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Damaged-World-Objects
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This philosophy essay uses the idea of a seabird killed by plastic waste to argue that pollution and other human-made materials have become powerful global forces that shape life on Earth. It draws on two philosophers' theories to suggest humans are now deeply entangled with technological products they created but can no longer control.
This chapter brings Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy into conversation with Michel Serres’s concept of world-objects to rethink questions of technology and ecological crisis in the Anthropocene. Beginning with Chris Jordan’s photograph of a seabird killed by plastic waste, it argues that pollution functions as a global technological object—an extension of human organs and desires that detaches from the body and transforms the conditions of life. Through Whitehead’s notions of prehension, causal efficacy and presentational immediacy, the chapter develops an account of experience as radically relational and non-anthropocentric, showing how contemporary life is shaped by non-optional entanglement with technological artefacts that have become environmental forces. Then, drawing on Serres and Leroi-Gourhan, it reframes technology not as discrete objects but as evolving processes that externalise and redefine human capacities, generating world-objects such as pollution, nuclear waste and biotech that reshape evolution and global co-existence. The chapter concludes by proposing that to live within the damaged conditions of the Anthropocene requires rethinking human subjectivity as a subject-superject emerging from relations with world-objects that humans have produced but can no longer control.
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Research digests by email
When a large batch of papers lands in the Atlas, we read through it and send a short write-up of what stood out.