material, materiality

http://hum.uchicago.edu/faculty/mitchell/glossary2004/material.htm
The words material and materiality carry ambivalent meanings in vernacular
English. On the one hand, material is defined as "things that are material,"
which emphasizes the physical aspect of things; on the other hand, it means
"(in various non-physical applications) something which can be worked up or
elaborated, or of which anything is composed." The second definition can be
better understood through its relationship to the first definition that, again, can
be differentiated into two major meanings: 1) something material is that which
"pertains to a matter as opposed to form"; 2) that which "pertains to matter or
body; formed or consisting of matter; corporeal." [1] Thus, although material
designates physical matter, it also assumes potential from its association with
non-physical matter.
Charged with philosophical and aesthetic implications throughout the modern
period, the multivalence of material, often accompanied by the word
"materiality," has surfaced as one of the crucial aspects framing the
characteristics of media. The central word, matter, came into English from the
old French materie, also from an ultimately traceable word, materia , from which
'root' meanings are derived. As a Latin word, materie refers to a building
material, usually timber (with which the word may be etymologically associated);
thence, by extension, any physical substance of anything. [2] Raymond
Williams points out that there was a tendency to associate material with 'worldly'
affairs and an attendant distinction, of a class kind, between people occupied
with material activities and others given to spiritual or liberal pursuits. Its
associations with the notions of "form" and "content" in late eighteenth century
German philosophy, constitute the current use of the adjective 1) and 2), and
help us to understand this context. For Kant, materie was to be distinguished
from substance, or the permanent in experience, since it only refers to the
distinctive nature of the object's appearances. Bearing surface value, its
physicality was less emphasized than its symbolic meaning, and considered
"secondary" or "superficial." [3] The moment when material acquires physicality
as a central meaning is captured in Hegel's understanding of the term. Hegel's
materie refers to physical matter, in contrast not primarily to "form," but to mind
or spirit and to the abstract or ideal. It is interesting to find the irony residing in
this transitional moment when the Kantian notion of material gains its
physical/tangible aspect. [4] Thus, Hegel's articulation of the "content" of art
objects was accompanied by the emphasis on the physicality of materie, which
entailed the polemic split between material and content. It was Marx who took
up the binary opposition of material and content, and yet subverted the
significance of the two concepts; material came to embrace extended meanings
charged not just with an element of a physical object but also with an irreducible
component of what shapes the phenomenal world. [5] By defining the arts as a
product of the material foundation, or the "base," Marx broadens the meaning of
material:

...Greek art presupposes Greek mythology, i.e. nature and the social forms
already reworked in an unconsciously artistic way by the popular imagination.
This is its material. Not any mythology whatever, i.e. not an arbitrarily chosen
unconsciously artistic reworking of nature. [6]
Here, material carries its most comprehensive meaning yet as the most
fundamental structure of the phenomenal world versus the superstructure to
which art belongs. Marx's further revelation concerning the relationship between
art as a form of production and commodity production in general opens the
sequential questions of the value of art as commodities and the fetishism of
commodities. [7] Traces of these observations are found in the extended
meaning of the word material in the early twentieth century.
One significant symptom of the extended meaning of material is sensed in the
field of the fine arts and art criticism. Marx's questions regarding the value of art
were succeeded by twentieth-century scholars who were engaged in the anxiety
of the work of art as a thing whose value can be judged by its material quality as
an object. Walter Benjamin questions the lack of "aura" in the work of art in the
modern technical reproduction that is indefinitely reproducible through printing
and photography. [8] Although the focus of the argument lies in the new mode
of production that marks the advent of the modern era, the discourse on the
"material turn" in the field of art in the early twentieth century can hardly be
missed. While Benjamin was to a degree nebulous in the shifting mode of
technical production and re-evaluation of art, Clement Greenberg, as an art
critic, made an enormous effort to redefine the value of the work of art. "It is by
virtue of its medium that each art is unique and strictly itself....For the visual arts
the medium is discovered to be physical; hence pure painting and pure
sculpture seek above all else to affect the spectator physically." [9] Greenberg's
emphasis on the significance of physicality in visual arts as such came out of
his defense of the avant-garde art that was undergoing the tendency to reveal
the "materiality" of pictorial space often times through the use of incongruous
materials for the effect of differentiating the surface. Inherited from Greenberg,
Michael Fried continued to evaluate art in its pure form in defense of avantgarde art against the newly emerging minimalist art of the 1960s. By suggesting
the binary opposition of "art" and "objecthood," Fried is concerned with what
should be retained in "art"--the quality that goes beyond the condition of being
non-art. The overwhelming discourse of the "objecthood" of art reveals the
tension between Fried's emphasis on the form over the specificity of material
and the minimalists', or "literalists" in Fried's word, focus on material proper.
"Like the shape of the object," says Fried, "the materials do not represent,
signify or allude to anything; they are what they are and nothing more." [10]
Thus, although Fried inherited much from Greenberg, the battle here reveals
that the focus of the discourse on material was shifting dramatically. Material
that had been merely part of form, as opposed to content/meaning of an art,
became the defining factor of what is art and what is not.
And yet, "the material turn" entailed multivalent factors and an equally complex

