MATTER AND WHY IT MATTERS by Kirthana SUDHAKAR
What does the term materialism mean? Through the course of history, the term has had several connotations depending on your cultural background and personal world-view. In the 20th & 21st centuries, most interpretations view materialism through the polarizing lens of money. Meaning that the accumulation of material wealth may be seen as positive or negative depending on one’s perspective. When we take the concept of materialism, and apply it to cities, it becomes more complex and less comprehensive through linear interpretation. For example, take the case of one’s home. The home is the most primitive symbol of well-being. Historically the home and hearth retain the universal symbol of security. When we extrapolate this concept to the linear scale of modern day “materialism”, we enter into the realm of polarity between the “absolute despair” of homelessness, and the “excess” of a $14 million home in Beverly hills. The Alan Watts article titled “A true Materialist society”, delves into the concept of materialism and materiality as applied to all aspects of life. This piece sees the author reinterpreting the idea of materialism through the lens of Zen Buddhism. Thus, it brings to light some of the problematic subconscious thought processes that “demonizing” of materialism can lead to. This demonizing, if left unchecked, can pervade food habits, body image, clothing, wealth and the home.
A: Show me the money! B: What money? The second reference I’d like to make for this paper is a September 11th Lips Lecture by Saskia Sassen. This lecture addresses the idea of materialism, employing the example of the real estate market in New York City today. Sassen begins this lecture with a definition of what the concept of “high finance” means to her. She takes us through the precedents established to the growth of high finance: the discovery and meaning of “the digital” in the 22
1980’s; and how technology became a part of our lives in the late 90’s. “The steam engine right now in our advanced economies, is high finance. High finance is grandly different from banking. The bank sells money, it’s commerce, we all need it, it’s been around for centuries and centuries in one way or another. High finance, one way of thinking it, which gets at what I want to get at, high finance sells something it does not have. The bank sells something it has: money.” Expanding on the steam engine analogy, the growth of high finance has exceeded anyone’s imagination. This exponential and explosive growth transformed the global economy; much like the steam engine. She illustrates how this is important in the context of the city, by describing the concept of “dark pools”, as private networks that account for a large majority of money transactions. These mechanisms employ the materiality of global cities. Worldwide real estate assets comprise 60 percent of the world’s material assets (Sassen, Sept 2018). Cities like New York, San Francisco, London and Tokyo, hold high value in the eyes of wealthy investors, who invest in large quantities of real estate. In the context of cities, Sassen sheds light on how the polarizing concept of materialism can be stretched to its limit. In the style of “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”; “Is a house where no one ever lives, still a home?” This brings us to the reason why the awareness of these mechanisms is important. In Sassen’s words: “The working city is a very special space that has outlived us for many generations. The city is one of the few places today where those without power, get to make a history, a culture, an economy.
