception (1945). In which Ponty argues that the Gestalt, or the whole that is more than the sum of its parts, fundamental to our perceptual experience. Ponty suggests that the mind and body are one; both grounded in the physical world, and that we derive all perception from living in our world. Phenomenology of Perception, is what Ponty is most well known for. Some other works he published in his life include; Humanism and Terror (1947), Adventures of the Dialectic (1955), Sense and Non-Sense (1948) and Signs (1960/1964). Two works were published after his death; The Prose of the World (1969/1973) and The Visible and the Invisible (1964).

Merleau-Ponty died suddenly of a stroke in 1961 at age 53 while preparing for a class he was teaching on René Descartes.  

Merleau-Ponty’s Works Referenced in Ingold’s Making

Le Visible et L’invisible (The Visible And The Invisible) is the name given to a collection of unfinished works published first 1964 in French. Among the editor’s notes in first English edition from 1968, Claude Lefort terms Le Visible as an “uncompleted work” (xvii) which “bear[s] every where the palpable trace of a thought in effervescence,” cut off from from completion due to Merleau-Ponty’s 1961 death (xv) Lefort describes the work as one which suggests a “new ontology” for understanding how objects perceived “acquire their full meaning” from external interpretation (xxi). Advancing the notion that our socio-cultural conventions mediate somatic perception, referred to as “perceptual faith,” Merleau-Ponty argues for a non-dualistic approach to the study of perception which conceives the observer and the object as intertwined and woven of the same “flesh” (Todavine, 2025). Allegorical for the necessary connection between “visible” and “invisible” — all that presupposes the visible — flesh, he contends that together, they combine fundamentally into a singular “chiasm” or vessel of understanding.

The second text that Ingold cites is the final essay completed in Merleau-Ponty’s lifetime: Eye and Mind. Published posthumously in 1964, the text explores how artistic creation constitutes a single action which connects immersion into one’s perception with the conventions of output. He focusses his argument on that of the painter; how their practice requires of them the correction of how they themselves visually experience the world through use of the grammar, techniques, and syntax of the creative medium, requiring embodied action in the accountability separate but essentially married realms of perception and form. 

Though Eye and Mind doesn’t explicitly reference the ideas of the incomplete Le Invisible, they connect in their perspective on the line blurring individual perception with the exterior world. Both penned toward the end of his life, the texts share the view that the observable world we interact with constitutes higher social abstracts that are delegated and sublimated into one’s own experience, eventually feeding back into shaping such broader abstracts in a necessary process. Though Eye and Mind does not place these observations in the sharp ontology of flesh or chiasm, it ascribes visual artistic works the character of being “the inside of the outside and the outside of the inside”; similarly proposing a cyclical duality where perception mediates and is mediated through formal reality (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p. 164). 

Ingold’s use of Merleau-Ponty’s Theory in Making

Tim Ingold first references Merleau-Ponty in exploring a strange quality that creative ideas seem to have – how they seem to ‘fly away from us’ before we can write them down; paint them; play them on an instrument – how our imagination, and our creative ideas seem so fleeting & ephemeral compared to how slow are bodies can work with material. As Ingold quotes in Le Visible et L’invisible, Merleau-Ponty wrote about this quality as well, speaking of how a melody being played by a violinist seems to fly out in front him and he “must dash on his bow to follow it.”

Ingold asks, then, how do artists reconcile this – how are makers able to overcome the fleeting nature of ideas? Ingold’s answer is in the ‘distance’ – conceptual or physical, between the maker and the material. To illustrate this, Ingold uses Merleau-Ponty’s observation about sight from Eye and Mind – that you cannot see what is right in front of your eye because the boundary between yourself and the what is in front of you will become blurred. The only way to see, as Ponty argues, and the only way to make, as Ingold argues, is to keep yourself at a distance from what you are making.

