a quick response to Complete Lies

The nature of my academic and administrative commitments is such that I really can’t afford to get drawn into blog debates in the near future, but a few things have been coming up that I want to address. Here, for example, is Complete Lies with a perfectly lucid remark:

“[ADDENDUM: I think this is why I am sort of confused by the problem that both Graham and Levi often articulate with Whitehead and Latour (collectively forming the rock supergroup, The Relationists). Both Graham and Levi say that objects can’t be simply nothing more than their relations or else change is impossible, so Graham (I’m not sure how Levi does this, so I’ll speak only of Graham here) takes the position that we need some substance-like-thing, that is, substance that is not inalterable or eternal, but some dark untapped core at the heart of things in order for there to be potentiality and change (while saying also, like Leibniz, that finite things contain infinity or maybe it’s closer to Nicholas of Cusa’s ‘relative infinity…’) Graham also says that it is this problem that causes Latour to move to his talk of plasma, which approaches monism or at least quasi-monists like Deleuze and Bergson, essentially the idea of an infinite reserve underlying all objects).

It seems to me though that another option besides positing infinity either within all objects, or underlying all objects, is to work with an idea of drive, will, or conatus. In this way, I think you get a model of change which better reflects reality. I suppose this is the option I’ve chosen to explore, which is why I tie myself to the vitalist tradition so strongly, since they, along with certain neo-Platonists (the ones who claim the world-soul to be more primary than the divine intellect) and voluntarists also seem to make this move, or at least a similar one. I’m hoping to write more about this tradition soon.]”

The reason I’m never sympathetic to calls for conatus is that they seem to me to amount to a vis dormitiva. “Objects change by means of a changing force.” “Objects change by means of appetite.” “Objects change by means of drive.”

In all of these cases, it would need to be shown where this supposed drive for the new is inscribed in what the thing is now.

What always puzzles me most is when Latour occasionally plays the conatus card (such as during our LSE debate), since the whole of Irreductions is otherwise devoted to the principle that a thing cannot borrow its future achievements in advance.