In The Importance of Being Earnest Jack Worthing was given his surname by Mr Thomas Cardew, who happened to have a first-class ticket for Worthing in his pocket when he found him in the cloakroom at Victoria station – the Brighton line. When told, Lady Bracknell exclaimed: ‘The line is immaterial!’ This turns out not to be true, since it emerges that Miss Prism left a baby at the cloakroom of the Brighton line.
Was it immaterial that Mr Cardew (whose Christian name – ‘James, or Thomas’ – Lady Bracknell also assumes is immaterial) had a first-class ticket? Not at all, for his wealth made his granddaughter an eligible bride for Jack.
I mention these questions of immateriality or irrelevance because I sometimes run up against materiality used in a sense that trips me up. An investor concerned about the healthiness of Nestlé selling so much chocolate was reported as saying: ‘We see ESG [environmental, social and governance] as a financial materiality.’ He didn’t mean it was solid matter, like cocoa butter, but that it was financially relevant. Lawyers now constantly discuss whether a false statement, made perhaps by Donald Trump, is material – whether it had a relevant effect. So they talk of its materiality.
Architects, determined to be more annoying, seem to speak of materials and materiality as though they were the same thing. Some architectural theorists make reference to the French writer Gilles Deleuze (1925-96) in discussing the difference between designs on a computer and those built of bricks and mortar. Other Marxian thinkers talk of ‘materialism without matter’. I think they are barking up a dead tree.
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