To Save Materialism from Itself

Tano S. Posteraro (bio)
Penn State University

A review of Grosz, Elizabeth. The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism. New York: Columbia UP, 2017.

“Materialism” functions today as an obligatory academic shibboleth. Against the somatophobia of the Western philosophical canon, many consider this a welcome relief. Elizabeth Grosz has herself done much to emphasize the force, significance, and ineliminability of the biological body in her analyses of everything from gender, to art, to political futurity. It is worth noting, then, that her latest book orients itself differently, arguing for nothing less than a turn to everything that is not material, not in order to leave materialism behind, but rather to complete it and to save it from itself. “Every materialism,” Grosz writes, “requires a frame, a nonmaterial localization, a becoming-space and time, that cannot exist in the same way and with the same form as the objects or things that they frame” (28). It would be wrong, of course, to spin this declaration in opposition to her earlier work. But it would be just as wrong, I think, not to see in it a punctuating point in a newer phase of Grosz’s thinking. Either way, in the end, one may be left wanting more than the series of figure studies that make it up.

The pragmatists used to insist that philosophy realizes itself most fully only in the attempt to ensure that the future will differ from the past—for the better, one hopes. They meant this at least in part as an indictment of metaphysical speculation. The Incorporeal pursues this precept, but argues for its location in the realm of ontology: “This is a book on ethics,” Grosz tells us early on, “although it never addresses morality, the question of what is to be done” (1). That’s because it is a book, more obviously, about ontology—”the substance, structure, and forms of the world” (1)—that attends not only to how the world is but more significantly to how it might be, in what ways it is open to change, in what those changes might plausibly consist, and through what processes they are brought about. The Incorporeal is a book about ethics in the sense that it seeks to secure, at the ontological level, the possibility for change in political, social, collective, cultural, and economic life. Grosz calls this “ontoethics.” It does not ask the (moral) question of what is to be done, but attends rather to the conditions that underwrite and direct the myriad (ethical) ways by which that question might be taken up and carried out.

These claims are far from novel. In making them, Grosz remains in the comfortable if crowded company of the feminist new materialists—Karen Barad, Jane Bennett, Diana Coole, Rosi Braidotti, and others—who have been deploying similar neologisms for at least a decade (Barad 2007: 90). To be fair, Grosz’s own Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism may be considered one of the movement’s founding texts. And this is part of what makes The Incorporeal feel new. The subtitle of the 1994 text designates corporeality as its theoretical aim. Twenty-three years later, it is that very same corporeality that is now to be completed with its opposite number. In this respect, The Incorporeal, even as it remains a work in ontoethics—and even while many of its sources as well as the overarching purposes to which they are put remain continuous with the work of the other new materialists—nonetheless represents a marked departure from the rest of the field.

The incorporeal is Grosz’s name for what is immaterial but not anti-material; what it is that conditions the material without itself being material; what is ideal, not as an objection to or a transcendence over the material, but as a production out of materiality that simultaneously frames, orients, and completes what produces it. The point, for her, is that the corporeal finds the principle for its creativity, its openness, and its futurity, in the incorporeal—and so it is to the incorporeal that an ontoethics ought to turn. The Incorporeal traces something of a subterranean history of the elaboration of that concept.

This history begins with the Stoics. They are presented at the outset as the poster children of ontoethics. It is in them that Grosz finds the first example of a thoroughgoing materialism that, far from dismissing or devaluing ideality, posits it as the necessary condition for the intelligibility of the material as such. It is in the Stoics, too, that Grosz finds an early indication of her ontoethical thesis that “our views of what the world is and how it functions make a difference to how we understand ourselves and our place in relation to other living beings and the cosmos itself” (18). This is so, for the Stoics, because the ethical task—the task of living well, in accordance with nature—is coincident with the rational pursuit of understanding ourselves as bodies causally imbricated within a corporeal order that exceeds and determines us without fully exhausting what we are capable of. Grosz endorses that position wholesale.

Two of the Stoics’ ontological doctrines matter most for this project: their account of bodies and causes, and their postulation of the incorporeals. To be a body is to be capable of acting or being acted upon (24). Activity and passivity are not designators of different kinds of material, but qualities of the causal relations between bodies made of the same sort. They are all informed and activated by an animating breath—pneuma, the creative principle of Stoic ontology. This principle is itself material, and works to distinguish the Stoics’ world of flux from the aridity of an inert mechanism; it does not inform matter from the outside, but rather runs through the distinctions between active and passive bodies. All bodies are particular, since abstract categories are incapable of causal effectivity. The universal “animal” cannot be acted upon, so it is more like an error in reasoning, a reification of what appears common across a set of individuals (27). Any materialism of this stripe requires a thoroughgoing nominalism. Everything that is, is a body, but the real is not exhausted by everything that is. Bodies are situated in space, their fluctuating relations are measured temporally, and at the limit of corporeality exists the void, the absence of body. Space, time, and the void are all instances of what the Stoics call “incorporeal,” that which is not capable of being touched, that which can neither act nor be acted upon. These three incorporeals frame and condition all of corporeality.

