COLLAPSE VII
The Chem ical Parad igm
Iain Hamilton Grant, one ef the four philosophers who
spearheaded 'Speculative Realism', 1 is distinguished h'y being
the sole proponent among them ef a renewed philosophy ef
nature. He has argued convincingly2for the erroneousness
ef the modern and contemporary dismissal ef the Natur
philosophen who sought to think the absolute according
to the generative power ef nature, integrating knowledge
ef the contemporary deliverances ef the sciences into their
speculative systems.
Collapse spoke to Grant about this indistinction between
philosophy and science, about the particular importance ef
chemistry as a new modelfor the thinking ef nature, and
about the pertinence ef the culinary for a contemporary
synthetic philosophy.
1 . See Appendix to COLLAPSE III.
2. See I . H . Grant, Philosophies efNature after Schelling, 2nd edition (London:
Continuum, 2008), 19-2 1 .
39
COLLAPSE VII
COLLAPSE : In the context of this volume on Culi
nary Materialism - cookery as a possible model for or
provocation to philosophical thought, as an activity as
unique to humans as philosophical thought, we would
like to delve into the specificity of chemistry, and to
understand why you have proposed it in various places
in your work as a particularly important model for
thinking. In particular you re-examine its importance
in the age of 'natural philosophy', when the sciences
had not yet attained the success necessary for them
to extract themselves from philosophy, and yet were
making momentous, and demonstrable, discoveries
about nature.
Firstly, what constitutes the specificity of chemistry
as a science - and how does this distinguish it from
physics as a model for thought?
IAIN HAMILTON GRANT: There are two things that
serve - particularly in the era you mentioned, but also
I think beyond that - as what we could call a 'chemi
cal paradigm' for thinking. The first is that it gives
an additional dimension to the empirical domain, a
dimension that the other natural sciences - bar medi
cine - didn't have. Medicine simply involves working
out animal economy - circulation, patterns of blood
lymph and so forth, and so involved messing around
in the interiors of bodies; chemistry involved messing
around in the interiors of bodies that had no such
40
Grant - The Chemical Paradigm
organic complexity. It involved a messy experimenta
tion, a grubbing around in the earth - whence the word
alchemia derives (according to some) : the 'dark earth'
[keme] of Egypt becomes al-chemia, becomes alchemy
and then chemistry.
So that's one thing about chemistry: it gives an
additional visceral dimension to the empirical, which at
one and the same time enables chemistry as a practice
to have a specificity that separates it from the other
natural sciences, and gives an additional character to
experiment. And this is the other, more conceptual
side of the question: in all the other natural sciences,
certainly around the eighteenth century, there is nothing
that compares with the model efknowledge that chemists
were proposing: analysis is one part of the equation,
but one understands nothing until synthesis has taken
place. In other words, it's not just about understanding
the 'nature of nature', not just about metaphysics - its
about recreating nature. That synthetic ambition is
unique to chemistry - it's about production as well as
analysis. And the idea that knowledge is only complete
once production has taken place, is something that
informs Kant's immediate inheritance from chemistry.
He mentions this in terms of experiments with calx,
especially in relation to Georg Ernst Stahl, a noted
vitalist of the era, but also someone who had insisted
that to analyse calx was one thing, to resynthesise it
was precisely the goal of chemical knowledge.
41
COLLAPSE VII
So it's those two dimensions - the additional ele
ments of the empirical and the additional elements
of the conceptual and thus of the experimental.
The empirical side is to do with messing around in
bodies with internal complexities which are both irre
ducible and non-organised ( in organic sense) . And the
other side is that, as a model for epistemology, there
is nothing that substitutes for chemistry's ambition to
synthesise its products as well as analyse them.
C: Regarding this 'grubbing around in the earth',
Dumas says: 'the science of chemistry was born at the
potter's wheel, in the glazier's workshop, the black
smith's forge and the perfumer's salon.' We would,
of course, like to add that all of these practices were
most likely born in the kitchen. For instance it has
been suggested that chemistry was 'invented' with
the burning of malachite, which would release molten
metals that would run out from under the cooking
pot . . . Which is to say that chemistry has this rela
tion to everyday praxis. Would be right to say that
at the root of the still-reigning hegemony of physics
as a model for the philosophical thinking of nature is
the fact that the Greeks categorised chemistry under
manual work - under logistika - separating it from
theoretical speculations on the nature of things? So
that, although chemistry may be the oldest science,
its lowly origins preclude it from being recognised as
42
Grant - The Chemical Paradigm
the most fundamental, and this conflict continues to
resonate through our contemporary epistemologies?
IHG: The normal stratification of the sciences in terms
of fundamentality has physics at the bottom, and
chemistry as the intermediary between it and biology;
and thereafter everything else is merely subdepart
ments of those. Although there's a really fascinating
sense in which no-one really knows where chemistry
lies on the spectrum of the sciences. But as you say,
there is an immanence of chemistry to life not merely
understood in the abstract, but understood in terms of
the most concrete practices: one could create a glorious
spectrum of chemical activities, from breathing, to the
osmotic porosity of our skin in respect to liquids with
which we come into contact; but on the other hand,
this quite abstruse range of human activities involved
in the production of things; and again it's the element
of production that distinguishes all of these.
If you look at the alleged fundamentality of the
physical sciences, this is still regarded as a Platonic
dream. One finds it in even in the criticism of natural
ism as Platonism by authors such as John McDowell
recently: physics is still considered not just as the
domain of armchair theorists but as this linear specu
lative model intended to serve as the fundament for
everything else, if only we can pull the theory back
43
COLLAPSE VII
together, if only we can find the Grand Unifying
Theory . . .
C: The physicist-platonist would, presumably, argue
that in attributing any fundamental role to chemis
try, one would confuse ontological with historical
or anthropological priority; in which case the ques
tion then becomes, what do we include in ontology:
if ontology includes the structural principles of the
synthesis of matter, then chemistry is ontological,
since the greatest achievement of modern chemistry
lies not in breaking down the elements, but, as you
say, in identifying invariants in the way they can be
assembled isomerisation, the fact that different com
pounds can be made of the same elements yielding
different properties.
