Chemistry of Darkness

From the new world to the new earth

The chemistry of darkness is Grant's name for a philosophy in which thought, sensation and matter are differentiations of natural forces rather than achievements of a self-grounding subject. The phrase condenses his 2000 encounter between Deleuze and Schelling. Against Hegel's reduction of real movement to the movement of the concept, Grant asks whether Deleuze and Guattari's new earth can avoid becoming another conceptual new world in which exteriority has already been recovered by spirit (Iain Hamilton Grant/Texts/Essays/Grant - The Chemistry of Darkness (Pli v.9) (2000).pdf, pp. 1–3).

Chemistry supplies the needed change of scale. It is the science of transformations that escape recognition at the level of stable faces and bodies, and it links the earth to manufacture, metallurgy and the production of novel materials. Grant uses this register to replace a merely regulative relation to the earth with an investigation of the forces that produce bodies and concepts alike (Iain Hamilton Grant/Texts/Essays/Grant - The Chemistry of Darkness (Pli v.9) (2000).pdf, pp. 3–4).

Unground and depth

The darkness is not an empty absence awaiting illumination. Grant reconstructs Schelling's Ungrund as indifferent to oppositions and prior to the distinctions it potentiates. Deleuze's account of depth converts that unground into a productive process: extensive dimensions issue from a depth that cannot itself be reduced to one more measurable depth (Iain Hamilton Grant/Texts/Essays/Grant - The Chemistry of Darkness (Pli v.9) (2000).pdf, pp. 4–6). The unground therefore matters because it prevents any product, including a subject or a philosophical system, from exhausting the productivity from which it came.

This gives darkness a determinate function. It marks the irreducible remainder in every attempt to make the real fully transparent to the ideal. Grant's later reconstruction of Schelling preserves the same structure by treating matter as power before body and by making natural science genetic: its object is the production of bodies, not bodies alone (Iain Hamilton Grant/Texts/Books/Author/iain-hamilton-grant-philosophies-of-nature-after-schelling.pdf, pp. 26–29).

Absolute empiricism

Grant calls the method absolute empiricism. The name does not mean that philosophy passively inventories given sensations. It reverses transcendental priority: because the ideal develops from the real, the conditions of ideation must be investigated through the natural processes that produce them (Iain Hamilton Grant/Texts/Essays/Grant - The Chemistry of Darkness (Pli v.9) (2000).pdf, pp. 7–8). Chemistry is exemplary because it makes and transforms its objects without making those transformations arbitrary.

Schelling's characterization of chemistry as sensory dynamics allows Grant to extend experience beyond the anthropocognitive. If chemical forces construct material qualities and sensation registers degrees of force, then other physiologies may realize forms of sensation unavailable to human organisms (Iain Hamilton Grant/Texts/Essays/Grant - The Chemistry of Darkness (Pli v.9) (2000).pdf, pp. 8–10). Chemical metaphysics is thus neither panpsychism by declaration nor a metaphorical animation of inert matter. It is the thesis that qualities, affects and organisms are determinate intensities of basic forces.

Process without a final organism

The chemical paradigm displaces the organism as nature's privileged end. Nature is product and productivity together: any organized being is a local stabilization within transformations that neither begin nor terminate in that being (Iain Hamilton Grant/Texts/Essays/Grant - The Chemistry of Darkness (Pli v.9) (2000).pdf, pp. 11–13). Consciousness is therefore a chemical recursion and an affective break, not the completion of becoming (Iain Hamilton Grant/Texts/Essays/Grant - The Chemistry of Darkness (Pli v.9) (2000).pdf, pp. 13–14).

The final descent into darkness follows from this anti-finalism. Particularity is produced through disjunctions whose material syntheses cannot be contained by a purely logical process. The chemistry of darkness studies those syntheses at the point where thought encounters the intensive basis it cannot retrospectively make its own (Iain Hamilton Grant/Texts/Essays/Grant - The Chemistry of Darkness (Pli v.9) (2000).pdf, pp. 14–15). It is the systematic counterpart to the machinic prose of black ice: both derive identity from material production, but the later essay gives that production a Schellingian physics.