Referring to Anselm Franke, the notion of animism envisions a cosmos where everything is alive and capable of communication. It challenges conventional boundaries by suggesting that all entities, including inanimate objects, can act as agents or “persons.” This perspective shifts the focus from "being" to "becoming" and questions the ontological separations fundamental to modern Western thought.

Modernity is rooted in the naturalisation of dualistic separations, such as those between nature and culture, subject and object, human and non-human, and life and non-life, which are not inherent but socially constructed and treated as given. These divisions permeate all levels of symbolic production, deeply influencing aesthetics and knowledge. Positivism in modernity depends on an imagination of negation, a product of these divisions, with animism playing a crucial role in shaping this concept of negation, condensed into a single term. In the late 19th century, ethnographers viewed animism as a remnant of "religion" that modern civilisation needed to suppress to achieve progress.

Since the mid-20th century, with the rise of communication media, computation technology, cybernetics and other system theories, animism has ceased to be modernity's excluded counter-image. Old dualistic oppositions have been replaced by relational paradigms rooted in networks of distribution and translation. This shift reflects a transformation in how we understand the world, moving from a focus on absolute external and regulated objects to modulation process and feedback loops, revealing a convergence between animism and new systematic thinking about flexibility and adaptation.