We have long told a particular story about what it means to be human: a rational, autonomous individual, separate from nature, in control of the world it designs. This figure sits at the centre of meaning, politics, and technology as the measure of all things. But this story has a problem: the world it imagines - separating nature and culture, bodies and machines, self and environment - was never real, and now increasingly so.
The trouble with the human is that placing one narrow version of the human at the centre has allowed the destruction of everything placed outside it: ecosystems treated as resources, people rendered as less-than-human, nonhuman beings and forces reduced to passive backdrop.
What more-than-human means
More-than-human is a new perspective. It starts from an observation: the human is never separate from the entanglements it lives within. We are always already ecological, sustained by microbial communities, weather systems, and soil. Always technological, shaped by the tools and infrastructures we build. Always relational, constituted through the beings and systems we depend on.
Satellites and sensors produce the conditions through which we know and govern the planet. Tree root networks exchange nutrients in ways that shape entire forest ecologies. Algorithms sort and value human lives. None of these forces are neutral background. They are active participants in how worlds are made.
The shift, then, is from asking “What does the human do to the world?” to asking “Through what entanglements does a world come into being?”
- Human: Cultural entities understood as distinct from Nature.
- Nonhuman: Anything that is not human, and is often associated with the Nature or Technology.
- Less-than-Human: People, who are politically, culturally, economically, or technologically reduced below the threshold of a “full” human.
- Other-than-Human: Beings distinct from humans yet not inferior, recognized as coexisting agents in the world.
- Trans-human: Enhanced or technologically augmented human; the human extended through (bio)technology but still as the primary subject.
- More-than-Human: A perspective in which reality, agency, & life are always already composed of entanglements that exceed the human.
Agency is distributed
Professor Donna Haraway showed that the boundaries between human, animal, and machine are maintained through institutions, science, and politics—not given by nature. They, therefore, can be redrawn. What we call “human” emerges through material and political entanglements rather than from a stable biological essence.
Physicist Karen Barad extends this further by saying that matter itself is active. Beings do not pre-exist their relations but are produced through them. This means that responsibility, too, is distributed. Accountability cannot be separated from the act of knowing, building, relating, or governing.
What this means in practice is that the question of who made this is always also a question of what was made alongside it, and what was unmade. Humans build technologies and systems, but those systems in turn shape bodies, perception, labour, and identity. Animals, plants, microbes, materials actively transform landscapes and economies; they are not background to human history but co-producers. Nothing exists or acts alone; life emerges through interdependence and co-creation.
Thinking and making with
At Waag, the more-than-human perspective runs through how we research, design, and ask questions. It shapes the way we approach a new project: rather than acting as experts on a problem, we participate in fields of relations. We attend to the nonhuman actors, infrastructures, and ecological forces that are already part of every situation.
The more-than-human perspective provides a guideline to understand and challenge thesee concepts; it also changes what we consider a good outcome. Rather than optimising for human control, we ask: what relations does this make possible? Who or what becomes more vulnerable, or more alive, because this exists?