reception in the early twentieth century. Varying in details, the shared

characteristic of the phenomenologists in the early twentieth century shows the
newly charged meaning of material in relation to the ontology of things. For
instance, Heidegger loaded a full range of meaning to the word thing (ding),
with its widest sense which comprised anything that is 'a something not
nothing.' [11] By including any thinkable categories of being in the concept
"thing," Heidegger denies the strict definition of the things as limited to physical
quality and releases it to the point where it carries the most abstract meaning.
The material aspect of things thus is blurred, and the very meaning of material
becomes associated with the abstractness of things, which prompts the use of
its nominalization, "materiality" in the late twentieth century.
With criticisms from various fields on the strictest definition of material in Marx's
vocabulary, the second half of the twentieth century saw an interesting
amalgamation of the very Marxist notion of material and the Heideggerian
reception of the material and things: material that is immaterial. This doubleedged meaning can be best articulated by the word "materiality." Materiality is
defined currently as "that which constitutes the 'matter' of something: opposed
to formality; the quality of being material; material aspect or character; mere
outwardness or externality." [12] The significance of the notion, conveying the
quality of being material despite its being non-material in actuality, has been
recognized in the burgeoning media discourse of the 1960s. A prominent
example is found in Marshall McLuhan's notion of media as "extensions of
man," which includes any material in unfixed form, or even formless material,
such as electricity. Here, the notion of materiality plays a crucial role in locating
the media as a paradigm, which is articulated by its relationship to form and
content of a medium. By emphasizing the "content" of the electric light,
McLuhan underscores the materiality of this seemingly contentless as well as
formless medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human
association and action. [13] His axiomatic phrase, "the 'content' of any medium
is always another medium," [14] first problematizes the immateriality of any
formless medium, and thereby enunciates the latency of materiality in any
medium. Raymond William's insight into media as social practice can also be
read in a similar context. By tracing the modern idealization of art and the
reification of medium as the result, Williams emphasizes medium as "the
objectified properties of the working process itself." [15] Thus, by focusing on
the "relations" embodied in media that are constructed by subsequent material
processes, i.e. printing and distribution, Williams urges the reconsideration of
modern media as social practice where any medium functions as a habitat
rather than just as a specific material means of communication.
These attempts to understand media beyond the materiality of them in a literal
sense have accelerated inquiries into the relations between different media
where often another medium takes its form. Friedrich Kittler's delineation of
diverse mediums in his discursive historiography of modern media captures this
aspect well: "Sound and image, voice and text are reduced to surface effect."
[16] As Kittler connotes, the "surface effect" is one of the multifaceted features
of the materialities of modern media, which implies that "any medium can be

translated into another." [17] The notion of materiality also plays a significant
role in differentiating modern media from "new media." For instance, Lev
Manovich's overemphasis on the "newness" of media derives from his limited
reception of materiality in its literal sense; by dismissing the materiality of new
media such as a computer, of which the functioning process itself embodies
specific materialities, Manovich underestimates the common ground shared by
modern media and "new" media. [18] The most extreme perspective on the
materiality of medium is found in Jean Baudrillard's provocative characterization
of a medium as a system administered by the code that is interwoven with a
technical apparatus (sound,image, etc.) and a corporeal one (gesture, sexuality,
etc.). " Reciprocity comes into being," says Baudrillard, "through the destruction
of mediums per se." [19] Composed of the "immaterial" code, yet still to be
"destroyed," a medium here is fully charged with its materiality. Forged within
this discourse, yet more fundamentally questioning the negative reception of
material in the twentieth century, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht envisions perhaps the
most expanded meaning of material/materiality by far. Citing Lyotard's words,
Gumbrecht suggests:
The fall of matter and materialism does not lead to the immaterial pure and
simple; rather, it branches into the immaterial and its material "sites" or
"supports" (French "supports"). Instead of substantial objects and their
meanings, we get information overload and a new hardness of "supporting"
materials, a new "performativity" of things and bodies. [20]
Thus, the point becomes that what is at stake is not a search for the reality of
the material nor the materiality of the real. Rather, Gumbrecht looks for the
underlying constraints whose material, technological, and procedural potentials
have been dismissed by interpretational conventions.
JeeHee Hong
Department of Art History
Winter 2003