What A Mesh

Timothy Morton's ecological theory is meshy. Literally, actually. For Morton, mesh explains the interconnectedness of all living and non-living beings. infinite both in number of connections and scale of differentiation. He states: 

The ecological thought does, indeed, consist in the ramifications of the truly wonderful fact of the mesh. All life forms are the mesh, and so are all the dead ones, as are their habitats, which are also made up of living and nonliving beings. We know even more now about how life forms have shaped the Earth (think of oil, of oxygen—the first climate change cataclysm). We drive around using crushed dinosaur parts. Iron is mostly a by-product of bacterial metabolism. So is oxygen. Mountains can be made of shells and fossilized bacteria. Death and the mesh go together in another sense, too, because natural selection implies extinction (Morton, The Ecological Thought, 2010). 

At first glance, this idea doesn't seem to jive with object-oriented studies, which holds that all objects exist independent of other objects and possess agency, or the capacity to move in and out of relations (and assemblages of relations). If all objects are interconnected, however,  they lack agency and, instead, remain ensnared within a totalizing relational determination. Independence of preordained—so noted because absolute relationality implicates relations, themselves, in a clown walk of codependence—relational assemblages is impossibilized, precipitating the stacking of relations on top of one another to forge illusive teleological regimes. So, does that mean the concept must be discarded, now that Tim is an OOO'er? 

Not necessarily. He just needs to clean up his mesh. Rather than defining it in hyperrelational terms that undermine objects themselves, Morton should, in my view, define the mesh topologically, as the sum total of all relations extant in a given spatiotemporal frame. In this way, the mesh complements Morton's hyperobjects thesis, completing the object-oriented turn of the ecological thought. Hyperobjects are characterized by an ambiguous mereology, in that they cannot be locally manifested because of their massive distribution. In other words, manifestations of a hyperobject—for example, Earth—have achieved escape velocity for the objects they pertain. Hyperobjects remain fully objectal, however, despite their size, a point that is sometimes missed. Even though hyperobjects occupy a higher dimensional space than "smaller" objects to which they adhere, they are fully agential beings, capable of entering into and departing relations. Operationalizing the mesh as the summation of all objects, on the other hand, would undermine objects, turning the mesh into an ultimate hyperobject from which all other entities could never, even in theory, be severed. In effect, the mesh would become a single substance, an objectal form, with other objects being defined in terms of alienation from this ideal. Put simply, the mesh would be God, auscultating itself through the becoming-other of its constituent parts. 

Instead, the mesh can be understood relationally, as the aggregate of all encounters between objects in a given assemblage. Just as a hyperobject can be parsed in terms of parts and wholes, so can the mesh. Thus, the mesh can be adapted to describe objects relating in various scales. If capitalism is a fictive hyperobject for Western economic entities, then the mesh encapsulates all commodified relations occurring within a capitalist framework in a given temporal frame. Like hyperobjects, the mesh can be scaled up or down, depending on the entities in question. Importantly, the mesh is not, itself, a relation, but a fictive entity bounded by prehension (if all relations are translations, then relations comprising the mesh are always already 'sensual', in the phenomenological sense of being 'intentional' deployed by Graham Harman). The key, here, is in the uncanniness of the mesh that parrots hyperobjectal incertitude, the inherent unfamiliarity of even the most familiar objects, or what Morton calls 'strange strangers'. Meshed entities exist coexistentially, yet contingently, meaning that no matter how close they appear to one another, objects cannot achieve a speed great enough to outrun their finitude. Accordingly, when objects seemingly should be on a march toward intimacy through repetition of relations, the absence of each other's being is made more and more present, the gulf of becoming—indeed, awareness of the lack of total interdependence—widened. Repetition of the withdrawn essential chasm births both reverence and horror, rendering the mesh a field of relational anxiety, within which objects are neither reducible to signification nor instrumentality, but expose processes of projection as an objectal withdrawal masquerading as a structurally individuated subjectivity. 

Put a bit poetically, existence in the mesh implicates the contingent affirmation of an unseen Other refracted through the looking glass, instead of an enduringly entangled binary of self and not-self on either side of a prismatic plane. That said, relations within the mesh seek not the colorful space opened on the other side of the rabbit hole, but, in contrast, a fuller experience of descent, simply out of love for the act of falling. 

 
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Comments

  • 12/12/2011 2:21 PM Marisol Bate wrote:
    I had trouble with the idea of the mesh, when I first encountered it in 'The Ecological Thought'. To me, it didn't work with object-oriented ontology, as you say, though the book was written prior to Morton's "official" turn to OOO. Also, the idea of of radical interconnectedness didn't seem to allow for the uncanny character of dark ecology that argued for so persuasively. If all beings are interconnected, the becoming of one impacts the becoming of all, such that the becoming of entities is a shared, mutualized experience. Can the uncanny exist under such circumstances? I'm not so sure.

    So, I was one of those people who would have argued that Morton needed to dismiss the radical interconnectedness of the mesh, but you make a very compelling case for its reconception, even if you're only taking a couple of steps to the side. Defining the mesh relationally, coupling Morton's idea with existing OOO strains, opens new space to explore another question that has been lingering in the back of my head: How do we discuss bounded relations? In other words, can we talk about relations within an entity? Mereologically, the answer is yes. The question then becomes "How?" - how, for example, do we describe all relations in a given territory? A relational mesh incorporates mereology, but not in a way that necessitates classification. In order words, the uncanny of the relationally situated mesh allows all relations to remain independent of one another, just as objects are, while allowing us to explore points of contingency between relations.

    And most interestingly, the 'mesh' is an entity at some level, too, so the experience of the uncanny extends to the idea of the uncanny itself, in a way. As Morton said, strangeness itself is strange. Good job!
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  • 12/13/2011 2:31 PM Craig Whitehead wrote:
    For what it's worth, I also found Morton's concept of 'the mesh' as absolute interconnectedness a bit problematic when viewed from an object-oriented perspective, but I hadn't considered the possibility of stepping back and viewing it relationally. Positing it as a fictional entity allows for the mesh-as-signifier's relations to be part of the mesh itself, which is an interesting take the preserves some of Morton's emphasis on dissolving boundaries, albeit without dissolving boundedness to the point of saying that everything is related to everything else. What, then, becomes of the ecological thought without a radicalized interconnectedness? If the ecological thought is no loner thinking interconnectedly, it seems to me that it becomes even more horrifying. It's think uncannily, a contemplation of the withdrawn, and a recognition of finitude - all of which are made more pallatable by the comfort of interrelation with neighbors, even if they are 'strange strangers' that become more so with intimacy.
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