Thursday.
“Materiality, relationality, agency. ” Bang, three big words on the board. Those can’t be thoroughly explained just by the googling definitions. I know the words here; but I really don’t know the words well.
Materiality: “the quality of being composed of matter.” (google definition) I think what Adrian was trying to say here is that matter matters. It’s like when you were a child (when I was still a child), you think that everything has a living mind. You talk to it and then make it talk back. You even tell stories with them, playing around, directing your personal small play. (Sounds strange? Or not? That’s what happens when you are the only child. It’s the policy in China at that time. ) It is still rather dominating, speaking for the objects using my own language. Who knows what the things were thinking in their own way, maybe they were laughing at me.(IF they really had conscious. )
Relationality: “the state or condition of being relational.” In relation to this, we did a small activity writing down our own relations to a person and a thing. One of the relations I wrote for “the tree” is “existence”. The logic is like this: From what I see, there is a tree. I see myself sitting in the room. So, relatively, I exist because I am sure the tree is there, existing. Then I thought, does seeing really reflect the truth? Some may say no. But, “Cogito ergo sum”. Therefore, I exist. 😉 Quite a comic thinking process. As I dig deeper, googling Descartes, I find he had been pondering such questions a long time ago. There is a branch under the study of metaphysics, Ontology. The fundamental questions included “what is a thing?” and the relation to other things—”whereness”. I’m still struggling with such beliefs. Sometimes, I think objects, things are just a reflection of conscious, visualized thoughts; but other days I may believe that mind and body are separate. At the moment, I am inclined to support the former because I believe that there is an unsaid rule that governs the universe(or universes), a Dao. All things are inevitably related by such a connection. I’m not trying to be mystic here, just making an assumption. After all, we all came from that big bang and there’s such things like gravity—an invisible force that pull us together(compare to the “rule” I mentioned). I’m still hoping modern physics may give us an answer.
Agency: This is word I do not comprehend the most. It is used in different fields for different meanings. I suppose it means the agency that make relations between things possible. For example, money is the agency when my father has a duty to support me through childhood financially. The thing in between things is the agency.
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