Only in the eighteenth century, when colonial powers began to conjure states into nations, did the imagination become a creative faculty and aesthetics emerge as a technique of individuation. Fantasies of the People is a series of texts moving across different provincial histories, calling upon disputes in anthropology, political theory, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry to interrogate the notion of fantasy as one that radically challenges what is real. Emerging from a conference convened by Devin Fore and Kerstin Stakemeier at Princeton University in 2025, the series takes as its starting point radical thinkers of the early twentieth century, such as Marxist feminist Lu Märten and the anarchist art critic Carl Einstein, who deemed fantasy a communal sense against the hermetic cognition of imagination. Calling upon a wide range of contemporary artists, writers, and researchers for discussion, the series proposes fantasy as a collective material practice, rather than treating it as a private or irrational faculty, exploring the media of communal sense, past and present, that have been sidelined by individuation, privatization, and colonial violence.
For this month’s installments in the series, the editors invited Ludovic Coupaye, Park McArthur, and Constantina Zavitsanos to reflect on fantasy as a technical system that establishes a new relationship between imagery and collective experience. Zavitsanos’s work presumes the facts of division and dependency as preconditions not for social alienation but for the formulation of a common sense. McArthur has focused on the way that accessibility and environments multiply subjects and distribute them across a community of care. Both explore the (dis)identification of abilities, and sensory experiences, across populations. Finally, Coupaye’s curatorial practice and academic scholarship challenges us to approach language and culture as a syntax of operational gestures that stitches together body, object, and image.
All three of these projects presume the image to be something other than a neutral reflection or a depiction of an objective, external world. Thus, the editors’ writing prompt for Coupaye, McArthur, and Zavitsanos: How do you think about the interactions between signs and objects, between images and bodies, on a material level? And how does this stance inform your thinking about technology? Are there aspects of instruments—whether practical, scientific, or epistemic—that exceed the criterion of pure functionality and set in motion processes of collective fantasy? Finally, is there a specific class of objects that should be privileged over others as catalysts of collective fantasy?
—Devin Fore and Kerstin Stakemeier, series coeditors
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Introduction: Realizing Fantasies … Again
My first attempt at thinking through the concept of “fantasy” was framed as an experiment to rethink more widely the concept of “objects,” prompted by an invitation to a conference gathering art historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and specialists of photography, cinema, and literature. For them, “fantasy” became a way of addressing apparitions, intangible and transient entities, and challenging their supposed separation from “reality.”
Drawing on my work with “Abelam” (Abulës-Speakers) people and their visual productions displayed during ceremonies in Papua New Guinea1 and on the cases discussed in the conference volume,2 I argued that fantasies are realized through objects and images.3 To show how, I proposed approaching artefacts simultaneously as contexts, processes, and presences.
Objects-as-contexts encouraged me to stay close to their physical and material specificities before reducing them to reflections of social or cultural settings. Objects-as-processes emerged from my engagement with the Francophone study of technics,4 through which technical activities were shown as actualizing norms, values, and forms of social relations. Objects-as-presence, finally, shifted my attention away from meaning and representation toward the capacity of objects to make entities, ideas, norms, or cosmic orders materially present, a move I owe to Anthony Forge’s work among the “Abelam”5 and to his PhD supervisee Alfred Gell’s Peircean approach to artefacts.6
Whilst the notion of presence helped demonstrate how objects and images make fantasies tangible, it did not fully account for how their efficacy propagates across persons, things, and milieus. If objects and images make fantasies, ontologies, and cosmologies real and present, through what mechanisms do they do so? How do they shape relations, affects, and collective life without being reduced to human intentions or social projections? In other words, what might a specifically nonhuman form of agency consist of? Given my focus on technics and technology, I became interested in whether presence could help show how power relations were actualized and/or transformed through technics, an issue long discussed all through the twentieth century.7
In the end, fantasy became a way to think through how images and objects could turn imaginaries and cosmologies into real effective forces in the world.
