Latour on Materialism

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Close Reads Podcast Introduction

1:00This is Close Reads. A philosophy podcast with Mark and Wes. I'm Wes Alwyn. And I'm Mark Linsenmeier.

1:09Why, it's another new reading. We were alerted to a short article, five pages by Bruno Latour, from, I see, 2007, called, Can We Get Our Materialism Back, Please? So I have not read this, but it was cited for what purpose I don't quite actually remember.

Graham Harmon's View

1:30In one of the books I'm reading by Graham Harmon for some upcoming Partially Examined Life episodes, he's evidently a great admirer of Bruno Latour, but dismisses in general Latour's view as, I think, maybe not materialist enough of trying to reduce everything to its effects on other things. So that if you want to say, what is this glass? You just talk about all the relations that the glass, what function does the glass serve? What is it, how does it act in relation to everything else?

2:02And in particular, treating everything, I think, with Latour as a social construction, I think. Mm-hmm. Isn't Latour the one famous for trying to argue a quark as a social construction? Maybe I'm making that up. But he later seemed to reverse course on that.

Latour's Reversal

2:20And this may be the paper or one of the papers where he does that. Right. What was the year of the very famous book of his that we actually read for the Partially Examined Life? We read back in 2019. We have never been modern from 1993. So quite a bit before this. And yes, Harmon seems to think that Latour has gotten more right-minded in a number of ways over the years. I know one of them was a rejection of Foucault-style,

2:52just everything is just power relations and there's no objective morality buried in there. Again, this just goes with your characterization as a social construction guy. But I don't know too much about what this actually is. Yeah. Do you want to get us started? Sure. Shall I read the abstract? Sure. If it's good enough, we might just be able to stop with stuff right there.

Abstract and Article Discussion

3:15Technology is epistemology's poor relative. It still carries the baggage of a definition of matter handed down to it by another odd definition of scientific activity. The consequence is that many descriptions of things have nothing thingy about them. They're simply objects mistaken for things. Hence, the necessity of a new descriptive style that circumvents the limits of the materialist, in effect, idealist definition of material existence. This is what has been achieved in the group of essays on thick things

3:46for which this note serves as an afterword.

Materialism and Idealism

3:51All right. Well,

Materialism and Idealism

3:51let's hope this afterword is summative. Yes. After some. You want to keep going? Well, I'm just even wondering if most philosophy papers don't have abstracts, right? Scientific papers have abstracts and I think they're not meant to tease things, just an odd definition of scientific activity. I feel like a scientific aspect would actually tell you what that definition is or it would have a little more

4:21actual content in it than we're seeing here. Yeah, you and I have a lot of experience essentially well, I was going to say writing abstracts but they're a little bit more involved than abstracts. What is this journal ISIS that it's in? That's just a major philosophy journal, right? I mean, I assume it's the Journal of the History of Science. It's the ISIS newsletter. Yeah, there you go. They're very interested in these subjects. So it's philosophy.

Philosophy of Technology

4:53Yeah, I don't know if the abstract is just this journal requires it. I don't know. It's weird. But, or maybe it's a product of the digital repository from which this was downloaded. Possible. Yeah, I don't know what, you know, the consequences that many descriptions of things have nothing thingly about them. Well, what would that possibly mean? I mean, it seems like Harmon wants the notion

5:24of object to be expanded beyond physical things. Well, if they have nothing thingly, I mean, maybe he is pointing, you know, talking about social construction or reduction to relations. I don't know. We probably shouldn't speculate. Okay. Here we go. Something has happened to materialism. In many ways, it seems that we have come full circle from the early modern controversies over the various abilities of material entities. for a short while, materialism seemed to be a foolproof appeal to a type of agency and a set

5:55of entities and forces that allowed analysts to explain, dismiss, or see through other types of agencies. Okay, we're going to get an example here. Typically, for instance, it was possible to explain conceptual superstructures by means of material infrastructures. Thus, an appeal to a sound, table-thumping materialism seemed an ideal way to shatter the pretensions of those who tried to hide their brutal interests behind notions like morality, culture, religion, politics, or art.

6:26Do you want to say anything so far?

