Morton, Timothy (2013): Hyperobjects. Philosophy and ecology after the end of the World

 Morton, Timothy (2013): Hyperobjects. Philosophy and ecology after the end of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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A quake in being. An introduction to Hyperobjects

In The Ecological Thought I coined the term hyperobjects to refer to things that are massively distributed in time and space relativo to humans (…) Hyperobjects then, are “hyper” in relation to some other entity, whether they are directly manufactured by humans or not.

Hyperobjects have numerous properties i common. They are viscous, which means that they “stick” to being that are involved with them. They are nonlocal; in other words, any “local manifestation” of a hyperobject is not directly the hyperobject. They involve profoundly different temporalities that the human-scale ones we are used to (…) Hyperobjects occupy a high-dimensional phase space that resuls in their being invisible to humans for stretches of time. And they exhibit their effects interobjectively; that is, they can be detected in a space that consists of interrelationships between aesthetic properties of objects.

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The hyperobject is not a function of our knowledge: it’s hyper relative to (…) humans.

(…) Hyperobjects are also changing human art and experience (the aesthetic dimension). We are now in what I call the Age of Assymmetry.

Hyperobjects are not just collections, systems or assemblages of other objects. They are objects in their own right (…)

derives from object-oriented ontology (OOO), an emerging philosophical movement commited to a ubique form of realismo and nonanthropocentric thinking.

(…) Hyperobjects are real whether or not someone is thinking of them.

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(…) one only sees pieces of a Hyperobject at any moment. Thinking them is intrinsically tricky.

(…) the emerging ecological age gets the idea that “there is no metalanguage” much more powerfully and nakedly than posmodernism ever did (…) Yet because there is nowhere to stand outside of things altogether, it turns out that we know the truth of “there is no metalanguage” more deeply than its inventors.

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(…)

This is not only a historical age but also a geological one. Or better: we are no longer to think history as exclusively human, for the very reason that we are in the Anthropocene. A strange name indeed, since in this período non-humans maje decisive contact with humans, even the ones busy shoring up differences between humans and the rest.

(…) situatedness is now a very uncanny place to be (…) I am unable to go beyond what I have elsewhere called ecomimesis, the (often) first-person rendering of situatedness “in”. This is not to endorse ecomimesis, but to recognize that there is no outside, no metalanguage.

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Hyperobjects are what have brought about the end of the world. Clearly, planet Earth has not exploded. But the concept world is no longer operational, and hyperobjects are what brought about its demise (…) the strongly held belief that the World is about to end “unless we act now” is paradoxically one of the most powerful factors that inhibit a full engagement with our ecological coexistence here on Earth.

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Numerous philosophical approaches have recently arisen as if in response to the daunting, indeed horrifying, coincidence of human history and terrestrial geology. Speculative realism is the umbrella term for a movement (…) All are determined to break the spell that descend on philosophy since the Romantic period. The spell is known as correlationism, the notion that philosophy can only talk within a narrow bandwidth, restricted to the human-world correlate: meaning is only possible between a human mind and what it thinks, it’s “objects”, flimsy and tenuous as they are (…) (Unlike Latour, I do believe that we have “been modern”, and that this has had effects on human and nonhuman beings.)

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(…)

Speculative realism has a healthy impulse to break free of the correlationalist circle, the small island of meaning to which philosophy has confined itself.

(…) Relativity theory destroyed the idea of consistent objects: things that are identical with themselves and constantly present all the way down (…)

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(…) Because they so massively outscale us, hyperobjects have magnified this weirdness of things for our inspection: things are themselves, but we can’t point to them directly.

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(…) hyperobjects are not simply mental (or otherwise ideal) constructs, but are real entities whose primordial reality is withdrawn from humans.

(…) Hyperobjects seem to force something on us, something that affects some core ideas of what it means to exist, what Earth is, what society is.

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(…) outer space is a figment of our imagination: we are always inside an object.

What we have then, before and up to the time of hyperobjects from the sixteenth century on, is the truth of Copernicanism, if we can call it that – there is no center and we don’t inhabit it. Yet added to this is another twist: there is no edge! We can’t jump out of the universe (…) Synthetic judgements a priori are made inside an object, not in some trascendental sphere of pure freedom.

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(…) And that is the problem, the problem called anthropocentrism.