Crystallized Capacities and Ontogenesis
The relation between fantasy and objects as contexts/processes/presences later became useful for my investigations of technics. Reading Gilbert Simondon’s work on technical objects,8 alongside more recent engagements with his thought,9 prompted me to revisit earlier approaches to materiality, visuality, semiotics, and technics.10 It invited me to search for a common analytical frame through which objects such as tools, instruments, machines, software, and images, including digital ones, could be investigated together, not as reflections of cosmos or worldviews,11 but as having their own nonhuman, and even non-anthropocentric, generative capacities. In other words, instead of a theory, I hoped to build a method that could unveil how power relations—including inequalities, discriminations, and, conversely, possibilities of resistance and freedom—are actualized.
This led me to suggest approaching objects as containers of crystallized capacities. Crystallized as in condensations of histories, power relations, and agencies into temporary stable (or metastable) material arrangements that also act as repositories of potential future actions. It thus means that their materiality (how they contribute to the constitution of persons and social forms) also depends on their physicality: not merely the substance from which objects are made, but the specific dynamic organization of their components and the constraints and possibilities presented or generated by this organization.
This rests on two premises. First, the actualization of these capacities depends, as we know, on historically, socially, and culturally situated human dispositions and practices, through which specific power relations take tangible forms. Second, because objects are concretions of relations-made-material, or in Bernard Stiegler’s words, organized inorganic beings, their agency cannot be reduced to their ascribed “function,” nor exhausted by interpretation, discourse, or critical analysis.12 For instance, their gendered, racialized, Eurocentric assumptions are enacted not only through representation but through formal, nonverbal structures and functioning principles, naturalized and stabilized through practice. This helped shift attention away from “ontology,” understood as the description of already constituted worlds, and towards ontogenesis, that is, the processes through which beings, actants, relations, worlds, and fantasies come into existence together.
Here, perhaps, Simondon’s notion of transduction opens a way to investigate how these capacities propagate. Objects and images are more than mere mediators between preexisting entities; they transmit and transform capacities across human, material, social, and, importantly today, environmental milieus. I playfully describe this propagation as an ontogenetic flux: a transductive process through which fantasies-as-potentials become actual, and through which norms, relations, values, and futures take material presence.
Technicity and the Functioning of Objects
The case of technical objects, that is, tools, instruments, machines and software, is particularly telling. These are not infinitely malleable products of social construction, even if their capacities indeed emerge from the interplay between social relations, material properties, and organizational principles. Once “concretized” in Simondonian terms, machines, devices, and software acquire a certain degree of autonomy.13 Humans can cultivate, redirect, or impede these crystallized operative processes, but they can never wholly determine how their operative and mechanical logics unfold.
The development of objects that were endowed with increasing behavioral autonomy are were simultaneously opaquer invited me to focus on their functioning rather than their function or role. “Functioning” refers here to the operative schema crystallized in a technical object—programmed, as physical (gears) and/or semiotic (code) relations—through which its components, and its relations with an associated milieu, including the human operator, are dynamically coordinated and rendered mutually compatible.
In hunting, a rifle does not function in the same way as a blowpipe, nor is a home printer the same as a networked university printer: Their physical organization mobilizes different body techniques, energies, temporalities, materials, forms of knowledge, histories, and institutions—as well as conceptions of prey, texts, or images. Additionally, I could use the rifle as a blunt instrument or turn the printer into an artwork in a museum exhibition, but their existence stays within the span their affordances allow.14 Given that affordance is not an essence but a relational field generated at the encounter between humans and objects, I felt that I should give credit to the latter’s physicality and onticity, lest I spoke for them.
This attends to what I have long found problematic in the category of “technology”: its tendency to reify technical relations into discrete objects and domains, a tendency historically associated with the abstractions of industrial modernity, colonial capitalism, and extractivist modes of relation.15 Instead, I find more productive the category of technicity, used by both André Leroi-Gourhan and Simondon.16 Paraphrasing the latter, I understand technicity as a regime of relations between humans and their worlds, coexisting with other regimes, whether religious, aesthetic, epistemic, or politic.17 Compared to “technology,” technicity thus foregrounds relations and processes rather than reified objects or domains and avoids dichotomies such as society/technology or technology/nature, whilst not excluding political, aesthetic, of affective relations.
Beyond Classical Objects? Algorithms and Images
But what about algorithms and images? Compared to the Guimbal turbine,18 a printer,19 or a spear-thrower,20 computer programs, particularly Generative Algorithms (“AI”), and images pose somewhat different challenges. The analytical framework proposed here is still preliminary, but it may nevertheless suggest a few directions.