There is (at least) one more incorporeal in Stoic ontology, this being the one most important for Grosz’s project: “lekton” (30). If all corporeal bodies are causes, then they cannot cause each other, at least not as causes do effects. They connect instead as causes to other causes in order together to produce changes in another ontological register. These are changes in a body’s predicates, what is “sayable” of it—what the Stoics call lekta. Grosz rehearses Deleuze’s favorite example, the relation of a cutting body to a body cut by it. The first does not relate to the second as a cause does to an effect; they are both causes, together, of a change in the attributes or predicates—i.e., in “what can be said”—of each. These predicates are not corporeal, not of the body, because they can neither act nor can they be acted upon. They are pure effects, epiphenomena, subsisting at the surface of the bodies of which they are predicated, causally inert and yet not nothing. In the event of cutting, the cut body acquires the predicate “being-cut” while the cutting body acquires an “is-cutting.” These predicates subsist or insist “on top of” bodies, but they do not exist in them (28). The production of sense is in the event of an alignment of a body with the predicates that hover over and exist outside of it. Even though the predicate “being-cut” does not come to be or pass away with any one particular act of cutting, that particular act, in aligning a wounded body with the predicate that designates its wound, institutes a novel relation of corporeal and incorporeal; it is an event of sense.

The effects of corporeal causes are incorporeal predicates. Language apprehends those predicates in order to materialize them, because speaking, listening, writing and reading are all bodily acts (38). The sense of that which is spoken, heard, written, or read is, however, strictly incorporeal—as distinct from the act of speaking it as is the predicate “cutting” from the particular event of a knife’s doing what it does. This means that predicates subsist independently of the minds that would contemplate or ascribe them. Grosz considers this among the Stoics’ most important insights, that there is more to the real than the material, but that this excess of ideality is not indexed to contemplating minds, experiencing subjects, or intentional acts. Importantly, this is not a dualism. The ongoing concatenation of causes that constitutes the material world is constantly throwing off incorporeal effects the way a running engine lets off steam. Thought orients itself toward those effects and language materializes them.

Fate is what the Stoics call the corporeal operation of all causes on each other (27). Grosz takes this to be one ethical implication of their ontology of bodies, that human life is sundered between a corporeal determinism and an incorporeality of sense that hovers over the chain of bodies and causes that make up the material world. Ethics is about the affirmation of incorporeal events, the alignment of bodies and sense. Freedom is about cultivating the ability to desire what happens, to bring one’s own nature into accordance with nature as such. The more we understand that causal order, the better we become at distinguishing what it is that we can control from what it is that we can’t. We can control our responses to what happens; we can cultivate our nature, our behavioral dispositions. We cannot control nature as such, and so the best we can do is to affirm its order (52). This motivates a shift from the depths of our own bodies to the surface of corporeality across which incorporeal events flash as the various transformations our bodies undergo. This is the Stoic lesson, that the rational concurrence of our nature with the natural order is attendant on the implication of the ethical in the ontological.

The Incorporeal follows a study of the Stoics with Spinoza, beginning, again, with Deleuze, who did perhaps more than anyone to secure the revolutionary implications of Spinoza’s ontology of immanence. But this is nothing new, and one can’t help but ask here the awkward question of audience. This chapter reads like a neatly written rehearsal of well-known Spinozan themes in a well-known Deleuzian tone. Who is it for? It might serve as an introduction were it not for the decidedly Deleuzian slant. But no one already familiar with Deleuze has much to learn from it. And it would surprise me to hear that most of Grosz’s readers don’t already know something about him. Grosz does at times try to position Spinoza in terms of her larger theoretic aims, and in so doing, she does, to be fair, occasionally move beyond a summary of the Deleuzian interpretation; the trouble here, however, is that the insights and lessons Grosz draws from Spinoza in this register don’t seem to add much to her reading of the Stoics. Points of disagreement aside, both serve for Grosz above all else as thinkers who see rational self-understanding as a tool for the extension and intensification of our capacities within a nature causally ordered. They both think the human being as ineluctably embodied and affectively engaged with the bodies around it, and they both take the situation of the human being as a living thing within a larger whole as an ethical challenge to be resolved through ontological analysis.

