ABSTRACT

The inverted Platonism of technoscience does not attend to immutable features of reality, but anticipates what lies just beyond reality. Technoscientific practice and technoscientific theorizing seeks to perfectly control the phenomenal world by imagining elusive objects, as elusive as the vanishing point of engineering. All of this can be further explored by considering another example, namely technoscientific theories of friction that take so-called vanishing friction events as their objects. When there is no friction whatsoever between two surfaces, their sliding motion could be perpetual. The theory thus speaks of 'superlubricity' as a state of matter akin to that of 'superconductivity'. Frictional duality could also refer to the various symptoms of ambivalence in a rigorously scientific paper that is dedicated to technoscientific theorizing. The notorious perpetual motion machine is emblematic of a technoscientifically inverted Platonism, and so is the nanowire, the frictionless surface, meta-materials or graphene.