(Un)actualized Objects

• In Event: History of Sociology and Social Thought Section Open Call Paper Session

Abstract

Recent social theory recenters objects—material and immaterial—by emphasizing their agency in social formations, not merely as projections, appendages, or inert stakes. Ignoring this agency, proponents argue, weakens analysis by missing how object entanglements shape history and, ethically, risks reproducing human‑exceptionalist hubris that underwrites colonial, capitalist, and imperial orders. In this paper, I argue that the insights of this approach should be incorporated into a non-essentialist humanist account of society centered on freedom. Such an account attends to qualitative differences among human, nonhuman, and object forms of agency, treating objects not as merely “posthuman” but as embodied potentials that often remain unactualized under relations of domination.

Author

• Oyman Basaran, Bowdoin College