On Broken Glass: For a Semiotics of Anti-Materiality

Scholars have mostly focused on “positive materiality,” studying the meaning of materials and techniques in the production of artifacts. Matter, however, means not only when it is shaped into materiality but also when it is destroyed. The essay that follows is meant to represent a first tentative enquiry into the meaning of anti-materiality. The study of destroyed artifacts aims at pointing out that matter is always materiality. It always conserves a shadow of meaning, independently from how profoundly its earlier form was disintegrated. The crepuscular significance of damaged materials has mostly escaped the attention of scholars. The essay attempts an initial exploration of it, proposing a condensed cultural history of broken glass. It therefore seeks to combine, in the same exposition, a chronological and a structural overview of broken glass, from Greco-Roman antiquity until early modernity.