Wet ⇌ Dry ⇌ Thick ⇌ Thin ⇌ (Getting Beyond the Raw and the Cooked) In the now famous move led by Lévi Strauss to awaken the humanities and social sciences to the minutiae of life and the way in which one might be able to access this minutiae, quite a strange, diverse and oddly “old fashioned” approach (read by this: scientistic, possibly sexist, homophobic, racist, classist, anti-art – the usual culprits) seem to have been quietly creeping back into both theory and practice. Nowhere is this more clear than in the current research environs, where that which is seen to be rigorous and objective manages at the same time to strip out the complex, the messy, the “that which does not fit in” in order to support a logic which itself admits only a problematic and seemingly privileged set of actors to its boardroom metrics and budgetary arrangements. An international call was thus initiated, with the result that this current set of responses takes up the vital theme(s) of materiality, but this time from the very arena so often relegated to a second class status: the senses. This is not done in contradistinction or binaric divide from, or privilege over, “reason.” Quite the reverse. The focus on the senses (perhaps we could say, echoing Deleuze, on the logic of sense) is to remind all who may need reminding (including ourselves) that intellectual rigour can never be siphoned from the very blood poetics to which it is attached. The artists, scientists, philosophers, designers, mystics and archivists whose work constitutes this volume of Zētēsis have set out to reconfigure materiality/ies by taking seriously art, including the arts, humanities and sciences, in all their excremental, messy and oddly slippery sensualities. No longer do we have to ask the endlessly annoying question “can artists work with scientists?” (yes); no longer do we have to ignore the political implications of “objectivity” and “neutrality”. This is to say, further, that no longer does materiality itself remains wedded to a Universal reason, dialectically historical, speculative, realist or otherwise. Instead, it is made manifest, becomes “present”, through an iterative and immersive expenditure steeped in the immediate terrain of multiversal logics. Instead, this neither-nor ana-materialism marks out the oddly cathected feed-back loops of the raw and the cooked, ones that form radically discontinuous economies (libidinal or otherwise) and therewith, establishes the limits (of meaning, identity, carnality, hunger, smell) without so much as leaving a trace. Welcome to Zētēsis: research generated by curiosity. A provocation – if ever there was one – to dare to be rigorous in all our possible uncertainties and practical romanticisms. It’s a delicate game we are playing after all – one not just for fools and horses.