Quotes About Materiality

Keiner dieser Aufsätze beabsichtigt, die Materialität des Körpers zu bestreiten; sie stellen vielmehr partielle und sich überschneidende genealogische Bemühungen dar, die normativen Bedingungen zu klären, unter denen die Materialität des Körpers gestaltet und gebildet wird, und insbesondere, wie sie durch differentielle Kategorien des Geschlechts gebildet wird.

Hence, it is not that one cannot get outside of language in order to grasp materiality in and of itself; rather, every effort to refer to materiality takes place through a signifying process which, in its phenomenality, is always already material. In this sense, then, language and materiality are not opposed, for language both is and refers to that which is material, and what is material never fully escapes from the process by which it is signified.

For even if we know very little that is certain about spirit or soul, the true nature of the body, of materiality, is totally unknown and incomprehensible to us.

The friendship between my hand and this stone enacts an ancient and irrefutable eros, the kindredness of matter with itself.

If we can think of a place, the physicality of a place, as a kind of 'material,' I would say the landscape of Florida in particular was especially important while writing 'Isle.'

As an artist, I've always felt most comfortable outside of the art supply store. So domestic materials are the ones that most help inform what I'm trying to talk about and our familiarity as a whole - kind of the collective us, I guess.

What if we were to acknowledge that the nature of materiality itself, not merely the materiality of human embodiment, always already entails "an exposure to the Other"?

The more materiality there is, the less humanity there is

A lot happens to the concept of agency once nonhuman things are figured less as social constructions and more as actors, and once humans themselves are assessed not as autonoms but as vital materialities.

Each human is a heterogeneous compound of vibrant matter. If matter itself is lively, then not only is the difference between subjects and objects minimized, but the status of the shared materiality of all things is elevated. (...) And in a knotted world of vibrant matter, to harm one section of the web may very well be to harm oneself. Such an enlightened or expanded notion of self-interest is good for humans.

More consciousness means a lessening of the illusion of materiality.

You begin with the possibilities of the material.

Knowledge has a materiality, not unlike the materiality of a ladder, that can be used to gain access to places and worlds that were previously unimaginable.

Science is a method of logical analysis of nature's operations. It has lessened human anxiety about the cosmos by demonstrating the materiality of nature's forces, and their frequent predictability.

The Christian religion is not about the soul; it is about man, body and all, and about the world of things -with- which he was created, and -in- which he is redeemed. Don't knock materiality. God invented it.

It is not only that bodies can leave their residue in the things they produce (an insight that object studies has taught us), but also that objectness reveals the divergent, layered, and sometimes annihilating gestures that can make up personhood. More than memorializing bodies that might otherwise not be remembered, Li's porcelain woman explores what it would mean to instantiate through excess materiality the dematerialized nonbody.

It's extremely difficult to say what one actually means by 'sculpture' other than, in a provisional sense, it's something that goes on the floor or a pedestal, and loosely applies to a certain history of the use of that term.

You begin with the possibilities of the material.

In the beginning all souls were as a unity to the God-Force. As self added or subtracted that which was in keeping with God's purpose, ye added or subtracted from the blessings ye might be conscious of in materiality. Thus karma is builded. And the law is perfect - what ye sow, ye reap.

I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out the real world.

Nothing of this world is not in God. Substance is not the despised materiality of bodies that must be separated from God; it is God, God under the attribute of extension or materiality. Descartes is thus mistaken, according to Spinoza, in defining matter as extension, for matter must necessarily have a conceptual equivalent, an idea, not in opposition to extension but as one of the attributes of substance.

You do not exist. I think I exist. I am conscious of my own identity. I was born, and I shall die. I have arms and legs. I occupy a particular point in space. No other solid object can occupy the same point simultaneously.

From start to finish the potter takes hold of the impalpable void and brings it forth as the container in the shape of a containing vessel. The jug's void determines all the handling in the process of making the vessel. The vessel's thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that holds.

I was worried in the '80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall.