on Grant’s response in The Speculative Turn

I’m afraid there will be little choice in coming weeks on this blog but to shift somewhat awkwardly between Middle East revolution and philosophy-related posts. Everything feels pretty trivial after seeing the Bahrainis gun down a perfectly peaceful march, but there are also people coming here craving philosophy posts. I’ll alternate as tastefully as the situation allows. Please bear with me as I also cheer on the Arab people in ridding themselves of dictatorships one by one. (And not just the Arab people: I hope Iran is coming up too, though brutality there has worked in a way that it didn’t work in Tunisia and Egypt.)

Anyway, most of you know that Iain Hamilton Grant has an interesting response to my article in The Speculative Turn. I felt like writing a response to his response, but on further reflection it seemed more fair to let him have the last word (just as I had the last word against Steven Shaviro in the same volume).

I’ll probably deal with Grant’s response somewhere in Treatise on Objects, but I’ll give the quickie response here.

Grant says that I’m defending a multiple-substance model against Giordano Bruno’s single-substance model. In response he calls both of these “depth models.” In short, he’s trying to claim that I’m actually closer to Bruno than he is, since Bruno and I both agree about substance and merely disagree about how many of them there are. By contrast, Grant says, he defends a model of “anteriority,” meaning a productive power deeper than any actual thing.

I agree that Grant’s model is one of anteriority. But I disagree that this allows him to avoid falling into a Brunonian position. the problem with Grant’s anteriority is that it falls into the usual “both heterogeneous and continuous” trap that haunts all philosophies of the pre-individual, which are really just “have your cake and eat it too” ontologies.

In other words, Grant thinks that there is a productive force that turns into individuals only when it meets with “retardations.” But either the productive force is a single lump, or it has multiple regions. If the former, then Grant concedes my point that he resembles Bruno. If the latter, then Grant is a sort of object-oriented ontologist in spite of himself. There is no “third way” between these extremes, often though it has been tried.

Stated differently, when Grant says that Bruno’s philosophy is of “one substance” and then Grant denies that he believes in substance and therefore doesn’t resemble Bruno, I view this as a verbal trick (not an intentional one; Iain doesn’t do that). My charge isn’t that Grant and Bruno are philosophers of one substance (though Bruno is); my charge is that they are philosophers of the one. And Grant never addresses this charge as far as I recall.

That still leaves the further question as to whether anteriority is needed. People often make this sort of claim against me. They say that there must be a “conatus” in the things that allows them to change. To this I say no, because conatus is just a vis dormitiva: “objects change by means of a changing faculty.” Latour saw this more clearly than anyone in his early writings, though in recent years he has inexplicably raised the Conatus banner aloft.

If you think the identity of objects all the way through to the end, you find yourself unable to bail out at the last minute by arbitrarily positing a magical faculty of change. And this is why I reject Grant’s view that there must be some anterior productive force lying behind any given object. Every object has a genetic history, sure, but not all aspects of that history are preserved; besides which, that history is one of the conjunction and disjunction of other objects, not of a “productive anteriority.”