“material” is a relic of industrialized language, and its employment in capitalist discourse tends to leave it somehow latent, accepting of its own subservience, its segmentation, its place on an assembly line, its life and death by way of a linear industrial process. industrial capitalism positions material as a constituent part of a commodity—something to be pillaged, exploited, and traded in bulk. the real story of material is, of course, much more nuanced than that, but the dominance of the manufacturing sector in the 18th and 19th centuries embedded this power relation into social discourse—just as the financial sector does now via language oriented towards neoliberal values which reaffirm the ethic of speculation. while the social relation to material has evolved since this shift towards speculation, it still carries this narrative of dominance; material has not been entirely “freed” of its subordination, though again, this sentiment alone does not give material enough credit. thereby i do not propose a disposal of the term altogether, but rather a soft pivot towards language which carries with it a different kind of rhetorical baggage that can be employed more productively in discussing those forms which are animated, alive, and authors in their own right. it is this that leads me to sculpture: if the speculative landscape “has the effect of making movable goods and possessions oddly unlike themselves” (vogl) through processes of financialized abstraction, then a material methodology—or rather, a sculptural methodology—is uniquely positioned to draw some truth, some likeness, from an analysis which positions speculation’s constituent and resultant forms as sculpture.