Animacy, Initiative, and the Trouble with Agency

For a long time, I was satisfied with the idea of agency.

Agency, particularly as it appears in new materialist and multispecies thinking, creates a fundamental shift to the old human habit of treating the world as inert. It reminds us that things affect us and are affected in return, and that what happens is rarely the result of a single will. We are not, and never have been, the only actors here.

But lately, agency has started to feel incomplete.

Agency is a relational concept. It describes what happens between things. It explains how forces move through a field, how bodies, materials, and systems respond to one another. What it doesn’t quite capture is something I keep encountering in practice: the sense that things don’t just respond, they initiate. They act for themselves.

This is where the word animacy has begun to matter to me.

By animacy, I’m not trying to measure the world against human ideas of consciousness or inner life. The question isn’t whether things think like we do, but whether our categories are capable of recognising forms of aliveness that don’t resemble us at all.

Animacy, as I’m using it here, names something quieter and more fundamental: the tendency of a thing to act, express, and persist according to its own nature, its own spirit.

Not because I’m paying attention, not because I’m in relation with it, but because that is what it does.

Agency, animacy, and attention are often tangled together, so it’s worth slowing down.

Attention is what I bring. It’s the act of listening, noticing, leaning in.

Agency emerges in the field that attention opens. It’s what becomes perceptible when bodies, materials, and forces meet.

Animacy sits beneath both. It doesn’t require my attention to exist, and it doesn’t depend on relation to begin acting. Animacy is initiative.

To put it another way, an object — a tree, a park bench, a light pole — has its own animacy whether I’m present or not.

This distinction matters because it subtly but profoundly changes my place in the world. If things only act in relation to me, then I remain the quiet centre of every situation, however politely decentered I try to be. But if things act from themselves, if they arrive already animated, already doing what they do, then my role shifts.

I am no longer an activator. I am a participant arriving in a process already underway. If animacy describes how the world already moves, then etiquette describes how I respond to that fact.

That realisation carries an ethical weight, but not the loud, moralising kind. It doesn’t demand belief or allegiance. It asks for something simpler and harder to sustain: etiquette.

Etiquette, in this sense, is not about politeness. It’s about knowing how to enter a space where you are not in charge, or even relevant to what’s occurring.

When animacy is taken seriously, the world is no longer a collection of neutral sites waiting for engagement. It’s a dense field of ongoing activity, negotiation, and presence. To step into that field without awareness is to interrupt. To assume welcome is to misunderstand what is already happening.

A streetlight doesn’t wait for me to notice it before it holds the dark at bay. A valley fills with sound whether I listen or not, and a lawnmower strains, glides, labours according to its own conditions and limits.

When I listen closely, these differences become vivid as textures of aliveness: weight, effort, rhythm, resistance. The soundscape changes not because I have animated it, but because I’ve tuned into something that was already happening.

This is where animism and new materialist thinking brush up against one another, and also where they part ways.

New materialism gives us a powerful language for relational agency: how matter participates in worlds, how humans are always acting alongside materials, systems, and environments that shape outcomes in ways we don’t fully control. It asks us to abandon the fantasy of isolated intention and recognise that action is shared, distributed, and responsive.

Animism, at least how I practice it, insists on something slightly more unruly. It insists that beings have initiative and sovereignty whether or not they ever enter into relation with me at all. The world does not require my attention to continue doing what it does. I am, in many situations, entirely optional.

Recognising this doesn’t diminish human experience. It refines it.

If the world is already alive, already busy, already in motion, then how I show up matters. Not because I benevolently grant meaning or spirit, but because I am responsible for how I enter a field that is not organised around me.

This is why animist practice doesn’t feel like belief to me. It feels closer to etiquette.

How do I arrive without assuming access? How do I listen without inserting myself as the centre? How do I notice what is already happening before deciding what I want from it?

Animacy reminds me that I am not the spark. Attention reminds me that I am accountable for my presence.

Everything else — agency, relation, meaning — unfolds from there.