Several years ago, I started using the phrase languagematerial in an attempt to resist deeply embedded dualisms that insist on separation between language and matter. That schism is so tangible, so real, so assumed that it is almost impossible to argue against it. The assumption can be seen in how we speak about ‘things’ and it exists even in places where one might expect a little more circumspection. Self-confessed materialists (who tend not to believe in any kind of God and therefore, in varying degrees, transcendence) still speak about mental health, for example, implicitly separating the mind from the body. But of course it is the body – what else could it be? Alan Jasanoff’s (2018) book The Biological Mind is an excellent place to start if one wants to de-programme or disabuse themselves of an assumed separation. And even if only relying on pop-medicine, lately, it is becoming clear that what we have in our guts – or rather what we don’t have – has an impact on how we feel. The Alexander Technique is another good place to visit. It teaches you to recognise that memories are held in the body’s musculature (of which the brain is one area) understood within the practice not as metaphor but as lived, embodied experience. Following this, it teaches you to inhibit learned responses across an individual’s system that may be unhelpful for posture or vocalisation.
Work by A’level students who I worked with earlier this week. I asked them to take some words I had written, cut them up and reproduce in anyway they wished. The words come from BHAM💥 The Black Hole Aesthetic Machine, part of The Doughnut(W)Hole, a Wrong Biennale Pavilion.The workshop was supported by by The Mayor’s London Borough of Culture. BHAM💥 The Black Hole Aesthetic Machine will unfold as a reading/ performance at Putney Library, London on the 19th of March, 2025, from 6 PM. Booking required: Order ticket’s here
Language is so often thought of as immaterial – the medium of ‘transcendence’ – while the body is mechanical and earthly. Descartes compared animals to machines because they did not have a mind or a language and therefore no link to God, while humans did and therefore existed as dual creatures. But when you think about it, there is no language of any sort outside of matter; no voice without flesh or hardware, no type outside a page or a screen, no thought outside a body – one that may or may not include brain matter (in other words it could be mechanical, biological, or a combination). So how can language be separate, except as a category we have imposed in order to make sense of reality? Carlo Rovelli’s (2016: 225) lovely description of human categorisation insisting on arbitrary separations in Reality Is Not What It Seems was a blessing to read, as it gave me the confidence to stick with my languagematerials: “reality is not made up of discrete objects. It is a variable flux”. (By the way, we will be looking at Rovelli’s Reality is Not What it Seems at the next Doughnut(W)Hole online reading group. Book here).
Earlier this week, as I put off getting up and going to work, instead opting for The Guardian’s Long Read, A century in the Siberian wilderness: the Old Believers who time forgot, a phrase about words and matter leapt out at me:
“The Old Believers emerged in the mid-17th century after Patriarch Nikon, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, amended the liturgy to bring it into harmony with the Greek Orthodox version. The reforms altered the spelling of ‘Jesus’ – at a time when letters were understood as something close to the literal flesh of God …” (Pinkham, 2026, my italics).
What is so interesting for me, a devout atheist incidentally, is to see how my insistence on languagematerial could potentially be read as deeply conservative, in that it returns us to a time before the Cartesian split between matter and mind became so ‘real’ at it stopped being questioned at all. Could I be just as entrenched as the Old Believers appeared? Perhaps that reading would also be a result of habitual thinking – because it implies linearity and forward-facing progressiveness, as if history naturally moves from error to enlightenment. That what was once believed can never again be revisited as context changes.
However, like dualism, linearity, forward facing progressiveness is becoming far less certain. Liberals – again, I count myself as one, provided it is accompanied by the word socialist (yes, liberal socialism is a thing) – around the world are coming to terms with the fact that the so-called world order seems to be heading backwards. Steven Pinker calls this moment a ‘democracy deficit’. Life expectancy is no longer certain to improve with each generation in the West. The illusion of peace in Europe is collapsing after almost a century in which a fantasy about ‘the end of history’ was perhaps believed by some to be as true as the Cartesian split long seemed. But it is not only current affairs that show us we do not have to, or indeed should not, accept linearity and forward-facing progressiveness as ‘natural’. Our digital culture is networked and while we once internalised the linearity of writing, we now internalise the rhizomatic meanderings that underpin digital media; itself a vast network of server farms, water usage, and devices – i.e. hardware and earthly matter. Non-linearity may seem new to many of us, but life in the form of historical hairpin bends and backward social swerves rather than neat forward-facing progression has been recognised for some time. Marshall McLuhan identified this in the 1950s (borrowing from those who came before him), and in the 1980s Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari wrote their now famous A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia in which the rhizome dominated. For those privileged enough to have had the resources and inclination to study, the explosive and chaotic moment we now face in our evolution may not come as such as a shock.
Much of my work has been about coming to terms with a different way of perceiving evolution and history. (From why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers/ to recent work where I included the phrase ‘sedimented-ripple time’.) Reading about the Old Believers and their firm belief that words were the literal flesh of God excited me – it made me see that my languagematerials, no matter how insistent many are on an implicit separation, has a long history, not as metaphor, but as ontology. In fact, the night before (as so many peri-menopausal women do, while drifting off to sleep) I was listening to a podcast – which I shall have to go back to as I missed the end – about Owen Barfield. He too was fascinated by ‘the word’ and Christian dualism, as explored briefly in the article below. Perhaps I will write more on him soon. For now… What a lot of exciting links to make one morning, and even before my second coffee.
Refs:
Jasanoff, A. (2018) The Biological Mind: How Brain, Body, and Environment Collaborate to Make Us Who We Are. New York: Basic Books.
Barfield, O. (2025) Owen Barfield and the Mystery of the Word, The Owen Barfield Literary Estate, 19 December. Available at: https://owenbarfield.org/owen-barfield-and-the-mystery-of-the-word/ (Accessed: 23/01/2026)
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hermitix (2026) The Philosophy of Owen Barfield with Mark Vernon [podcast episode], Hermitix, 21 January. Available at: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/hermitix/episodes/The-Philosophy-of-Owen-Barfield-with-Mark-Vernon-e3dlgq6 (Accessed: 21 January 2026).
Pinkham, S. (2026) A century in the Siberian wilderness: the Old Believers who time forgot, The Guardian, 22 January. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/22/forty-years-in-the-siberian-wilderness-the-old-believers-who-time-forgot (Accessed: 21 January 2026).
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