The other reference to Merleau-Ponty in Making is incorporating his observations about lines into Ingold’s deconstruction of the abstract ideas we project onto materials. As Merleau-Ponty argues in Eye and Mind, true lines and physical borders don’t really exist in our conscious perception – they are a conceptual idea that we project onto materials, but we don’t really see them. However, Ingold argues, while lines aren’t true to our conscious perception, they are true to our rationalized understanding of movement; while we might not see a real line behind a fish as it moves, we rationalize the arc of its movement as a line. Lines, here, are not physical realities that we perceive, but active concepts behind our perception that we use to understand forces, a concept that becomes crucial to Ingold’s whole conception of how materials function.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s observations rooted in the perception of lived experiences offers Ingold an understanding of creative ideas, lines, and our relationship to material that is grounded in our direct experience of the world, and what it can teach us.

Lefort, Claude. (1968). Editor’s Note. In M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and Invisible (pp. xv-xxi). Northwestern University Press. https://monoskop.org/images/8/80/Merleau_Ponty_Maurice_The_Visible_and_the_Invisible_1968.pdf 

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). Eye and Mind. In The Primacy of Perception (p. 164). Northwestern University Press. https://voidnetwork.gr/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/The-primacy-of-perception-by-Maurice-Merleau-Ponty..pdf 

Todavine, T. (2025). Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2025 Edition). <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2025/entries/merleau-ponty/>. 

Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art & Architecture. Routledge.

Django, Colin & Daniel

We may think of semiotics as far too dense and abstract a concept for a child to have any hope of understanding, but Umberto Eco didn’t seem to think this was the case at all. In 1966, he partnered with abstract artist Eugenio Carmi to write the children’s book “The Three Astronauts,” turning dense and esoteric media theory into a simple children’s story. Eco and Carmi’s story can tell us all sorts of things about how we learn, how we can spread ideas, the power of story, and why it may be absolutely vital that we think like a child.

Much of the experience of learning media theory is the feeling of unraveling, unearthing or unlearning a set of assumptions we’ve taken for granted. But perhaps, if someone grew up with some awareness of these different understandings of the world, these perspectives might not have to be so difficult to unearth. If the insights of media theory are truly valuable and have real implications for how we live and conceive of the world, shouldn’t we then consider how to help these ideas grow and take root? We may have begun to understand these concepts in our young adulthood, by directly reading the writings of philosophers and thinkers. But is that how it ought to be for the next generation? What is the point of this thinking about the world if it only reaches a single cultural and economic in-group late in our youth? Is it true that these concepts can only exist in their most dense and esoteric forms, or could they be refitted for a general, or perhaps younger audience? Should we instead think of how to build an understanding from the ground up for the next generation, so they might consider these ways of looking at the world while they are first experiencing the world? How could we possibly make ideas like semiotics digestible to a child?

It is hard to shake the perception that academic, technical, philosophical literature is more important, prestigious and effective than simple stories. However, this could not be further from the truth. Stories are the most powerful tool human beings have ever created. As much as we may like to think of ourselves as empirical, rational thinkers, it is undeniable that we see the world in stories. History, as any historian would tell you, is not objective; it contains objective facts, but those are not what we call history – history are the stories we tell about that information- how we string it together. Politics are the narratives, stories, we build around societal information. Religion is a set of stories that inform everything we believe about the universe. For millennia, we used oral stories to remember our history and knowledge of the world. Every conversation we have in our lives is simply an exchange of stories. As anthropologist Clifford Geertz writes: “culture is the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.”

There is one more thing that stories can do for us as media theorists that we may have overlooked. As Ingold argues, any attempt to have an idea truly take root cannot be done by teaching it; simply spitting the information at the learner. It must be done with experiential learning; learning with; learning by doing. This may have a clear application for material subjects like craftsmanship, but how do we learn an abstract philosophical concept experientially? The answer, you might have guessed, is in stories.

Let’s return to Eco’s The Three Astronauts. Eco puts an enormous amount of trust in the children that are reading his book. He hopes that, through the book, they will learn the concept of semiotics but, strangely, he does not teach them a single thing about semiotics.

