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Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World
Having set global warming in irreversible motion, we are facing the possibility of ecological catastrophe. But the environmental emergency is also a crisis for our philosophical habits of thought, confronting us with a problem that seems to defy not only our control but also our understanding. Global warming is perhaps the most dramatic example of what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects”—entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place. In this book, Morton explains what hyperobjects are and their impact on how we think, how we coexist with one another and with nonhumans, and how we experience our politics, ethics, and art.
Moving fluidly between philosophy, science, literature, visual and conceptual art, and popular culture, the book argues that hyperobjects show that the end of the world has already occurred in the sense that concepts such as world, nature, and even environment are no longer a meaningful horizon against which human events take place. Instead of inhabiting a world, we find ourselves inside a number of hyperobjects, such as climate, nuclear weapons, evolution, or relativity. Such objects put unbearable strains on our normal ways of reasoning.
Insisting that we have to reinvent how we think to even begin to comprehend the world we now live in, Hyperobjects takes the first steps, outlining a genuinely postmodern ecological approach to thought and action.
Moving fluidly between philosophy, science, literature, visual and conceptual art, and popular culture, the book argues that hyperobjects show that the end of the world has already occurred in the sense that concepts such as world, nature, and even environment are no longer a meaningful horizon against which human events take place. Instead of inhabiting a world, we find ourselves inside a number of hyperobjects, such as climate, nuclear weapons, evolution, or relativity. Such objects put unbearable strains on our normal ways of reasoning.
Insisting that we have to reinvent how we think to even begin to comprehend the world we now live in, Hyperobjects takes the first steps, outlining a genuinely postmodern ecological approach to thought and action.
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
About the author
Timothy Morton
78 books317 followersTimothy Bloxam Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They are the author of Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence; Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (with Marcus Boon and Eric Cazdyn); Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World; and other books.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 145 reviews
April 29, 2019
Part I: A Theory
I'm pretty sure Timothy Morton is a Hyperobject. He is Viscous: he won't let you leave without sticking repetition after repetition to you. He is Non-Local: no single argument exists at any single point in his book. His Temporality is Undulating: I'm not sure what future Timothy wants from me, let alone this chapter, and that's to say nothing of future future Timothy. He is in a constant process of Phasing: his examples are constantly swapping from one topic of unorthodox-ily/partially/erratically defended tangential/debatable/dubious applicability to another. And he is Interobjective: his book appears to be only the effect of the interrelation of his previous effort Ecology without Nature, Graham Harman, and Martin Heidegger.
Part II: Questions, Etc.
Timothy, why are you so hot under the collar? Why do you repeat so much? Why are you so jumpy with your references? Why are you so noncontinuous with your arguments? Why are you so diminutizing of artistic/political movements when you forbid diminutizing objects? Why do you repeat so much? Why do you contradict yourself, like with Kant on pg30, or with rejecting meta by out meta-ing it? Why do you use Hegel's theory of aesthetics as a multi-page lead-in to what you posit as a new stage in the theory if you think the theory is so bad?
Part III: Reader's Guide
* Get ready to hear thoughts, many thoughts, about global warming.
* Either skip the introduction (~20pgs) or skip the first three chapters (~40pgs): no, you're not missing anything.
* Definitely read the chapters entitled Phasing, Interobjectivity, and The End of the World. These are the most stimulating passages.
* If you're feeling pretty good about that, keep going into Hypocricies, but know that when you ask yourself "ok, is this going to get better again?" the answer is no, it isn't.
* Did you like Terry Riley's In C (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjR4QY...), but find it far too conservative and reinforcing of the western tradition? If yes, read The Age of Asymmetry. If no, don't.
Part IV: Sincerity?
This book - by which I mostly mean those three chapters indicated in Part III of this review - is stimulating. His removal of the temporal present and the notion of 'world,' as well as his redefinition of what constitutes an object to include its temporal and causal (I use the word casually for brevity) dimensions give one plenty to chew on, even if they have analogues elsewhere. And for that, despite the fun I've had in this review at its expense, you may find this work worth looking into.
Part V: Ah-Hah
I used a Pope Francis prayer card as a bookmark for this. At first I didn't realize the relationship between book and bookmark would get so awkward, but once I did it became kinda entertaining.
I'm pretty sure Timothy Morton is a Hyperobject. He is Viscous: he won't let you leave without sticking repetition after repetition to you. He is Non-Local: no single argument exists at any single point in his book. His Temporality is Undulating: I'm not sure what future Timothy wants from me, let alone this chapter, and that's to say nothing of future future Timothy. He is in a constant process of Phasing: his examples are constantly swapping from one topic of unorthodox-ily/partially/erratically defended tangential/debatable/dubious applicability to another. And he is Interobjective: his book appears to be only the effect of the interrelation of his previous effort Ecology without Nature, Graham Harman, and Martin Heidegger.
Part II: Questions, Etc.
Timothy, why are you so hot under the collar? Why do you repeat so much? Why are you so jumpy with your references? Why are you so noncontinuous with your arguments? Why are you so diminutizing of artistic/political movements when you forbid diminutizing objects? Why do you repeat so much? Why do you contradict yourself, like with Kant on pg30, or with rejecting meta by out meta-ing it? Why do you use Hegel's theory of aesthetics as a multi-page lead-in to what you posit as a new stage in the theory if you think the theory is so bad?
Part III: Reader's Guide
* Get ready to hear thoughts, many thoughts, about global warming.
* Either skip the introduction (~20pgs) or skip the first three chapters (~40pgs): no, you're not missing anything.
* Definitely read the chapters entitled Phasing, Interobjectivity, and The End of the World. These are the most stimulating passages.
* If you're feeling pretty good about that, keep going into Hypocricies, but know that when you ask yourself "ok, is this going to get better again?" the answer is no, it isn't.
* Did you like Terry Riley's In C (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjR4QY...), but find it far too conservative and reinforcing of the western tradition? If yes, read The Age of Asymmetry. If no, don't.
Part IV: Sincerity?
This book - by which I mostly mean those three chapters indicated in Part III of this review - is stimulating. His removal of the temporal present and the notion of 'world,' as well as his redefinition of what constitutes an object to include its temporal and causal (I use the word casually for brevity) dimensions give one plenty to chew on, even if they have analogues elsewhere. And for that, despite the fun I've had in this review at its expense, you may find this work worth looking into.
Part V: Ah-Hah
I used a Pope Francis prayer card as a bookmark for this. At first I didn't realize the relationship between book and bookmark would get so awkward, but once I did it became kinda entertaining.
March 7, 2021
I work as a researcher at an assessment startup (well, scaleup) company. It's a really cool assessment company, and I work with some incredible people. But it's an assessment company, and it's stewed in a host of concerning philosophical issues. The one most pertinent to this review (aside from the fact that it's a company -- for another review) is that it falls prey to one of the grand delusions of the 21st century: the belief that with enough (tech) data, particularly quantitative data, and the right analysis, you can know and predict anything. If you've followed me for like any amount of time, you know my eyes are rolling. The assessment space is steeped in social science methodology -- methodology that, in many ways, is just now starting to catch up to philosophy from ancient Greece & mid-century lit crit. Yet somehow I spend a lot of time parenthetically justifying my background as a literature researcher & English/Ethics teacher.
Actually, I spend a fair bit of time justifying the humanities, period. And that's why my review can't possibly be objective (objectivity doesn't exist anyway), and why this book was such a fucking gift: a palate cleanser professionally and personally; a reminder of why thinking, and particularly thinking away from scientism, is unquestionably essential.
Timothy Morton, who according to her Twitter goes by she/him pronouns, is brilliant. Full stop. You may not like everything she says, or you may not get how he formulates his arguments. But it's a twisting, additive brilliance, roiling with an incredible catalogue of western (and some eastern) philosophy and MEDIA (media! to quote poets, and show art, and reference musicians all AS REFERENCES -- like my HEART, how do I EXPRESS how much it means to see that -- to see art as "proof", as real.). I will admit that the writing is fluid, to put it lightly (and Morton hangs a lantern on that in the intro), but there's kind of a "reading Gravity's Rainbow" quality to it -- things are being captured that haven't been captured anywhere else (that I've read, anyway), but that reveal some pretty fucking intensely deep truths. Hyperobjects exist, and they make absolute perfect sense.
I'm listening to Mother Mother while I write this, and I just laughed out loud because this book can kind of be encapsulated by this quote, from the OH so sing-a-long-able "The Stand"
Okay I'm kidding but only kind of. The primary thesis of this book coils around "interobjectivity" and object oriented ontology (OOO). My v basic understanding of OOO is that it suggests we stop prioritizing of humans over objects/non-humans -- and in doing so, opens up an entirely new way of conceptualizing ontology. Basically: fuck the mind/individual-centric anthropocentrism that Descartes and Kant really fucked us over with -- now let's disentangle ourselves and see what else is out there.
It's the perfect framing for Morton's project: defining hyperobjects, these massive, nonlocal, temporally undulating viscosities -- these huge concepts that stretch in every direction in time and space, influencing every action and thought, inescapable and wholly unknowable. Global warming is the example Morton's work hangs on, but read this and then let your mind run wild. Morton, sometimes subtly and sometimes overtly, suggests that it's been trapped in modernity for too long already. Time to check out the "third option" -- exploring the essence, right there yet withdrawn, of things (159). Ontology, separate from scientism. Finding out (or worse, thinking you've found out) a bunch of facts about a thing does not knowing the thing make.
If you're looking for, like, a "mission" beyond defining hyperobjects and how they affect modern life, you won't find it. That's okay and it's also the point: we've given up "thinking" (Morton uses this as an intransitive verb and it's fantastic) the issues in favour of trying to solve them. While she's deeply entrenched in leftist ideology, she also calls out the way the left has twisted itself away from solving any of the issues it espouses in its activism. In belittling and refuting incremental change, he says, and believing only HUGE change is relevant, we've stopped any action from actually taking place (because change on the level demanded is, frankly, impossible). The book ends with a call for rest: to stop and fucking think.
Okay so yes, this book is fantastic. However, a few notes.
1. It's not an introductory text. Like, if books were undergrad courses, this would be like, Philosophy 301: you either need to have your phone beside you ready to google "Kant aesthetics" or "Hegelian synthesis" etc, or you need a basic understanding of the tenets of western philosophy. It's not tossed off pretentiously, though, and that's important. It's that Morton has a different point to make, but other people have done previous thinking to help him make it. But to keep this concise (200 pages), she blazes through the stuff you can learn about elsewhere. So: not exactly accessible. And the prose is quite dense. But doing the googling, if that's what you gotta do, will definitely pay dividends.
2. Indigenous ways of knowing are not mentioned once in this book. This is an oversight, because from what I have been taught, Indigenous thinking has been doing much of what Morton wants to start.....for centuries. So...maybe this is just a suggestion to Morton to step away from White systems for awhile and see what else she can find.
3. The quantum stuff is largely inaccurate. It's okay because it doesn't actually detract from the points Morton's making when he references it, but the examples aren't true to the physics.
4. I also don't know that Morton gets Nietzsche, at least not as how I've thought him (I love that verb!!). But I don't think many people do, so let the hate fly, I guess. But I don't think this particular thing is up for debate: he might have inspired it, but Nietzsche himself is not a nihilist.
Aside from that: strap yer boots on, kiddoz. The world is ending, and "it"'s got a lot to show us as a result.
---
I think the best thing you can feel when you finish a book is tri-simultaneously alive, challenged, and understood.
I didn't know speculative philosophy existed, not like this, before haphazardly finding this book miscategorized under "Science" in a used bookstore. It feels like a fucking nostos. This way of thinking; I'm home. So many dog-eared pages; a sense of flow while reading; the shittiest of startup words: synergy; validated.
So cheers to Timothy Morton and the twisted world of object oriented ontology -- I can tell you I'll be spending a lot more time in philosophy sections of bookstores, now that I know this way of thinking exists in them.
Actually, I spend a fair bit of time justifying the humanities, period. And that's why my review can't possibly be objective (objectivity doesn't exist anyway), and why this book was such a fucking gift: a palate cleanser professionally and personally; a reminder of why thinking, and particularly thinking away from scientism, is unquestionably essential.
Timothy Morton, who according to her Twitter goes by she/him pronouns, is brilliant. Full stop. You may not like everything she says, or you may not get how he formulates his arguments. But it's a twisting, additive brilliance, roiling with an incredible catalogue of western (and some eastern) philosophy and MEDIA (media! to quote poets, and show art, and reference musicians all AS REFERENCES -- like my HEART, how do I EXPRESS how much it means to see that -- to see art as "proof", as real.). I will admit that the writing is fluid, to put it lightly (and Morton hangs a lantern on that in the intro), but there's kind of a "reading Gravity's Rainbow" quality to it -- things are being captured that haven't been captured anywhere else (that I've read, anyway), but that reveal some pretty fucking intensely deep truths. Hyperobjects exist, and they make absolute perfect sense.
I'm listening to Mother Mother while I write this, and I just laughed out loud because this book can kind of be encapsulated by this quote, from the OH so sing-a-long-able "The Stand"
Talk about space!
Well it's a beautiful place
But it's so damn cold
Sure, for the human race
But for the planets and the stars and everything else and Mars
It's like paradise, spread out with a butter knife
Okay I'm kidding but only kind of. The primary thesis of this book coils around "interobjectivity" and object oriented ontology (OOO). My v basic understanding of OOO is that it suggests we stop prioritizing of humans over objects/non-humans -- and in doing so, opens up an entirely new way of conceptualizing ontology. Basically: fuck the mind/individual-centric anthropocentrism that Descartes and Kant really fucked us over with -- now let's disentangle ourselves and see what else is out there.
It's the perfect framing for Morton's project: defining hyperobjects, these massive, nonlocal, temporally undulating viscosities -- these huge concepts that stretch in every direction in time and space, influencing every action and thought, inescapable and wholly unknowable. Global warming is the example Morton's work hangs on, but read this and then let your mind run wild. Morton, sometimes subtly and sometimes overtly, suggests that it's been trapped in modernity for too long already. Time to check out the "third option" -- exploring the essence, right there yet withdrawn, of things (159). Ontology, separate from scientism. Finding out (or worse, thinking you've found out) a bunch of facts about a thing does not knowing the thing make.
If you're looking for, like, a "mission" beyond defining hyperobjects and how they affect modern life, you won't find it. That's okay and it's also the point: we've given up "thinking" (Morton uses this as an intransitive verb and it's fantastic) the issues in favour of trying to solve them. While she's deeply entrenched in leftist ideology, she also calls out the way the left has twisted itself away from solving any of the issues it espouses in its activism. In belittling and refuting incremental change, he says, and believing only HUGE change is relevant, we've stopped any action from actually taking place (because change on the level demanded is, frankly, impossible). The book ends with a call for rest: to stop and fucking think.
Okay so yes, this book is fantastic. However, a few notes.
1. It's not an introductory text. Like, if books were undergrad courses, this would be like, Philosophy 301: you either need to have your phone beside you ready to google "Kant aesthetics" or "Hegelian synthesis" etc, or you need a basic understanding of the tenets of western philosophy. It's not tossed off pretentiously, though, and that's important. It's that Morton has a different point to make, but other people have done previous thinking to help him make it. But to keep this concise (200 pages), she blazes through the stuff you can learn about elsewhere. So: not exactly accessible. And the prose is quite dense. But doing the googling, if that's what you gotta do, will definitely pay dividends.
2. Indigenous ways of knowing are not mentioned once in this book. This is an oversight, because from what I have been taught, Indigenous thinking has been doing much of what Morton wants to start.....for centuries. So...maybe this is just a suggestion to Morton to step away from White systems for awhile and see what else she can find.
3. The quantum stuff is largely inaccurate. It's okay because it doesn't actually detract from the points Morton's making when he references it, but the examples aren't true to the physics.
4. I also don't know that Morton gets Nietzsche, at least not as how I've thought him (I love that verb!!). But I don't think many people do, so let the hate fly, I guess. But I don't think this particular thing is up for debate: he might have inspired it, but Nietzsche himself is not a nihilist.
Aside from that: strap yer boots on, kiddoz. The world is ending, and "it"'s got a lot to show us as a result.
---
I think the best thing you can feel when you finish a book is tri-simultaneously alive, challenged, and understood.
I didn't know speculative philosophy existed, not like this, before haphazardly finding this book miscategorized under "Science" in a used bookstore. It feels like a fucking nostos. This way of thinking; I'm home. So many dog-eared pages; a sense of flow while reading; the shittiest of startup words: synergy; validated.
So cheers to Timothy Morton and the twisted world of object oriented ontology -- I can tell you I'll be spending a lot more time in philosophy sections of bookstores, now that I know this way of thinking exists in them.
June 16, 2015
I am not sure Morton understands quantum physics. Or, um, science.
HOWEVER.
Ignore those rambling bits of his, and focus on the broader idea. Yes, this book reads kind of like the ravings of someone having a fever dream. Yes, this book is focused on the arcane as examples. Yes, this book is full of its own hypocrasies and contradictions.
BUT.
The idea of hyperobjects as a way to visualize and contextualize the things that have such a profound effect upon us (e.g. climate, radiation) and to show how a) humans aren't the center of the universe (the lesson that has to keep being learned by humanity every successive generation or so, apparently), and b) the interconnectivity that winds its way throughout our universe. No man is an island, no island is an island, and that island only a part of a larger system that is barely perceivable by our limited senses.
A deeply stimulating read. I look forward to reading more of Morton's ideas, even with the persistent fever dream quality of his writing.
HOWEVER.
Ignore those rambling bits of his, and focus on the broader idea. Yes, this book reads kind of like the ravings of someone having a fever dream. Yes, this book is focused on the arcane as examples. Yes, this book is full of its own hypocrasies and contradictions.
BUT.
The idea of hyperobjects as a way to visualize and contextualize the things that have such a profound effect upon us (e.g. climate, radiation) and to show how a) humans aren't the center of the universe (the lesson that has to keep being learned by humanity every successive generation or so, apparently), and b) the interconnectivity that winds its way throughout our universe. No man is an island, no island is an island, and that island only a part of a larger system that is barely perceivable by our limited senses.
A deeply stimulating read. I look forward to reading more of Morton's ideas, even with the persistent fever dream quality of his writing.
April 9, 2016
An English professor writes about metaphysics, very badly. The root problem is that he takes Graham Harman at his own estimation, and thinks that the new Object-Oriented Ontology is a boost to the sort of writing that the New Atheist crowd dismiss as "quantum woo".
Things to note about OOO: it wants to emphasise primacy of objects against any reductive programme that would paraphrase them away as either lower-level physical entities (see Harman's critique of Ladyman/Ross), or sensory elements (traditional empiricism, which already had plenty of critics before Harman or even Husserl happened on the scene). So I think Tim has missed the point of it all since his analysis of physical solidity on pg. 40 is precisely the kind of reductionist story that OOOists aren't trying to tell.
Plenty of thinkers in Anglophone philosophy have wondered about object-identity and process-identity (which would cover most of the entities Tim wants to call "hyperobjects"), it's a fascinating area to wonder about, but of course nothing written in English can be of any interest to someone in Critical Theory, unless it is pure commentary on "continental" sources. There are no ideas or problems here that would be unfamiliar to David Lewis, yet I get the impression that David Lewis' work is entirely unfamiliar to the OOO fraternity.
That's the "theory" side of this work. In addition, there's the usual middle-aged trendy business of bragging about how engaged with popular culture he is, which is always excruciating and always involves dated references. On pg 150 he offers that OOO is the only alternative to "...some New Age head-shop, lava-lamp ontology that defaults to a reductionist atomism." So that's where he's setting his stall in the neoliberal Marketplace Of Ideas: aiming for that Guardian Belief audience, who regard themselves as too smart for the vulgarities of New Atheist or hippie nonsense, but yearn for the some kind of unconventional intellectualism, something "quirky" and not too difficult, a nice bit of dinner party chat to leave the listeners wondering at your mystery.
Maybe there was a novel in this book, if it didn't take its author seriously. Or perhaps he should just embrace his flicker of self-awareness on pg 46 ("...am I a nihilistic postmodernist, or a New Ager in academic drag?" - Tim, you're the former, migrating to the latter category), quit his job and set up his own New Church Of Cosmic Consciousness, or some other string of words that hasn't already been copyrighted. I think he would actually be happier that way, particularly when he spends the huge income on all the old records and artworks he would like to own.
Nice pictures, though.
Things to note about OOO: it wants to emphasise primacy of objects against any reductive programme that would paraphrase them away as either lower-level physical entities (see Harman's critique of Ladyman/Ross), or sensory elements (traditional empiricism, which already had plenty of critics before Harman or even Husserl happened on the scene). So I think Tim has missed the point of it all since his analysis of physical solidity on pg. 40 is precisely the kind of reductionist story that OOOists aren't trying to tell.
Plenty of thinkers in Anglophone philosophy have wondered about object-identity and process-identity (which would cover most of the entities Tim wants to call "hyperobjects"), it's a fascinating area to wonder about, but of course nothing written in English can be of any interest to someone in Critical Theory, unless it is pure commentary on "continental" sources. There are no ideas or problems here that would be unfamiliar to David Lewis, yet I get the impression that David Lewis' work is entirely unfamiliar to the OOO fraternity.
That's the "theory" side of this work. In addition, there's the usual middle-aged trendy business of bragging about how engaged with popular culture he is, which is always excruciating and always involves dated references. On pg 150 he offers that OOO is the only alternative to "...some New Age head-shop, lava-lamp ontology that defaults to a reductionist atomism." So that's where he's setting his stall in the neoliberal Marketplace Of Ideas: aiming for that Guardian Belief audience, who regard themselves as too smart for the vulgarities of New Atheist or hippie nonsense, but yearn for the some kind of unconventional intellectualism, something "quirky" and not too difficult, a nice bit of dinner party chat to leave the listeners wondering at your mystery.
Maybe there was a novel in this book, if it didn't take its author seriously. Or perhaps he should just embrace his flicker of self-awareness on pg 46 ("...am I a nihilistic postmodernist, or a New Ager in academic drag?" - Tim, you're the former, migrating to the latter category), quit his job and set up his own New Church Of Cosmic Consciousness, or some other string of words that hasn't already been copyrighted. I think he would actually be happier that way, particularly when he spends the huge income on all the old records and artworks he would like to own.
Nice pictures, though.
May 6, 2023
Nuclear materials may present us with a very large finitude, but not an infinitude. . .They are not objective lumps limited in time and space, but unique beings. They have everything that Heidegger argues is unique to Dasein.
This isn’t a plea for help. There isn’t a program on display about how to temper our carbon footprint. Morton’s project presents us with the unthinkable, Hyperobjects—who’s very size and complexity place them not “outside” our reason as “we” are are an indivisible element of “this”. Our sense of being, placed as it were inside of an existence is always already in a Kantian phenomenal state, but there’s still spaces where our being fears to tread: the noumenal and Dear Hegel was so kind as to tape over these revealing possibilities.
Following the other Speculative Realists Morton recognizes the plurality of nonhuman actors and objects in this weird world-sense, or sensing as in an active (if delusional) projection. There’s time for both hand wringing and hand holding in this flux, where Morton parses the implications of a Rift and as to solutions, he is quick to quip: when I hear sustainability, I reach for my sunscreen. Other notions of moderation and recovery are explored through the cold truth of deep time.
This isn’t for the squeamish but that time has already passed and we weren’t even waiting (much less aware) when there was.
This isn’t a plea for help. There isn’t a program on display about how to temper our carbon footprint. Morton’s project presents us with the unthinkable, Hyperobjects—who’s very size and complexity place them not “outside” our reason as “we” are are an indivisible element of “this”. Our sense of being, placed as it were inside of an existence is always already in a Kantian phenomenal state, but there’s still spaces where our being fears to tread: the noumenal and Dear Hegel was so kind as to tape over these revealing possibilities.
Following the other Speculative Realists Morton recognizes the plurality of nonhuman actors and objects in this weird world-sense, or sensing as in an active (if delusional) projection. There’s time for both hand wringing and hand holding in this flux, where Morton parses the implications of a Rift and as to solutions, he is quick to quip: when I hear sustainability, I reach for my sunscreen. Other notions of moderation and recovery are explored through the cold truth of deep time.
This isn’t for the squeamish but that time has already passed and we weren’t even waiting (much less aware) when there was.
Read
May 18, 2023finally an answer to the question: what if something was really big
July 19, 2014
There are some interesting ideas here (like the titular hyperobjects), but to get to them you have to wade through paragraph after paragraph of wildly overheated prose that resembles the ravings of a madman. There are no real arguments here -- just endless (often bizarre) assertions. And while this is a terribly erudite book, it is curiously careless with actual facts (in particular, take anything the author uses from the sciences with a grain of salt the size of your head). Is the author a holy fool, a trickster, or merely someone damaged by an academic echo chamber where everything is relative, desperately trying to deal with the real? I don't know, but it is a mentally stimulating read. But I don't think it, or the obscure artists it praises, will do anything substantive to get society to address global warming, since it (and they) are all far too obscure and arcane.
December 9, 2017
Fantastic book. Viscous and unsettling and overwhelming, like its subject matter—but promising, if not a way through, then a framework through which to interpret our moment, and a context for our growing anxieties about our place in the "world" or something like it. Readable and dense.
September 12, 2016
Do you want to read the word hyperobject three times per sentence? Do you want to read pseudoscience with just the right amount of philosophy ? Do you want unnecessary big words and pompous writing?! A potpourri of subjects all of them leading to global warming? If so, then yes, this is the book for you! First of all there are already terms that can be used to describe certain things but the author, of course, prefers to coin his own every chance he has. Second I'm no scientist but there are a lot of "holes" in Mortons theories, so many in fact that most of the time he doesn't justify his believes, instead changes subject. To put it very simply, you know when you're in a test and you have to bullshit the answer because there is a minimum character mandatory reply? Imagine that times 300 pages and you get this book!
The best thing of the book is the picture in the cover. Anyway don't recommend!
The best thing of the book is the picture in the cover. Anyway don't recommend!
March 11, 2014
So I'm still reading Morton's Hyperobjects, despite the slightly artificial veneer of "let's talk to a broader and therefore more fun audience" that in Canada we call "knowledge mobilization" -- hey the future of scholarship. But the real book is an attempt to situate what we normally think of as larger-than-life events such as global warming, the poisonous penetration of radiation into the lives of everything, even the economy into the discourse of OOO -- Object-oriented Ontology, which as a philosophical movement, aims to achieve a nonanthropomorphic realism; in other words, have us understand these broad occurrences as things inside which we ourselves as objects are dwarfed, such that we can't really perceive them. Welcome to the Age of Hyperobjects. We perceive their effects-for, or affects-for (a variety of other objects, especially ourselves) but not the object itself which always withdraws form us. ( A sort of updating of the Kantian phenomenon/thing divide.) As a result he usefully reprises many of the tenants of OOO and speculative realism and wants us to sashay up close to the "awful shadow of some unseen power"--not that he has any allegiance to Shelley or his Romanticism; he's in fact especially critical of their legacy as in fact an English prof with an allegiance to certain kinds of science, and scientism.
To decentre the human, he argues our notion of "world" is no longer viable, since by creating aesthetic and cynical distance, it gives us a false sense of security. Because objects can't be exhausted by perception (Husserl) -- we can never see the other side of a coin for instance, no matter how many times we turn it -- they can only hint at the real, but we are wrapped in the spacetime they emit. Hyperobjects' scale and nonlocality -- he takes us through a interesting tour of quantum physic's "spooky action at a distance" -- also contributes to their seeming amorphousness. Such notions lifted metaphorically from science suggest to him an aesthetics of causality, in fact that causality is a kind of aesthetics, at least as we have been using it to distance ourselves from the persistence and instance of things.
As interesting and even perhaps revelatory as all this might be, I found I had some difficulties: there are inconsistencies, contradictions, simplifications, distortions. All of which are of course their own objects, but which seem to counter some other objects. The meta-discourse discourse is one instance. He wants to demolish the recent history of debate in the social sciences and humanities as an "I can do meta than you" but his own narration is just such an attempted refocusing. Or maybe I'm missing something.
He damns Big Oil for intruding oil into water, but somehow can't see Big Wind's insertion (he really doesn't see this) of even his own perceptive understanding of "capitalist essentialism" into community and environment as also damnable -- despite that in the Age of Hyperobjects, he says it's impossible to find a right answer-- all answers, all "solutions" have multiple often conflicting outcomes --. He thinks he's got one here.
Well, as I say, I'm still reading….
A Houdini exercise.
Later: Phasing is an important concept in the book, but the writing is often out of phase with itself. It's redundant, repetitive, self-inflating, contradictory and at times merely absurd. On pp 163ff, there is a specially pleaded, potted & absurd history of music from Hayden to La Monte Young in which Beethoven is skewered for enslaving the piano to equal temperament whereas Young frees its strings in a frenzy of just intonation. These pianos are clearly not pianos but perhaps indexical objects of the hyper object of this particular narrative.
Later still: Despite these caveats, the book is a passionate introduction to Object-oriented Ontology and speculative realism and the extension of its tenants to Morton's facinating notion of hyperobjects. The book ends with the deployment of an aesthetics based in these concepts. So to just "Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World" but especially final aesthetics.
To decentre the human, he argues our notion of "world" is no longer viable, since by creating aesthetic and cynical distance, it gives us a false sense of security. Because objects can't be exhausted by perception (Husserl) -- we can never see the other side of a coin for instance, no matter how many times we turn it -- they can only hint at the real, but we are wrapped in the spacetime they emit. Hyperobjects' scale and nonlocality -- he takes us through a interesting tour of quantum physic's "spooky action at a distance" -- also contributes to their seeming amorphousness. Such notions lifted metaphorically from science suggest to him an aesthetics of causality, in fact that causality is a kind of aesthetics, at least as we have been using it to distance ourselves from the persistence and instance of things.
As interesting and even perhaps revelatory as all this might be, I found I had some difficulties: there are inconsistencies, contradictions, simplifications, distortions. All of which are of course their own objects, but which seem to counter some other objects. The meta-discourse discourse is one instance. He wants to demolish the recent history of debate in the social sciences and humanities as an "I can do meta than you" but his own narration is just such an attempted refocusing. Or maybe I'm missing something.
He damns Big Oil for intruding oil into water, but somehow can't see Big Wind's insertion (he really doesn't see this) of even his own perceptive understanding of "capitalist essentialism" into community and environment as also damnable -- despite that in the Age of Hyperobjects, he says it's impossible to find a right answer-- all answers, all "solutions" have multiple often conflicting outcomes --. He thinks he's got one here.
Well, as I say, I'm still reading….
A Houdini exercise.
Later: Phasing is an important concept in the book, but the writing is often out of phase with itself. It's redundant, repetitive, self-inflating, contradictory and at times merely absurd. On pp 163ff, there is a specially pleaded, potted & absurd history of music from Hayden to La Monte Young in which Beethoven is skewered for enslaving the piano to equal temperament whereas Young frees its strings in a frenzy of just intonation. These pianos are clearly not pianos but perhaps indexical objects of the hyper object of this particular narrative.
Later still: Despite these caveats, the book is a passionate introduction to Object-oriented Ontology and speculative realism and the extension of its tenants to Morton's facinating notion of hyperobjects. The book ends with the deployment of an aesthetics based in these concepts. So to just "Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World" but especially final aesthetics.
March 12, 2020
I picked up Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World because the hyperobject seems like it might help to explain why people are so bad at thinking about climate change. Even if it is helpful, I recommend against reading this book--just take the concept and run.
I otherwise understand Hyperobjects in roughly this way: What exists at the edge of our perception and understanding? Objects! As proof, Morton points to "hyperobjects," which "are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans." Morton offers the following helpful examples of hyperobjects, which include: black holes, oil fields, the Everglades, the biosphere, the amount of plutonium on the planet, styrofoam, or plastic bags. (These last two are nifty inclusions; they qualify because they take so long to decompose.) Many human actions have ruined the planet we've found so useful and that's true whether or not we or our culture can perceive of what's happening. Playing with these ideas, we can start to explore others. The "Anthropocence" is a mostly useful idea, but within the context of this philosophy, it seems ironic that something named after human actions draws humanity's attention to things that are all but beyond our comprehension. Part of the green appeal of OOO is that it works against our understanding of human perception as central to reality and makes human experience a bit more philosophically peripheral.
Two critical notes disguised as a conclusion. First, Hyperobjects would be more productively subtitled "ecological evidence in support of object-oriented ontology." In other words, I understand its engagement with climate change as mostly subservient to metaphysical arguments between philosophers, which I think even philosophers should find silly. Second, I dislike Morton's obsession with coining words and phrasings (e.g. "Age of Asymmetry"). When scholars start naming the "Great This" and the "Ages of That," I assume they yearn to win the footnote immortality jackpot and are buying as many tickets as possible. "Hyperobject" is useful but it feels like these coinages are all Morton does when he is not defending object-oriented ontology.
I otherwise understand Hyperobjects in roughly this way: What exists at the edge of our perception and understanding? Objects! As proof, Morton points to "hyperobjects," which "are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans." Morton offers the following helpful examples of hyperobjects, which include: black holes, oil fields, the Everglades, the biosphere, the amount of plutonium on the planet, styrofoam, or plastic bags. (These last two are nifty inclusions; they qualify because they take so long to decompose.) Many human actions have ruined the planet we've found so useful and that's true whether or not we or our culture can perceive of what's happening. Playing with these ideas, we can start to explore others. The "Anthropocence" is a mostly useful idea, but within the context of this philosophy, it seems ironic that something named after human actions draws humanity's attention to things that are all but beyond our comprehension. Part of the green appeal of OOO is that it works against our understanding of human perception as central to reality and makes human experience a bit more philosophically peripheral.
Two critical notes disguised as a conclusion. First, Hyperobjects would be more productively subtitled "ecological evidence in support of object-oriented ontology." In other words, I understand its engagement with climate change as mostly subservient to metaphysical arguments between philosophers, which I think even philosophers should find silly. Second, I dislike Morton's obsession with coining words and phrasings (e.g. "Age of Asymmetry"). When scholars start naming the "Great This" and the "Ages of That," I assume they yearn to win the footnote immortality jackpot and are buying as many tickets as possible. "Hyperobject" is useful but it feels like these coinages are all Morton does when he is not defending object-oriented ontology.
October 7, 2014
Don't know why he associates himself with the OOO guys. His project seems vastly different from those of dickheads like Ian "Tiny Ontology" Bogost and Levi "Onticology" Bryant. Then, in this general area, you have people like Jane Bennett, who actually have reasonable ethical minds but have fallen way too far down the rabbit hole to recover. Still, maybe he needs OOO for some of this stuff to work. The truth is I don't know enough about quantum physics to figure out just how much of this is total bullshit. But I also think that, even when taken with a giant heaping plate of salt, Morton's project is at least interesting. More important, he comes up with really useful and illuminating concepts and ideas. At times, reading this felt a bit like reading Zizek, whose "philosophy" seems to me really suspect, but whose writings nevertheless often demonstrate great insight.
The shit Morton says about Twin Peaks, for instance, provides a useful, surprisingly clear framework for discussing the uncanny nature and affective power of Evil in the Oeuvre of David Lynch.
The shit Morton says about Twin Peaks, for instance, provides a useful, surprisingly clear framework for discussing the uncanny nature and affective power of Evil in the Oeuvre of David Lynch.
November 17, 2023
This book TOTALLY FUCKS!
It’s amazing.
I haven’t been this excited about a book (or if I’m getting honest here, about anything else really) in a long time.
I read about HYPEROBJECTS in the book I read before this one (Using Image and Narrative in Therapy for Trauma, Addiction and Recovery - James West editor).
Which I LOVED.
So I (of course) read this IMMEDIATELY.
And as previously mentioned.
It FUCKS!
HELLA!
Anyway.
A hyperobject is philosophical construct introduced by philosopher Timothy Morton, referring to objects or phenomena that are - VAST: in that they are massively distributed in time and space relative to individual humans. VISCOUS: in that they stick to beings that interact with them. PHASIC in that they have temporal undulation, existing in different temporal dimensions of which parts are periodically invisible at any given time. INTER-OBJECTIVE in that they impact and are involved with a multitude of other entities.
IN SUM: Hyperobjects are vast, sticky, complex phenomena that extend beyond the human dimensions of time and space.
EXAMPLES OF HYPEROBJECTS
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
MACHINE LEARNING
THIS BOOK REVIEW
EARTHS ECOLOGY
SOLAR SYSTEMS
THE INTERNET
BLACK HOLES
CAPITALISM
MARKETS
TRAFIC
LIFE
OIL
This book is split into 2 sections.
SECTION 1
Tries like hell to define what a hyperobject is.
And largely succeeds.
SECTION 2
Applies the HYPEROBJECT construct to GLOBAL WARMING.
And it’s a GAME CHANGER.
This book is impossible to summarize.
Suffice it to say.
It is what it describes.
It is itself a HYPEROBJECT.
Much like CONCRETE POETRY.
Where the visual arrangement of words is just as important as the words themselves.
Such as:
I
C
E
M
E
L
T
I
N
G
- or
G
N
I
N
R
U
B
D
L
R
O
W
This book is an ACTUAL HYPEROBJECT.
It’s a HEX.
It’s MYSTIFYING.
It’s BRILLIANT artphilosophy with a DEADLY serious MISSION.
PURE JOY in the ABSOLUTE WORST POSSIBLE SUBJECT.
The END OF THE WORLD
🔥🌏🫠☠️🕳️
It’s amazing.
I haven’t been this excited about a book (or if I’m getting honest here, about anything else really) in a long time.
I read about HYPEROBJECTS in the book I read before this one (Using Image and Narrative in Therapy for Trauma, Addiction and Recovery - James West editor).
Which I LOVED.
So I (of course) read this IMMEDIATELY.
And as previously mentioned.
It FUCKS!
HELLA!
Anyway.
A hyperobject is philosophical construct introduced by philosopher Timothy Morton, referring to objects or phenomena that are - VAST: in that they are massively distributed in time and space relative to individual humans. VISCOUS: in that they stick to beings that interact with them. PHASIC in that they have temporal undulation, existing in different temporal dimensions of which parts are periodically invisible at any given time. INTER-OBJECTIVE in that they impact and are involved with a multitude of other entities.
IN SUM: Hyperobjects are vast, sticky, complex phenomena that extend beyond the human dimensions of time and space.
EXAMPLES OF HYPEROBJECTS
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
MACHINE LEARNING
THIS BOOK REVIEW
EARTHS ECOLOGY
SOLAR SYSTEMS
THE INTERNET
BLACK HOLES
CAPITALISM
MARKETS
TRAFIC
LIFE
OIL
This book is split into 2 sections.
SECTION 1
Tries like hell to define what a hyperobject is.
And largely succeeds.
SECTION 2
Applies the HYPEROBJECT construct to GLOBAL WARMING.
And it’s a GAME CHANGER.
This book is impossible to summarize.
Suffice it to say.
It is what it describes.
It is itself a HYPEROBJECT.
Much like CONCRETE POETRY.
Where the visual arrangement of words is just as important as the words themselves.
Such as:
I
C
E
M
E
L
T
I
N
G
- or
G
N
I
N
R
U
B
D
L
R
O
W
This book is an ACTUAL HYPEROBJECT.
It’s a HEX.
It’s MYSTIFYING.
It’s BRILLIANT artphilosophy with a DEADLY serious MISSION.
PURE JOY in the ABSOLUTE WORST POSSIBLE SUBJECT.
The END OF THE WORLD
🔥🌏🫠☠️🕳️
October 27, 2015
At times brilliant, at times superfluous, much like the concept being presented. The writing could use a heavy edit and a more formal tone. Many of the ideas are presented in a Gravity's Rainbow-esque stream of consciousness, connecting a string of unrelated topics together without the edifying bulwark necessary to prop up each argument or concept. Much hand-waving to be seen, but also a few magic tricks.
August 14, 2018
Non c'è un Altrove dove rifugiarsi. Bello credere nella fine del mondo, se solo non fosse che è già qui.
May 7, 2018
"Nowhere in the long list of catastrophic weather events--which will increase as global warming takes off--will you find global warming. But global warming is as real as this sentence. Not only that, it's viscous. It never stops sticking to you, no matter where you move on Earth" (49).
"But there is no away at the end of the world" (109).
"Cynicism becomes the default mode of philosophy and of ideology. Unlike the poor fool, I am undeluded--either I truly believe that I have exited from delusion, or I know that no one can, including myself, and I take pride in this disillusionment" (155).
"We need to get out of the persuasion business and start getting into the magic business, or the catalysis business, or the magnetizing business, or whatever you want to call it. Using reason isn't wrong. But with objects this huge, this massively distributed, this counterintuitive, this transdimensional, it's not enough simply to use art as candy coating on top of facts. We can't just be in the PR business. Percy Shelley put it beautifully when he wrote, 'We [lack] the creative faculty to imagine that which we know.' That was back in 1820 and it's only gotten worse" (182).
"Art in these conditions is grief-work. We are losing a fantasy--the fantasy of being immersed in a neutral or benevolent Mother Nature--and a person who is losing a fantasy is a very dangerous person. In no sense then should art be PR for climate change. Have you ever considered the possibility of doing PR for a relentless army of zombies?" (196).
"But there is no away at the end of the world" (109).
"Cynicism becomes the default mode of philosophy and of ideology. Unlike the poor fool, I am undeluded--either I truly believe that I have exited from delusion, or I know that no one can, including myself, and I take pride in this disillusionment" (155).
"We need to get out of the persuasion business and start getting into the magic business, or the catalysis business, or the magnetizing business, or whatever you want to call it. Using reason isn't wrong. But with objects this huge, this massively distributed, this counterintuitive, this transdimensional, it's not enough simply to use art as candy coating on top of facts. We can't just be in the PR business. Percy Shelley put it beautifully when he wrote, 'We [lack] the creative faculty to imagine that which we know.' That was back in 1820 and it's only gotten worse" (182).
"Art in these conditions is grief-work. We are losing a fantasy--the fantasy of being immersed in a neutral or benevolent Mother Nature--and a person who is losing a fantasy is a very dangerous person. In no sense then should art be PR for climate change. Have you ever considered the possibility of doing PR for a relentless army of zombies?" (196).
May 19, 2021
Wow! Another stinker from the OOO crowd! Do you like your philosophy with heavy doses of the author making it known (far too often) that he is hip, cool, and with the times? Because he makes it clear on every page that he is a "real cool dude".
Hyberobjects (the book) comes off as a hyper pompous experiment in fitting as much non-sense word salads on each page. I understand that Heidegger, Hegel, and other well-known continental philosophers have dense and complex books but they at least had an excuse in writing the way they did but Morton? I have no idea why he needed to write in such a weird manner. I get that it supposed to be written in a semi-personal but when you're dealing with complex and complicated subjects that he supposedly is doing (couldn't tell you), it comes off as extremely odd.
For the few that actually read what I "review" (I use this term very broadly and loosely), are well aware that I see very little of value in OOO/"Speculative realism" (most of the philosophers that are denoted "speculative realists", either don't know what the term actually means or have distanced themselves from it (rightly so)). OOO seems to be a grounded on misreading Heidegger's Being and Time and writing in a highly obscure manner.
PS. If you're looking to get the 'skinny' on OOO/OOP you best read Peter Wolfendale's Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon's New Cloths, as it is the clearest explanation of OOO to exist (I think).
Hyberobjects (the book) comes off as a hyper pompous experiment in fitting as much non-sense word salads on each page. I understand that Heidegger, Hegel, and other well-known continental philosophers have dense and complex books but they at least had an excuse in writing the way they did but Morton? I have no idea why he needed to write in such a weird manner. I get that it supposed to be written in a semi-personal but when you're dealing with complex and complicated subjects that he supposedly is doing (couldn't tell you), it comes off as extremely odd.
For the few that actually read what I "review" (I use this term very broadly and loosely), are well aware that I see very little of value in OOO/"Speculative realism" (most of the philosophers that are denoted "speculative realists", either don't know what the term actually means or have distanced themselves from it (rightly so)). OOO seems to be a grounded on misreading Heidegger's Being and Time and writing in a highly obscure manner.
PS. If you're looking to get the 'skinny' on OOO/OOP you best read Peter Wolfendale's Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon's New Cloths, as it is the clearest explanation of OOO to exist (I think).
Read
December 4, 2023Not even wrong…
Timothy Morton should have been a novelist. By drawing parallels between everything ever, whether that’s at the scale of the cosmological or the Newtonian or the quantum or for that matter the psychic or the social, he’s not being more materialist or “object-oriented,” he’s talking shite. Unless, of course, you believe that the ultimate mediator of reality is one Timothy Morton.
He’s writing about “hyperobjects.” What’s a hyperobject? Glad you asked! He gives a definition right at the beginning, with a series of criteria. Unfortunately, in the actual meat of the text, he extends the definition to everything ever, and he more or less cops to the fact. Not that those criteria were valid – if someone considers things being “viscous” to be a critical ontological category, you’re allowed to call this grade A bullshit.
That sounded harsh. And it is. But he has real writing capability! When he called large swaths of postmodernist philosophy an “airport lounge,” I lol’d, and that’s a metaphor I’m going to carry with me like Wittgenstein’s ancient city. Like I said, should have been a novelist. This would have been gorgeous as a novel, actually, in which things like hyperobjects can have real narrative value. It’s not philosophy.
Timothy Morton should have been a novelist. By drawing parallels between everything ever, whether that’s at the scale of the cosmological or the Newtonian or the quantum or for that matter the psychic or the social, he’s not being more materialist or “object-oriented,” he’s talking shite. Unless, of course, you believe that the ultimate mediator of reality is one Timothy Morton.
He’s writing about “hyperobjects.” What’s a hyperobject? Glad you asked! He gives a definition right at the beginning, with a series of criteria. Unfortunately, in the actual meat of the text, he extends the definition to everything ever, and he more or less cops to the fact. Not that those criteria were valid – if someone considers things being “viscous” to be a critical ontological category, you’re allowed to call this grade A bullshit.
That sounded harsh. And it is. But he has real writing capability! When he called large swaths of postmodernist philosophy an “airport lounge,” I lol’d, and that’s a metaphor I’m going to carry with me like Wittgenstein’s ancient city. Like I said, should have been a novelist. This would have been gorgeous as a novel, actually, in which things like hyperobjects can have real narrative value. It’s not philosophy.
October 29, 2021
Los hiperobjetos del título (sí, les puso así por la Hyperballad de Björk) son aglomerados de objetos interconectados que incluyen a sus observadores. Su presencia permea tanto que no hay afuera ni metalenguaje desde el cuál inventar algún tipo de distancia. Morton señala correctamente que el procedimiento de buscar un metalenguaje de mayor orden al de cada discusión particular es tan culpable de la confusión actual como el posmodernismo sin urgencias que pretende que todas las metáforas son igual de buenas.
Morton menciona muchos ejemplos de hiperobjetos (demasiados capaz), pero se centra en el cambio climático. Según él, su irrupción trajo el fin del mundo - no como amenaza o vaticinio sino como hecho consumado. Desde entonces, pensar en totalidades sistémicas como "mundo" es como mínimo insuficiente, y propone en cambio un pensamiento fundado en agregados de unidades discretas pero interconectadas de formas numerosas e inaccesibles.
Algunas de las propiedades de estos hiperobjetos serían la viscosidad (se pegan a los objetos involucrados con ellos), la multidimensionalidad (no meramente espaciales) la no-localidad (no puede ser reducido ni aislado a sus manifestaciones locales) y la interobjetividad (no en el sentido de Ken Wilber, sino en uno que abarca como objetos también a los sujetos observadores o afectados).
El concepto que presenta es muy estimulante, pero Hyperobjects tiene varios problemas. La autoadscripción del autor a la Object Oriented Ontology y las citas a Harman y Heidegger en ocasiones ocupan el lugar de una argumentación explícita. Además a estas alturas las referencias a cultura pop a lo Zizek y las páginas dedicadas a la física cuántica no convencen a nadie, son un estorbo a la lectura, y lo primero que una edición responsable quitaría. Tal como está, el libro me pareció un vehículo imperfecto para un concepto valioso.
Morton menciona muchos ejemplos de hiperobjetos (demasiados capaz), pero se centra en el cambio climático. Según él, su irrupción trajo el fin del mundo - no como amenaza o vaticinio sino como hecho consumado. Desde entonces, pensar en totalidades sistémicas como "mundo" es como mínimo insuficiente, y propone en cambio un pensamiento fundado en agregados de unidades discretas pero interconectadas de formas numerosas e inaccesibles.
Algunas de las propiedades de estos hiperobjetos serían la viscosidad (se pegan a los objetos involucrados con ellos), la multidimensionalidad (no meramente espaciales) la no-localidad (no puede ser reducido ni aislado a sus manifestaciones locales) y la interobjetividad (no en el sentido de Ken Wilber, sino en uno que abarca como objetos también a los sujetos observadores o afectados).
El concepto que presenta es muy estimulante, pero Hyperobjects tiene varios problemas. La autoadscripción del autor a la Object Oriented Ontology y las citas a Harman y Heidegger en ocasiones ocupan el lugar de una argumentación explícita. Además a estas alturas las referencias a cultura pop a lo Zizek y las páginas dedicadas a la física cuántica no convencen a nadie, son un estorbo a la lectura, y lo primero que una edición responsable quitaría. Tal como está, el libro me pareció un vehículo imperfecto para un concepto valioso.
Read
August 28, 2022ok whirlwind this is quite the piece and absolutely one of my favourite books I've read this year. Tim has been on the radar for a little while and seems to be growing. Glad I got here now!
To get this out of the way, Tim works with and in OOO (Object-Oriented Ontology) which is a bit of a battlefield in contemporary philosophy as I understand it there are strong feelings from everybody I'm not here to wade in on whatever side. But this was my official intro to OOO! I really enjoyed what was happening with Heidegger here, partly because Tim keeps distancing and then returning to it, it feels very love-hate! It's entertaining!
Also a note that Tim's love for Percy Shelley is just v cute I like the punctuating appearance of PS
My highlights are truly on every page & that is because it felt necessary! TM's style is accessible with the nods to pop culture we find in a lot of pop-philosophy (contradiction in terms? ;) ) but then that's batted out of the air with a Derrida/Heidegger reading of interobjectivity and indeed Hegel makes his appearance toward the end (weirdly I didn't hate this reading of Derrida I felt it was v sophisticated). Not a fan of Nietzsche & I think for the N quote pulled that's valid - imo the most exciting Nietzschean (non)ecology is found in The Will to Power but that's not established as a 'canonical' text yet! grr. Ridiculous breadth! We're spinning in Roman Jakobson (my love) as a means of understanding weather Events with a good splash of quantum theory & relativity in the beginning. V funny stabs at Deleuze maybe it's philosophical schadenfreude by this point
Discussion of the future-art critical too. Too relevant. Hegel makes his grand entry here.
You have to wonder whether your poem about global warming is really a hyperobject’s way of distributing itself into human ears and libraries. Art becomes an attunement to the demonic.
...
Art in these conditions is grief-work. We are losing a fantasy—the fantasy of being immersed in a neutral or benevolent Mother Nature—and a person who is losing a fantasy is a very dangerous person. In no sense then should art be PR for climate change.
I want to reread very soon I like TM
To get this out of the way, Tim works with and in OOO (Object-Oriented Ontology) which is a bit of a battlefield in contemporary philosophy as I understand it there are strong feelings from everybody I'm not here to wade in on whatever side. But this was my official intro to OOO! I really enjoyed what was happening with Heidegger here, partly because Tim keeps distancing and then returning to it, it feels very love-hate! It's entertaining!
Also a note that Tim's love for Percy Shelley is just v cute I like the punctuating appearance of PS
My highlights are truly on every page & that is because it felt necessary! TM's style is accessible with the nods to pop culture we find in a lot of pop-philosophy (contradiction in terms? ;) ) but then that's batted out of the air with a Derrida/Heidegger reading of interobjectivity and indeed Hegel makes his appearance toward the end (weirdly I didn't hate this reading of Derrida I felt it was v sophisticated). Not a fan of Nietzsche & I think for the N quote pulled that's valid - imo the most exciting Nietzschean (non)ecology is found in The Will to Power but that's not established as a 'canonical' text yet! grr. Ridiculous breadth! We're spinning in Roman Jakobson (my love) as a means of understanding weather Events with a good splash of quantum theory & relativity in the beginning. V funny stabs at Deleuze maybe it's philosophical schadenfreude by this point
Discussion of the future-art critical too. Too relevant. Hegel makes his grand entry here.
You have to wonder whether your poem about global warming is really a hyperobject’s way of distributing itself into human ears and libraries. Art becomes an attunement to the demonic.
...
Art in these conditions is grief-work. We are losing a fantasy—the fantasy of being immersed in a neutral or benevolent Mother Nature—and a person who is losing a fantasy is a very dangerous person. In no sense then should art be PR for climate change.
I want to reread very soon I like TM
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 29, 2014
I'm no philosopher, at least not in any professional sense or by virtue of being well-read in the subject. I like philosophy. I have read some - mostly classical and some of the more well-known later ones. Basically, the stuff you're likely to encounter in decent high school and college education (at least in the 80s and 90s when my formal education took place) and or a bit beyond that. I've read some since then, nothing in particular, just what fell into my TBR pile from friends and whatnot.
This book was my first exposure to object oriented ontology (OOO). It's an introduction of sorts, but only to one type of object, not to OOO itself. For that reason alone I'm reluctant to recommend it to someone who has encountered OOO before. (And also for that reason, I plan to reread it soon.)
Still, even with my light exposure to philosophy and complete lack of exposure to OOO I enjoyed the book and found it very thought provoking. I'm not sure I understand all of it, let alone buy it.
Given my superficial understanding, I'm not going to attempt more than the briefest of explanations.
What is OOO? A metaphysical theory that treats all things in the universe as objects without preference to their particular characteristics: size, intelligence, age, longevity, whatever. Thus is rejects human-centric interpretations based on any sort of human superiority or notions that reality is a product of the mind and senses. Objects are not necessary indivisible in the strict sense or even physical - forces and processes are objects too. Objects are objects are objects and exist on equal footing with each other.
What are hyperobjects? Object that are vast - compared to humans at least - in space and time. Examples are things like the Earth, evolution, galaxies, and even global warming. We can never fully experience such objects. Instead we see small parts of them or experience them indirectly through their effects on us and other objects - the evolution of selectively bread foxes in Russia, extreme weather events, the Earth setting from the moon, the disk of galaxy in the night sky.
The author invented (discovered?) hyperobjects in an earlier work, but this is the first work which details them and how they affect us and other objects. Although focused on hyperobjects, many of the concepts and ideas seem like they should apply equally to regular objects (or whatever non-hyper objects are to be called).
This was definitely a different way of looking at reality for me and, I would guess, most people. It's worthwhile to read to experience that point of view, even should it be replaced by a better theory.
So, if you have a little philosophy under your belt, especially some metaphysics, I do recommend this. Even if you don't and just want to bend your brain a bit, you might want to give it a try.
This book was my first exposure to object oriented ontology (OOO). It's an introduction of sorts, but only to one type of object, not to OOO itself. For that reason alone I'm reluctant to recommend it to someone who has encountered OOO before. (And also for that reason, I plan to reread it soon.)
Still, even with my light exposure to philosophy and complete lack of exposure to OOO I enjoyed the book and found it very thought provoking. I'm not sure I understand all of it, let alone buy it.
Given my superficial understanding, I'm not going to attempt more than the briefest of explanations.
What is OOO? A metaphysical theory that treats all things in the universe as objects without preference to their particular characteristics: size, intelligence, age, longevity, whatever. Thus is rejects human-centric interpretations based on any sort of human superiority or notions that reality is a product of the mind and senses. Objects are not necessary indivisible in the strict sense or even physical - forces and processes are objects too. Objects are objects are objects and exist on equal footing with each other.
What are hyperobjects? Object that are vast - compared to humans at least - in space and time. Examples are things like the Earth, evolution, galaxies, and even global warming. We can never fully experience such objects. Instead we see small parts of them or experience them indirectly through their effects on us and other objects - the evolution of selectively bread foxes in Russia, extreme weather events, the Earth setting from the moon, the disk of galaxy in the night sky.
The author invented (discovered?) hyperobjects in an earlier work, but this is the first work which details them and how they affect us and other objects. Although focused on hyperobjects, many of the concepts and ideas seem like they should apply equally to regular objects (or whatever non-hyper objects are to be called).
This was definitely a different way of looking at reality for me and, I would guess, most people. It's worthwhile to read to experience that point of view, even should it be replaced by a better theory.
So, if you have a little philosophy under your belt, especially some metaphysics, I do recommend this. Even if you don't and just want to bend your brain a bit, you might want to give it a try.
June 28, 2016
I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of reading Morton’s narrative. His ideas are well thought out and inventive, and his subtle use of repetition is masterful: helpful, rather than annoying. Most of all, I found that his conception of the hyperobject and his perspective on global warming were enlightening. I am admittedly easily persuaded by well-wrought prose, but these ideas resonated with me quite deeply--the idea of the hyperobject is quite convincing; he accurately conceptualizes complex issues such as global warming without overwhelming his reader, but without trivializing the issues either. Like Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, the accessible nature of both the language and concepts is refreshing, and the sense of pragmatism—-as in, it seems they each have a foot in the ‘real’—-presents a convincing starting point for an argument crafted for the general population, rather than a specialized scholarly audience.
Speculative realism, like object-oriented ontology (I want to read Harman now!), seems to offer an appealing and generative space for the rethinking of ‘big’ issues, and the way that Morton interweaves classical philosophy (Kant; Heidegger) with his own contributions (observations; interconnections) is nothing less than exciting. I should note that his discussion of his ideas in terms of contemporary art is nothing less than masterful; often theorists inadvertently simplify artwork when they attempt to illustrate their points by means of someone else’s creation, reducing great works to diagrams, but he seems to be sensitive to this possibility, and his elucidations assert themselves as such: they are his/the work is separate. In his discussion of Yukultji Napangati’s Untitled 2011, he recounts how the painting “strafes me with layer upon layer of interference patterns”, and “is a quantum all to itself, not an incomplete part” (69), explaining how the work stimulates his consciousness and interact with the viewer in general. In some cases, such as his co-option of Shelley or the caves at Chauvet, he breathes new life into historic work, making it new (some could say this is no different from his treatment of the aforementioned philosophers); this is also praiseworthy and engaging.
Speculative realism, like object-oriented ontology (I want to read Harman now!), seems to offer an appealing and generative space for the rethinking of ‘big’ issues, and the way that Morton interweaves classical philosophy (Kant; Heidegger) with his own contributions (observations; interconnections) is nothing less than exciting. I should note that his discussion of his ideas in terms of contemporary art is nothing less than masterful; often theorists inadvertently simplify artwork when they attempt to illustrate their points by means of someone else’s creation, reducing great works to diagrams, but he seems to be sensitive to this possibility, and his elucidations assert themselves as such: they are his/the work is separate. In his discussion of Yukultji Napangati’s Untitled 2011, he recounts how the painting “strafes me with layer upon layer of interference patterns”, and “is a quantum all to itself, not an incomplete part” (69), explaining how the work stimulates his consciousness and interact with the viewer in general. In some cases, such as his co-option of Shelley or the caves at Chauvet, he breathes new life into historic work, making it new (some could say this is no different from his treatment of the aforementioned philosophers); this is also praiseworthy and engaging.
June 22, 2022
I think one may need to look at this book through the lens of someone really trying, if only experimentally, to reduce if not totally excise anthropocentric bias from philosophy. Morton is claiming reason's right to imagine objects that don't need us to exist. This runs counter to twentieth century relativism and its preference to analyze things from various exclusively human perspectives. You can almost sense in Morton an active aversion to what he finds to be human chauvinism. Why do we imagine that only we humans have the power to create credible slices of space-time reference by virtue of individual points of view? After all, doesn't everything in a universe affect everything else? What makes us so special?
Anthropocentrism has long since been the exclusive norm in consciousness studies. Thomas Nagel's celebrated essay, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat," is routinely quoted for its notion that we shouldn't attribute consciousness to anything unless we can know "what it's like" to be that thing. But this stricture runs the risk of ruling out imagination and the possibility of other sympathetic connections that could be metaphysically real.
I believe Morton is entertaining the idea that there are many ways of knowing. Anthropocentrism may be a rather poor way to get to know many of the objects, small and large and very large, that we routinely encounter in the business of living. (Morton focuses on the very large, the things that we don't see because they exceed our customary, if not blinkered, visual range).
What Morton doesn't do much of is look at how different types of people who are not philosophers -- such as artists and shamans, to name two -- look at or interact with objects in and out of nature. I'm reminded of Don Juan, the Yaqui shaman of Carlos Castaneda's books, who explained that seeing life in supposedly inanimate objects makes sense because doing so makes his life not only more interesting, but ultimately more true. Don Juan's kind of reasoning may fall outside the dominant modern Western philosophy, but perhaps not outside of philosophy itself as more creatively and expansively conceived.
Anthropocentrism has long since been the exclusive norm in consciousness studies. Thomas Nagel's celebrated essay, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat," is routinely quoted for its notion that we shouldn't attribute consciousness to anything unless we can know "what it's like" to be that thing. But this stricture runs the risk of ruling out imagination and the possibility of other sympathetic connections that could be metaphysically real.
I believe Morton is entertaining the idea that there are many ways of knowing. Anthropocentrism may be a rather poor way to get to know many of the objects, small and large and very large, that we routinely encounter in the business of living. (Morton focuses on the very large, the things that we don't see because they exceed our customary, if not blinkered, visual range).
What Morton doesn't do much of is look at how different types of people who are not philosophers -- such as artists and shamans, to name two -- look at or interact with objects in and out of nature. I'm reminded of Don Juan, the Yaqui shaman of Carlos Castaneda's books, who explained that seeing life in supposedly inanimate objects makes sense because doing so makes his life not only more interesting, but ultimately more true. Don Juan's kind of reasoning may fall outside the dominant modern Western philosophy, but perhaps not outside of philosophy itself as more creatively and expansively conceived.
March 29, 2021
He had me until the last two chapters.
It just seemed like a necessary project. Get everyone on board with ecology-as-a-thing. Make climate crisis tractable.
And so much the better if we was going to bring new life to Continental philosophy in the meantime. The constant, ironic, and then not-ironic, riffing on Heidegger made it somehow FUN! Tragically necessary, but also a fitting next move in the evolution of Big Ideas.
I also appreciated the way that in addition to bringing forward the whole heft of the phenomenological tradition via Heidegger, which really gives the post-metaphysical, neo-materialist position a lot of weight... well in addition to this huge momentum he brings in for this new dialectical move in the history of Thought, there's a whole lot of attention in his theory building to the American pragmatist tradition. Maybe it's not as explicit, but it's so masterfully included if you know your James and really have wrestled with the doctrine of radical empiricism and how to take it seriously as a scholar.
So yeah, that's all great. And he even manages to do all this while talking like the mid-century Analytical guys and especially like Bertrand Russell. Big Tent Energy. The use of contemporary pop culture examples, and absurd thought experiments, and dry humor: So Russell. Makes it a fun read you can sell in bookstores.
This means the whole first 2/3 of the book feels justified and necessary. In part because he keeps reminding you that it's the end of everything, and here we are sitting in "the charnel grounds." So materialism is the morally necessary, pragmatic next step for shared human thought-life. Metaphysics just ain't viable on any level at this intellectual moment, and a "deeper" or more pervasive kind of materialism is what it takes to get people in a lot of quarters of science and art on the same page. The argument is that we MUST have a shared understanding of the ecological object, the crisis entity, in order to begin solving the wicked, the ultimate, collective action problem of the species. Hard to disagree.
In fact, I have been willing, for YEARS, to do the bracketing it takes to meet the rest of the world on materialist ground. There's a lot to effing bracket, but I had come to agree that the need was just so great because of the climate crisis, and OOO was the project that had the history and the humor to hold us to it. Humanism, animism, spirit, all of it: throw them on the funeral pyre with the gods.
But, wait a minute here. Really, what have I and my discourse become by taking the new materialism's thousand cuts to personhood, being and spirit? If our common language is stupid, how stupid have we become?
This agreement I have made the last 20 years - a compromise made to sustain good conversation with smart people as the Matrix-y oilslick of materialism oozes through the disciplines and down into everyday relationships, eating up all matter and anti-matter as all that is etheric melts into solidity: this agreement I've made started to unravel with Morton's discussion on going meta. It's a brilliant and wonderful piece of writing. I think every intellectual should read it. His critique of "going meta" is, of course, the most meta move that one can made. He's the Foucault of meta. There's no more performative contradiction to spot. Like meta-PHYSICS, this discussion posits that ALL meta moves are actually counter-productive when it comes to finding shared ground. When it comes to the project of getting our minds around - or at least ON - the thing at hand. And there's a crisis in our midst that makes counter-productive moves not just useless, but even immoral in a sense.
So I was still with him at this point, but somehow he seemed to be fighting a side battle. With particular people in mind. There was some sort of pre-emption here, an opponent or opponents not named. As clever and important - and even life changing - as this section is, I started to smell something foul here. This felt somehow like mission creep, under cover of the moral rationale of ecological crisis as his focal point. I'd need to know the literature and community around this book better to have any sense of what the real fight is in this section. Since I'm ignorant of the literature all I can communicate here is a feeling - the first sense of suspicion toward the author and the clarity of his intent.
I could be totally wrong, because I'm talking about my feeling about this part of the project rather than a rational critique here Yet a lot of Morton's project from this point forward IS emotional - he turns to the work of stripping emotions out from where he believes they do not belong, and later to advice on how artists should evoke wanted emotions. So I think it's worth noting that it is on the intuitive and emotional levels that the work started coming apart for me exactly here.
And then, my god, the full force of the blow lands on your would-be soul. It begins with his evisceration of interiors - such that a piano's insides are tantamount to those of a self. It's so sophomorically clever you can't stand it. The full force of the post-humanism is blown into language. Quaffed into an absolute. The full force of the materialist thesis crashes on you like said piano.
He has as much fun comparing the "unbinding" of objects to the "unbinding" of Chinese's women's feet as the aformentioned Analytical guys. It really feels gleeful, like Russell and GE Moore and Wittgenstein at the height of their idea-play (a kind of play that came to an end when we realized how much of real true existence it had bracketed out of the conversation; hmmmmm). This comparison of humans to all other objects, the evacuation of the sense of self from the idea of a human, is intended to be epistemically violent, to disabuse us of the precious metaphysics we reserve in the parts of ourselves that believe we might have a soul.
Point taken. WE ARE POST-HUMANIST NOW. I wanted to barf, from that acid subjective (yes) interiority of my gut. He reminds us again and again that he teaches this stuff to undergrads, pulling out the rugs everywhere, making them into materialists for life.
It's still not the worst thing, though. I'm GLAD he's willing to go all the way here at the end of the book and truly articulate what is at stake. His point is that we can have hyperobjects because we don't have the meta. Because everything is objects. Intimacy itself is an intimacy of and through objects. And this is needed - remember - because apocalypse. Always with the "charnel grounds."
(There's a problem in the theory about whether space is material. Because so much of the interface of objects - of the relationality that is central to his theory BECAUSE he's a radical empiricist* - is not via objects but happens in space. BECAUSE OF space. But, what is space? I think OOO is both totally dependent upon and stupid about space. But that's a different review.)(Remember, the genius of Radical Empiricism is that it treats the relations between things with equal attention as the things themselves.)
It's at this point in the text that I wanted to do a find-and-replace on the term "charnel grounds." Seriously Tim, I get your glee in appropriating the term, and in fronting a whole lot of what feels like Old-White-Overeducated-American-Man-Buddhism (a distinct sect of Buddhism) in this text (Buddhists in actual Buddhist lifeworlds aren't usually all that hip to the post-metaphysical spirituality that we can read into the Heart Sutra and the doctrine of dependent arising and suchlike). But that, in Buddhist and Hindu lifeworlds, is where the actual charnel grounds are located. Meantime the mantric repetition of the term "charnel grounds" is there to remind us: this is the end of philosophy, this is the end of ideas, this is the end of the world, this is the end of meaning, this is the end of interiority, this is the end of meta... there is no place else to go. No refuge left for spirit. For humanism. For self.
(Oh and P.S. remember the point where he writes that the word OM is how Buddhists and Hindus evoke all of material reality? That side argument is in there, it seems, because he wants religious people who follow the consciousness-first or Dharmic cosmology to critique him, and then he can win by refusing to go meta. It's a pretentious, shallow, condescending way to use academic writing and his academic position. The argument here would be to squeeze the Taittirya Upanishad down through the pasta machine of the Mandlebrot Set. It's an obvious, sadly stupid analytical move.)
Anyway. Post-humanism. Radical Materialism. This is a moral argument that he is making. Moral and "spiritual."
Still, I was sympathetic because I've been through this journey myself the last 20 years.
And then he lost me with the art criticism.
The hubris.
The bad taste.
The onanism of putting himself forward as some sort of Ideas-man for creators. The presumption that the philosophy of academicians somehow goes BEFORE the cultural contributions of the artists at the farthest reaches of the real. That they need go to an "intellectual" to understand what is real, what they are expressing, and how to express it correctly.
Wow. The self-congratulation going on there. The epistemic domination. The ugliness.
To the last point, the ugliness, my god, the artistic commentary in this book is so poor. The philosophical commentary to this point has been skillful! If I've disagreed with it, at least I've seen its rationale.
But oh my god man, stay in your lane.
Here at the end, talking about what kind of art works and what doesn't work, and what artists should do, I think he wants us to remember the book's beginning, where he's so very moved by hyperobject art he think nails it. And then I see: what he wants art to nail is not the reality of the materialist universe he thinks he's mapping, but the pure expression of Hyperobjects the book.
It's all branded content. And he' the intellectual rockstar, is - at last - the arbiter of taste.
If he were just an academic Diva, *or* a philosophy person with cringey taste, that'd be fine. But he's both, and the coup de grace of the book is supposed to be his critique and agenda setting for the art world. For how the art of the future will get us all together to chorus in reproduction of this new materialism.
It feels culty the way any diva looking for a following is culty. And it feels cringey the way creators who take social media seriously are cringey.
This is not the dialectical move we have been waiting for. This is a project that wants to make us soulless (provisionally ok), but really would just leave us tasteless (hard no).
Which calls into question the whole moral imperative of the project: the "charnel grounds" we're always being reminded of, however awkwardly. I feel by the end that what he wants is for us as readers to get behind his judgements of TASTE, as a front for his judgments about the nature of existence. And just in those last two chapters, after managing to reluctantly see the worth and coherence of his project's construction all the way through, he lost me entirely and completely. I'm grateful. Reading this brought the materialist compromises I've made into high relief, and gave me enough of a thread to pull on that I can recursively deconstruct them. It gives me a clean loom again with which to bring forth my own inner life again, making the dialectical move forward that my abandoned soul requires.
All because he just has really bad style. Thanks, Tim. Now please, leave the artists alone.
It just seemed like a necessary project. Get everyone on board with ecology-as-a-thing. Make climate crisis tractable.
And so much the better if we was going to bring new life to Continental philosophy in the meantime. The constant, ironic, and then not-ironic, riffing on Heidegger made it somehow FUN! Tragically necessary, but also a fitting next move in the evolution of Big Ideas.
I also appreciated the way that in addition to bringing forward the whole heft of the phenomenological tradition via Heidegger, which really gives the post-metaphysical, neo-materialist position a lot of weight... well in addition to this huge momentum he brings in for this new dialectical move in the history of Thought, there's a whole lot of attention in his theory building to the American pragmatist tradition. Maybe it's not as explicit, but it's so masterfully included if you know your James and really have wrestled with the doctrine of radical empiricism and how to take it seriously as a scholar.
So yeah, that's all great. And he even manages to do all this while talking like the mid-century Analytical guys and especially like Bertrand Russell. Big Tent Energy. The use of contemporary pop culture examples, and absurd thought experiments, and dry humor: So Russell. Makes it a fun read you can sell in bookstores.
This means the whole first 2/3 of the book feels justified and necessary. In part because he keeps reminding you that it's the end of everything, and here we are sitting in "the charnel grounds." So materialism is the morally necessary, pragmatic next step for shared human thought-life. Metaphysics just ain't viable on any level at this intellectual moment, and a "deeper" or more pervasive kind of materialism is what it takes to get people in a lot of quarters of science and art on the same page. The argument is that we MUST have a shared understanding of the ecological object, the crisis entity, in order to begin solving the wicked, the ultimate, collective action problem of the species. Hard to disagree.
In fact, I have been willing, for YEARS, to do the bracketing it takes to meet the rest of the world on materialist ground. There's a lot to effing bracket, but I had come to agree that the need was just so great because of the climate crisis, and OOO was the project that had the history and the humor to hold us to it. Humanism, animism, spirit, all of it: throw them on the funeral pyre with the gods.
But, wait a minute here. Really, what have I and my discourse become by taking the new materialism's thousand cuts to personhood, being and spirit? If our common language is stupid, how stupid have we become?
This agreement I have made the last 20 years - a compromise made to sustain good conversation with smart people as the Matrix-y oilslick of materialism oozes through the disciplines and down into everyday relationships, eating up all matter and anti-matter as all that is etheric melts into solidity: this agreement I've made started to unravel with Morton's discussion on going meta. It's a brilliant and wonderful piece of writing. I think every intellectual should read it. His critique of "going meta" is, of course, the most meta move that one can made. He's the Foucault of meta. There's no more performative contradiction to spot. Like meta-PHYSICS, this discussion posits that ALL meta moves are actually counter-productive when it comes to finding shared ground. When it comes to the project of getting our minds around - or at least ON - the thing at hand. And there's a crisis in our midst that makes counter-productive moves not just useless, but even immoral in a sense.
So I was still with him at this point, but somehow he seemed to be fighting a side battle. With particular people in mind. There was some sort of pre-emption here, an opponent or opponents not named. As clever and important - and even life changing - as this section is, I started to smell something foul here. This felt somehow like mission creep, under cover of the moral rationale of ecological crisis as his focal point. I'd need to know the literature and community around this book better to have any sense of what the real fight is in this section. Since I'm ignorant of the literature all I can communicate here is a feeling - the first sense of suspicion toward the author and the clarity of his intent.
I could be totally wrong, because I'm talking about my feeling about this part of the project rather than a rational critique here Yet a lot of Morton's project from this point forward IS emotional - he turns to the work of stripping emotions out from where he believes they do not belong, and later to advice on how artists should evoke wanted emotions. So I think it's worth noting that it is on the intuitive and emotional levels that the work started coming apart for me exactly here.
And then, my god, the full force of the blow lands on your would-be soul. It begins with his evisceration of interiors - such that a piano's insides are tantamount to those of a self. It's so sophomorically clever you can't stand it. The full force of the post-humanism is blown into language. Quaffed into an absolute. The full force of the materialist thesis crashes on you like said piano.
He has as much fun comparing the "unbinding" of objects to the "unbinding" of Chinese's women's feet as the aformentioned Analytical guys. It really feels gleeful, like Russell and GE Moore and Wittgenstein at the height of their idea-play (a kind of play that came to an end when we realized how much of real true existence it had bracketed out of the conversation; hmmmmm). This comparison of humans to all other objects, the evacuation of the sense of self from the idea of a human, is intended to be epistemically violent, to disabuse us of the precious metaphysics we reserve in the parts of ourselves that believe we might have a soul.
Point taken. WE ARE POST-HUMANIST NOW. I wanted to barf, from that acid subjective (yes) interiority of my gut. He reminds us again and again that he teaches this stuff to undergrads, pulling out the rugs everywhere, making them into materialists for life.
It's still not the worst thing, though. I'm GLAD he's willing to go all the way here at the end of the book and truly articulate what is at stake. His point is that we can have hyperobjects because we don't have the meta. Because everything is objects. Intimacy itself is an intimacy of and through objects. And this is needed - remember - because apocalypse. Always with the "charnel grounds."
(There's a problem in the theory about whether space is material. Because so much of the interface of objects - of the relationality that is central to his theory BECAUSE he's a radical empiricist* - is not via objects but happens in space. BECAUSE OF space. But, what is space? I think OOO is both totally dependent upon and stupid about space. But that's a different review.)(Remember, the genius of Radical Empiricism is that it treats the relations between things with equal attention as the things themselves.)
It's at this point in the text that I wanted to do a find-and-replace on the term "charnel grounds." Seriously Tim, I get your glee in appropriating the term, and in fronting a whole lot of what feels like Old-White-Overeducated-American-Man-Buddhism (a distinct sect of Buddhism) in this text (Buddhists in actual Buddhist lifeworlds aren't usually all that hip to the post-metaphysical spirituality that we can read into the Heart Sutra and the doctrine of dependent arising and suchlike). But that, in Buddhist and Hindu lifeworlds, is where the actual charnel grounds are located. Meantime the mantric repetition of the term "charnel grounds" is there to remind us: this is the end of philosophy, this is the end of ideas, this is the end of the world, this is the end of meaning, this is the end of interiority, this is the end of meta... there is no place else to go. No refuge left for spirit. For humanism. For self.
(Oh and P.S. remember the point where he writes that the word OM is how Buddhists and Hindus evoke all of material reality? That side argument is in there, it seems, because he wants religious people who follow the consciousness-first or Dharmic cosmology to critique him, and then he can win by refusing to go meta. It's a pretentious, shallow, condescending way to use academic writing and his academic position. The argument here would be to squeeze the Taittirya Upanishad down through the pasta machine of the Mandlebrot Set. It's an obvious, sadly stupid analytical move.)
Anyway. Post-humanism. Radical Materialism. This is a moral argument that he is making. Moral and "spiritual."
Still, I was sympathetic because I've been through this journey myself the last 20 years.
And then he lost me with the art criticism.
The hubris.
The bad taste.
The onanism of putting himself forward as some sort of Ideas-man for creators. The presumption that the philosophy of academicians somehow goes BEFORE the cultural contributions of the artists at the farthest reaches of the real. That they need go to an "intellectual" to understand what is real, what they are expressing, and how to express it correctly.
Wow. The self-congratulation going on there. The epistemic domination. The ugliness.
To the last point, the ugliness, my god, the artistic commentary in this book is so poor. The philosophical commentary to this point has been skillful! If I've disagreed with it, at least I've seen its rationale.
But oh my god man, stay in your lane.
Here at the end, talking about what kind of art works and what doesn't work, and what artists should do, I think he wants us to remember the book's beginning, where he's so very moved by hyperobject art he think nails it. And then I see: what he wants art to nail is not the reality of the materialist universe he thinks he's mapping, but the pure expression of Hyperobjects the book.
It's all branded content. And he' the intellectual rockstar, is - at last - the arbiter of taste.
If he were just an academic Diva, *or* a philosophy person with cringey taste, that'd be fine. But he's both, and the coup de grace of the book is supposed to be his critique and agenda setting for the art world. For how the art of the future will get us all together to chorus in reproduction of this new materialism.
It feels culty the way any diva looking for a following is culty. And it feels cringey the way creators who take social media seriously are cringey.
This is not the dialectical move we have been waiting for. This is a project that wants to make us soulless (provisionally ok), but really would just leave us tasteless (hard no).
Which calls into question the whole moral imperative of the project: the "charnel grounds" we're always being reminded of, however awkwardly. I feel by the end that what he wants is for us as readers to get behind his judgements of TASTE, as a front for his judgments about the nature of existence. And just in those last two chapters, after managing to reluctantly see the worth and coherence of his project's construction all the way through, he lost me entirely and completely. I'm grateful. Reading this brought the materialist compromises I've made into high relief, and gave me enough of a thread to pull on that I can recursively deconstruct them. It gives me a clean loom again with which to bring forth my own inner life again, making the dialectical move forward that my abandoned soul requires.
All because he just has really bad style. Thanks, Tim. Now please, leave the artists alone.
August 14, 2018
"Iperoggetti" non è un bel libro. È prolisso, ridondante quando non ripetitivo, fuori fuoco, vago. Vomita parallelismi matematici mal digeriti, concetti fisici solo poco meglio inquadrati, analogie artistiche basate su colori che (per stessa ammissione dell'autore) non si possono vedere nelle riproduzioni in bianco e nero presenti nel testo. Si pone come saggio altamente strutturato, ma — con totale assenza di rigore — anziché definire i termini di cui discute continua a girarci attorno ribadendo gli stessi esempi e le stesse frasi, nella speranza che in qualche misterioso modo i concetti sedimentino da soli.
Insomma, "Iperoggetti" è, oltre che un libro brutto, anche un libro fastidioso. Soprattutto perché di cose da dire ne ha, e — qua viene il dramma — le dice forse nel modo più azzeccato possibile. Iperoggetto è infatti per l'autore ogni ente amorfo, onnipresente e imprendibile, le cui conseguenze tuttavia incombono sull'esistenza degli altri enti, uomo compreso. Quale strategia migliore per descrivere un iperoggetto, se non crearne (o emularne) uno?
Trabordante, disarmonico, incompleto, alieno a ogni volontà di risultare "a misura d'uomo", "Iperoggetti" si incentra in particolar modo sul riscaldamento globale e il suo imperscrutabile di "minaccia futura" che è in realtà già presente in tutte le sue implicazioni. Raro esempio di testo in cui la pars construens è superiore alla pars destruens, ancor più che un saggio filosofico o un pamphlet ecologico sul cambiamento climatico, il testo è dunque una metafora di quest'ultimo: brutta, eccessiva e disorientante, eppure urgente e impellente, esattamente come l'(iper) oggetto in esame.
p.s. "Iperoggetti" è anche un chiave di lettura dell'ormai celebre "Trilogia dell'Area X" di VanderMeer, dichiaratamente ispirata al contenuto del saggio e, nonostante i difetti, valido contraltare narrativo e dunque lineare agli spiraleggianti ruminamenti di Morton.
Insomma, "Iperoggetti" è, oltre che un libro brutto, anche un libro fastidioso. Soprattutto perché di cose da dire ne ha, e — qua viene il dramma — le dice forse nel modo più azzeccato possibile. Iperoggetto è infatti per l'autore ogni ente amorfo, onnipresente e imprendibile, le cui conseguenze tuttavia incombono sull'esistenza degli altri enti, uomo compreso. Quale strategia migliore per descrivere un iperoggetto, se non crearne (o emularne) uno?
Trabordante, disarmonico, incompleto, alieno a ogni volontà di risultare "a misura d'uomo", "Iperoggetti" si incentra in particolar modo sul riscaldamento globale e il suo imperscrutabile di "minaccia futura" che è in realtà già presente in tutte le sue implicazioni. Raro esempio di testo in cui la pars construens è superiore alla pars destruens, ancor più che un saggio filosofico o un pamphlet ecologico sul cambiamento climatico, il testo è dunque una metafora di quest'ultimo: brutta, eccessiva e disorientante, eppure urgente e impellente, esattamente come l'(iper) oggetto in esame.
p.s. "Iperoggetti" è anche un chiave di lettura dell'ormai celebre "Trilogia dell'Area X" di VanderMeer, dichiaratamente ispirata al contenuto del saggio e, nonostante i difetti, valido contraltare narrativo e dunque lineare agli spiraleggianti ruminamenti di Morton.
June 2, 2021
This is my second read through; Hyperobjects remains my favorite book of philosophy.
Timothy Morton sets out to describe what he has called “hyperobjects”. These objects are immense on a scale that humans will never truly understand. They are things so massively distributed in both time and space as to be mostly incomprehensible. Hyperobjects are things like: global warming, plastic, plutonium, the entire human race, the system of machine production, etc. Morton argues that these are real things that dislocate us from the Enlightenment idea that humans are the center of the world. In fact, Morton argues, the ‘world’ as we normally conceive of it has actually already ended. We find ourselves in the time of Hyperobjects, and our ways of thinking and being must change. We have to learn to live with things that will far outlast even our children’s children.
One of the reasons I love reading Morton’s work is ability to create deeply rich concepts with catchy names. For instance, the ‘strange stranger’. The idea that some things are and will always be radically unknowable, but we still are forced into intimate contact with them. Hyperobjects resist our ability to measure and categorize, yet we live with global warming literally every second of our lives. Plastic takes up so much space in our world it becomes almost invisible in its visibility. I could literally go on and on about this book. Send me a message if you want to hear more.
Timothy Morton sets out to describe what he has called “hyperobjects”. These objects are immense on a scale that humans will never truly understand. They are things so massively distributed in both time and space as to be mostly incomprehensible. Hyperobjects are things like: global warming, plastic, plutonium, the entire human race, the system of machine production, etc. Morton argues that these are real things that dislocate us from the Enlightenment idea that humans are the center of the world. In fact, Morton argues, the ‘world’ as we normally conceive of it has actually already ended. We find ourselves in the time of Hyperobjects, and our ways of thinking and being must change. We have to learn to live with things that will far outlast even our children’s children.
One of the reasons I love reading Morton’s work is ability to create deeply rich concepts with catchy names. For instance, the ‘strange stranger’. The idea that some things are and will always be radically unknowable, but we still are forced into intimate contact with them. Hyperobjects resist our ability to measure and categorize, yet we live with global warming literally every second of our lives. Plastic takes up so much space in our world it becomes almost invisible in its visibility. I could literally go on and on about this book. Send me a message if you want to hear more.
December 15, 2020
You could grasp the concepts of hyper objects with just the intro and the last chapter, The Age of Symmetry (which should be required reading). You might also grasp a hyper object by listening to Pink Floyd or watching a Butoh Performance. Ursula Heise gave the best criticism here https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/... however I’ll say this...for artists attempting to make work that reckons with the Anthropocene rather than the overwhelming tendency to either ignore it, or as Morton puts it, do PR for it, this book is an incredible inspiration.
July 17, 2021
I tried on this one, but I just don’t get it. So I will noodle on this a while and see what comes up.
