Matter Still Matters (in The Immaterial Age)

The recurrent arguments of immateriality, with its claims for shapeless functions and for information as raw material, continue occurring in a pervasively tangible world: people are surrounded by a universe of tangible artefacts, where relations among people, and between people and their world, are mediated by the concrete shape of artefacts and the tangible attributes of materiality. Everything is tangibly made of something: our clothes, the everyday objects we use, our devices, and our personal items. The assumptions of the all-pervading pre-eminence of immateriality are rather paradoxically faced with the dominance of materiality.The surrounding world is still firmly rooted in the physical substrate of matter, be it natural or artificial. Clearly, technology’s immaterial impact – either traditional or innovative – on people’s daily experience has enormously increased over time. For decades, the impact of technology as informatics, electronics, robotics, bioengineering, advanced material technology, and so forth has been largely interpreted as the agent driving the system of products towards the contraction of its material substrate to be substituted by immaterial processes and services. The claims advocated by policies of sustainability, in turn, have addressed dematerialization as the strategy for sustaining ways by which material product functions may be beneficially converted into immaterial performances. From the perspective of industrial products – in particular – the claims of dematerialization have largely implied a progressive emphasis on product performance through its communication and information components, overcoming more traditional perspectives grounded in tangible functionalism. Nevertheless, the empirical and social understanding of matter, as well as the tangible, human relation with the substance of things, remains the main part of the process of constructing the world, where everything is made up of substance: objects, personal belongings, and devices, whether technological or not