This sleight-of-hand begins with Carmi’s illustrations, which are entirely abstract – scraps of newspapers in different languages that are supposed to signify Russian, Chinese and American astronauts. Some may argue that the children would get confused, making the book an utter failure at teaching. Umberto, however, does not talk down to the child. He does not explain everything to them and answer every question before they arise. He wants the child to wonder, because wondering is an active exercise – it is experiential learning. The experience of wondering and wrestling with an idea is much like the experience of feeling and working with a piece of clay. The child may ask themselves, “why is he calling that scrap of newspaper an astronaut?” But by the end of the book, the child has answered that question for themselves. Wondering, and therefore experiential learning, is inherent to experiencing a story, because a story is always about what happens next.

“It so happened that the American didn’t like the Russian, and the Russian didn’t like the Chinese, and the Chinese was suspicious of the other two.

This was because the American, to greet somebody, said “How do you do?”

and the Russian said “Здравствуйте”

and the Chinese said〝你們好…” “

In this passage, the child is presented with three different sets of symbols, and three different systems of meaning. They aren’t taught what systems of meaning are, or even given the language – “symbol,” “semiology,” “system of meaning.” Regardless, through wondering what happens next in the story, they learn experientially that different signifiers can refer to the same signified thing, that different cultures have different systems of meaning, and also, by the end of the story, how we can reconcile those differences compassionately.

We might think that this is a ‘dumbed down’ way of explaining semiology, but in fact, it is a way that cuts out any of the esoteric, in-group language that has to be learned, gives active, relevant examples of how this concept will actually play out in the world, and allows the reader to learn experientially – all without the reader even realizing they are learning. This is the power of explaining an idea through story, as if we were explaining to a child. But in the process of explaining this way, we gain even more – by stripping out the arbitrary, context-dependent language with which semiotics is usually explained, we avoid a common pitfall in the way we learn language.

We acquire language not as individual words, but as whole ‘chunks’ of language. This is what linguist Michael Lewis calls “the lexical approach.” We learn these ‘chunks’ – pre-set phrases – like “give me that” or “what’s the magic word?” from our parents, teachers, and the media around us. We then repeat them back, and ingrain them in our minds. This is why you may be able to finish the sentence “we’ll cross that bridge when…” or “all’s well that ends…” Often, however, we only get a general idea of what these phrases mean, we don’t think about why we use them over other ways we could choose to say something, and we don’t think about what their individual parts mean out of context. We can find proof of this in “fossil words” – words that stay frozen only in specific phrases long after we’ve stopped using them in any other context. We repeat these words inside the chunks in which we learned them without ever noticing that we don’t know what they mean anymore, like fro in “to and fro”  or amok in “running amok.”

The way we learn ideas is much the same. If we think of our learning and understanding as building a house, we are not neat builders. We do not carefully lay new ideas down brick by brick in sequential order. We instead grab and throw down messy chunks of ideas full of things we’ve never considered properly, unchecked assumptions, and arbitrary cultural biases. This is a tendency not at all remedied by academia. We learn to ‘sound smart’ – to repeat the terms and ways of speaking we hear from academics, often without really thinking about what they mean. This is made worse when we are forced to take in massive amounts of input of ideas and produce huge amounts of output in a tremendously short amount of time. Though this allows us exposure to more ideas, it often does not give us the space to sit with concepts, interrogate them, think about them like a child; ask all the ‘why’ ‘where’ and ‘how’ questions.

We do all sorts of things without quite knowing why, we use all sorts of things without knowing quite what they are or where they come from, and we say all sorts of things without knowing quite what they mean. We have a dangerous tendency to forget that this is the way we learn language, and also the way we learn ideas in media theory. If you cannot explain an idea to a child, if you cannot conceive of it or express it without repeating the chunks of esoteric, academic language in which you read it, perhaps you don’t understand it as well as you must to help it spread beyond your academic in-group or cultural system of meaning. Perhaps you don’t understand it like a child. To think like a child is to question everything, to take nothing for granted, and to build your understanding from the ground up. In stripping his idea down until it was simple enough to be understood in a children’s book, and explaining it experientially through a story, Eco was able to think about semiotics in the best way we can – like a child.

