What’s the matter? we question a problem or situation at hand…
Matter of factly… meaning actually in fact…
Mind before matter.
When researched, “The term matter traditionally refers to the substance that all objects are made of…” I can go further, yet substance is where we can stop. There is printed matter, abstract matter, atoms and electrons, protons, and neutrons, which are a the basic building blocks of a much more intangible thing, word, person, place, feeling, icon….
Linguistically, matter is “a situation, state, affair, or business: a trivial matter……….
….importance or significance…
..reason
… things sent by mail
…a substance discharged by a living body…”
What then, matters? Seemingly everything and nothing, as all things are calculated in dealing with the presence or absence of matter.
If matter didnt matter, would we exist? Would anything exist?
With existentialism approaching, the multiplicity of what matter is, does, does not, and has, creates a sovereign world within six simple letters. Matter composes all things. Is matter therefore, an inadvertent creator or has society created a hell of a loaded bag of meanings for this word.
Roland Barthes, an early 20th century thinker/talker/writer/reactionary and man of abundant critiques for the bourgeois, should be called to the podium. Has “matter” become inflated by society’s temptation to bastardize and/or project ideas?
Barthe broke his work into three hierarchical levels:
FUNCTIONS ACTIONS NARRATIVES
The term matter can also be broken into the above categories of meaning. Matter’s physical components are functional in that they contribute to a larger whole; matter brings about action in that it has mass and occupies volume and/or …
Lastly, semiotics, which like matter, is composed of parts that together are signs; and semantics, which like mass and volume combined to create matter, holds the action of combining signs which create messages. Phew. Narratives are stories or partial stories.++++++++++++
Barthes would most likely say Yes! to the latter with his ideas and theories conveyed in Mythologies (1957). The most fundamental meaning for matter, [protons, neutrons, et al] has had its legs splayed opened and parts thrown about by a bourgeois society using pugnacious tactics for implication that there is something entirely wrong with the makeup and components of a situation.
WHAT IS THE MATTER? There is no simplistic formula here. A multi-faceted argument, theory, and even adversary, the word matter itself deters clarity.
Dissecting the phrase, “What’s the matter”, infers the presence of protons, neutrons, electrons operating together to create a mass and volume…
QUESTION: How the fuck did “what’s the matter?” come to mean “what’s wrong”?
