Editorial: The Comings and Goings of Space and Matter

Abstract

Many of the contributions to this issue of Soft Power address – directly or indirectly – tendencies that for some time have been defined with expressions such as material turn or spatial turn to proclaim the superseding of formalist and constructivist visions of the world and society, or to indicate the restructuring of the idea that ours is, above all, an era of dematerialization, despatialization, and deterritorialization.
In point of fact, in the 1980s Michel Serres – with the persuasive power of his prose – in Passage du Nord-Ouest had already announced the decline of the hegemony that formalism, logicism, and nominalism had conquered in the 20th century over science culture, then also extending their influence to philosophy and the humanities. Finally – according to him – knowledge was once again devoting its attention to the material world, the multiplicity of its forms, the variety of its spatial dimensions, the unstoppable flow of its transformations; in his opinion, a real dimanche du monde was welling up and he celebrated it with his research, recognizing its most important expressions in the geometry of the fractal objects of Benoît Mandelbrot, in René Thom’s catastrophe theory and in that of Ilya Prigogine’s dissipative structures.

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