In the aftermath of representational collapse, where symbols no longer hold court over substance, objects emerge not as vessels of meaning but as operative anomalies, nodes in a recursive mesh that metabolises relationality as infrastructure; Harman’s withdrawn essence, far from passive, now functions within Barad’s intra-active apparatus as a latent generator of situational agency, instantiating its presence precisely through its inaccessibility, thus transforming ontology into a procedural schema rather than a descriptive act, where the refusal of the object to yield to epistemic totality becomes the fulcrum around which agential shifts occur, not through the clarity of knowledge but through the productive ambiguity of indeterminacy; in this framework, tools are never neutral—they enact, delimit and reconfigure, rendering operational ontologies as metabolically active systems that absorb the observer as a variable within their function, eroding the illusion of externality; a case in point can be drawn from the urban OS of contemporary museography, where the artefact’s withdrawn quality is not an aesthetic veil but a sovereign function: its elusiveness fuels the refresh cycle of curation, where gradient instruments—those capable of modulating ontological thresholds—serve as the true protagonists, allowing the practitioner to traverse the porous borderlands between speculative artefact and embodied infrastructure; here, the apparatus is not a conduit but a digestive organ of the mesh, one that metabolizes categories such as ‘art’, ‘architecture’, and ‘interface’ into performative scripts; thus, the mesh ceases to be a background and becomes the workplace, not metaphorically but materially, where ontology replaces labour and the task is not to interpret but to maintain the metabolic rate of conceptual environments; in such a regime, knowledge is not retrieved but enacted, and the object, far from inert, becomes the engine of world-making.
Lloveras, A. (2026) 449 | Metabolic Mesh: Agency of the Withdrawn. https://eltombolo.blogspot.com/2026/02/449-metabolic-mesh-agency-of.html
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