Materials against materiality

TLDR

The article argues that material properties are processual and relational, generated within fluxes between substances and the surrounding medium, and that objects are active because they are caught up in lifeworld currents, drawing on Gibson’s tripartite division of environment. The article seeks to reverse the emphasis on materiality of objects toward the properties of materials and to describe these properties by telling their stories. Drawing on James Gibson’s tripartite division of the inhabited environment into medium, substances and surfaces, the article argues that forms of things are continually generated and dissolved within the fluxes of materials across the interface between substances and the surrounding medium.

Abstract

This article seeks to reverse the emphasis, in current studies of material culture, on the materiality of objects as against the properties of materials. Drawing on James Gibson's tripartite division of the inhabited environment into medium, substances and surfaces, it is argued that the forms of things are not imposed from without upon an inert substrate of matter, but are continually generated and dissolved within the fluxes of materials across the interface between substances and the medium that surrounds them. Thus things are active not because they are imbued with agency but because of ways in which they are caught up in these currents of the lifeworld. The properties of materials, then, are not fixed attributes of matter but are processual and relational. To describe these properties means telling their stories.