-
IHG: The elements of ontology are produced, natural
ising historicism while denaturing critique, so to speak.
This is a favoured response of the late eighteenth
century philosophers of nature (Ritter, Steffens), and
retains its pertinence so long as the question can still
be put. What remains, however, is priority.
C: Historically, how do thinkers in the period you
are particularly interested in work out that priority?
44
Grant - The Chemical Paradigm
IHG: If one rehearses the order of priority on the
basis, not of ontology or in terms of philosophical
anthropology - and a brief parenthesis on that: there
is a fascinating extent to which you could deliver
chemistry as the furthest reaches of a philosophical
anthropology a la Heidegger; you could really develop
a question of Being as posed by elements, in so far as
these are immediately involved in the exchanges that
constitute us physically. Another way perhaps of look
ing at the animal/world distinction, where a further
stratum might be interposed between them in order
to generate both animal and world, and to sustain
them. In this, the idea of animal economy might again
be important. At the outer limits of philosophical
anthropology, you could do something like that with
chemistry which would be fascinating. Here there are
the beginnings of a reversal that is quite interesting
and which neither relies on Dasein nor on somaticism;
this reversal is Schelling's account of what is involved
in sensation, which is what he calls a 'chemical dynam
ics'3: He sees the fundamental elements of sensation
as being what happens when you have exchanges,
when there are possibilities of fundamentally chemical
exchange; although physics may be viewed as funda
mental in terms of providing light, in terms of the sun,
3. 'Chemistry is nothing else but sensory dynamics', Ideasfor a Philosophy of
Nature, SW II, 323-4 tr. E. E. Harris and P. Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988), 257.
45
COLLAPSE VII
astrophysics and so forth, there is nevertheless a proc
ess of exchange that constitutes the very Sun.
So, the idea of ontological priority being attached
to physics rather than chemistry rests on a version of
linear production that chemistry confutes, and this is
why we could comfortably talk about, as it were, the
genesis of all things, in chemical terms, or at least in
terms that directly reference chemistry.
So the other side of that is, I think, that there is
this fascinating question that arises in the context of
the thinking of the philosophy of nature at the end
of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth
century: this question is basically 'what is nature' - one
of the most fundamental questions, the Greek ques
tion obviously, the question of the pre-socratics, also
the question of Aristotle, and Plato's question. The
answer they all give is that nature,phusis, is generation
first and foremost - it's not such and such an entity,
object, structure or whatever, it's generation. So, for
example, even Plato, in the Timaeus, when he talks
about nature, talks about the generation of things.
There are structural elements in it - he does talk about
fundamental ontological elements in the constitution
of things presented as the 'world soul', although it is
important to note that for Plato 'soul' is arche kineseos,
the source of motion, rather than substance - but they
are elements of the constitution of things, and the science
of the constitution of things is, in the terms in which
46
Grant - The Chemical Paradigm
we are discussing, a chemical science - it involves
exchanges, it involves reciprocity.
So, the question 'what is nature', 'what is phusis',
is answered by the Greeks as 'genesis'; and for the
eighteenth century Naturphilosophen, that also becomes
the dominant paradigm. And what's interesting is
the relationship between the changes that are tak
ing place in the nomenclature for chemical elements
post-Lavoisier - changes that, if you like, lend those
elements the appearance of metaphysical simples - and
the role chemistry plays in changing the thinking of the
scientists and philosophers of the period concerning
how to pose this question of nature, and what kinds
of terms it would be satisfactory to answer that ques
tion in. The interest there is centred around this basic
question of what is a chemical element on one hand,
and what is a chemical process on the other. The set of
nomenclatures that Lavoisier invented were intended
to be simples that one could always analyse out of
any process, through chemical intervention. But it's a
mistake to regard these processes as being 'available'
without chemical intervention, without processes of
analysis and synthesis. Because the idea is, in effect, that
the elements are constants in the process of breaking
things down and putting them back together again,
regardless of whether that's done by us - by chemists,
scientists - or whether it's done by nature. So it is
the entire process of analysis and synthesis that is the
47
COLLAPSE VII
object of chemistry, rather than the element. And it's
that reciprocal relation between analysis and synthesis
that is key in rethinking nature, phusis, generation, in
terms of chemistry rather than in terms of structural
invariance or whatever.
C: Could we see the Naturphilosophen, and this dawn
of a new productivist, synthetic model of knowledge,
as transitional between the 'first' (rationalist) scientific
revolution, and the massive industrialisation of chemi
cal processes in the nineteenth century? If so, then
what is their relation, and that of chemistry, to the
romanticism that is contemporaneous with the latter?
IHG: Absolutely. And even in England, you could con
sider Humphry Davy's experiments on leather tanning,
and the miner's lamp, all of these renowned practical
solutions to practical problems. But the problem of
engagement is being posed here - the question of what
is happening when there is any engagement whatso
ever in nature. Now 'romanticism' is a misnomer in two
crucial respects: as regards romantic natural science,
the immediate scientific paradigm that comes to mind
is biology. The replacement of mechanics with some
form of organics is the story that is told, and it's wholly
misleading. If you look at the biologists, they're not
reducibly biologists, indeed the word 'biology' only
becomes current only in about 1802, considerably
later than a lot of this so-called 'romantic science'
48
Grant - The Chemical Paradigm
was happening. Consider for example someone like
Kielmeyer (who taught Cuvier - he was not a nobody
in the context of the natural sciences ! ) In 1793, he
wrote a discourse on the proportions of forces, which is
ostensibly - or is recounted in books of the history of
science as - the first proposal of the Mekkel-Serres law,
the recapitulation thesis, that ontology recapitulates
phylogeny. However, what he's actually after is what
has been characterised by Timothy Lenoir in terms of
a Laplacian dynamics of the totality of nature - from
geogeny through to noogeny, from the production of
planets through to the production of thought.
