Colloids

Substances such as mist, mud, slime, dough, foam, paste and gels, which trouble and breach recieved categories of solid and fluid. Liminal matter, apparently formless?

Dispersed and continuous. Repetition and mediation. Surfaces folded through substance? (Szerszynski 2021)

Amorphous continua? Greater emphasis on internal differences and relations?

Granular materials such as sand can sometimes be solid enough to walk on, but at other times let things sink into them; they can flow – and when agitated even behave as a gas. Liquid foams can keep their shape for a while, but also float and flow; some solid foams can exhibit all the various properties of solids yet have the mass and conductivity of a gas, and even – for example the built environment, with its rooms and cupboards, corridors and tunnels, arches and doorways – have flows passing through them. — Bronislaw Szerszynski, “Colloidal Social Theory” (2021)

And we can go further ‘up’ the scalar dimension to include anything with hollows or cellular structures – mountains, buildings, animal bodies, institutions – or mass flows of reiterated, ostensibly separate but in some way exchangeable entities such as traffic, clouds, crowds, nations, flocks of birds or planetary rings. — Bronislaw Szerszynski, “Colloidal Social Theory” (2021)

Viewed colloidally, human history as a whole could be likened to a very slow submarine avalanche, a self-organising process of dissipation that has entrained more and more matter over the millennia. Through the proliferation of causal and functional relations between its constituent parts, human society has achieved a degree of autopoietic liberation from its environment. — Bronislaw Szerszynski, “Colloidal Social Theory” (2021)

approaching the world as continua — as “stuff’ — requires concepts that emphasize the immanent (involving relations internal to an entity), the inclusive (permitting the coexistence of contrasting or contradictory properties), the gradual (allowing properties to manifest differentially at different points), and the generative (involving the constant production of form). — Bronislaw Szerszynski, “Toward a Continuous-Matter Philosophy” (2021)

• [&] See also: surfaces?