Response 2.0

Rick Elmore, divine respondent, has written to me out of the blue with a question about interonnectedness and Graham Harman.

First of all, let me remind you how joyful it was to hear Rick's response to my talk, in which I felt so thoroughly known, it was very touching.

Okay, the essence of Rick's question is this: if I'm cleaving to Harman's withdrawn objects, what happens to the radical interconnectedness of The Ecological Thought?

Here is part of my response:

That's a very significant question. I hope I can answer it here though rather briefly. I'm working on two projects, one on causality and one on hyperobjects, which will address this question.

1) I might have made mistakes in the past! (Of course, one often says this, especially if prone to making mistakes... : ) )

2) I don't think when I wrote ET that I had figured out the question of whether the mesh or the strange stranger had ontological priority.

2)a) Strange strangers are unicities, even in ET, so the mesh didn't even there suggest that things are *only their relations. There was a more paradoxical thinking going on about how the relationality of things made them uncanny.

3) Now I believe that there is a mesh, that it's totally interconnected (as before)--even that it's nonlocal and nontemporal in some sense. Yet the mesh floats ontologically "in front" of the strange stranger(s), rather than subtending it/them/her. This works if we think of causation has happening in, even equivalent to, the aesthetic dimension, which is how it must work if we have withdrawn objects...