It is Kant who shows, at the very inception of the Anthropocene, that things never coincide with their phenomena. All we need to do is to extend this revolutionary insight beyond the human-world gap (…) a thing is a rift between what it is and how it appears, for any entity whatsoever, not simply for that special entity called the (human) subject. What ecological thought must do, then, is unground the human by forcing it back onto the ground, which is to say, standing on a gigantic object called Earth inside a gigantic entity called biosphere.

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(…) The Titanic of modernity hits the iceberg of Hyperobjects. The problem of hyperobject, I argue, is not a problem that modernity can solve. Unlike Latour then, although I share many of his basic philosophical concerns, I believe that we have been modern, and that we are only just learning how not to be.

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(…) Reality itself intervenes on the side of objects that from the prevalent modern point of view  - an emulsion of blank nothingness and tiny particles are decidedly medium-sized. It turns out that these medium-sized objects are fascinating, horrifying and powerful,

For one thing, we are inside them, like Jonah in the Whale. This means that every decision we make is in some sense related to Hyperobjects.

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Hyperobjects are the harbingers of a truly “post-modern age” (…) All humans, I shall argue, are now aware that they have entered a new phase of history in which nonhumans are no longer excluded or merely decorative features of their social, psychic, and philosophical space (…) This phase is characterized by a traumatic loss of coordinates, “the end of the world”.

(…) If anyone gives us a vivid sense of the uncanny strangeness of coexistence, it Is Heidegger. I have also come to understand, against Levin as, that it is indeed on the terrain of ontology that many of the urgent Ecological battles need to be fought.

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(…) I refer to Heidegger’s tool-analysis, which until Harman’s strikingly innovative appropriation of it, lay around in the shop, halfheartedly handled by pragmatism and ignored by deconstruction. The turn to the tool-analysis in OOO and in “thing theory” is welcome.

(…) Hyperobjects seem to have five interrelated qualities. Or rather these qualities provide more and more accurate modes of human attunement to hyperobjects. Part 1 thus starts with an overall quality of hyperobjects (viscosity) and moves through three categories until we arrive at the fifth section (on interobjectivity), in which it becomes clear that hyperobjects forces us to rethink what we mean by object. The three categories are nonlocality, temporal undulation, and phasing.

 

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PART I

What Are Hyperobjects?

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Viscosity

I do not access hyperobjects across a distance, through some transparent medium. Hyperobjects are here in my social and experiential space (…) As I reach for the iPhone charger plugged into the dashboard, I reach into evolution, into the extended phenotype that doesn’t stop at the edge of my skin but continues into all the spaces my humanness has colonized.

On every right side of every American car is engraved an ontological slogan that is highly appropriate for our time: OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR. Not only do I fail to access hyperobjects at a distance, but it also becomes clearer with every passing day that “distance” is only a psychic and ideological construct designed to protect me from the nearness of things.

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(…) Hyperobjects are agents.

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(…) Kant argues that aesthetic experience is an attunement (Stimmung).

(…) Hyperobjective art makes visible, audible, and legible this intrauterine experience that Sartre loathed, the “sly solidarity” between things: “The slimmy is myself”. Viscosity for Sartre is how a hand feels when it plunges into a large jar of honey -it begins to dissolve: “The sugary death of the For-itself (like that of a wasp that which sinks into the jam and drowns in it).

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(…) When the inside of a thing coincides perfectly with its outside, that is called dissolution or death (…)

A baby vomits curdled milk. She learns to distinguish between the vomit and the not-vomit, and comes to know the not-vomit as self. Every subject is formed at the expense of some viscous, slightly poisoned susbstance, possibly teeming with bacteria, rank with stomach acid. The parent scoops up the mucky milk in a tissue and flushes the wadded package down the toilet. Now we know where it goes. For some time we may have thought that the U-bend in the toilet was a convenient curvature of ontological space that took whatever we flush down it into a totally different dimension called Away; leaving things clean over here. Now we know better: instead of the mythical land Qway, we know the waste goes to the Pacific Ocean or the wastewater treatment facility. Knowledge of the hyperobject Earth, and of the hyperobject biosphere, presents us with viscous surfaces from which nothing can be forcibly peeled. There is no Away on this surface, no here and no there. In effect, the entire Earth is a wadded tissue of vomited milk.

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(…) Light itself is the most viscous thing of all, since nothing can surpass its speed. Radiation is Sartre’s jar of honey par excellence, a luminous honey that reveals our bone structure as it seeps around us (…) Hyperobjects are viscous.

Like a nightmare that brings news of some real psychic intensity, the shadow of the hyperobject announces the existence of the hyperobject.

