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If Bhaskar discovers materialism in the impossibility of straightforward idealism, Grosz discovers idealism in the impossibility of straightforward materialism. Both end up in about the same place, though by different paths.

Grosz traces a line of thinking that she argues is solidly grounded on materialism, but which nevertheless uncovers meaning that exceeds the material. She starts her narrative with the Stoics of Ancient Greece, moving on to Baruch Spinoza, a contemporary of Descartes,^§MS3.1.2g then to Friedrich Nietzsche in the nineteenth century, and Gilles Deleuze in the twentieth. The thread of continuity she calls “the incorporeal.”

Meanwhile, she points out, it is “almost impossible to find a credible idealism today.” Nevertheless, she asks “What intellectual maneuvers must materialism develop to hide what it must assume – concepts, processes, frames, that are somehow different from and other than simply material? … How do materialists understand meaning or sense in terms beyond their materiality as sonorous or written trace?”⁵⁶

Spinoza, Grosz argues, offers an alternative to Descartes’ dualism, where body and mind are two separate substances, thinking and things. Rather, there is a single indivisible substance where meanings are immanent, pervasive, indivisible. “Descartes is thus mistaken, according to Spinoza … for matter must necessarily have a conceptual equivalent, an idea, not in opposition to … but as one of the attributes of substance … Substance is both material and incorporeal.”⁵⁷

For his heretical idea that God might be pervasively present in the world (Grosz’s “incorporeal”), Spinoza was twice charged with heresy and convicted, first by the Portuguese-speaking Jewish community of his birth in Amsterdam, and later by the Catholic Church when his writings were listed in the Index of Banned Books. “The Lord shall blot out his name from under heaven,”⁵⁸ said the rabbis of his Amsterdam congregation. It was precisely these kinds of separations that Spinoza said were impossible, of heaven from earth, of a speaking God from spoken-to humanity, of language from living.

In the twentieth century Gilles Deleuze^§MS3.1.1b also draws inspiration from Spinoza, whose “substance” Deleuze renames the “plane of immanence.” Instead of conceptual oppositions between mind and body, or material and ideal, he finds “entwinement of ideality or conceptuality with materiality or corporeality – the nature of the world, substance – is folded in on itself through life and the process of becoming-alive.” This, says Grosz, is “an incorporeal order of sense that enables and conditions thought.”⁵⁹ The material and the ideal lie together in tension, a state of becoming, the one never separable from the other.

This is where, to slip across to the terminology we use for our transpositional grammar, the material has its as-yet-unrealized meanings-in, and the ideal or incorporeal is capable of exceeding the already-real, of creating meanings-for.

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⁵⁶ Elizabeth Grosz, 2017, The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, pp. 17, 18. Some instances of the “new materialism”: Franco “Biffo” Beradi, 2015, And: Phenomenology of the End, Sensibility and Connective Mutation, Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e); Ian Bogost, 2012, Alien Phenomenology, or What It Is Like to Be a Thing, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press; Ray Brassier, 2007, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction; London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan; Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., 2010, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press; Graham Harman, 2016, Immaterialism, Cambridge, UK: Polity; Galen Strawson, 2013, “Real Naturalism,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association 86(2):125–54; Quentin Meillassoux, 2006 [2008], After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, London, UK: Continuum.

⁵⁷ Elizabeth Grosz, 2017, The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, pp. 6–7, 54–55, 61.

⁵⁸ Steven Nadler, 1999, Spinoza: A Life, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, p. 120.

⁵⁹ Elizabeth Grosz, 2017, The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, pp. 164–65.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 276–277. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Elizabeth Grosz’s “Incorporeal” §MS3.1.1a