Entity to Event: From Literal, Mechanistic Materiality to Probabilistic Materiality

Materiality is a word now much in vogue. A term bearing all kinds of implication and suggestion, it is enjoying its current popularity as if it were a notion born yesterday to fulfill the appetite of pixel-plagued bit-weary early millennial writers who have discovered a taste for ‘stuff’ – the matter of the real put into opposition (wrongly, I believe) with the immateriality they attribute to the virtual. Myths upon myths, these concepts build on oppositions and binaries that come to us out of classical philosophy as well as the prohibitions that the Abramic religions institutionalized within their teachings – so that the pure and the impure, clean and dirty, virtuous and vice-ridden map their hard orthodoxy onto the distinction of matter as always aligned with the earthly, the physical, and most tainted of all, the realm of the senses, the body – the flesh.