Two principles define the boundaries to which any method aiming to observe complex and vast phenomena must respond: the lens of interdependence that shapes systems theory, and the irreducibility of what is observed—entities that are uncontrollable through the logical categories to which we have been accustomed, at least since Aristotle. Morton proposes an unprecedented angle of observation through “hyperobjects,” which he defines as: “entities that are massively distributed in time and space. A hyperobject could be a black hole. A hyperobject could be the oil field at Lago Agrio in Ecuador, or the Everglades in Florida. A hyperobject could be the biosphere or the solar system. A hyperobject could be the total sum of all the nuclear material on Earth, or simply plutonium, or uranium. A hyperobject could be the incredibly long-lived product of human manufacture: Styrofoam or plastic bags […] Hyperobjects are ‘hyper’ relative to some other entity, whether they are directly constructed by humans or not.”[1]
Hyperobjects are such because they exceed what we can know about them, both in terms of their ontology and of the scales at which they—partially and temporarily—manifest in our experience. In this way, Morton shields such constructs from the temptation, deeply rooted in anthropocentric thought, of human control. “Their ultimate essence is inaccessible to humans. […] Hyperobjects possess certain characteristic properties that can be identified ‘by subtraction’: we cannot de-fine them, but we know they exist through their manifestations in our lives.”[2]
We may imagine that, for the English philosopher, this is an attempt to deconstruct the foundations of “anthropocentric” thought in order to define a form of “realism”—as he likes to call it—better suited to explaining the manifestations of an overall framework—climatic, environmental, anthropological, social—whose bearings we have lost. For this reason, hyperobjects cannot be regarded as mere mental constructs, because they manifest with full force in our experience, often in extraordinary ways, yet always challenging our understanding. Up to a certain point, we know nothing of their existence, yet we undergo them—sometimes we are overwhelmed by them.
“Hyperobjects have already had a significant impact on human space, both psychic and social. They are directly responsible for what I call the ‘end of the world’ and render both ecological denial and apocalyptic environmentalism obsolete.”[3] In some sense, they make narration itself impossible, as they establish an unbridgeable rift between experience and knowledge: as individuals, we live through the collapse of the Marmolada glacier’s north face in its most dramatic form, yet we do not know where global warming “is”—only that it is everywhere, as we are forced to witness its manifestations all around us. We read with horror about the massacre of the Yanomami people caused by groundwater contamination, yet we fail to understand why now, and why in this way. When we hasten to construct predictive models derived from disasters that have struck others or ourselves, we risk being overcome by the anxiety of control, believing what we see; we see a summer cyclone, we flee from an uncontrollable fire. Thus we lose the clarity necessary to contemplate the exceeding dimension proper to hyperobjects. The fire is the epiphenomenon—but of what? We mistake the part for the whole.
To maintain the necessary mental acuity, we must undertake an important methodological effort to become aware of the impossibility of closing this rift; yet we can rely on a kind of hypostatization of their properties, useful to fill the gap of understanding something that ultimately remains elusive.
- Hyperobjects are viscous – in the way they manifest, they penetrate our experience, deeply shaping our lives. When we encounter them, they are pervasive and “excessive”: they have an impact we cannot control, invading our lives and leaving us utterly powerless. The red leaves of plants growing undisturbed around the Fukushima Dai-Ichi power plant, and our inability to completely and definitively contain the reactor explosions and the subsequent discharge into the Pacific Ocean, exemplify this (for how long will we be unable to tread that soil? How many millions of liters of radioactive water will we continue to pour into the Pacific?). Viscosity is the property of hyperobjects that allows humans to become aware of the consequences of something that is always elsewhere but that, precisely for this reason, constantly reminds us that there is no longer an “elsewhere”: a striking property that makes dramatically evident that what we undergo—what manifests—is not the hyperobject itself, but only one of its consequences.
- Hyperobjects are nonlocal – if what we experience is an epiphenomenon, an emergent trait, a local behavior that cannot itself be identified as “the hyperobject,” this observation forces us to adopt an irreductionist mode of thought. The temporality in which hyperobjects exist is neither that of their possible local manifestations—the time of human experience—nor that of history: the memory of hyperobjects is not human memory. “Hyperhistory” cannot be subsumed under history. Moreover, hyperobjects cannot be localized within the space/time coordinates to which we are accustomed: where, exactly, are radiations located? Where is global warming? The domain to which hyperobjects belong is alien—and unknown—to humans. Hyperobjects force us to consider scales of order we thought we would never have to reckon with; boundaries we were unaware of confront us with the fact that there are orders of scale we cannot experience and can scarcely even conceive.
- Hyperobjects are interobjective – they possess a third property, interobjectivity; their local manifestation depends on interdependencies among objects and subjective perceptions so intricate as to be uncontrollable. Their viscosity, pervasiveness, distribution, and indirectness stem from networks of complex relations that determine them on very large—and thus invisible—scales. “On very large scales, all entities are interconnected in an intersubjective system called a mesh. A mesh consists of the relations among the intertwined threads of metal no less than the spaces between them. Meshes emerge as powerful metaphors capable of describing the strange interconnectedness of things. […] Objects provide good examples of intersubjectivity, particularly the fact that nothing is experienced directly, but only through other entities, within a shared sensual space.”[4] If the principle of interdependence refers to the operational properties of systems—that is, the idea of a network as a set of nodes, connections, and flows, where objects are virtually superfluous—Morton’s interobjectivity restores the centrality of the object and its power to engage with the perceiving subject through its aesthetic properties. It is, ultimately, an ontology of the object and its opacity to the subject, who can experience it locally but can never comprehend it in its completeness or essence—thus definitively banishing any attempt to define an ontology or even a phenomenology of events.
The perspective outlined through hyperobjects is crucial because it allows us to understand how what happens elsewhere now conditions everything that happens to us. “Every decision we make is to some extent made in relation to hyperobjects.”[5] For this reason, we must renounce the pretense of forming an exhaustive understanding of hyperobjects—about which we sometimes speak with undue ease: ecology, climate change, nature, biosphere, and so on—but we will not be able to avoid defining lines of action that will always involve hyperobjects. This compelling realization reveals the need for governance capable of curbing reactive policies toward the environmental and social crises with which we must constantly reckon. We will not be able to find local solutions; rather, it will be necessary to operate at macro-, hyper- levels in the hope of reducing local emergencies (in both senses: manifestations precisely located in space/time, and crises we must confront in specific moments and places).
- How far must we “zoom in” to gain a different understanding of a phenomenon?
• To what broader context must we refer in order to attribute, on a nonlocal level, this local manifestation?
• At what scales must we look to properly understand a local manifestation?
• What aesthetic properties allow us to enter into relation with this hyperobject?
[1] T. Morton, ibid.
[2] T. Morton, ibid.
[3] T. Morton, ibid.
[4] T. Morton, ibid.
[5] T. Morton, ibid.