Eco, Umberto & Carmi, Eugenio. The Three Astronauts. Secker & Warburg, 1966.

Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Routledge, 2013.

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books, 1973.

Lewis, Michael. The Lexical Approach. Heinle, 1993.

We may not think of media as having anything to do with ecology, or animism, or the spiritual beliefs of Indigenous oral cultures – but after reading David Abram’s 1996 The Spell of the Sensuous, it becomes indisputably clear that these things are inextricably linked.

Abram’s core argument is a tapestry of interrelated ideas which weave together to completely change the way we think about our conscious experience and the land around us. The Spell of the Sensuous is about a specific way of seeing and understanding the world – not through our abstract knowledge of scientific facts, but through our direct, conscious experience through our senses that we all live in every day of our lives. This way of understanding is inextricably tied to reciprocal interactions with animals, plants and the land around us. Abram argues this is the way that Indigenous oral cultures understand the world to this day, and shows how a sect of philosophy known as phenomenology began to rediscover it. Abram tells the story of how we lost this understanding through the development of writing and abstract thought, how we began to ignore what our senses tell us & cut ourselves off from communication with things that aren’t human or human-made. We’ll get there, but let’s start where it all began – the natural world.

We learn that animals evolve in ecosystems; intricate webs of relationships between different species of animals and plants that all evolved alongside each other. But we forget that we are not exempt from this rule; that we are animals. We may also forget that our senses are not just for listening to music or watching movies – but are instead a system that evolved to be the interface for these inter-species relationships, as they did for all animals. We forget that the purpose for which our senses evolved was to experience and interact with the natural environment – our ears are tuned not to the entire frequency spectrum, but to the range of animal calls. What else did our eyes evolve to see but the trees and animals around us, the world of things that are not us? Abram calls this the “more than human world” – the natural environment, as seen directly through the lens of our senses – a world of communication between humans and non-humans. We’ve left this world, for only the past few hundred years, but our senses have not changed.

But what is this way of understanding – this thing you’re experiencing at this very moment – the world as we understand it not through objective facts or scientific knowledge, but through our eyes and ears, nose and brain and body? What can we learn from this world we directly percieve through our senses? In 1913, Austrian mathematician Edmund Husserl set out to answer this question, founding a new field of Philosophy that studies the phenomena we perceive directly with our senses – phenomenology.

Science and experiment have given us unimaginable insight into how our world works. They allowed us to cut past bias and falsehoods and learn truths about the world beyond what we can perceive with the senses – like atoms, soundwaves and DNA – leading to a monumental shift in the way we think about the world. But, Abram argues, with this shift in our knowledge came a shift in our culture and psychology – the the assumption that these technical, mechanical truths come before the conscious experience you’re having right now – that your entire life can be reduced down to a set of facts; to particles, chemicals and synapses firing in the brain – that your mind is not an inseparable part of your material body, but a but another immaterial thing, consciousness, that exists somehow beyond the body.

Phenomenology isn’t counter to science; it isn’t saying these things we’ve discovered through science aren’t real – It is saying that our direct, conscious experience through our senses is also worthy of exploration. After all, this is how you experience every moment of your life, along with every other living animal. This world of perception isn’t a lie, It isn’t an illusion concealing the real world. It is a real world, full of interactions, through our senses, between ourselves and everything around us, from animals to plants to the land. Hence Abram’s term – ‘The More than Human World.’

Abram has a deeper purpose for bringing up phenomenology in his book – a connection he noticed as he lived alongside cultures from the Koyukon peoples of northern Alaska to the Balinese of Indonesia – this ‘phenomenological’ way of viewing the world; understanding reality purely as we see it through our senses without abstract rationalization, was exactly how these peoples thought and lived. We’ll go over an example of this kind of thinking soon, but first, let’s talk about an experience Abram had, living in rural Indonesia.

