Semantics, Animism and the Aliveness of Things

A few days ago, driving home through the city, I saw something that made me forget I was behind the wheel of a squillion-kilogram machine. I recovered and made it home in one piece, but all I had been thinking about was a quote mentioning mashed potatoes, which, as you’ll see, makes perfect sense.

The best quote I ever heard was from a guy who used to do online radio before podcasting was a thing. I’m old, what’s your point? Anyway, he DJ’ed for EVE Online Radio and his name was Mog.

Mog said,

Semantics is the difference between mashed potato and fuck you.

Genius.

And largely, I agree with him. Arguing semantics, especially at my day job, shits me to tears. I’d usually prefer to get on and do the thing rather than talk endlessly about what words we should use.

However.

A few days ago I was driving home from an appointment in the city, unhurriedly negotiating the traffic, singing my little heart out to something on my playlist, looking around at everything. I was relaxed, having a great time. Mostly from pure muscle memory, I drove up a street I used to walk along after work. You’d be familiar with the street I’m referring to, I wrote about it here: Finding Spirit in Concrete Spaces.

I’m going to be an arse and quote myself, in case you’re link-averse and comfortable right where you are:

Many years ago, I used to walk to work, past an abandoned house with a mesh-covered garage opening that framed a view into a wild courtyard beyond. The garage itself was dark and uninviting, littered with urban debris, but the courtyard was an unexpected oasis, vibrant green and teeming with birds, skinks, and insects. I'd often stand there, probably looking like some weird, crazy lady, just absorbing that magical juxtaposition of decay and life, and the welcoming green beyond the grime.

That was my first foray into urban animism. I think I later wrote somewhere about that garage and attached house being renovated which effectively removed that menacing garage, guarding the entrance into a courtyard full of life. When that happened, my relationship with that part of the street waned, we moved and I started taking the bus to work. Over the years, I’ve driven past there from time to time and felt nostalgic about that intimidating garage.

Old, grimey and slightly meancing - the garage that was a gateway.

But fuck me backwards, doing my whole relaxed, happy driving thing, I saw it again. Without thinking, I glanced over just as I passed the old spot where the garage used to be...and there it was! A gateway to the same courtyard. I literally gasped, did a double-take, and managed not to drive into anything.

The once-menacing gateway was back, modernised and refurbished as a dark, moody, city-chic walkway tucked under new apartments. And it led straight out into a beautifully paved and gardened courtyard. Sure it looked a lot more curated than when it was last there, but shit, it was the same.

All the way home I felt absurdly chuffed that the gateway had been reinstated. It felt like an old friend had unexpectedly come home. As well as being part of my personal history re-alived, it was also part of the wider city narrative. I doubt that old garage, now new, noticed my presence, but it had shaped me, years ago, into noticing things like this. And that made me happy.

Of course, I had questions. Not about the building as such (although I did feel vaguely perturbed by some of the colour choices on the façade), but about how this came to be. The stream of consciousness went something like:

How did that happen? Why reinstate an entryway that had been removed? Did the building or courtyard have a hand in it? Could the building have influenced the renovation, seeking the return of the gateway? Was there intentionality on behalf of the structure itself?

A few clicks, a whirring sound, a ding-ding-ding, and then it all fell into place, like an old dial-up internet connection. I realised what I was actually thinking about was sentience and agency. My mind had jumped straight to the idea that the building was influencing its own form, and that thought stuck.

Pause. Call it lag.

Then it hit me. This wasn’t just nostalgia, it was language tripping me up. My words hadn’t caught up to what I’d felt.

Here’s what I eventually landed on. Yes, the building influenced the renovation. Not alone, never alone, but as part of a distributed field I’ll talk about in a moment. The courtyard’s pull, the building’s history, the memory of a garage, the aesthetics of the street, all of it acted on the people making decisions. Those planners thought they were being purely practical, but they were participants in something larger. That’s what agency looks like.

And then, of course, language caught up and bit me. If that’s agency, what have I been calling sentience all this time? I’d been tossing the words around interchangeably, which is fine for small talk but disastrous for meaning. The difference matters, and I’d been blurring it.

Sigh.

Fucking semantics.

To be fair, semantics aren’t really the issue. The problem is lazy wording — using two distinct ideas as if they mean the same thing. It’s an old habit: choosing language that’s close enough to get by, instead of sharp enough to think with. But the words we choose shape how we see the world, and in animism that’s not a minor detail. The difference between sentience and agency is the difference between noticing life and recognising participation.

So.

Sure, you could Google sentience and agency, but since we’re already knee-deep in words, let’s pull on these threads together

According to Vorholter (2024):

…agency is broadly defined as the socio-culturally mediated capacity to act. Classically, the concept has been used to analyse how people try to influence, or change, their lifeworlds and how they act within, or even resist, powerful structures.

Or more simply: “the capacity of individuals to have the power and resources to act and fulfil their potential” (Wikipedia 2025).

