Elden’s The Birth of Territory offers a crucial starting point because it shows that even the apparently self-evident spatial basis of politics is historically produced. Territory is not simply land, nor merely terrain, but a political technology: a bundle of legal, technical, cartographic, military and administrative practices through which space becomes measurable, governable and sovereignly appropriable. Elden’s distinction between land as property, terrain as strategic ground and territory as juridico-technical space reveals that the modern state is not only an institution but also a spatial epistemology. This matters because contemporary struggles over borders, resources, migration and sovereignty often treat territory as natural when it is in fact a historically contingent apparatus of power. The political implication is profound: if territory was made, it can be remade. Elden therefore destabilises the spatial ontology of modern politics and opens a path toward alternative spatial imaginaries grounded not in domination but in plurality, use and contestation.
Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture extends this destabilisation from space to ontology itself. His central claim is that the Western division between nature and culture is not universal but historically specific. Through his analysis of the Achuar and other Indigenous cosmologies, Descola demonstrates that animals, plants and spirits may be understood as persons, social partners or intentional agents rather than as mute resources. His four ontological regimes—animism, totemism, naturalism and analogism—show that Western naturalism is only one possible way of distributing continuity and difference among beings. The importance of Descola’s intervention lies in its refusal of anthropological provincialism: the West is not the neutral observer of other worlds but one ontological formation among others. By making non-Western cosmologies theoretically serious, Descola reopens the question of what counts as society, agency and relation. This is indispensable for any ecological politics because environmental crisis cannot be addressed while “nature” remains conceptually external to social life.
Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature provides the ethical and political critique needed to understand why the nature/culture split has been so destructive. For Plumwood, Western rationality has been structured by a logic of dualism in which reason is opposed to nature, mind to body, culture to matter, masculinity to femininity, and human to animal. These dualisms are not innocent conceptual distinctions; they are colonising structures that justify domination. Her concept of backgrounding is especially important: both women’s reproductive labour and ecological systems are treated as invisible supports for the achievements of the dominant subject. The master identity denies dependency precisely on what sustains it. Plumwood’s contribution is therefore to link feminism, ecology, anti-racism and anti-colonial critique within a shared analysis of domination. She does not ask for a simple reversal in which women or nature become morally superior; instead, she calls for a non-hierarchical recognition of both continuity and difference. Her work transforms environmental ethics into a politics of dependency, reciprocity and accountability.
Pasquinelli’s The Eye of the Master brings this critique of mastery into the domain of artificial intelligence. Against the dominant mythology that AI imitates the brain or approaches autonomous intelligence, Pasquinelli argues that AI is better understood as the automation of labour’s intelligence. Machines become “intelligent” by extracting, formalising and recombining the cognitive, perceptual and cooperative capacities embedded in human work. His examples—from de Prony’s calculation tables and Babbage’s engines to cybernetics, the perceptron and machine learning—show that automation has always been tied to the division, measurement and command of labour. The “eye of the master” names not only surveillance but the managerial gaze that abstracts collective practice into calculable operations. This analysis is decisive for contemporary AI ethics because it shifts attention away from speculative fears of machine consciousness and toward material questions of labour, exploitation, bias and social hierarchy. AI is not outside capitalism; it is one of capitalism’s most sophisticated infrastructures for capturing collective intelligence.
Chen’s “Beyond Tools: Generative AI as Epistemic Infrastructure in Education” sharpens this point by showing how AI systems reorganise not only labour but also knowledge formation. Chen argues that generative AI should not be understood as a neutral tool but as epistemic infrastructure: a system that shapes what users notice, judge, question and learn to do. His analysis of MagicSchool AI and Brisk shows how educational AI may produce epistemic substitution, in which machines perform the cognitive operations through which teachers develop professional judgement. Lesson planning and feedback are not merely tasks to be made efficient; they are practices through which pedagogical expertise is cultivated. When AI generates the lesson plan or pre-selects the feedback, the teacher risks becoming a reviewer of machine output rather than a primary epistemic agent. Chen’s framework—skilled epistemic action, epistemic sensitivity and habit formation—offers a rigorous way to evaluate whether AI sustains or supplants human agency. His argument complements Pasquinelli by showing that automation’s danger is not only economic deskilling but epistemic impoverishment.
Fisher’s Capitalist Realism explains why such technological and ecological problems are so difficult to politicise. Capitalist realism is the condition in which capitalism appears not merely dominant but inevitable: the only realistic economic and political system. Fisher’s famous claim that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism captures the paralysis of contemporary political imagination. His analysis of culture, education, mental health and bureaucracy shows how systemic contradictions are privatised as individual failure. Depression, anxiety, boredom and exhaustion become personal pathologies rather than symptoms of post-Fordist capitalism. Fisher is vital to the present synthesis because he identifies the ideological atmosphere in which alternatives are pre-emptively disqualified. Even anti-capitalist gestures can be absorbed as lifestyle, spectacle or ethical consumption. Thus, ecological design, democratic urbanism and responsible AI cannot succeed unless they also confront the deeper structure that makes capitalist priorities appear natural, unavoidable and “realistic.”
Poikolainen Rosén and Heitlinger’s article on more-than-human design offers one practical response to this impasse. They argue that human-centred design, while historically valuable in challenging purely technical approaches, remains inadequate in the face of ecological crisis because it continues to privilege human needs over multispecies flourishing. Their concept of more-than-human design draws on posthumanism, new materialism, Indigenous and pluriversal thought, animal-computer interaction and systems theory. The living root bridge in Meghalaya, India, illustrated in their article, becomes an emblem of a different design logic: one in which living organisms are not merely raw materials but participants in an ongoing ecological relation. Yet the authors are careful not to romanticise such examples; they ask how more-than-human design can be implemented, evaluated and scaled. This practical orientation is crucial. More-than-human thinking must become more than critique or speculation; it must reshape design methods, participatory processes, technologies, policies and infrastructures.
Purcell’s Recapturing Democracy supplies the democratic framework needed to connect these concerns to urban politics. He argues that neoliberalisation has transformed cities into competitive growth machines, where land is valued primarily through exchange value and democratic decision-making is treated as inefficient. Yet Purcell refuses despair. Neoliberalisation is hegemonic but never total; it is uneven, contradictory and contested. His answer is not a fixed model of democracy but a set of democratic attitudes: habitual, oppositional orientations that help movements pursue more just urban futures. Drawing on Lefebvre’s right to the city, Purcell insists that democracy must be spatial. It must concern who has the power to shape urban space, whose needs count, and whether the city is organised for collective life or capital accumulation. His empirical cases from Seattle and Los Angeles show that democratic struggle is already happening in redevelopment conflicts, environmental justice campaigns and infrastructure debates. Purcell therefore provides the political vocabulary for turning relational critique into urban practice.
The conceptual convergence among these texts is striking. Elden historicises territory; Descola pluralises ontology; Plumwood critiques dualistic mastery; Pasquinelli exposes AI as captured labour; Chen diagnoses epistemic substitution; Fisher names the ideological closure of capitalist realism; Poikolainen Rosén and Heitlinger propose more-than-human design; and Purcell advances radical democratic urbanism. Together, they show that domination works by making historically produced arrangements appear natural. Territory appears as neutral space; nature as passive matter; AI as objective intelligence; education as efficiency; design as user service; capitalism as realism; urban growth as common sense. The task of critical theory is to denaturalise these formations and reveal the relations, exclusions and dependencies they suppress.
The strongest synthesis is therefore this: modern power operates through infrastructures that organise agency while concealing their own contingency. Territory organises political authority; naturalism organises beings; dualism organises value; AI organises labour and knowledge; capitalist realism organises possibility; human-centred design organises participation; neoliberal urbanism organises space. Each infrastructure narrows what can be seen, said, valued or done. Yet each is also vulnerable because it must be continually reproduced. The point is not simply to reject territory, technology, design or institutions, but to democratise and ecologise them. A more just future requires infrastructures that cultivate agency rather than extract it, sustain epistemic judgement rather than replace it, and recognise nonhuman beings as participants in shared worlds rather than background conditions.
The principal limitation across these works is the difficulty of moving from critique to durable institutional transformation. Descola and Plumwood powerfully unsettle Western ontology, but translating ontological pluralism into policy remains difficult. Pasquinelli and Chen expose how AI captures labour and judgement, but alternative technical infrastructures are still underdeveloped. Fisher diagnoses capitalist closure with unmatched force, yet his work can leave readers searching for strategic footholds. Poikolainen Rosén and Heitlinger explicitly confront the implementation problem, but more-than-human design remains emergent and faces serious tensions around representation, scaling and conflicting species interests. Purcell’s democratic attitudes are promising precisely because they avoid rigid blueprints, yet they also depend on movements capable of sustaining long-term struggle against entrenched capital.
Even so, the combined contribution of these texts is substantial. They invite a shift from mastery to cohabitation, from extraction to reciprocity, from efficiency to judgement, from property to use, from inevitability to democratic possibility. Their shared political lesson is that alternatives are not created by imagination alone; they require practices, institutions and infrastructures that make different relations durable. Another world is not simply waiting to be imagined. It has to be designed, taught, governed, inhabited and defended differently.
References
Chen, B. (2025) ‘Beyond Tools: Generative AI as Epistemic Infrastructure in Education’.
Descola, P. (2013) Beyond Nature and Culture. Translated by J. Lloyd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Elden, S. (2013) The Birth of Territory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Fisher, M. (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester and Washington: O Books.
Pasquinelli, M. (2023) The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence. London and New York: Verso.
Plumwood, V. (1993) Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London and New York: Routledge.
Poikolainen Rosén, A. and Heitlinger, S. (2025) ‘Introducing More-Than-Human Design in Practice’, Interactions, 32(2), pp. 54–56.
Purcell, M. (2008) Recapturing Democracy: Neoliberalization and the Struggle for Alternative Urban Futures. New York and London: Routledge.
