ABSTRACT
In the nineteenth century the Western world began to experience the onslaught of materiality as industrialization smashed into the conservative social world of European daily life. That shock wave was exported to the rest of the world and now tears at the social fabric of every society. During the Industrial Revolution and the associated immense urban transformation, severe non-correspondence began between the material component of social life and the sociality of verbal meaning and human action. An appalling dissonance developed between materiality and sociality, most brutally expressed in the consequences of mechanized warfare and industrialized killing.