This question about recapitulation is a question
about the fundamentality of the cell. In microbiology
the question of levels is quite simply: what's basic
and what isn't? If the cell isn't basic - and it isn't,
phylogenetically (that is, in the genesis of phylla at
all), it's a late acquisition, and is highly conditional
(there are all sorts of conditions required) - then what
is the unit of analysis sufficient to reveal any relation
between phylogenesis and ontogenesis? And it's quite
clear that this question is evident in Kielmeyer: he was
asked by Windischmann: Is it possible that creatures
recapitulate not just from the plant to lower animal to
higher animal, in the development of species; but actu
ally recapitulate the entirety of earth history? In other
words, how many processes have to be gone through
in order that later creatures emerge rather than earlier?
49
COLLAPSE VII
And it strikes me that once you admit that prospect,
you very quickly lose any particular somatic referent
to pin the basics to. That's chemophilosophy in the
recapitulationist sense - the bottom drops out of the
picture, the element drops out of the picture, and in
place of that you have a non-determinable series of
recapitulative cycles.
So, once again, it's a mistake to see the romantic
notion of science in terms of biology. This is what
defines romanticism, I think: it's not this or that aspect
of nature, but nature as such and as a whole. The
reason no-one's a Cartesian is the total supplanting of
this or that part of nature with the idea of nature as a
whole: nothing that happens is not a part of nature, by
definition - otherwise it wouldn't happen. And this
includes the most ridiculous of adjuncts, what Aristotle
would calls 'accidents' and therefore non-essential
components. It's that elimination of the distinction
between necessary and accidental.
C: During the period we are discussing, we find a con
fluence between chemistry - before it really had a word
for itself - and philosophy. It wasn't just philosophy
reflecting on chemistry.
IHG: No; in fact the idea of separating the two was
as alien to the Naturphilosophen as it was to those
who overtly opposed them: who opposed them
50
Grant - The Chemical Paradigm
fundamentally on grounds that cannot be reduced to
either the philosophical or the scientific. I don't just
mean that in a modern sense, I mean simply that the
model of knowledge across the community of investi
gators of the problem of nature does not rely on one set
of tools rather than another. And one can identify two
reasons why that would be the case, neither historical,
both conceptual: One is that, to see the production of
concepts as being in any way separate from the produc
tion of other natural phenomena is bizarre. No-one's a
Cartesian by the end of the eighteenth century; at best
what you have is attempts to generate the phenomena
of life by artificial means - hence the importance
of Galvani's electrical experiments with the voltaic
pile, for both philosophers and scientists. There was
a German term, Natuiforscher, which we translate as
'natural scientist' , but 'student of nature' is the direct
translation, and that's probably the best way to refer to
people working either side of the conceptual schism, as
it were But as I say, there's no way of separating them.
The reason, firstly, is that no-one regarded thought as
being alien from the rest of the processes of production
that take place in nature. But secondly, the idea that
conceptual activity constitutes or is limited to a reflec
tion upon pre-established entities, simply doesn't cash
out in terms of practice. There's a terrible tendency in
the history of science to rewrite periods that we don't
agree with in terms of what we do. So if you look at
51
COLLAPSE VII
some of the essays in the mid-twentieth-century, up to
about 1975, on the speculative philosophy of nature, on
the one hand they are full of venom about the work of
the earlier period; on the other hand they want to say
that anything that might have been of value in it, was in
fact arrived at by different means. But this is actually a
staggering admission: if there is more than one means
to arrive at a given product, whether this be urea or
concepts, then why resist the opportunity to pursue
that? And the business of the study of nature could not:
If there is nothing that is not a part of nature, then any
starting point, anywhere, of any nature whatsoever, is
going to arrive, if not at the same conclusions, then
at parallel conclusions, or at conclusions that stand
in certain structural relations to other conclusions, to
other investigations . . . Once again, the model is one
of production rather than just understanding, and so
we're not dealing with epistemology, we're dealing
with fundamental meta-physics, which rests in nature
qua production, rather than simply being about it.
C: The birth of chemistry in culinary praxes that we
have postulated, is extended by later developments
of chemistry which were to a large extent industrially
driven; and implications of the 'synthetic interven
tions' of chemistry continue to unfold now in the
biochemical and biomedical sciences. A key moment
was in 1838 when Wohler made urea in the laboratory,
52
COLLAPSE VII
Newton's otherwise unforgivable dualisms: they have
at least an historical, sociological explanation. But
I think, in addition, the model of science as being
about understanding, about analysis, is regrettably
impoverished.
And the same question, I think, can be posed to
philosophy: to what extent is philosophy just sitting
on the sidelines, wondering how we can understand
X, rather than entering into a process of investigation,
the investigation of thinking nature but not thinking
nature reductively: nature can be produced by thought
precisely because thought cannot be produced outside
of nature. But this alters what 'thinking nature' means.
It's about experiment not simply in terms of results,
but in terms of design, in terms of what sorts of interven
tions provide what sorts ofreaction - Bacon understood
that, but what do we take from Bacon? Merely the
rejection of Aristotle.
C: The notion that there is an 'overcoming' of aristo
telianism - an overcoming of qualitativism - in the
quantitative approach to chemistry?
IHG: Exactly that notion, but it rests, of course, on
unacknowledged occlusions: certainly Aristotle's phys
ics and zoology and so forth are inherently qualitative
in ways that acknowledge it as nothing other than a
description of nature. However Aristotle's account of
54
Grant - The Chemical Paradigm
the natural world is itself parasitic on the rejection of
various structural models, various abstract models
that one finds in Plato for example. So, not simply the
example of mathematics, but the idea that there aren't
abstract models that coexist alongside Aristotelianism,
and indeed that are made out of Aristotelianism after
the neoplatonists' synthesis: the compromise between
Aristotelian physics and Platonic physics is made
precisely in terms of abstract models of production
and cycling and exchange of 'phenomena amongst
themselves' - phenomena on their own, so things rather
than phenomena, really. All in terms of a dynamics. So
the idea that there would be a period that we could
call 'Baconian' that begins to supplant qualitative
description by means of abstract modelling, I don't
think is an accurate portrait of the history. However,
given that something does happen, and that Bacon is
doubtless a substantial contributor to that, we have
to ask what it is to which they're responding. And
some of the continuities between Cartesianism and
the medieval precursors, late Aristotelianisms - to
what extent are they purely qualitative, to what extent
do they become not merely quantitative but highly
abstract. So the grammar, the logical grammar of
objects, ceases to be the syllogism, substance and its
accidents, that Aristotle presents.