…some time passes…
The more I think about this, the less positive it seems. I should have known better and have lowered my initial rating. The syllable count is jacked up while the paragraphs per page count is low. The key terms are trendy and you get hit over the head with them numerous times just in case you wanted to avail yourself of forgetting as a means of escape. The author presents this material as philosophy while holding a chair as an English professor at Rice. This material might work well in lectures, but I found it confusing and difficult to follow.
Let’s start with the title and the focus on Hyperobjects. These are defined as “things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans.” This gets a bit odd quickly, since “thing” is a highly inclusive term. From the beginning, a hyperobject can be a black hole, an oil field, the Florida Everglades, the Solar System, the sum total of all nuclear materials on Earth. It could also be the total of Styrofoam or plastic bags that have been manufactured or “the sum of all the whirring machinery of capitalism.” There are lots more examples of hyperobjects and you can learn about them by reading the book — but I AM NOT RECOMMENDING THAT.
The idea at play here seems to be that we exist in a universe of objects that we are unable to know on their own terms. Indeed, this is what is now known as “object oriented ontology” or “OOO”. We only know in terms of our own subjectivity and our inability to get to the noumena. This giving priority to all things human warps our view of the world. Fortunately, or unfortunately as the case may be, hyperobjects force us to confront a universe in which humans do not have privileged position. Hyperobjects are real independently of whether someone is thinking of them. This forces us to reorient our thinking to the physical world. How do we talk about and think about the physical world in a new way? How do we recognize and appreciate our experiences in such a setting. The book goes downhill from there for me.
Some reactions:
As a first reaction, I do not see the problem with having to encounter very large multidimensional things that can be best treated by abstraction. The capitalist system has been around for a while and written about by more than a few authors, including Professor Morton, and it just does not bother me or impede my thinking about it to no that I only encounter bits and pieces of capitalism along the way and that economic reality often needs to be presented through a morass of analyzed data. I do not take the “market” out to lunch nor do I know anyone who does. What is the problem?
Seriously, the first figure in the book is a plot of temperature changes over time, shown as an example of how global warming cannot be seen directly but can be thought of and computed as in the Figure. This is not really a deep dive into the representation of nature, the world, and hyperobjects abstractly (and with statistics too). If this is what the author leads with, I have to wonder just what is going on - what is the intellectual AHA here? That there are some things that we see as statistical realities? As I finished the book, I wondered if COVID-19 would qualify as a hyperobject? As it turns out, it seems to qualify and I was not the first to think of COVID-19 as an example.
The same problem shows up a bit later in the chapter on “phasing”. There one finds the following: “We can only see pieces of hyperobjects at a time. The reason why they appear no local and temporally foreshortened is precisely because of this trans dimensional quality. We only see pieces of them at once, like a tsunami or a case of radiation sickness. If an apple were to invade a two-dimensional world, first the stick people would see dots as the bottom of the apple touched their universe, then a rapid expansion of shapes that would appear like and expanding and contracting circular blob, diminishing to a tiny circle, possibly a point, and disappearing.” This is a fantastic way to describe how those in a limited dimension would see the entrance into their space of an object from a higher dimension.
The trouble was that I had encountered a similar description to this before - a long time ago. After some probing, I remembered that I had read a similar description in Edwin Abbott’s novella “Flatland”, first published in 1884. I tracked it down and found it in Section 15, on pages 65-73, a little over halfway through the book - a discussion of what a three dimensional object would look like to individuals living in two dimensional space. Abbott even includes a diagram to illustrate the effect. The discussion is more detailed and clearer than the one in Morton’s book. While Abbott’s book is very odd and hardly a children’s book, it is also highly entertaining and very well known in England and the US. While not a children’s book, it is a book that is frequently read by young people interested in mathematics and is still in print today.
Why mention this? Because in a book on supposedly cutting edge ontology with large multidimensional objects as the central foci of inquiry, what is one to make of a fundamental example of the movement to higher dimensions that was first made (and made more effectively in my opinion) in a young person’s book published nearly 140 years ago? Why is this perspective novel? What does it help us to understand that was not available from other philosophical perspectives?
Finally, I was disappointed by the general looseness of the arguments. A lot of claims are made along with references to what seem to be current disputes. I expected some discipline to the presentation, such that I could at least try to follow some of the claims and check out was others were saying about them, even if I was not totally on board.. While I am not a philosopher, I always try to follow the central arguments and work them through as far as I can. That was not possible here, which was frustrating to me. I have also grown wary of trendy thought movements that get their legitimacy from links to computer science nomenclature.
I wish I could be more positive about this.
IN PROGRESS …
…some time passes…
The more I think about this, the less positive it seems. I should have known better and have lowered my initial rating. The syllable count is jacked up while the paragraphs per page count is low. The key terms are trendy and you get hit over the head with them numerous times just in case you wanted to avail yourself of forgetting as a means of escape. The author presents this material as philosophy while holding a chair as an English professor at Rice. This material might work well in lectures, but I found it confusing and difficult to follow.
Let’s start with the title and the focus on Hyperobjects. These are defined as “things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans.” This gets a bit odd quickly, since “thing” is a highly inclusive term. From the beginning, a hyperobject can be a black hole, an oil field, the Florida Everglades, the Solar System, the sum total of all nuclear materials on Earth. It could also be the total of Styrofoam or plastic bags that have been manufactured or “the sum of all the whirring machinery of capitalism.” There are lots more examples of hyperobjects and you can learn about them by reading the book — but I AM NOT RECOMMENDING THAT.
The idea at play here seems to be that we exist in a universe of objects that we are unable to know on their own terms. Indeed, this is what is now known as “object oriented ontology” or “OOO”. We only know in terms of our own subjectivity and our inability to get to the noumena. This giving priority to all things human warps our view of the world. Fortunately, or unfortunately as the case may be, hyperobjects force us to confront a universe in which humans do not have privileged position. Hyperobjects are real independently of whether someone is thinking of them. This forces us to reorient our thinking to the physical world. How do we talk about and think about the physical world in a new way? How do we recognize and appreciate our experiences in such a setting. The book goes downhill from there for me.
Some reactions:
As a first reaction, I do not see the problem with having to encounter very large multidimensional things that can be best treated by abstraction. The capitalist system has been around for a while and written about by more than a few authors, including Professor Morton, and it just does not bother me or impede my thinking about it to no that I only encounter bits and pieces of capitalism along the way and that economic reality often needs to be presented through a morass of analyzed data. I do not take the “market” out to lunch nor do I know anyone who does. What is the problem?
Seriously, the first figure in the book is a plot of temperature changes over time, shown as an example of how global warming cannot be seen directly but can be thought of and computed as in the Figure. This is not really a deep dive into the representation of nature, the world, and hyperobjects abstractly (and with statistics too). If this is what the author leads with, I have to wonder just what is going on - what is the intellectual AHA here? That there are some things that we see as statistical realities? As I finished the book, I wondered if COVID-19 would qualify as a hyperobject? As it turns out, it seems to qualify and I was not the first to think of COVID-19 as an example.
The same problem shows up a bit later in the chapter on “phasing”. There one finds the following: “We can only see pieces of hyperobjects at a time. The reason why they appear no local and temporally foreshortened is precisely because of this trans dimensional quality. We only see pieces of them at once, like a tsunami or a case of radiation sickness. If an apple were to invade a two-dimensional world, first the stick people would see dots as the bottom of the apple touched their universe, then a rapid expansion of shapes that would appear like and expanding and contracting circular blob, diminishing to a tiny circle, possibly a point, and disappearing.” This is a fantastic way to describe how those in a limited dimension would see the entrance into their space of an object from a higher dimension.
The trouble was that I had encountered a similar description to this before - a long time ago. After some probing, I remembered that I had read a similar description in Edwin Abbott’s novella “Flatland”, first published in 1884. I tracked it down and found it in Section 15, on pages 65-73, a little over halfway through the book - a discussion of what a three dimensional object would look like to individuals living in two dimensional space. Abbott even includes a diagram to illustrate the effect. The discussion is more detailed and clearer than the one in Morton’s book. While Abbott’s book is very odd and hardly a children’s book, it is also highly entertaining and very well known in England and the US. While not a children’s book, it is a book that is frequently read by young people interested in mathematics and is still in print today.
Why mention this? Because in a book on supposedly cutting edge ontology with large multidimensional objects as the central foci of inquiry, what is one to make of a fundamental example of the movement to higher dimensions that was first made (and made more effectively in my opinion) in a young person’s book published nearly 140 years ago? Why is this perspective novel? What does it help us to understand that was not available from other philosophical perspectives?
Finally, I was disappointed by the general looseness of the arguments. A lot of claims are made along with references to what seem to be current disputes. I expected some discipline to the presentation, such that I could at least try to follow some of the claims and check out was others were saying about them, even if I was not totally on board.. While I am not a philosopher, I always try to follow the central arguments and work them through as far as I can. That was not possible here, which was frustrating to me. I have also grown wary of trendy thought movements that get their legitimacy from links to computer science nomenclature.
I wish I could be more positive about this.
IN PROGRESS …
December 14, 2021
Methinks much learning has made him mad.
August 25, 2023
El otro día un amigo argentino me comentó que alguna vez le ofrecieron este libro a los chicos de Caja Negra y lo rechazaron. ¿Por qué? Misterio. Morton, como toda esa escritura contemporánea que pasea por los bulevares del aceleracionismo, la ontología orientada a objetos, los nuevos realismos, el antropoceno y otros raros peinados nuevos de las humanidades, a veces parece un chamuyero magistral: asume, por ejemplo, que todos estamos curtidos en los últimos avances de la física cuántica y hace préstamos conceptuales que difícilmente podría, en mi caso, juzgar críticamente lo apropiado o no de esos usos. No sería raro que, como ocurrió hace un par de décadas como síntoma del engolosinamiento de cierta filosofía francesa, apareciera un Alan Sokal a decir: Mr. Morton, usted no sabe un carajo sobre física, devuélvase a los cuarteles de las ciencias blandas. Riesgo, supongo, de querer abarcar de alguna forma la complejidad que demanda un tiempo histórico atravesado por la crisis climática en curso. A propósito, mientras leía este libro miraba también con asombro a través de Internet las inundaciones ocurridas en el valle central chileno: puentes bajo un agua marrón llena de sedimentos, ramas de árboles, casas completas. «La fuerza de la naturaleza», dicen ciertos ecologistas naif o los jóvenes hippies ecofascistas que creen que el humano es una plaga.
Al volver la mirada al libro, Morton: bien, esto que conocemos como cambio climático es un hiperobjeto viscoso, no-local, blah, blah. Como batería conceptual estética para leer obras de diverso cuño -performances, películas, instalaciones, poemas-, resulta interesante aunque quizá convendría ir a las fuentes que el propio Morton cita: Adorno y Heidegger, por ejemplo. Como constelación de obras unidas por una actitud frente al problema (el problema: el antropoceno) parece más interesante y en ese sentido quizá convenga leerlo como una obra de ficción especulativa antes que como un libro de filosofía. Un poco como Borges, que según Piglia leía cierta filosofía como literatura fantástica. Leído así, los hiperobjetos de Mr. Morton son criaturas aterradoras y extrañas que están por todos lados y habría que acostumbrarse a asimilar. Quizá ese es mi problema: sería como decirle a un minero que abrazara su silicosis o a los muertos de Chernobyl que su cáncer es la aparición inevitable de formas no-humanas de vida en su cuerpo.
EN FIN.
Al volver la mirada al libro, Morton: bien, esto que conocemos como cambio climático es un hiperobjeto viscoso, no-local, blah, blah. Como batería conceptual estética para leer obras de diverso cuño -performances, películas, instalaciones, poemas-, resulta interesante aunque quizá convendría ir a las fuentes que el propio Morton cita: Adorno y Heidegger, por ejemplo. Como constelación de obras unidas por una actitud frente al problema (el problema: el antropoceno) parece más interesante y en ese sentido quizá convenga leerlo como una obra de ficción especulativa antes que como un libro de filosofía. Un poco como Borges, que según Piglia leía cierta filosofía como literatura fantástica. Leído así, los hiperobjetos de Mr. Morton son criaturas aterradoras y extrañas que están por todos lados y habría que acostumbrarse a asimilar. Quizá ese es mi problema: sería como decirle a un minero que abrazara su silicosis o a los muertos de Chernobyl que su cáncer es la aparición inevitable de formas no-humanas de vida en su cuerpo.
EN FIN.
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