The next chapter, on Nietzsche, is unfortunately beset by a similar set of issues. Much of it consists in familiar themes, redescribed now in terms of incorporeality. Take the will to power. Grosz reads it as an incorporeal condition for material wills instead of the set of all their conflicts (111). This counterintuitive interpretation seems to rely on two closely related claims. First, if we understand individual bodies as material, then we have to conceive the impersonal field out of which they take shape, are oriented, and into which they dissolve as necessarily immaterial. Second, material bodies require a principle of individuation; they have to be bounded, delimited, particular, otherwise it makes little sense to call them material or corporeal. Since the will to power is supposed to designate precisely that which exceeds the individual—”a monster of energy” in continual self-transformation without beginning or end—then it is best understood as incorporeal, at least qua impersonal and undelimited (112). The eternal return, the overman, fate, and amor fati all receive similar treatments. In the end, Nietzsche comes out sounding a lot like Spinoza (maximize joyful encounters!), who comes out sounding a lot like the Stoics (affirm what happens to us!), all of whom sound unsurprisingly a lot like Deleuze, the subject of the next chapter (121).

While incorporeals abound in Deleuze’s work—Difference and Repetition‘s virtual and its intensities, A Thousand Plateaus‘s Body without Organs and the Nonorganic Life traverses it—Grosz focuses instead on What is Philosophy? and its concepts of the concept and of the plane of immanence. Her analysis departs from typical accounts of Deleuze’s metaphysics in order to bring together the ontological (plane of immanence) with the ethical (ethology of affects). Grosz reads What is Philosophy?‘s plane of immanence as the abstract coexistence of ideas and concepts in an order of eternality not unlike the realm in which the Stoics’ lekta subsist independently of their alignments with spatiotemporally determinate bodies (137). The plane of immanence is, for Grosz, the plane proper to a thought unbound from particular thinkers and from individual events of thinking (139). It is traversed by concepts, which are fabricated out of the components of other concepts, emergent from out of the histories of their elaboration, and internally consistent, i.e., sufficiently autonomous from their conditions of creation for them to assume a place on the plane of immanence. Concepts on the plane are incorporeal, available to divergent actualizations across space and time and ingredient in different events of thought while remaining irreducible to each (145). Concepts are produced and affirmed by particular bodies in particular conditions. They bear witness to forms of life or styles of living (149). Thinking is another way of navigating the world. Ethics is about learning to do that more joyfully, less resentfully, more powerfully, less sadly. And just as that involves a learned style of bodily comportment away from the toxic and towards the enlivening, so too does it require a form of affirmative thought, a production and coordination of the right concepts.

Here, again, is the relation between the corporeal and the incorporeal, between ethics and ontology. A compelling move, no doubt—but a simple one. And it isn’t exactly clear what the chapter’s other preoccupations—Uexkull’s ethology, the brain-subject—are supposed to add to it. The Incorporeal pivots around this chapter. It’s followed by dense introductions to the work of Simondon and Ruyer, both of whom play serious roles in Deleuze’s early metaphysics, but neither of whom seems to have all that much to do with the book’s first three chapters. They may prove illuminating studies for some readers, but one can’t help but wonder again whether any such reader really exists for a book like this one. For the Deleuzian, they are redundant. For anyone else, they might seem interesting, but no real argument is provided for why one ought to concern oneself with them outside of their importance for understanding Deleuze. Grosz’s chapter on Simondon runs through his theory of individuation, his endeavour to explain the generation of individual things outside the Aristotelian scheme, his postulation of the preindividual, and his taxonomy of phases of individuation. While Grosz does provide the reader a few hints at what a Simondonian ontoethics might look like, it isn’t clear what role incorporeality is supposed to play in that project, and one is left wondering again about the significance of the chapter outside of Deleuze studies.

Simondon repurposes a concept from thermodynamics in order to describe the state of preindividual being as “metastable,” retaining unexhausted potentials for the generation of various orders of individuality (173). Metastable being resolves itself in the individuation of an extensive entity; that individual thing realizes and cancels the instabilities that initially catalyzed it (179). Biological individuation is open-ended. Life comes correlative with a distinction between interiority and exteriority—a membrane—that places its internal system in communication with a milieu outside it. This communication lasts as long as does the living thing. Psychic individuation, or thought, emerges from another order of complexity, out of the tensional relations and instabilities between a living body’s affects and perceptions (188). Perception orients the body in a world by simplifying that world into an action space; affect allows that body to feel its way through that space. The psyche continually recalibrates these distinctions and their relations to the world outside them, placing the living thing once again in circuit with the preindividual potentials from which it arose.