The key part, for me, is the ability to act or influence. Any being with agency can change something in its environment and move toward a specific outcome. A general anthropological stance says humans have agency to enact change; a materialist view might even claim we’re supreme in it.

I don’t buy that hierarchy. Agency isn’t a ladder with humans on top; it’s a field we share. A tree, a river, your letterbox, or an apartment with a gateway can all influence the world in their own ways, shifting what happens through relation and effect.

According to our wise old friend Merriam-Webster, sentience is “feeling or sensation as distinguished from perception and thought.” In simpler terms, it’s the capacity to feel, for example, register pleasure, pain, or emotion, rather than to reason or act.

Seeking light and life

If you were to get all sciencey about it, you could say animal sentience usually refers to the ability to experience positive states such as joy and negative ones such as pain or fear (Proctor, 2021). Some (still sciencey) research even extends this to plants, describing their ability to perceive stress or injury and respond physiologically.

Sentience, then, is awareness and affect. It allows a being to feel but not necessarily to influence. Note “according to science”. I’ll state the bleedingly obvious that science is a materialist paradigm and should be treated as such. I’ll let you Google that one.

So, my understanding: agency doesn’t necessarily require sentience, and sentience doesn’t automatically mean agency. A being can act without awareness, and awareness doesn’t guarantee the power to act. It’s a nuanced distinction, and in anthropology it’s contested, but fascinating.

There are a couple of things I want to say about all this.

Firstly, semantics are tedious. Differentiating between sentience and agency, even though I started doing it as a thought experiment, was probably tedious to read. But despite the dryness of it all, it’s still crucial.

Having a sharp understanding of the language we use, and applying it deliberately, shapes how we relate to the world. If I only think of the beings around me as sentient, I’m containing a complex, nuanced phenomenon inside a box with impermeable boundaries. It’s a sympathetic but passive universe — everything can feel, but nothing can help shape what happens.

If I think instead of everything around me as having agency, which is a relational and distributed phenomenon, the aliveness and potential of it really hits.

Saying agency is relational means it doesn’t sit inside an individual (human or otherwise) as an isolated thing. It emerges between beings, in the exchanges, responses, and feedback loops connecting them.

Saying agency is distributed means it’s not located in a single point (a person, god, or doorframe) but spread across systems. No single node “causes” action; each contributes to a pattern of influence. Agency becomes a field event, like a murmuration, a collective movement where intention dissolves into pattern.

Just sit with that for a few moments and really absorb how those ideas land.

Every time I sit with the idea of agency, both relational and distributed, the sheer hugeness of it makes me squeeze my eyes shut and my gut jump sideways in excitement and a little anxiety.

Getting the words right, as annoying as it can be, isn’t about pedantry. It’s about opening the right doors to perceive what’s going on around us.

The second thing I want to say steps us back a little. We’ve established that words matter. A lot. Language isn’t neutral. The words we pick open doors, erect barriers, invite or repel connection.

If I call a building “just bricks and beams”, I don’t open the possibility that the entranceway might have a say, a pull, an influence. If I call it an agent, a relational node, then suddenly I’m listening: what is it doing? Who is it acting with? Is the doorway passive, or part of a co-creation with the courtyard, the people, the history, the light?

Because when we say that agency is a relational and distributed phenomenon, we are saying:

• It doesn’t sit inside a single thing. The doorway didn’t decide alone to reappear. It reappeared in relation to the courtyard, the planners, the site’s history, memory, and presence.

• It stretches across persons, things, and times. The building’s past corridor, the memory of residents, the plants’ growth, the city’s redevelopment, all are part of what made that gateway return.

Language that reduces agency to “humans do / things are done to” flattens possibility. But language that opens agency into networks of material, memory, people, and place invites us into an animist posture. We start asking: who’s acting with whom? Which forces made this moment possible? What kind of living interchange am I part of?

Because when we say that agency is relational and distributed, we’re also saying something about animism and the aliveness of things — that life isn’t contained within bodies but unfolds between them, in the spaces where meaning and matter meet.

So yes, semantics still matter. Both the mashed-potato part and the fuck-you part. Because to write “sentience” when I mean “agency” isn’t mere laziness; it mis-shapes how I approach the world. It keeps me locked in human-centric frameworks when what I’m pointing to is something wider.

My words, and now hopefully yours, can either shrink the living web or widen it.

Language re-enchants. Pick words with awareness and deliberateness. Because at the threshold of animism, we’re not just naming things, we’re inviting relation.

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References:

Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press.

Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Sentience. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved October 2025, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sentience

Proctor, H. (2012). Animal sentience: Where are we and where are we heading? Animals, 2(4), 628–639. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani2040628

Vorholter, J. (2024). Agency as the socio-culturally mediated capacity to act. Journal of Contemporary Anthropology, 45(2), 112–130.

Wikipedia. (2025). Agency (sociology). In Wikipedia. Retrieved October 2025, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_(sociology)