Have a personal or library account? Click to login
Metamodern Theory for the Study of More-than-Human Cultures Cover

Metamodern Theory for the Study of More-than-Human Cultures

Open Access
|Feb 2026

Abstract

This article develops a metamodern framework for the study of more-than-human cultures by integrating a materialist semiotics (hylosemiotics), with a processual social ontology of agency. Against anthropocentric accounts that restrict culture to language and symbolic thought, I argue that culture emerges wherever social animals coordinate through materialized signs. Drawing on cases from corvid tool use to multispecies infrastructures, the article reconceptualizes meaning as situated inference rather than transmission. Agency is asymmetrically distributed across socio-material systems, not lodged in individual actors or flattened into universal actancy. The result is a framework that preserves normativity without either anthropocentrism or anthropomorphism and naturalizes meaning without reducing it to matter. By tracing how coordination, agency, and responsibility are routed through materialized signs and social kinds, metamodern theory provides an analytic for studying multispecies cultures as well as ethical accountability under conditions of planetary scale transformation.

Language: English
Page range: 146 - 155
Published on: Feb 25, 2026
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services
Publication frequency: 1 issue per year

© 2026 Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, published by Tallinn, Erfurt University
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.