55
COLLAPSE VII
C: Let's now try to test this suggestion that physics and
chemistry might represent two different paradigms or
models for philosophy: The model of physics envisions
a philosophy that deals with analysis into ultimate
entities, whereas a 'chemical paradigm' would include
a certain experimental component and a 'synthetic
ambition' for thought. Can we challenge this simple
dualism by exploring the ways in which physics, in
fact, is continuous with chemistry (is there, in fact, any
specific point at which we can disjoin them?) ; doesn't
physics itself incude its own chemical way of thinking?
Consider the 'cosmic cooking processes' that gen
erate the universe as differentiated, before there is
'chemistry proper') : If gravitation precedes heat and
elements (the general requirements of material chem
istry and cooking processes) , then it deepens the
chemical horizon, from that of processes and matter to
that of the continuum itself: Gravitation creates a new
form of modality in the universe, outside the qualita
tively homogeneous continuum. Whereas we usually
associate physics with the qualitative homogeneity of
spacetime, we should note that gravity serves as the
universal thermodynamic motor of complexification,
and synthesises the 'ingredients' that generate regional
contraction or intensification and thus local syntheses.
So gravity could be seen as the force which creates
a bi-modal web: universal-local, generic-particular;
revealing the gradational spectrum of the continuum
56
Grant - The Chemical Paradigm
wherein transitions and transports along complex
modalities unfold as modes of cohesion, liquefaction,
production and synthesis . . . at which point the objects
of chemistry 'proper' emerge. In this case, the 'chemical
paradigm' would not belong to chemistry, since there
couldn't be a chemistry unless physics was already a
synthetic rather than a nomological science.
IHG: If chemistry opens up the paradigm of the
synthetic as a way not simply of doing 'philosophy
of science' but of doing philosophy of nature, then
yes; clearly there's a chemical way of thinking about
physics.
Do we understand chemistry and physics as rep
resenting different extensive domains, or as having
different extensive quanta with regard to their field of
objects - being ontologically more or less comprehen
sive? If that were so, it would suggest that chemistry is
in fact related to a circumscribable domain of nature.
What then would be the status of thinking synthetically
about physics? If it remains analogical, then we're
back at the situation of being able to talk about nature
only analogically, in its fundaments, exactly as Kant
could; we're no further along than Kant's biologism,
even though we're calling it chemistry. It cannot be
merely analogical. Therefore it cannot be the case that
this synthetic paradigm that belongs to chemistry can
be limited to the chemical domain: it must be actually
57
COLLAPSE VII
instantiated in gravity. And if this is the case, then
are we merely talking about a chemical paradigm for
thought, or are we talking about a chemical process?
You see the same thing with [cosmologist] Lee Smolin
talking about whether the laws of physics in the early
universe are the same as the laws of physics in the
late or middle-aged universe. If they are the same,
regardless of time, then what precisely is the status
of evolution in terms of nature? Is it just the exhaus
tion of local possibilities with respect to inherently
contingent particular spatio-temporal creatures or
entities? Or does it apply to nature as a whole? If to
nature as a whole, then it cannot be the case that the
laws of nature are the same in the early and the late
universe. So there you would have a biologism that
would extend to the totality of nature. I think it would
be a question therefore of by what means we could
conceivably manage the relationships between local
and universal with respect to chemistry and physics:
Is there a conceptual apparatus that could do that
without in fact creating the correlationist problem;
without creating, as it were, a reality that sits outside
of what can only be referred to analogically by dint of
access by, let's say, a restricted creature, or a synopsis
that fails with respect to the totality?
The other way of thinking about it is to talk about
particular processes, particular expressions that man
age or do not manage to achieve a certain degree of
58
Grant - The Chemical Paradigm
extensity with respect to the all. That's how I prefer
to think of it. I talk about the 'extensity test' in Phi
losophies efNature After Schelling. I thought about this
as a practical programme for doing the history of
philosophy. You could take various philosophical
systems and ask, how far do they reach, what do they
exclude; so you measure the success of ontology by
virtue of what it excludes. And anything that excludes
is manifestly wrong - a basic Schellengian principle
- and invites a problematic of either eliminativism or
productivism on the one hand, or ofhyperinflationism
with respect to a presumably limited ontology on the
other. So the test of extensity merely says, where's the
biggest metaphysics . . .
Stengers and Bensaude-Vincent, in their work on
the history of chemistry,s do write about chemistry
as being the science that invents its own universal,
and they invoke Schellingian aid in doing so. And
there is something interesting about the 'invented
universal' - it's doing the same undercutting, but with
respect to constructivism, any constructivist solution
of the sort that you find in various neokantianisms,
but also I think in various strands of contemporary
5. Bensaude-Vincent writes: 'Chemistry creates its own object, manufactures
its Universal'. 'Lavoisier: Eine wissenschaftliche Revolution', in Michel
Serres (Ed.) Elemente eine Geschichte der Wissenschaflen (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1 994) . 671 . See also B. Bensaude-Vincent and Stengers, A History
qJ Chemistry A History qJ Chemistry, trans. 0. van Dam (Cambridge MA:
Harvard University Press, 1996) .
59
COLLAPSE VII
philosophy, many of which make claims beyond their
fundamentally Fichtean metaphysics.
C: What are the implications of extinction for a chemi
cal paradigm of nature and chemophilosophy? If
proton decay really occurs, then this means the end of
chemistry proper. How can chemophilosophy get past
chemistry proper, and the regime of matter, without
essentially dismissing materialism?
IHG: If 'materialism' is reducibly and exclusively
about bodies, then we do indeed have a chemical
philosophy, but a chemical philosophy of the sort that
Lavoisier dreamt of, and indeed beyond the sort that he
dreamt of: a nomenclature that represents the primary
bodies of the universe, which are immutable, etc. So,
it's only in such an instance that proton decay would
result in a challenge to chemophilosophy. Whereas
if matter is more than body, then it follows that this
isn't the same type of problem at all. If it makes sense
to talk about materialism in the context of anything
other than body, then it's a very interesting question.