6:30Forces that allowed analysts to explain to dismiss, okay, foolproof of appeal to a set of entities and forces that allowed us to dismiss other types of agencies. So that sounds like the myriology that Harmon was talking about. You could reduce macroscopic objects to atoms and things like that. So if that's the case, we could kind of anticipate that he wants to say that the things that we're calling matter like atoms and quarks

7:01are more like abstract scientific models and they don't have the right there. We model them on macroscopic objects, which might be hard and right, but they don't actually share that. So, but and then the possibility of explaining conceptual superstructures by means of material infrastructures. I don't know what that means. I mean, that sounds like a conceptual superstructure just might mean the way that we cut up the world for everyday purposes. So the midsize

7:32objects, cups and squirrels and things. Well, let's just say we explain the differences between those insofar as there are authentic differences by means of their matter and the structure of matter. So gold is one thing, water is another. We have their, you know, we have their macro level properties that we interact with and we can see the distinction, but we can explain it by appealing to H2O

8:02and what's the, what's the, what's the symbol for gold? is it AU or is that silver? AU. All right. I mean, ironically, a table thumping materialism, if we're right, the table doesn't, right, the table ends up getting reduced to its component molecules and things. So that's, you're literally thumping something that is going to be reduced in your ontology, if that's what we're talking about. It's mostly space.

8:33It doesn't matter. And, but that little thing at the end, the reason I wanted to stop those who hide their brutal interests behind notions like morality, culture, religion, politics, or art. So I'm not exactly sure. I mean, this sounds like the, you know, the feminist critique of using supposed scientific objectivity to mask your totalizing oppressive viewpoint, but I'm not really sure because that's not using art,

9:03for instance. Well, in the case of Marx, he thought of himself as a materialist, right? He was shattering the pretensions of bourgeois ideology, representing its own interests as if they were in the general interest or moral or something like that, when they really, it was just their brutal interests. So yeah, that kind of materialism, I think, you know, Marxian materialism was supposed

9:34to shatter that in a sense. We'd have to say specifically how. You could look at, you know, you could maybe make an argument that Nietzsche's version of this, that there's a materialism to it, right? He wants to be deflationary about morality, but anyway. Yes, that is much closer than my guess, which was sort of confusing who's being attacked with who's doing the attacking here. Let's just keep going. Yeah, go next sentence there.

10:04But that's precisely the point. It was an ideal and not a material way of making a point.

10:12Materialism, in the short period in which it could be used as a discussion closing trope, implied that what now appears in retrospect is a rather idealist definition of matter and its various agencies. I'm not enough of a historian to put dates on this short period where the materialistic explanans had its greatest force, but it might not be totally off the mark to say that it persisted from the era of post-Marxism, Marx's own definition of material explanation being infinitely

10:42more subtle than what his successors made of it, all the way to the end of the century sociobiologists who tried without much success to insert their own simplistic mechanisms into the glorious lineage of Darwin. Yeah, so here it sounds like reduction of we might reduce all of human culture to a biological

11:12substrate, for instance, or be reductionist in the Freudian, what some people might think is the Freudian sense, where all of culture is just sublimation of sexual instincts or something like that, is that what he's pointing us to now? Shatter the pretensions of those who try to hide there. I think it's probably something simpler than that. I think that because he says, oh, even Marx is not guilty of this, it's the idea of just the dumbest sort of the world is just particles in the

11:43void bumping against each other causing things and everything, all of science is supposed to be reducible to this. And so he's going to say that there's something wrong with this conception, that this is not either scientifically based or it's not properly materialist in some sense. We'll have to see. All right. So, you know, we can say that about identity theory and philosophy of consciousness, right? Consciousness just must be reducible to the brain. Yes, definitely. And then anything

12:14else we could say about culture and morality and all the rest of it, we could be deflationary about it from a materialist point of view. This is kind of what Dostoevsky represents really well in his novels and associates with nihilism. Why does this materialism appear to us in retrospect as much too idealist? The reason it's been worked out only recently in various commentaries on Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy. Under the rubric of

12:45matter, two totally different types of movement had been conflated. first, the way we move knowledge forward in order to access things that are far away or otherwise inaccessible. And second, the way things move to keep themselves in existence. We can identify matter with one or the other, but not with the two together without absurdity. Of course, we might marvel at the miracle of a correspondence between the geometrization of the ways we know and the

13:15geometrization of the things that are known, but this is because we commit wittingly or unwittingly a little sleight of hand and explain this spurious correspondence by the fact that the, quote, primary qualities of the objects known are themselves geometrical. That is easy to do when all the other qualities, those that will become the secondary qualities, have been carefully eliminated one after the other. All right. So there's an objection here to, well, maybe let's go

13:47back up to the top. I do not get these things because I would not have thought matter refers to movements at all. If anything, it would refer to objects in the void, you know, causality generally. But those are not the types of movement he's, what he's talking about, right? The way things move to keep themselves in existence. That sounds Aristotelian. Yeah, unless we're thinking, unless we get fancy about it and think, well, an atom,

