I use both terms of immaterial and material throughout all of my essays and while it would be funny to never explain it, I feel like actually defining them would be important to maintain consistency. Even if in my own eyes both terms can be understood through contextual usage, an outsider may not fully understand.
Immateriality influences materiality but all immateriality is rooted in materiality— materialism trumps immateriality as it is the basis of immateriality. The materiality is inherently unlimited because of its true incomprehensibility as one cannot fully understand it in its entirety. However, the material is comprehensible because of social agreement of its consistency. Even if we do not know that everyone is seeing the same river, because we all agree that it is the same river, we treat it as such. By extension, any interpretation of the material— the immaterial is limited.
Immateriality can quickly transform and change, such as ways of expressing wealth through fashion, beauty, and hobbies. Most immateriality happens cognitively and can be transformed over time. What doesn’t change is the material influence as a result of wealth and power. While the 1% engage in hobbies and activities that differentiate themselves from the people, those hobbies are prone to changing, but what doesn’t change is the real manpower they can easily access due to their material influence.
Layers of Immateriality
- Base Materiality, if all human structures fall apart such as the economy, government, etc; it is the raw building blocks for immateriality to be created from. A tree can transform from a religious symbol to a source of fuel potential, but at its core, it is a tree. Materiality is always prone to transformation by immateriality according to how it inspires and in exchange how it is seen.
- Basic Immateriality is what I also call as material in many of my other essays, as it is the simple transformation of the base materiality. The root of most power is directly related to the ease of access to material resources. It is the power that is immaterial, but the power’s ability to obtain material resources is not. Even if the power is not being actively used, it is agreed upon by others often enforced through said material accessibility.
- Advanced immateriality are structures that are disconnected or attempting to disconnect as much as possible from the base material. Often this advanced immateriality is expressed through the creation of culture and jobs. The act of creating art digitally is so disconnected from the base material actions of extracting paint from tubes, dipping a pen into an ink jar, and playing with physical instruments. The act of investing and trading with cryptocurrency run by machines is completely severed from real resource acquisition.
Getting involved with advanced immateriality will always be connected to a material source that should not be ignored. Creating digital art will always be made on physical programs built with mined silicones and metals often powered by non-renewable energy. Mining cryptocurrency requires fresh water cooling systems when it overheats.
Those who have base material accessibility make barriers of immateriality to blur avenues making tangible resource acquisition difficult and vague. The more society agrees that advanced immateriality is permissible and interchangeable for real material accessibility, it creates an effective distraction from garnering real power and influence. At the end of the day, if the ability to access base material resources is difficult despite having supposed immaterial influence, you still lack real world authority.
In the 21st century, we are so disconnected with physical processes that it is altering the way that we think. There are entire jobs that do not see the real material results of their actions, leaving their impact incongruent to their executive decisions. Hyperfocusing on immateriality within culture is a tool used by those with real power to blind the people from their exclusion to material resources.
People have been so obsessed with advanced immateriality that it completely ignores basic immateriality and base materiality’s influences. It assumes that decisions made in advanced immateriality are done in a vacuum, without subconscious influences shaped by material impacts.
A Cultural Example
In base materiality, there is no such thing as race. There are such minute biological differences between races, on a genetic and medical level there is no difference between humans in exception to negligible external traits or features. Still, race is a social construct made in a world where humans are attempting to make strict boundaries of things that are much more vague, transient, and everchanging.
With basic immateriality, even if race is not real, there are still physical patterns people pick up on to view and treat others differently. There are enough patterns within human groups to pick which groups to subjugate or fight against, resulting in the development of unique cultures and histories. There are real societal implications on how people are elevated or oppressed due to being born within the socially agreed construct of race.
Finally, with deep immateriality as it recognizes the base materiality but also assumes an immaterial assumption of decisions being made within a vacuum, it turns itself into parody. It knows that race is not real but transient and hyperfocuses on the cultures that are built off of race, coming to the conclusion that race is a choice and can be changed at will by covering itself in the culture that the race has created.