Plato, for example, does not talk about 'Idealists' in
Statesman (273b5) the word is asomatoides the
incorporealists. And the Stoics obviously picked this
up. So the really big question is what comes first,
powers or bodies; must powers inhere in bodies, or
are bodies consequences of powers? If powers inhere
-
-
60
Grant - The Chemical Paradigm
in bodies, then powers do not explain the origins of
bodies; and therefore we have a fundamental dualism
between powers and bodies. If bodies are the products
of powers, then not only do we heal the dualism, but
also the decay of the body then tells us nothing about
the nature of matter.
C: Thus we arrive at field theory, which you discuss at
length in Philosophies efNature After Schelling.
IHG: And this relates directly to the history of chem
istry - electrochemistry, electromagnetism, Faraday . . .
the issues o f the identifiability o f processes stem not
from bodies, but from fields and the interactions they
have as their consequences: particular realisations and
instantiations in particular bodies. The idea is that if
being incorporates more than just body - and if it
doesn't, then the origin of bodies is incomprehensible
- if it does, therefore, incorporate body and powers,
powers sufficient to make bodies, then we have this
dualism: if being therefore incorporates anything more
than bodies and powers in a dualistic relation, it must
be powers first, and bodies later. And if that's the case,
then the ontological bases are not this or that body,
but powers that coalesce and accrete in them.
C: We could bring this back to the question of gravity's
cauldron again . . .
61
COLLAPSE VII
IHG: Yes, and Plato: Sophist 2 4 7e - 'I hold it as a mark
of being that it consists of power'.
C: Does the pursuit of a philosophy of nature amel
iorate the anxieties attendant upon scientific elimi
nativism, leading to an inclusivism that satisfies the
intellectual instinct for the 'universal' in a different
way? So that rather than scientific thought being (as
in Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound) a trauma that dispos
sesses us of everything we 'knew', it becomes a means
to engage in a more 'Ferenczian' examination of trau
mata as cosmic elements that are already indwelling,
bored through us, that compose us?
IHG: I think the anxiety of loss, the anxiety of dis
enchantment in certain post-Sellarsian eliminativists,
and certain strategies for re-enchantment, have this in
common: that if the sciences are able to achieve this
elimination, it rests on the assumption that ontology
is subject not only to scientific determination, but
to scientific revision - at the level ef ontology. In other
words, that there are no entities left over to which folk
psychology may have referred, or to which animists
may have referred. In other words, we no longer even
have to ask the question of what is it that animated
these rocks in order to make such and such an event
to occur - because that rests on a mere misunder
standing. However, does this mean that at any level
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we have achieved the elimination of animism? One
strategy in this ( and I take this to be the one that
rests on the interminable reciprocity of nature and
culture ) is the Adorno/Horkheimer one, which is to
say, as the response to positivism, that this brave new
world is as animistic as can be imagined: Tue archons
continue to haunt the surface of the earth even as
they're ensconced around ocean-floor volcanic vents.
But on the other hand, what is it that reduces the
local conditions at every level for every phenomenon
whatsoever to 'mere' conditions as opposed to enti
ties and processes that in fact take place? So in other
words, what's the status of the tunnelling or boring?
There are several kinds of real tunnelling or boring.
Some of them result in real trauma for animals able to
talk about it; some result in areas of Cornish fenland
that are unable to support life; some of them result
in the deaths of animals that have been sent down to
collect the tin from it; some of them result in a species
of magical realism such as Novalis dreamt of, such
that he sought to write an encyclopedia not simply
after the image of the Diderotian disenchantment of
superstitious nature, and not simply to respond by
re-enchanting nature; but to provide a system capable
of everything. So, what is the scope of universalism?
Is it to establish the universal, such that everything else
becomes a particular determination of it, in Spinozist
manner, and to give universal names, or to give it a
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hinge such that the name might not be insufficiently
determined by the actuality. Or is it in fact to continue
to be part of the process of the whole self-manufacture?
The universal manufactures itself - it is not manufac
tured by chemistry - I think that would ultimately be
my answer to Bensaude-Vincent and Stengers.
C: There is a certain affinity between what we have
described as the 'chemical paradigm' of thinking,
and the legacy of 'universalism'. In the latter, thought
begins with the mixture and the mixed rather than
the elementary, from ratios of magnitudes ( de Villa
Nova, Bradwardine) , from combinatorial configura
tions ( Llull ) , from compositional potencies ( Novalis)
and from synthetic bundles of incommensurable fibres
or ideas; thought must proceed from these mixtures
in order to approximate or ( re) produce the universal.
We can go so far as to claim that chemistry is the first
synoptic philosophy, in that its starting point is the
full spectrum of nature as a universal mixture, or more
precisely a unified continuum where the synthetic topos
and the analytic locus, the universal and the regional,
are mediated. So there must surely be an intrinsic
relation between chemophilosophy and universalism.
But is this relation simply a matter of observing how
chemistry proceeds in the production of universals?
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IHG: What immediately occurs to me about the uni
versalism problematic - the problem of universals
and particulars - vis-a-vis thought beginning with the
synthetic, or indeed with the analytic, is something
like the following: The universal, as contrasted with
the particular, entails precisely the same kind of ontic
restrictions that the particular does. In other words, if
there is a universal, or indeed many universals, then it
entails precisely the restrictedness of those universals
to being particulars once again - particulars of a cer
tain sort, i.e. ones that cover many. It's not clear that
this would satisfy the demands of a properly synthetic
or indeed synoptic philosophy.
I am interested, though, in the idea that chemistry
is a synoptic philosophy that proceeds from the full
spectrum of nature. It boils down to the following
question: Does nature consists of particulars or not?
