Latour: “If there really is one thing that materialism has never known how to celebrate, it is the multiplicity of materials, that indefinite alteration of the hidden forces that enhance the shrewdness of those who explore them.”

For some time I’ve suspected that Marx failed to really turn Hegel upside-down. He just exchanged the contents within the same container. The container itself — idealism — was just emptied of mind-concepts and filled with matter-concepts. However, with Marx as with Hegel “All the phenomena of existence have mind as their precursor, mind as their supreme leader, and of mind are they made.”

The idea of a mind and the idea of a brain are both ideas. One who thinks of brains but does not interact with and allows stubbornly surprising real brains to intrude the idea of brains, has taken zero steps toward realism, however intensely one has thought those steps through and however vividly one has pictured the reality at which we must arrive. Perhaps a little more surprisingly, the same is true even of one’s own mind…

If you succeed in failing to do this, your prize is the entire universe. Then you can say:

Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

*

Here is the passage leading to this quote…

What do they become in this case? Thought applied to matter, itself conceived as form (in the third [“platonic”] sense of the term), so that, once again, form and thought repeat each other, and this repetition arouses the same enthusiasm among the rationalists as adequatio rei et intellectus. We have lost the materials, we have lost the technological detour, we have lost the clever artifice. When people say of technologies that they are neither good nor bad, they forget to add: nor neutral.

Fortunately, the investigator knows how to undo this amalgamation, since she finds herself situated at the same branching point as the one that had already almost made her miss the worth proper to the sciences. The scorn with which people view technologies comes from the fact that they are treated according to the same model that we saw used to misunderstand the work of reference. Just as there was, in epistemology, a theory of objectivity as “correspondence” between map and territory, there is in technology a theory of effectiveness as correspondence between form and function. Technology is believed to be an action stemming from a human being—most often male, moreover—that would then bear “on” matter itself conceived through confusion between geometry and persistence. Technology then becomes an application of a conception of science that is itself erroneous!

If there really is one thing that materialism has never known how to celebrate, it is the multiplicity of materials, that indefinite alteration of the hidden forces that enhance the shrewdness of those who explore them.