quick response to Shaviro

I’m glad Shaviro agrees to the ceasefire (I have a lot to write at the moment), but since he MADE A POST, I should be allowed to respond quickly. Here’s one of his key passages:

“In other words: I do not see the point in maintaining, simply because interactions (or relations) are always partial and limited, to therefore hypostasize whatever was not grasped (prehended) in the event of a particular encounter as a shadow object that exists in and of itself apart from the encounter. (Quite ironically, this means that Harman and Bryant are more Kantian than I am — in spite of what I have said on this subject before).”

As for the Kant point, I already agreed with Shaviro last summer that my position is in agreement with Kant’s on the things-in-themselves. It’s the other side of Kant (privilege of the human world relation) which is more dominant these days, and on that point I have nothing to do with Kant. Shaviro knows and concedes this; I’m just adding the clarification for others.

As for the other part, I encounter this objection a lot… Just because the mosquito only encounters certain aspects of me, why does that mean that I as a real object am withdrawn from the mosquito?

The question betrays the view that objects can be built up out of qualities. According to this view, the mosquito may only encounter 3% of me, but it’s still encountering me directly, and hence no withdrawal is occurring.

I say that this is false. An object is not a bundle of qualities (this holds for both real objects and sensual ones). An object is a unit, and by definition you can’t encounter “part” of a unit; you either encounter the unit or you don’t.

In my theory, real never encounters real. But real does encounter sensual. Contact is always asymmetrical, and the sensual realm is needed as a bridge between reals (just as the real object, namely a perceiver, is what is needed to link various sensual objects together in the same perceptual experience).

Oddly, this leads me to the exact opposite conclusion of many Deleuzians. For me, causation always occurs on a surface, never in the depths.

Shaviro also seems to claim in that post that the fact that we can destroy mosquitoes entails direct contact with the mosquito. He never says why, though. Indirect destruction is perfectly possible, as seen in the cases of bombs dropped from airplanes or even bullets fired at a distance.

He says that I’m hypostatizing an object outside its encounters. But, I repeat, the problem is his, and it’s the opposite problem… No objects outside the encounters leads to too many problems: no possibility of change, and no possibility of adeqautely accounting for counterfactual situations.

If Shanghai is nothing but the sum total of perceptions of it right now, this has a hard time addressing questions such as: “What if I were to appear in Shanghai this instant?” The answer is that I would be having a new, personal perception of Shanghai, not of the perceptions of Shanghai. Shaviro never lets us come to rest in anything real. His is a world filled with hot potatoes, with the burden of reality always being passed elsewhere.