We find ourselves caught in them. The name of this trap is viscosity.

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(…) The sticky mirror demonstrates the truth of what phenomenology calls ingenousness or sincerity. Objects are what they are, in the sense that no matter what we are aware of, or how, there they are, impossible to shake off.

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The more we fight phenomenological sincerity with our reason, the more glued we figure out we are, which is what it feels like to live in risk society: a society in which growing scientific awareness of risk (from toxic chemical, for instance) changes the nature of democracy itself. But it also means that we have exited modernity. The beautiful reversibility of the oily, melting mirror speaks to something that is happening in a global warming age, precisely because hyperobjects (…) What Husserl noticed -that objects can’t be exhausted by perception –has a viscous consequence. There is no Goldilocks position that’s just right from which to view objects. What OOO asserts is that one can extend this insight to nonhuman entities (…) A good example of viscosity would be radioactive materials. The more you try to get rid of them, the more you realize that can’t get rid of them. They seriously undermine the notion of “away”. Out of sight is no longer out of mind (…)

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Nonlocality

When I look at the sun gleaming on the solar panels on my roof, I am watching global warming unfold (…) Yet global warming is not here. Hyperobjects are nonlocal.

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(…) Post-Humean casuality is by no means a matter of “objective” versus “subjective” impressions, let alone a matter of human reality versus nonhuman reality. Rather it’s a matter of different levels of casuality. It’s a matter of how entities manifest for other entities, whether they are human, or sentient, or not (…) What we are dealing with here are aesthetic effects that are directly casual (…) action at a distance is involved. A gamma particle is a wonderful example of a profound confusion of aisthēsis and praxis, perceiving and doing. A gamma particle is an ultra-high-frequency photon. In illuminating things, it alters things: flesh, paper, brains.

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The subject of gamma rays brings up the source of the title of this section: quantum theory. Quantum theory is a nonmaterialist theory of physical substances. Antirealism appropriates quantum theory, since quantum theory supposedly shows reality is fuzzy or deeply correlated with perception and so forth. Quantum theory is the only existing theory to establish firmly that things really do exist beyond our mind (or any mind). Quantum theory positively guarantees that real objects exist! Not only that -these objects exist beyond one another. Quantum theory does this by viewing phenomena as quanta, as discrete “units” as described in Unit Operations by OOO philosopher Ian Bogost. “Units” strongly resemble OOO “objects”. Thinking in terms of units counteracts problematic features of thinking in terms of systems.

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Perceptual, sensual phenomena, such as hardness and brilliance, are at bottom quantum mechanical effects. I can’t put my hand through this table because it is statistically beyond unlikely that the quanta at the tip of my finger could penetrate the resistance wells in the quanta in the table’s surface. That’s what solidity is.

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(…) Bohr argued that quantum phenomena don’t simply concatenate themselves with their measuring devices. They´re identical to them: the equipment and the phenomena form an indivisible whole (…) Nothing is radically external to anything else (…) rough approximation notwithstanding, reality is not a machine. Quantum theory extends the nonmechanism inherent in relativity theory: “The classical idea of the separability of the world into distinct but interacting parts is no longer valid or relevant.”

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(…)

Unless you want to believe that the speed of light can be violated – a notion that gives physicists the jitters- you might have to accept that reality just is nonlocal. Nonlocality deals a crushing blow to the idea of discrete tiny things floating around in an infinite void, since there is strictly no “around” in which these things float: one is unable to locate them in a specific region of spacetime (…) In some deep sense there’s no (single, firm, separate) photon as such. If biology discovers how entangled lifeforms are, quantum entanglement opens a more profound interconnectedness.

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(…) A hyperobject if ever there was one: an auto- affective ocean that lives between the size of an electron (10^-17 cm) and the Planck length (10^-33 cm). This whole might be strictly unanalyzable: the implicate order has an irreducible dark side because it’s made of rotations within rotations, or as Harman puts it, “objects wrapped in objects wrapped in objects”.

(…) in the terms set by physics itself objects aren’t made “of” any one thing in particular. Just as there is no top level, there may be no bottom level that is not a substantial, formed object (…) “Quantum theory requires us to give up the idea that the electron, or any other object has, by itself, any intrinsic properties at all. Instead, each object should be regarded as something containing only incompletely defined potentialities that are developed when an object interacts with an appropriate system.” To argue thus approaches Harman’s image of the withdrawn-ness of objects as a “subterranean creature.” