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8 hesitate to indicate the practical consequences of their theories: Latour drew the outlines of a new ‘politics of nature’ that forces us to rethink political ecology, 10 whereas Bredekamp insisted on the ‘right to life’ that should also be attributed to images and artefacts. 11 But, above all, such approaches raise the question of what ‘agency’ means, if it is also assigned to things. As Alfred Gell, in many respects the most rigorous theorist of the agency of objects, has already argued, there can be no attribution of agency to objects without at least considering the question of whether there can be any agencywithout intentionality and consciousness. 12 The harsh criticism that such approaches have provoked indicates a fundamental conflict between ontology and phenomenology in our dealings with objects. As language often mirrors ontological presuppositions, the problemmight be connected to the limi- tations of our semantics: applying the phrase ‘agency of x’ to things or artefacts seems, at first sight, to suggest that these objects ought to be regarded as full equivalents to (human) subjects. Whereas Latour’s actor-network theory proposes to question and to overcome the established dichotomy of subjects and objects, the inherent ‘logic’ of our semantics tends to reinstate such dualisms and thereby persistently shapes our ontologies and epis- temologies. This is one of several reasons why theories that try to do justice to the ines- capable human need to attribute the power to act to objects, and to interact with them as if they are animate or even sentient, are often criticized. As Latour’s and Bredekamp’s theories tend to perpetuate the familiar semantics that implicitly attribute agency to one single actor, they seemingly assign the same agency that humans are capable of to objects. For that reason they are charged with animism, fetishism or the anthropomorphisation of the inanimate. 13 From such a point of view the actor-network theory or Bredekamp’s concept of image-act would simply attribute to things what previously was taken for a unique capacity of human beings. If that were the case, we would still stage the same drama—merely having exchanged the actors that perform the roles. However, the broad and productive reception that, for example, the actor-network theory has found in anthropology, archaeology, art history, and many other disciplines, points to the fact that it not only enlarges the scope of ‘actors’ in social life, but changes the way in which actions and interactions have to be conceived of. If the central assump- tions of Latour’s actor-network theory are taken seriously, we have to break with the tendency to attribute agency exclusively to one person or even one object. Insteadwe have to understand ‘agency’ as an effect that is produced in and through the interactions between human actors and artefacts, in networks, art nexuses, collectives and processes. From such a perspective, agency is not exercised by only one actor but decentralised and 10 See: Latour, Politics of Nature , 2004.  11 See: Bredekamp, Das Beispiel Palmyra , 2016; and Bredekamp, Image Acts , 2018 [2015], p. 282: ‘It is in the right to life that images may […] claim for themselves that there arises the command that one care for them, use them, but also address them critically.’  12 See: Gell, Art and Agency , 1998, pp. 12 –26; and van Eck, ‘Alfred Gell,’ 2018.  13  See, e.g.: Wiesing, Sehen lassen , 2013, pp. 78–105; and Büchsel, ‘Das Ende der Bildermythologien,’ 2014.  14 Knappett and Malafouris, ‘Material and Nonhuman Agency,’ 2008, p. XI.  15 Gell, Art and Agency , 1998, pp. 12 –26 and 28–38.  16  Latour, Pando-