the latest from Shaviro

Here’s part of Shaviro’s latest interesting post, a reaction to Levi on Hayles:

“An object’s knowledge of other objects is indeed merely perspectival and partial (in this sense I agree with Harman’s and Bryant’s claim); but the way objects affect one another cannot be reduced to their knowledge of one another. Harman says that when fire burns cotton, the fire doesn’t engage with all the properties of the cotton. I would say rather that the fire, in destroying the cotton, does indeed engage with the cotton in its totality; I would revise Harman’s claim to say that, although the fire affects the cotton utterly, it doesn’t ‘know’ all the properties of the cotton.”

I’ve encountered this claim from others before, and often even Levi tends in the same direction (despite the fact that Shaviro presents my position and Levi’s as basically the same; there are similarities, but this is a point where I think Levi and Shaviro are actually a closer match than either of them is with me).

Namely, there is sometimes a willingness to agree that knowledge is a form of translation that inevitably shapes, molds, or transforms whatever it encounters– but then these same people shy away from agreeing that causation is also such a form of translation. They say that causation is total without withdrawal, and the problem is simply that knowledge is never able to match this total causal contact.

As I see it, this does nothing more than repeat the purely arbitrary dualism that has been with us since Descartes. Why should knowledge be some sort of special distortion grafted onto the surface of an unproblematic pre-cognitive contact?

My position is much simpler: all relations are relations. All relations transform that to which they relate. Hence, there is only a difference of degree between cognitive and purely causal relations.

Whenever I write my next systematic-type book, I’m going to try to make an even clearer case for why partial relations to real objects are impossible. But Shaviro is wrong to think this means that objects are hopelessly closed off in themselves, just as he is wrong to think my position is static and allows for no change. Rather, I think this is a case of projection, for it is Shaviro’s own position that is guilty of total cutoff and stasis. Insofar as he defines things by their relations, they are forever bonded to those relations, which perish instantaneously. He is left with no flux or becoming at all, but merely with a series of stop-action cinematic frames, each cut off from the next. Shaviro, like Whitehead and Latour (not bad company) is an occasionalist when it comes to questions of time.