This process involves the implication of a living thing within a collective, which affords it the ability to consider possible points of view, other perceptions and affections, and to orient itself in terms of this excess of others over itself. The further the individual extends itself in these directions, the more it “transindividuates” itself, losing its identity with itself in order to gain access to a richer field of preindividual potentials (193). This gain heralds the introduction of the ethical into human life as the task of making resonate higher and higher orders of potentiality, of “sett[ing] off new becomings in the processes of (endless) individuation” (206). Ethics, for Grosz, is nothing other than this affirmation—of amplitude, openness, and creativity, all immanent to the ongoing individuation, that is, the becoming, of the living being (207).

In her final chapter, Grosz discusses the work of Raymond Ruyer, who is just beginning to enjoy something of a revival today due almost entirely to his status as an influence on Deleuze. So it’s no surprise to see him placed up against Simondon. They do share a number of theoretical concerns, but most important for Grosz is Ruyer’s relatively unique aspiration to save a concept of finality from the advances of an increasingly popular mechanistic biology. That biology goes wrong, on his account, in its limitation to the spatiotemporally determinate, the corporeal. As with Simondon, Ruyer thinks that the explanation of individuation requires a preindividual field. Ruyer calls it the “transspatial” (226). It’s made up of themes, patterns, or potentials that underwrite the actualization of particular individuals.

Actualization eludes exhaustively causal specification. Causes operate determinatively; they are actual, localizable in space and time. The equipotentiality of the embryo (and of the brain) is not itself a property, but the state of being able to realize a multiplicity of different properties. The presence or absence of what embryologists call “chemical organizers,” which are causal artifacts of the genetic composition of the embryo, can be construed as triggers of potential themes, which once invoked by them pass into spatiotemporal actuality (233). But they cannot be considered causes; invocation is something else entirely. It operates vertically, drawing into the actual relevant themes from the mnemic, the transspatial. Triggers, or “invokers”—pressure, temperature differential, chemical gradient—act like smells that recall memories.

The brain retains the equipotentiality of the embryo; it is the embryo in the adult, just as the embryo is its own brain. Thought occurs in the brain’s invocation of sense, ideas, and values—all incorporeal, the domain of themes and potentials. Goal-directed action would be impossible were it not for these. In orienting ourselves toward potentials in acting we cannot but feel, as Grosz has it, “the pull of the future, of an ideal to be accomplished or a goal or purpose to be attained” (244). The ideals that orient us are not imposed from without like moral precepts but rather suffuse and direct the world’s myriad becomings, luring it from the future into different and new creative transformations. Ethics, Grosz suggests again, is about experimenting with these possibilities, affirming the excess of the world over itself, the inexhaustible potentials into which life is endlessly resolving itself (248).

Ruyer calls this “neofinalism,” a theory of ends that casts them not ahead of us but in another ontological register that allows them to fully saturate the corporeal world as the fiery pneuma of the Stoics does the bodies of their plenum. These ends also comprise a reservoir from which new forms of life can be drawn, whether in technological innovation, aesthetic stylization, the creation of institution and collectives, or indeed in the act of thinking itself. Since Ruyer’s ethics of creativity relies upon his postulation of incorporeal ends, and since those incorporeal ends (or themes) themselves are responsible for the creativity of the world right down to its basic components, he stands, I think, as perhaps the book’s best example of an ontoethical thinker. The Incorporeal presents itself as an attempt to theorize a neglected ontological domain by uncovering its existence across a selective genealogy of thinkers. But sometimes it seems as if what we get is just another book on Deleuze—how easily it could have been reframed and retitled Deleuze and the Incorporeal—whose chapters begin with summaries of his monographs and commentaries (the Stoics, Spinoza, Nietzsche), pivot around his own work, and conclude with analyses of some of his lesser known inheritances (Simondon and Ruyer), without doing all that much besides. Some of the chapters work well as pillars for Grosz’s project—as with the Stoics and, to a more complicated extent, Ruyer—but others feel forced into relation with each other and with the thrust of the book as a whole.

In the end, The Incorporeal seems to hesitate between the development of an original ontology and a work of Deleuze scholarship. It seems to hesitate just as waveringly between a set of introductions and a creative trajectory of recharacterizations. Grosz’s latest effort is at its strongest when it is thematizing the subterranean ontological importance of its title concept across Deleuze’s history of philosophy; it is at its weakest when it tries to press from that ontology an ethics consistent across thinkers as diverse as Nietzsche and Simondon, or Spinoza and Ruyer. The direction of the text is promising, no doubt, but one is left hoping that in her future work Grosz will be able to detach the elaboration of some of its themes from the figure studies that make it up.