The Mesh Is a Sensual Object

I was very surprised when I decided to flip my ecological model upside down. When I wrote The Ecological Thought I assumed that the mesh was ontologically prior (or rather, and worse, I thought it was outside of ontology altogether). Then from that emerged strange strangers.

This was nowhere near good enough a reading of Levinas, let alone the OOO I'd finally embrace a few months after that book came out.

Apropos of a forthcoming post, I now think emergent properties of anything are sensual in OOO terms. That is they are manifestations of appearance-as or appearance-for, what Harman calls the as-structure.

So strange strangers are pretty flimsy beasts if they are only emergent properties of the mesh.

At UCLA when I gave my first full on OOO talk I decided that if you upturned the five-part model of rhetoric so that you started with delivery, you would have an OOO rhetoric.

Since then I've been wondering whether the same would work for mesh.

Having thought it through for two months I'm convinced that it works. Actual entities are strange strangers, expanding my ET language to include non-life.

And relations between them constitute the mesh.

This mesh is pretty darn "real" if by that you mean "involving interactions that don't require some third person 'observer'."

DNA's relation to RNA for instance is a sensual object. Part of the mesh.

The machinery of evolution ontologically sits on top of the strange strangers! The mesh is te emergent feature!

I'm not sure this means as much to anyone else as it does to me, yet. But it sure explains a heck of a lot of things. We don't have to keep positing prequels to the drama of life for instance. The temporal "trace structure" is an emergent property of objects. And so on and so on.

You heard it here first. This is so important to me and I trust my readers to think it through with me.