I confess to being reluctant to call software “objects,” since they are composed of programs actualized—processed and made present—through devices such as desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile phones.21 Indeed, the capacities of software to be actualized across devices has been central to the explosive diffusion of “AI” processes throughout professional and personal lives. Yet, computer programs still have a physicality and functioning principles that warrant the same mechanological analysis as any other Simondonian machine.22 This is particularly relevant when considering algorithms and machine-learning systems as operationalizing specific semiotic ideologies through their functioning, as argued by Paul Kockelman and, more recently, Raffaele Andrea Buono.23 However, it is the material and environmental dimensions of devices and body techniques which actualize them: screens, mice, as well as other concealed objects that make them run, such as graphic cards, CPUs, and cooling systems, all make softwares present to our body and our senses
A similar line of inquiry may apply to images. Art historians and anthropologists have repeatedly shown that images do nothing without form and do not merely reflect sociocultural principles but also generate affects, significations, and bodily responses.24 As with “Abelam” visual compositions, motifs, and lines of red/yellow and black/white contrasts displayed on the façade of a ceremonial house, image efficacy seems to exceed questions of representation alone, as Forge hinted at.25 This idea was suggested after my previous analytical experiment on Sepik human figures, which led me to suggest that one of the formal techniques that these figures relied on was to use the human body as an analogy of containment, enabling these images to act as receptacles. I suggested that resorting to formal anthropomorphic dimensions was a device to sustain their functioning as temporary vessels of ancestral beings and substances, rendering them efficacious in ritual practices by making them present.26
A comparable role for presence may be observed across widely different contexts: Egyptian funerary figures that sustain the presence of the deceased and their retinue; Christian icons and relics as not only depictions but as loci of divine presence;27 Kandinsky’s abstract compositions, whose effects rely less on representation than on the dynamic relations of colors, forms, and rhythms; Julio Le Parc’s optical environments, which generate perceptual transformations through light, rhythm, and participation; or even the distributed presence of the artist or its prototype through artefacts, discussed by Gell. In each case, efficacy emerges from specific formal, material, and technical arrangements that organize perception, orient affect, and enable particular relations between humans and nonhumans.
Composition, colors, scale, rhythm, and contrast may signify or reflect sociocultural choices, but they also organize perception and channel attention. Investigating the specific technicities through which images generate effects, bodily and sensorily, may provide a way to analyze their efficacy across cultural and representational differences.
Ontogenetic Fluxes and Their Propagation
Approaching together objects and images as containers of crystallized capacities might thus allow us to show them as potentialities—or fantasies—made present. It is for this reason that I much prefer to speak of ontogenesis rather than ontology.
Images and artefacts are not merely representations or indexes of worlds, nor simply mediators between them. I suggest approaching them as transductive operators through which capacities propagate across human, material, and environmental milieus, what I call, playfully, an “ontogenetic flux.” The waves and forms of relations generated when humans encounter objects and images actualize norms, values, relations, and possibilities that had remained latent—never fully, never perfectly, yet real, nevertheless. The effects of these encounters propagate outwards through social, physical, and affective milieus in a reticulated fashion and trans-form, sometimes in unexpected and unpredictable ways.
Fantasies, including those that stem from ecological or political dreams or nightmares, are therefore not unreal projections opposed to reality. They are capacities crystallized in objects and images, capacities through which people, things, and worlds are continually individuated together.
Ludovic Coupaye, Growing Artefacts, Displaying Relationships: Yams, Art and Technology amongst the Nyamikum Abelam of Papua New Guinea (Berghahn Books, 2013).
Published as Object Fantasies: Experience & Creation, ed. Philippe Cordez et al. (De Guyter, 2018).
Ludovic Coupaye, “Realizing Fantasies: Objects as Contexts, Processes and Presence,” in Object Fantasies.