Abram describes an encounter with a water buffalo. Finding himself staring face to face with this huge creature, he noticed something strange – without language, there was an extremely simple way he and the buffalo could communicate. The buffalo let out a loud exhale, and Abram responded with his own exhale. Mimicry; this tendency animals have to repeat the sounds and gestures of other animals may seem purposeless, but Abram argues mimimicry accomplishes one simple thing, for both animals – it affirms that you are sensing the other animal, and that the other animal can sense you. It is a way even animals can say, without words, “I am alive, and I know you are alive too.” Abram argues that these indigenous cultures; ones constantly foraging for food in forests or carefully watching and being watched by deer as they hunt, ones not surrounded by man-made structures and systems, are more aware of this reciprocal relationship.

Back to our example of phenomenology. To understand what this way of thinking really means, let’s take an example from Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty – 

Think about what it’s like to look at a bowl. You can never see the entire bowl at once. To your eye, the bowl exists only as one section of its entire surface, until you turn your head to see more of it. A part of the bowl you couldn’t see before now comes into view, and that part of the bowl you saw earlier disappears from view. In objective, scientific terms, the entire bowl does exist statically all at once, but through your conscious experience – through your senses, you can never see it all at once. Through your senses, the bowl isn’t something static. To your eye, it changes form – it has multiple forms depending on your perspective. And the only way for those forms to reveal themselves is in response to your own senses, in response to the placement of your own body.

This way of thinking feels bizarre to us – somehow so foreign it feels incomprehensible or at the same time so obvious it feels pointless. But Abrams argues it may once have been more common to think of a bowl, or a tree or rock, as something dynamic, not static. To our eyes, even objects aren’t cold, static, unchanging things. In a strange way, they respond to us. And it was this realization that led Abram to connect phenomenology with something else that was shared by almost all of the cultures he visited – animism.

Unlike the belief in an all-powerful, immaterial god, Animism is the belief that everything around us has a spirit. That word, spirit, may trip us up here – to our culture, that word may have the connotation of a ghost; something intangible, immaterial, beyond our world or our dimension of being. But, Abram points out, Animistic cultures don’t see spirit that way. Yes, they view things like rocks or rivers as having their own spirit, as being alive, but not in the same way a plant is alive – just like a plant is not quite alive in the same way an animal is alive. Here, spirit is purely material – it isn’t about transcendence or intangibility, it is about response and reciprocity. This is what connects Merleau-Ponty’s example to Abram’s experience with the buffalo. Think about how Abram exhaled in response to the buffalo, and the buffalo exhaled in response to him; both affirming that they could sense and were sensed by each other; both literally affirming that they were each alive. To an Animistic culture, this example of a bowl may work in much the same way – a person moves their head to reveal another side of the bowl, and to their eye, the bowl shifts to reveal another side of itself; both affirming that they could sense and were sensed by each other; both affirming that they were each alive. A bowl may not be alive in anywhere near the same way a buffalo is alive, certainly not in the way our culture would use the word alive, but to an Animistic culture, both the bowl and the buffalo have a spirit.

But why do all of these cultures, thousands of miles apart, all just coincidentally think this way, and develop these animistic beliefs? It may make more sense to ask, Abram argues, why doesn’t our culture see things this way? Perhaps our ancestors shared this understanding of the world, until something changed in our perception. Each one of the Indigenous cultures that Abram lived with had one thing in common – they were oral cultures; they had not developed writing. It does not at all seem clear at first how developing writing could have stopped us from seeing the world through the conscious experience of our senses, and from believing everything around us has a sort of dynamic spirit. To understand, Abram brings us to the turning point of alphabetic writing; to when the ancient Greeks adopted writing from the ancient Hebrews.

