Episode 16

Hyperobjects Book Report

2015–05–20

TOC

• Input
• Hello
• Hyperobjects

Input

Silencaeon, Wyrdwulf :: Lovely dark ambient droning guitars with occasional chanting.

Love Theme From Chinatown :: Forget it, Jake. It’s a Hyperobject.

Hello

After an extended hiatus (my apologies), I am back with a book report. There was some discussion amongst my peers about this book, and it was decided that whichever of us read it first would need to do a book report for the rest of the class. It took me so long to get around to finishing this that I suspect the others are all just pretending to have not read it yet for my sake, but nonetheless, for them and for all of you, here’s my take on Hyperobjects.

Oh, and briefly: I have a Patreon, now, to support my writing. If you would like to help out with me being able to dedicate more time to my actual work (as opposed to my day job), please check it out. Spreading the word is appreciated, of course.

Hyperobjects

We live in times so strange that to say “we live in strange times” has moved beyond the facile, through irony, and deep into boring. We live in times so strange that to state otherwise would be strange. This has the faint air of paradox about it, a nagging intuition that whatever models we come up with the explain the world, reality is constantly slipping out from under them, like we’re trying to pick up mercury. And like trying to catch mercury, the process carries the distinct possibility of at least driving us mad, if not killing us outright.

Philosophy feels, to someone like me who’s more of a hobbyist than a professional in the field, like it’s reached some kind of dead-end. Derrida has written himself under erasure, Deleuze and Guattari have built incredible landscapes which we are still exposing, but as fascinating as they are, it feels like navigating within the frame, rather than pushing the boundaries of the possible. Philosophy doesn’t feel like an exploration anymore, it feels like a tunneling under the boundaries of reality, to try to escape some weird jail sentence. The rhizome tries to undermine the walls of the black iron prison, but we spend most of out time mapping ever more convoluted tunnels, and every time we come up for air, they’ve built a new wing.

her: that’s fucking bleak

me: it’s ok if it’s bleak, it’s only the second paragraph

me: hope arrives later in the form of OOO

me: IN A WORLD… WHERE ONTOLOGY HAS FAILED

me: alternatively, WHERE WE’RE GOING, WE DON’T NEED ONTOLOGY!

I try to spend my time on the outer borders of philosophical awareness. It’s a prerequisite for being a Sci-Fi writer, you go out into the Zone and bring back radioactive trinkets for the village. This happens on a number of levels, but one of them is recognizing that the only difference between the Fringe and the Now is whether the growth gets pruned back or becomes the new center. So I’m always on the lookout for philosophical inquiries that promise a genuine new direction. Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects is the most promising of these I’ve seen in years.

I was hooked from the full title: Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Posthumanities). “Posthumanities”? You better believe I’m gonna read that shit. That is my jam.

Of course, because it’s interesting, it’s difficult to summarize, so I have to try. I should lead by saying that, as a hobbyist, I lack a good deal of philosophical context that Morton expects from his readers. Knowing more than I do about folks like Hegel and Heidegger will probably be helpful in reading this, though by no means necessary. I bring this up to clarify that there are probably ideas in Hyperobjects that I’m either missing or misinterpreting, due to a lack of context, so, please recognize that everything I say here is interpretation, and if I am wrong about any Mr Morton’s intentions I hope I’ll be forgiven. Specifically, Morton claims to be operating within the context of something called “Object-Oriented Ontology,” which, it turns out, appears to be one of those things that apparently I have an affinity to without knowing the name before now. Again, I’m probably missing a lot here, but I can still take a stab at understanding.

“Hyperobjects,” as I understand the idea, are things that are so deeply complex that we cannot hope to comprehend them, yet so immediate that they are with us constantly. The book’s central focus is on Global Warming, the Hyperobject par excellance. What is “The Climate?” If we consider it as a Thing, we must acknowledge that it is insanely complex, and incomprehensible by an individual. And yet, as he says, the climate is also the rain drop that hits you on the head. You cannot escape it, and you cannot comprehend it. The once-innocent question, “how about this weather?”, takes on a menace, the background becomes foreground. It gives a sense of strangeness to everything it touches.

