Towards an Ethics of Material Imagination
“… I don’t believe any longer that we can afford to say that it is entirely out of our hands. We made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over.” - James Baldwin, from “Notes for a Hypothetical Novel”
By unscientific and utterly subjective reckoning, at least 90% of the interactions we humans have in urban / semi-urban capitalist societies are mediated by material objects and material systems designed by others, who we likely don’t know, made (by strangers) from materials that are sourced in unfamiliar ways, from locations we’ll probably never visit, by the hands of yet more strangers.
Processed materials dictate the experience of human life, from moment to moment. We move, eat, legislate, communicate, love, die, heal and give birth all whilst tethered to non-human materials. We tacitly accept physical and psychological connections to materials at every step of our lives, and in so doing we accept (for better or worse) the manner in which these materials are pulled from the earth, rearranged into useful form, then swept back into the earth as useless detritus.
If the earth is composed of the materials that mitigate the rigours of daily life with transitory sensations of comfort and convenience, these same materials have prior purpose as the components of the foundational systems upon which the possibility of life itself is predicated. At this moment, we are witnessing these fragile systems of life becoming nonviable thanks to the ways we extract material for human comfort and experiencing the collapse that occurs when too many segments are removed from the impossibly complex puzzle of life upon which we depend.
Our tacitly accepted value systems of natural materials scaffold a structure that is rapidly buckling under its own weight. For just under two centuries, we have actively embraced an extractive material economy that might be described as “Dig/Arrange/Consume/Burn/Dump”. This extractive model offers occasional comforts for those in one segment of the equation, and vast riches for those in another part. It underpins social structures that centre consumerism and colonialism, competitive enclosures of wealth, endless cycles of stultifying work, and fetishized militarism. A new relationship between human comfort and natural materials is urgently needed.
All materials are “natural”. Petroleum, copper, iron, cobalt, lithium.. these are all “natural materials”, but prevailing methods for extracting them cause horrific damage to adherent ecologies and societies. Similarly, the term “natural materials” can signify “materials that come from living organisms”. Here too, common methods for apprehending the useful materials of life itself leads to depletion and ecological imbalance, resulting in system collapse and species extinction. However, it is in the area of material “extraction” from living systems that there is broad promise for shifting away from extractive economies and towards emergent, regenerative ones that allow diverse systems of life to find both comfort and abundance.
I am currently researching the history, current state and future of Portuguese cork farming and production. In fifteen years of working with cork as a material for design within built environments, I have found it to be a material that provides measurable physical and psychological comfort to human activity. However, in the harvesting, production, use and recycling stages of cork, the source system of life (cork forests) is not depleted but fortified. As humans interact with cork trees to gather material, the forests themselves grow denser, suck more CO2 from the atmosphere, develop more complex root systems, shelter greater biodiversity, and nurture landscapes that are increasingly resilient and resistant to threats of fire and desertification.
Herein lies the real opportunity. If we can identify more value in materials that, like cork, are inherently regenerative in the way that we extract them from their sources, and find new use applications to replace materials that do not come from regenerative sources, then we may improve our chances for thriving within new climatic parameters.
Further, if we expand our ontological understandings of materials and find new portals of material experience, we can also find new portals for supporting all life systems of Earth. By extension, we will find new paths towards social structures that are just, equitable and regenerative.
If one accepts the notion that the vast majority of our intentions and actions are mediated by materiality, and that we are largely unaware of the context and consequences of this materiality, then it bears shifting our attention to Jacque Derrida, and his conception of intention and emergent worlds, or as paraphrased by Jane Bennett, “..things in the world appear to us at all only because they tantalise and hold us in suspense, alluding to a fullness that is elsewhere, to a future that, apparently, is on its way.”
As Americans (like me) are taught from a young age, materiality and consumption tantalises with the fulfilment of an “inalienable right” to the pursuit (but not the achievement) of happiness.
How we humans value and act through material determines the ethics of how we act in the world. As a designer working with cork, I often hear others refer to a general attraction to the material, describing it as “warm”, “soft”, “gentle”, “pliable” and other adjectives that also describe the best bits of sensorially experiencing human bodies. This regenerative material is one that transmits a subliminal kindness in those that experience it.
So let’s imagine that our interactions with materials are the builders of our social structures. In our assumed right to pursue happiness through materialistic means, we bring about consequences and effects that are both products of our societal structure and the cause of how these structures evolve. If we accept that our social structures are not as fair, healthy and joyful as they might be, then it bears imagining new material practices that might have a proportional effect on the societies around them.
The MA Material Futures course is a space where this occurs. In triangulating design knowledge with scientific rigour and poetic curiosity, the proposals that emerge from the course challenge tacitly accepted concepts of materiality. MAMF students careen headlong into the muck of materiality, proposing artefacts and actions that embrace the material connection to Earth, body, politics and society. It is this sort of active, critical making that has the power to seed future worlds of greater justice and abundant life.
Baldwin, James. Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son. New York: Delta Book, 1962.
Bennett, Jane, 1957-. Vibrant Matter : a Political Ecology of Things. Durham :Duke University Press, 2010.
Derrida, Jacques. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” Trans. David Wills. Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (2002): 369–418.