André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech (1964; MIT Press, 1993); André-Georges Haudricourt, La Technologie Culturelle: Recherche d’histoire et d’ethnologie des techniques (Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1987); Pierre Lemonnier, Mundane Objects: Materiality and Non-Verbal Communication (Left Coast Press, 2012); Ludovic Coupaye, “Technology,” in Cambridge Handbook of Material Culture Studies, ed. Lu Ann De Cunzo and Catharine Dann Roeber (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Anthony Forge, “The Problem of Meaning in Art,” in Exploring the Visual Art of Oceania, ed. Sydney M. Mead (University of Hawai‘i Press, 1979).
Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Clarendon Press, 1998); Ludovic Coupaye, “The Problem of Agency in Art,” in Anthony Forge, Style and Meaning: Essays on the Anthropology of Art, ed. Alison Clark and Nicholas Thomas (Sidestone Press, 2017).
For example, Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty, trans. Arthur Wills and John Petrie (1951; Routledge, 2023); Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (Vintage Books, 1964); Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Beacon Press, 1964); Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, vol. 1, Technics and Human Development (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967); Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, vol. 2, The Pentagon of Power (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970); Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (1977; MIT Press, 1985); Andrew Feenberg, Questioning Technology (Routledge, 1999); Andrew Feenberg, Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revisited (Oxford University Press, 2002); Judy Wajcman, TechnoFeminism (Polity Press, 2004); and Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Polity Press, 2019).
Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (1958; Univocal Publishing, 2017).
For example, Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Urbanomic, 2016).
For example, Materiality, ed. Daniel Miller (Duke University Press, 2005); Carlo Severi, The Chimera Principle: An Anthropology of Memory and Imagination (2007; HAU Books, 2015); Susanne Küchler and Timothy Carroll, A Return to the Object: Alfred Gell, Art, and Social Theory (Routledge, 2021).
John Tresch, “Technological World-Pictures: Cosmic Things and Cosmograms,” Isis 98, no. 1 (2007).
Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (1994; Stanford University Press, 1998), 49.
Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 25–51.
James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Perception (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986).
Ruth Oldenziel, “Introduction: Signifying Semantics for a History of Technology,” Technology and Culture 47, no. 3 (2006); Eric Schatzberg, Technology: Critical History of a Concept (University of Chicago Press, 2018); Ludovic Coupaye, “Danse avec les catégories: anthropologie de la technologie et anthropologie des techniques,” Artefact: Techniques, Histoire et Sciences Humaines 15 (2022).
Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech; André Leroi-Gourhan on Technology: A Selection of Writings from the 1930s to the 1970s, ed. Nathan Schlanger (Bard Graduate Center and HAU Books, 2025); Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects.
Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 162.
Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 57ff.
Ludovic Coupaye, “Ontologies in the Making or Ontogenesis? Yams and Printers as Autonomous Objects and Their Milieus,” in Ontologies in the Making: Anthropological & Archaeological Perspectives, ed. Quentin Letesson et al. (Presses Universitaires de Louvain, 2025).
Leroi-Gourhan, in André Leroi-Gourhan on Technology, 105–9.
See Yuk Hui, On the Existence of Digital Objects (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
Bernhard Rieder, Engines of Order: A Mechanilogy of Algorithmic Techniques (Amsterdam University Press, 2020).
Paul Kockelman, “The Anthropology of an Equation: Sieves, Spam Filters, Agentive Algorithms, and Ontologies of Transformation,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3, no. 3 (2013); Raffaele Andrea Buono, “Domesticating Robots, Domesticating Language: The Hylomorphic Paradox of ‘Openness’ in Large Language Models,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 36, no. 2 (2026).
There is indeed a line of investigation (or more accurately in my case a reading list) that goes through Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art (1934; Zone Books, 1992); Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (1936; Schocken Books, 1968); Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford University Press, 1972); Gregory Bateson, “Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art,” in Primitive Art and Society, ed. Anthony Forge (Ely House and Oxford University Press, 1973); Ernst H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order (Clarendon Press, 1979); David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (University of Chicago Press, 1989); Gell, Art and Agency; W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (University of Chicago Press, 2005); Philipoe Descola, Les formes du visible: Une anthropologie de la figuration (Le Seuil, 2021); as well as Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums (Berg, 2001), for instance when it comes to photography.
Forge, “Problem of Meaning in Art.”
Ludovic Coupaye, “A Viewpoint from the Foothills: Making Sepik Valley Images as Containers,” Journal de la Société des Océanistes 146, no. 1 (2018).
Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art (University of Chicago Press).