Writing began, like cave paintings, with simple pictures of the world around us, such as Aztec logograms and Egyptian hieroglyphics. In semiotic terms these were iconic, not symbolic – they referred directly to our natural world; oxen and birds, people and objects. The Egyptian written word for ox – “aleph,” was simply a picture, or icon, of the animal itself. This icon was adopted into the early writing system for the Sinaitic languages, like Hebrew and Phoenician, and later by the Greeks. But the Greeks spoke an entirely unrelated language with different sounds, belonging to the Indo-european family. They had to take these icons, which each had cultural connotations, names & meanings, and signified plants and animals, and transplant them into an entirely foreign system of meaning. They had to repurpose these icons into symbols. Before, each Phoenician or Hebrew letter or icon related directly to what it signified; the natural world. Each icon visually referred back to different non-human animals and plants; to that web of relationships in the ecosystem. These new Greek symbols were now arbitrarily related to what they signified – which was now no longer non-human elements of the natural world, but human-made sounds. Abram argues that this shift, the invention of the alphabet, was not only a shift in language, but a shift in our psychology.

Abstract means unable to be perceived by our senses – separate from the world of our conscious, sensuous experience. For a culture that is constantly immersed in the web of relationships of the land around them – hunting animals, gathering plants and observing the world with their entire range of senses – the concept of some entirely other immaterial, abstract space simply would have no reason to cross their minds. Oral stories, like that of the Navajo, or aboriginal Australians, simply didn’t make sense without their ties to the land in which they took place. You cannot tell a story that takes place nowhere, so you must specify where it took place. This is the view held by the oral cultures of today, and the view we once all held before writing. But for the Greeks, who were beginning to adopt a system of writing without reference to the world of non-human things we see with our senses, who were beginning to transition into sedentary agricultural societies, who were beginning to build urban cities and view the land as a set of resources, it became possible to conceive of a new kind of space – an abstract space. Oral stories began to be written down, set in stone and passed from culture to culture. We began to write stories that were not tied to a specific place – they could be read by anybody, anywhere, and could make sense even though they were not specified to take place anywhere.

Greek philosophers like Aristotle and Plato, growing up in this new culture, inspired a monumental shift in our thinking – that there was a world of pure ideals, an abstract world completely beyond the land in which we evolved and all of the non-human inhabitants we perceive through our conscious experience. And, even more importantly, that our conscious experience itself, or soul, could exist outside of the body itself – that our brain and eyes and ears and nose and body did not require each other, but could exist without each other.

You might not know it, but the culture in which you grew up has carried the torch of this abstract, empirical, scientific way of understanding. These new kinds of societies began to develop technologies, new ways of using the land as resources, that did not require the direct interaction inherent in hunting and gathering. Later, they expanded on this abstract, immaterial conception of the world and developed scientific methods of inquiry that revealed hidden, mechanical processes that we can’t see – that are beyond the world of our perception. While there are thousands of years and all sorts of other developments between us and the ancient Greeks, this moment where they shifted from oral to written culture marked the moment where the world lost its spirit. A bowl, or even a plant or animal, was no longer a dynamic, shifting, responding thing – it existed as an ideal form in abstract space, beyond our senses – our senses only limited us to seeing different parts of its true form. Our senses could no longer be trusted – they were an illusion that obscured an abstract, static, unresponsive world.

But though this view is shared by scientific inquiry, and is not at all untrue, it is also true, as phenomenologists argue and Indigenous cultures experience, that our senses are not lying to us. The world is dynamic. It is not an unchanging, unfeeling set of resources to be turned into human made objects. It is full of birds whose songs we hear and who can hear our voices, and trees who show us only a part of their branches until more are revealed in response to our movement. Though a monumental shift in our thinking brought about by alphabetic writing has hidden this fact from us – we are animals. Though we have left our ecosystem, stopped seeing and hearing and reciprocally speaking and responding to things that are not human, our senses are the same as they were. They evolved to hear and see and interact with the other animals around us. As a consequence of this, if we pay careful attention to how we feel the world through our conscious experience and set aside for a moment what we know about it, we might find that everything seems to be listening, and responding.