14:18right? It must have moving components in order to exist. It's, you know, the most fundamental level matter must be movement. And if he's referencing Whitehead, maybe this is exactly what he means, right? So you need circular movement. The form persists, but the form persists by this, this kind of repetitive movement. And I, and I've made the association between that and Aristotle before. So I think you're, it does look very Aristotelian and

14:48maybe that, maybe that's what Whitehead is doing in part. I'm not sure, but. What's, what's this other type of movement? The way we move knowledge forward in order to access things that are far away or otherwise inaccessible. Why would anyone think that that is a definition of materialism as opposed to materialism being a metaphysical position and this is clearly an epistemic technique? Yeah. I mean, I, I don't know it just, unless you, unless he wants to say that the movement of knowledge forward and involves

15:18reducing everything to spatio-temporal movement, right? And then we, so, so maybe he's saying it, but he's conceding broadly that there must be a being at work being itself, but then wants to say we shouldn't reduce that to spatio-temporal, right? What moves knowledge forward is this, is this capacity of science to reduce everything to equations and what Harmon is going to associate with the continuum. I mean, later on we get

15:49the, the objection to primary qualities, which is really just a recapitulation of Kant, right? We can do with the primary qualities what we did with the secondary qualities, which is just to say they're in the head and not out there, but for the science, it's very important to, and this I agree with, to scientific theory of matter, well, it at least starts out being important, you know, as it was for Galileo and Locke, that one can say,

16:19well, yeah, the geometrical properties of things are the things in themselves and they are the things to which we have direct access so that, yeah, when we experience the red rose, red is just in our head and it's a product of the relationship between our faculties, the way our body and mind happen to be structured and this thing out there and that produces the red, but the redness is to be explained in terms of primary

16:50qualities and light bouncing off something and the rose and then coming into our eye and thus producing the red. You need, you need, you know, if you're going to have secondary qualities, you need to be able to appeal to things in themselves which cause them. So anyway, so he's making a very, very standard objection to that. Does the idea of geometrical here literally mean geometrical or is he, is it just a shorthand for saying law-like, accessible

17:20by science? So we reduce all the messiness, right? This is, so it's an attack on scientism. We reduce all the messiness to just what is tangible, what is, I mean, it's interesting that he, that does, would we say then democracy is something far away or other, otherwise inaccessible and we reduce it to shapes. We reduce it to things that can be measured amounts of,

17:51of various. So I'm not sure what the things far away that he was referring to in the earlier part. But if we, if we say that geometrical here just means law-like, then the issue is, oh, look, our science, our, our equations that we come up to explain things, look how simple and streamlined and elegant they are. Isn't it amazing that we're able to do that because the logos is also in things themselves? Well, they're all, it's only in things themselves because you've

18:22in advance stripped away anything that is not quantifiable from reality and said, oh, that's merely a secondary quality. Although what's left, the primary qualities, those are so geometrical and law-like.

18:36Yeah, I think generalizing it to logos probably makes sense. I think when he says we move knowledge forward in order to access things that are far away and otherwise inaccessible, I think the, the otherwise inaccessible is of course something like an atom, which we, uh, we can't see exactly, but we have to theorize and, and posit as a model and in order to explain phenomena that we are more

19:06directly acquainted with. Well, why would that be, why would that conflict with the, the way things move to keep themselves in existence as something on the atomic level? So, yeah, I'm as a, as a scientist who I'm, I'm theorizing about these little tiny bits and when I theorizing that about them, I say, this is the way that a gold atom continues to be itself by having this internal motion. There's, I don't see any sleight of hand or this seems

19:37very compatible. Yeah. But I, I think what he's saying, I mean, I was speculating that what he's saying is the way things move to keep themselves in existence might be more Aristotelian. It might be something else and we shouldn't equate it with mathematical equations about spatiotemporal entities. That's the thing that can move knowledge forward. That's the thing that gives us technology. That's the low hanging fruit in a sense, but, um, we ought not

20:09to conflate the reality and whatever fundamental dynamism is at the bottom of reality with the dynamism that science gives us. Now that that's purely me speculating because I don't, because I do find it surprising that he's embracing what seems like a more Aristotelian. And again, maybe it's white head as well. Um, view about the fundamental dynamism of things. It's that, which is a view that I'm very fond of. Does Aristotle say that the things themselves, the object of

20:40the study has a logos and that is why it can be grasped. I mean, it's, this seems very compatible with what I know about Aristotle, but I just didn't recall him making that. I mean, that's, I'm, I'm putting it in by saying it's logos. It's, it's the, the Heraclitian, uh, formulation that, uh, you know, fundamentally things are measurable ratios. You know, that's why science, the world is, is explorable by science.

21:10Do you, do you see that as anti Aristotelian or very Aristotelian?