Morton implies strongly, to my reading at least, that we increasingly exist in a world dominated by Hyperobjects. The onrushing catastrophe of Global Warning is the most immediately threatening, of course, but the idea of Hyperobjects is a compelling model for many other notions. It’s the sort of idea that’s tempting to apply somewhat haphazardly, and I find myself thinking in terms of Hyperobjects when contemplating things as varied as economic systems and interpersonal relationships. Hyperobjects are as immediate as the moon rising over the horizon, and as distant as the supply chain that brings you your Apple Watch.

Morton delivers these slippery ideas with grace, and style, and more than a few My Bloody Valentine references. His tone, he says himself, is somewhat informal:

“Throughout Hyperobjects I frequently write in a style that the reader may find “personal”—sometimes provocatively or frustratingly so…. as an object-oriented ontologist I hold that all entities (including “myself”) are shy, retiring octopuses that squirt out a dissembling ink as they withdraw into the ontological shadows. Thus, no discourse is truly “objective,” if that means that it is a master language that sits “meta” to what it is talking about.”

Which also brings me to what, for me, is one of the most challenging notions of this book: the negation of the idea of the meta. Not that it can’t exist, of course, but rather that we have reached a point where our constant poststructural meta-jumping, that allows us to be so philosophically smug, becomes broken by the nature of hyperobjects. To paraphrase for brevity, Morton states that due to an increasing awareness of the interconnectedness of global systems we now realize there is no ‘away’ to throw the trash. But, as he makes clear, this is not true just in an ecological sense. I think Morton makes a compelling case that any philosophical position of meta-ness is in a sense an illusion. Every time the reader wants to jump to a systems level, to position ourselves somehow outside the problem, he sends us crashing down to earth, flattening us until we become spread across the landscape, in a totality of awareness not brought about from distance, but from a terrifying immediacy.

As someone who tends toward systemic thinking, this is an intensely uncomfortable position for me. There’s a privilege of safety in having a place to retreat to, where you are outside the system. The metaphor that Morton keeps coming back to is the fluid mirror in the Pill Scene in Matrix, a mirror that sticks to the observer, that cannot be escaped. In this sense, the philosophy of Hyperobjects is god damned terrifying. There’s no escape because there’s nowhere to escape to. Our philosophy lies rusting in Kazakhstani fields, leaking jet fuel into fallow soil. We’re at the bottom of a very, very deep gravity well. And we’re increasingly desperate in our search for any other life.

And somehow, here, there is hope. My Associate defines herself as a “post-nihilist.” I say that I try to do that but she’s much better than I at the “post” part. Hyperobjects, with all its sticky ooze of inescapable reality, starts, for me, to point a way out of the mess it describes, because, for the first time in a long, long time, I feel like someone is actually attempting to describe it without resorting to evasion or escapism.

There’s also another thread here, something about an acceptance of more (not to put too fine a point on it) magical approaches to understanding our current situation. I’ve talked around this idea here, before, it’s something that is still forming. But with things like Future Everything’s Haunted Machines talks (seriously, if you’re interested in the way magical metaphors affect our interaction with technology, watch all of those, especially Warren Ellis and Eleanor Saitta’s), and The Dark Mountain Project trying to find a path that rejects the dichotomy between culture and primitivism, there’s definitely something real here beyond my lack of academic rigor.

And that is in a sense ultimately the message of Hyperobjects for me. Our current methods of understanding, and the tools that they imply, have gotten us pretty far, but they have also landed us in some sticky messes, both philosophically and quite literally. This book does not claim to have the answers. But it does frame the questions in new ways that might allow for a path out of this thicket of despair that we have grown around ourselves. And that, for me, is among the highest praise it is possible to give to a work of philosophy.