And if it does consist of particulars, then, if thought
begins with a mixture, then it's a mixture of particu
lars, ultimately, to which we would want to reduce
it. If nature does not consist of particulars, on the
other hand, then particulars are abstractions from,
or processes of, the very nature that thought tends to
synthesise, analyse, or synopticise with. And it strikes
me that nature cannot therefore consist of particulars,
precisely for the reason that chemistry is a synoptic
philosophy - a philosophy that both synthesizes and
self-analyses. In other words, if chemistry is properly
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a science of nature: if it offers itself as a model for
thinking nature, a model for thinking nature that
refuses an upper limit to synthesis or a lower limit to
analysis, that begins in medias res, from the universal
which is given as universal and of which the synoptic
philosophy itself is an expression.
C: From the time of Lavoisier's chemical revolution
onwards, we can see that there is an implicit connection
between chemistry and political thought. Whilst the
socio-political is recaptured and understood within the
chemical continuum, the political chemistry underpins
certain strains of philosophies of Nature which fun
damentally determine the characteristics of modem
European philosophy. How do you see the influence
of chemistry on political thought and political chem
istry on philosophies of nature since the inception of
modem chemistry?
IHG: There's a really fascinating question about
nomenclature - Lavoisier as being simply a 'nomen
claturist' of the elements. And the kinds of battles that
were contemporaneous with that - Gay-Lussac, for
instance, the anti-phlogistical crew and the phlogistical
crew and so forth - they're all battling away, and one
way that that's been regarded by historians of science
is as a regional politics of scientific advance. Clearly it
would be foolish to disregard that perspective entirely.
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On the other hand, I want to know exactly how far we
can take the analogy - or rather, how far we can take
the reality - of a chemical politics, or a political chem
istry. For example, it seems to me that if politics has a
chemical basis, and let's say for example that it takes
place independently of animals capable of political
interactions, then and then only would it be possible
for it to escape any kind of chemical base - but, assum
ing, therefore, that politics is of a chemical base, then
what would it mean to talk about a political chemistry,
other than a derivatively secondary parasitic account of
the discovery of this or that element, or the domestic
ownership of various chemical paradigms, of various
means of doing chemistry? But that would surely entail
a renewedly reciprocal relationship between chemistry
and politics, such that the one determines the other, at
the cost of the latter determining the prior. At which
point, we have no direction; there is no relation any
more between politics and chemistry at all. That, I'd
suggest, destroys both politics and chemistry, rather
than, as it were, situating the political as an interest
ingly complex region, dare I say, of chemistry.
So there is that reciprocity problem, I have a
worry about there being such a thing as the politics
of chemistry that's approached in anything other than
a metaphorical way. So the question I would want to
ask in response, is: At what cost do we get a politics
of chemistry? Are we talking about the politics of how
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chemistry happens to have been conducted in certain
places at certain times? Because if so, then there clearly
is a 'politics of chemistry' . But if we're talking about
anything more substantial than that, such that it's
determining the limits of the thinkable, or the limits
of the actual, or the limits of what is, then we must be
talking about a very bizarre form of politics that takes
its cue from creation narratives of one sort or another . . .
C: This is part o f your general caution with regard to
precipitate politicization.
IHG: Yes: under what conditions is it established that
the conceptual is subject to ownership by its users? I'm
aware that the cost of this is a species of Platonism,
but I think the grounds for the refutation of Platonism
have been grossly exaggerated !
C: Nevertheless: if political models of early chemical
thought used to be the French Revolution and various
affect-driven forms of socialism and class struggle,
what would be the political model of contemporary
chemistry in which chemical humiliation has been
wedded to neuroscientific humiliation and planetary
capitalism has its own chemical paradigm (from circu
lation, consumption and transformation of fuels and
minerals to producing its own nature for the horizon
of thought) ?
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IHG: One comes across this in Marx, where Wechsel
wirkung - 'metabolism' - is a constant trope. It's in the
Grondrisse, it's in Capital, it's in the Early Manuscripts,
and it's in the later scientific work. So the one thing
that undercuts the althusserian rupture is precisely
metabolism - which suggests one of two things: either
Marx is an arch-romantic, in exactly the same way
that Nietzsche is, thinking about Bildung in precisely
the sense of the formative processes that take place in
'life', in living nature - and there are good grounds for
making such a reading of Marx - or, that this really
is a mere metaphor. And Marx himself is conflicted
about it, insofar as he's a politician of lebensrealismus,
believing that only certain types of entity can possibly
be conceived of as being alive - 'Nature builds no
machines', he says in the Grondrisse. 6 Equally there is
no such thing as an automaton that moves itself - this
is entirely a specious species created by the engines of
capital for ideological purposes. And I'm simply not
sure what it means to suggest that there is anything
other than a metaphor of circulation that capitalism
uses; just as there's a 'survival of the fittest' narrative
that capitalism uses, and so forth. At which point,
what is the additional question here? What is the real
6. ' [N]ature builds no machines' writes Marx in Grundrisse (trans. Martin
Nicolaus [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973], 692) .
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question at the basis of this - can there be a politics of
nature such that the latter is derivative of the former?
C: From a socio-cultural angle, cooking is distin
guished from nature's generative and synthetic proc
esses, which span all cosmological processes. But
from the point of view of nature, such a distinction
is regional and myopic: Nature's self-cooking simply
doesn't distinguish itself from culture or the culinary
art. For Freud and Ferenczi, this relation between
nature and culture is not merely limited to the syn
thetic field of cooking; it also holds true for eating
and consumption. With that said, is it still possible
to give a rigorous and systematic account of the culi
nary art without falling into the myopic realm of
gastronomic fetishism? - Within the generative and
universal nature, how can consumption and cooking,
the gastronomic and the culinary, be distinguished
from one another?
IHG: I'm intrigued by the point at which nature's
'self-cooking' arises, and the notion of fetish. For
Freud as for Evans-Pritchard, for the late nineteenth
century anthropology of primitive societies, fetishism
is precisely what results from an animist metaphysics.
Things are alive, fundamentally, they're animated by
spirit that moves them, and so forth. So it seems to me
that the idea that nature cooks itself is already fallen
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prey, if not to a gastronomic, at least to a culinary
fetishism. So the general question of fetishism is that it
must be balanced against some species of panpsychism
or panbiologism - maybe the antithesis of the fetish
would be precisely the demonstrability of panspermia.
