I just came across a wonderful short essay from 1992 (translated 2001) by Paolo Virno, called The Two Masks of Materialism.

Virno suggests that materialists are fundamentally interested in the unity of life and philosophy. To that end, they don two kinds of “character masks”:

the “sociologist of knowledge” tells you about theory’s non-theoretical origins

the “sensationist” recovers the sensible basis of abstract thought, its specific pleasures and pains.

He argues that, in our present “mature capitalism”, the all-pervasive role of technological mediations as materialized theories means that sensation is no longer the starting point, but rather then end-point. Generalizing Bachelard’s claim about laboratory science “sensual learning is no longer a point of departure, it is not even a mere guide: it is an end”.

This is good news for the materialist, though it requires the masks to be worn in a slightly different way:

The sociologist of knowledge can no longer “go about looking for ‘vital’ residues in one theory or another, but must instead identify and describe a specific form of life on the basis of the type of knowledge which permeates it.” This method, which begins with the experience of work, is how to get at the sociological and material aspects of contemporary existence by considering pure theory as material fact.

(To paraphrase, the routine becomes: tell me what you think, I’ll tell you how you work, what relations you entertain, what your interests and least-reflected feelings and impulses are.)

For the sensationist, the recent inversion of the theory/sensation sequence solves the problem that persists whenever it is taken for granted that sense-data comes before theory (a situation wherein a materialist insistence on including pleasure and pain inevitably comes off as “quarrelsome and impotent”). If sensual perception now always comes after theory, then pleasures and pains appear as culminating accomplishments. Furthermore, because they are experienced as pleasures and pains rather than disinterested/disembodied knowledge, they become preludes to politics.