21:17Well, I'm not sure. Like during our metaphysics, Aristotle metaphysics episodes, I, so I tried to kind of draw a connection between the concept of an atom and that kind of dynamism of being at the bottom of things. And then Aristotle's idea of being at work, being itself, that sort of dynamism, dynamism. And that's a bit strained, obviously, or maybe very strained because, um, for Aristotle, the dynamism seems to

21:49come from the, uh, well, it, it comes in a sense from the form as a final end, but it also keeps the form going, but let's not get into the details of all the, all the causal stuff, but you know, how, how does that work with Aristotle? It's a bit more mysterious. How it works with science is, is much more straightforward and involves space, spatial matter in space and move matter moving in space. So I, I, you know, does era would for Aristotle, does it involve like micro level

22:20entities moving around? I don't not on the face of it. I don't know them. I don't know how compatible. I mean, you're bringing my mind to his objections to pure materialism that you can't just have a Lucretius, a Democritus type, just stuff that you have to have the form. You have to have them, uh, merged in this way is that the fundamental unit is the formed matter, not just matter in which form would.

22:51So maybe this is the contrast that he's pointing out is that the idea of something moving to keep itself in existence is the Aristotelian one. And, uh, the other one, I still wouldn't put it in the way that, uh, Latour does here, the way we move knowledge forward in order to access things that are far away or otherwise inaccessible. But what, what fundamentally makes that the case is that there is observable dead matter, right? If you say that there's something

23:21fundamental about forces that are, not directly observable, um, then you don't, you know, I'm just thinking of the, uh, the telescope or something like we don't observe the gravity. You just observe the positions of the planets and you come up with your equations based on that. So that seems compatible with just atoms in the void. So it's, it's atoms in the void versus being at work being itself. It seems to be the, the thing that

23:53he, he thinks that materialists are committing themselves to both, which I don't know that I agree with that because I feel like the being at work being itself is only for Aristotle scholars. I don't know that that's a, that's a, I, I understand the comparison to, uh, you know, our model of the atom, but I guess I've never really heard, uh, a, a, a physicist or chemist say, and, uh, you know, that's what makes the atom. What it is, is because it has this motion, like the characterize it as

24:23fundamentally motion, but perhaps you read more than I have in this area.

24:29Yeah. I mean, it's, it's right. It has to be, it has to, you don't think it's fundamentally motion.

24:37I mean, it's motion of electrons or an electron shell, right? You know, it gets complicated, but it's, it's, I think what's the, the important thing is, is that what we, what we experience as something relatively static and persistent at a macro level is produced by change. And I think Aristotle was very interested in this idea that becoming somehow underwrites being, um, change underwrites staying the same. And yeah, at that level, it's all

25:08buzzing, confusion, and movement. And then we get what looked like relatively comparatively, right? The atom is a very, you know, it can be a very stable entity, but it's, um, but it's, but it is because the, the movement is all, is all circular in a sense that the electrons don't just fly off into the void. The thing doesn't just, uh, dissipate and collapse because of the movement. The movement has to be repetitive and, and ordered.

25:38So, so yeah, I mean, that, that's my association, but I think it is. Well, and that's probably different than I think it's important even in physics. Yeah. Right. That's not democracy. That's not when you say atoms in the void or something, it's, it seems like it's something more static. Let's just get into the paragraph out. See, well, for, for democracy, this is one word for democracy, right? The, um, uh, or for Epicurus, it was Lucretius that had the swerve, right? So yeah, things are moving, but, but

26:09also the, the theory, you know, from, from Epicurus and I don't know how it relates to democracy, but is that you just have all these atoms flying around and they accidentally concatenate into order the kinds of things that we see. But then there's some principle of why they would persist that way and not fall apart again. But, so it's almost like natural selection. Um, and swerve is very important because it is sort of like the mutation part of natural selection.

26:39You need, you need to try all the different possibilities before something gets selected. Um, but anyway, all right. Yeah. Let's just continue to read. This is my turn. The application of this point to technical entities is rather straightforward, but it is well worth insisting on since the history of technology has for so long been a bastion of the idealist materialism I've just mentioned. Um, I wish he'd say more about how it's idealist. Yeah, he sure has it. Uh, cause it's an interesting idea and

27:11we ought to be told what it is. I mean, he's, he's alluded to it, but all right. We can still understand James Watts's beautifully drawn designs of a steam engine without any difficulty, even though steam engines themselves have all but vanished for any piece of machinery to be drawn to specs by an engineer on one hand should be on the one hand or to remain functional without rusting and rotting away on the other requires us to accept two very

27:43different types of existence.