But there's a fascinating point here about the rela
tionship between two sides of a problem: One situating
gastronomy with respect to cosmology - or cosmogony,
more importantly; and the other about extending the
culinary all the way back to cosmogonic origins. There
are two sets of problems there: one is that cosmogony
would surely assert that the culinary, if it's the same
as the origin of all things, defeats fetishism a priori
in so far as it means that the entire universe simply
is cooking itself; and the gastronomical is simply the
differentiator between toxin and nutrition - a very
long way down the chain, if you like. Or, if that's
not an overextension of the culinary model - which
it might well be, along the lines of my responses to
the previous question - then on what grounds do we
assert a 'self-cooking' of nature? It's a peculiar image,
if you think about it - it's a schizogenic rather than a
cosmogenic image. It's the self-production of cookery
at the origin of time - which I agree can be thought,
but at various well-known costs.
C: All that you have said about chemistry could
be applied to your own philosophical work, which
could be read entirely as a riposte to the notion that
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philosophers have a right to dismiss all questions of the
history and contingent stratification or organisation
of matter and thought - Kielmeyer's 'dynamics' - by
way of ontologies (whether 'fundamental', mathemati
cal, subtractive, or whatever) which still claim that
there's nothing philosophically interesting about such
'accidents' or their metaphysical treatment. What's
interesting about Quentin Meillassoux's point of view
is that he takes this to new heights, claiming that even
the laws of nature are accidental, non-necessary, not
just their products. Let's attempt to crack open the
Speculative Realist alliance in a new direction - what
would be your counter-position here?
IHG: The short answer is that natural history is
entirely, necessarily contingent; however, necessita
tion happens as a component of that.
C: Necessitation is contingent . . .
IH G : . . . Not the other way round: Necessitation takes
place within contingent universes, and that would be
necessarily true of any universe generated by any kind
of process whatever.
C: Since for Meillassoux, contingency embraces not
only the unreason of becoming and productivity but
also indefinite states of frozen fixity, then maybe we
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should ask how chemistry could cope with these latter
states, that are bereft of any processual dynamics? Is
chemophilosophy able to think such an account of
contingency?
IHG: So: If we accept that chemophilosophy is syn
thesis, and that synthesis has no upper or lower limits,
then are there laws governing its development, and
if so, are they universal with respect to that entire
synthetic process? They would be, if and only if they
were not themselves subject to synthesis, which has no
upper or lower limits - which suggests that there cannot
be laws that are co-extensive with the process - the
laws must be emergent from it - that would be the
difference.
C: Wouldn't that be consistent with Meillassoux's
construction of hyperchaos: even randomness is a
valid 'quotation' of hyperchaos - there is a hierarchical
'lamination' of laws and meta-laws at different levels
(so that, for instance, randomness is regular and law
ful at a meta-level) . But hyperchaos is the intellectual
intuition of the collapse of this whole stratal system
- a 'pure chronics' - which makes possible to think a
'hard-edged' flipping from one state to another, from
one regime of law or lawlessness to another, with
out reason. Is that 'intellectual intuition' of absolute
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contingency something unthinkable within a
synthetic paradigm?
IHG: Does a chemophilosophy in fact rule out the
sort of radical contingency that would have no deter
minable consequence? Is process, in other words, too
rooted in nature to allow access to the kind of intel
lectual intuition that one can read from Meillassoux?
I've rephrased the question in a loaded way, I guess:
to say 'is it too rooted in nature' presupposes the
nature of nature such that it would not be subject to
the same sort of hyperchaotic possibilities of a sudden
hard-edged change.
I don't see that there's any inconceivability to the
idea that processes are suddenly emergent, immediately
emergent, that there is spontaneity, and so forth, in
the midst of natural process. There's an interesting
parallel, actually, with a process that derives from Kant
and the problematic of the transcendental account of
causation. If you ask the question, what is the synthetic
a priori, it's very easy to answer that in terms whereby
the synthetic a priori becomes nothing more than an
epistemology. But Kant's own account vitiates this: he
says later on that the extendability of practical reason
into the domain that theoretical reason cannot tread
is one prospect for the transcendental, and therefore
for the realization of synthetic a prioris, that is not
simply epistemic, but practical. But then we have,
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at the conclusion of the Third Critique, this moment
of terror in the face of the absence of finite rational
beings from the surface of the earth; at which point
it becomes clear that the stakes of the transcendental
are the re-engineering qfcausality such that time becomes a
creature qi.finite rational beings, rather than the other way
around. And there's a clearly interesting consequence
that flows from this with regard to the current question:
If causality is subject to radical reorganization such
that prior and posterior, ground and consequent, are
entirely reorganisable, then what are we asking about
when we ask about causality? Are we asking about
anything that has any implicit a priori form that is
subsequently realized - or does the re-constructibility
of causality, the non-necessity considered in relation
to causal form, does the number of possible causes, of
thinkable causes, subject the very idea of causality to
such indeterminism that the arrow of time is removed,
at least potentially, that there being any cosmogenic
process whatsoever becomes just one among many
radical contingencies? Clearly it does; but crucially,
this is on the back of an initial experiment which runs
thus: is it possible that causality can be thought by
finite rational beings in such a way as to make finite
rational beings the causes rather than the consequence
of causal processes? And it depends fundamentally,
I would say, on an answer to that question, whether or
not the species of radical contingency is cosmologically
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instantiable in the way that it might be intellectually
intuited for, let's say, an ontologjcal project. But if that's
the case, if there is that difference, then what is the
relationship between cosmology and ontology? And all
of a sudden, we're back in the domain of metaphysics,
which must have an account of the relation between
ontology and nature, at some point.
So I think there's a similarity in the experiment
about the re-engineering of time and cause . . .
I t seems to me that what allows the questioning of
the distinction between ontology and metaphysics is
simply the thesis that there is something that is neces
sary, whatever that might be. If one starts from the
question 'what is necessary?' and answers that with
'nature' - i.e. a more concrete rather than material
response to the question 'what is necessary?' - then
one has to ask, what is necessary about nature? To
which the only possible answer would be: that there
is one, or not - a bivalent solution. Now, one can't
claim the absolutely necessity of nature; therefore
it must necessarily be that nature is contingent. But
nature is also composed of contingency: manifestly
nature could be otherwise. Xenobiology has made
an impact not because it studies actual alien life on
alien worlds, but because shows that it can't be ruled
out in principle that biologies respond differently to
different environmental conditions, and so on. So, the
idea of experimentation in the production of different
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natures is a forerunner to its analysis here - again, a
chemically-inspired account.
