Grant’s response to my essay

In a way it’s ironic that, following the brief Ben Woodard interview of Badiou, an anthology of contemporary philosophy (The Speculative Turn, I mean) should begin with a dispute between me and Iain Grant over the true shortcoming of Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake 410 years ago.

Nonetheless, Bruno (rather than Spinoza) is the real forerunner of much of the anti-object sentiment in our midst today. Bruno is really the godfather of the tacit “Aristotle is a dead end” attitude with which I so heartily disagree. Among other problems, this leads to the counterintuitive strategy of celebrating Leibniz only at the price of denying his thoroughly Aristotelian outlook. (See Deleuze’s The Fold, for instance: a book I can’t love for precisely this reason, much as I would like to.)

Grant’s response to me, as many of you will have read, is that the anteriority of productive force is what is important, not its unitary character. My response to his response would have been (but it was only fair to let Grant have the last word in the volume) that any notion of an anterior productive force without substantial forms is ipso facto a single-substance philosophy. Individuals for Grant can occur only through obstructions or “retardations” of productive force. In short, for Grant the real action always happens outside individuals.

It’s not all that different from the debates I’ve had with Steven Shaviro or even Michael Austin (see Austin’s typically lucid critique of me in Speculations 1). Holding there to be a conatus or process over and above (or rather, under and beneath) individual things is in my opinion to invoke a vis dormitiva: objects change by means of a changing faculty.

The strong suit of Latour’s Irreductions was to deny that there could anything like “potential” or “time” outside of actors; change was to be explained by actors, rather than explain them. Latour backed away from that a bit in the LSE discussion, but I still see no room for anything like conatus in the framework of his philosophy. Even in his still unpublished new system, continuity is produced, not presupposed. It is still a philosophy of the occasion or the instant or the cut-off actor. In Stengers (with her Deleuzian bent) there is more than enough room for conatus, but not really in Latour, who is basically Whiteheadian and not Deleuzian in orientation (I realize many people join those two figures together, but I hold it to be a fundamental mistake, and I think Whitehead would have said the same had he lived to see it).

But back to the main point… To say that the individual entity needs conatus is to skip the whole problem of how an actual thing can become something other than it is now. It is to assume that actuality itself is lacking in tension, so that it therefore needs to borrow its principle of change from the outside. I hold, instead, that its principle of change comes from the tension in its own components, which are themselves also actual, but which form the larger thing only through a sort of uneasy, transient truce. Actualities are in such seismic conflict from the start that they don’t need some magical dynamic force lying beyond the actual in order to keep on moving.