Towards the Theory of Non--Abelian Tensor Fields I

We present a triangulation--independent area--ordering prescription which naturally generalizes the well known path ordering one. For such a prescription it is natural that the two--form ``connection'' should carry three ``color'' indices rather than two as it is in the case of the ordinary one--form gauge connection. To define the prescription in question we have to define how to {\it exponentiate} a matrix with three indices. The definition uses the fusion rule structure constants.