C: In-vitro, in-silico, or even in-ratio synthesis before
or without analysis.
IHG: Exactly, or with an analysis that takes place
after the event - look at the various manifestos about
artificial life, for example.
C: So in the absence of the fundamental hypothesis
that something must be necessary, the periodic table,
posited on the basis of its contingency, becomes the
figure of knowledge: 'these are the ones we've found
so far'.
IHG: The periodic table is never settled, so who knows
at what point one is dealing with discovery and at which
point invention? This is something that Stengers and
Bensaude-Vincent deal with in their history of chemis
try - that chemistry is entirely concerned with inventing
both its universals and, even if only through nomen
clature, its own beings. Ontology as a process of pro
duction, heterogenesis, is prior to Being, in that sense.
To complete the point, if contingency is necessary for
any nature that is possible, then necessitation takes
place within a given nature such that in that nature
it ceases to be possible to produced otherwise than,
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in fact, it is. However, how many ways there are to
produce that nature is open to question. And that's
why there are chemical, philosophical, and physical,
biological and ecological accounts of what it is that
nature is. Start anywhere, and ask: what are the con
tingent processes of necessitation that characterise
this nature?
C: Questions which the culinary situation presents in
microcosm: one can start anywhere, to discover what
are the fundamental 'elements', and one cannot distin
guish between discovery and invention in the kitchen.
IHG: I could answer that with an anecdote: One of
Isaac Asimov's novels Robots qfDawn consists of a char
acter who grows up on earth in what are called 'metal
wombs', with no exposure to the outside, because the
outside's a shit place. In the process of the narrative
he goes to this place called Aurora where they grow
fruit, and his immediate reaction is that 'there was
something offensively carrotty about the carrots'. Now,
for that character, for Elijah Bailey, clearly there is a
process of discovery in terms of the responses of his
tastebuds: he ceases to look at it in terms of pleasure or
familiarity and starts to look at it in terms of sensation.
And there's an interesting question about the effects of
chemistry, culinary chemistry as it were, on sensation,
that he is exploring as a matter of experimentation.
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As an extension of this thesis, culinarism in general
might operate an interesting affront to taste, which
would be simply that it is not about pleasure, it's about
the possibility of sensation. There's an entire Sadean
algebra of possible chemical combinatorials.
C: Perhaps we could imagine some culinary version
of the experiment Ritter made - in the Schellingian
conviction that ( as you describe above) sense experi
ence is derived not from intellect at all; but rather
sense experience, and intellect with it, is derived from
physics - whereby he attached a battery to his eye . . . !
In any case, there's already a kind of asceticism that
goes with 'developing a palate' - one foregoes pleasure
in order to be educated - although to speak of this i
as an education that is arrested at different points for
different individuals would be to assume a kind of
teleology, when in fact there is a whole field of perver
sions available . . .
IHG: Deferred gratification through education . . . I
think of Freud's troubles with identifying qualitative
and quantitative dynamics in the relationship, for
example, between intensity as a raw measure of dif
ferentiation, and pleasure and pain. His conclusion
is that no such distinction is possible - that is, there
is no quantitative absolute point at which qualities
become the qualities they are.
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C: lndistinguishability of pleasure and pain at high
intensity - the Vindaloo Principle?
IHG: On the other hand, to pursue the fictionalisation
line, one could imagine a Crash-type novel about the
sensations of which tongues, stomachs, eyes, skin,
are capable - entirely to do with the characteristics
of food, a kind of piling in rather than a piling up . . .
C : Orwell achieves a kind o f culinary horror in Coming
upfor Air, where the abject indeterminacy of an ersatz
sausage is the apotheosis of the oppressive, malignant
atmosphere:
The frankfurter had a rubber skin, of course, and my
temporary teeth weren't much of a fit. I had to do
a kind of sawing movement before I could get my
teeth through the skin. And then suddenly - pop !
The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort
of horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue.
But the taste ! For a moment I just couldn't believe
it. Then I rolled my tongue round it again and had
another try. It was FISH ! A sausage, a thing calling
itself a frankfurter, filled with fish!
Totally Lovecraftian, this pulp icthyoid horror . . .
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IHG: In Beckett's More Pricks than Kicks, Belacqua talks
about toast that shatters like glass, to be spread with
stilton that is not to be used until it walks on its own:
He looked sceptically at the cut of cheese. [ . . . ] He
rubbed it. It was sweating. That was something. He
stopped and smelt it. A faint fragrance of corruption.
What good was that? He didn't want fragrance, he
wasn't a bloody gourmet, he wanted a good stench.
What he wanted was a good green stenching rotten
lump of Gorgonzola cheese, alive, and by God he
would have it.
C: After the divergence from a common origin of
'grubbing around' (in your apt phrase, since it ety
mologically connects shallow digging - supposedly
superficial inquiry - and the 'scraping together' of
'grub'), in postmodern food science's obsessive pursuit
of new combinatorial resyntheses and novel 'mouth
feels', the culinary, and chemistry and its 'tinkering',
are reunited, in this productive perversity.
IHG: You should visit a Scottish sweet shop, they
seem to excel in the production of foodstuffs that are
truly grotesque - quite shocking.
C: Children have a paradoxical combination of fussi
ness about food and a taste for the most aggressively
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synthetic products. Tunnocks Teacakes, also a modern
Scots delicacy, I would have thought of as an early
example of chemically-inspired ( quite literally) food
production - what is the foam stuff inside them?
IHG: I've no idea. Cavity wall filling? . . . I was think
ing of soor plooms - they're little globules of boiled
sugar filled with such excessive quantities of lime-like
substances as to make them totally and utterly unpalat
able. The principle upon which these are sold is: see
how many you can eat before you throw up.
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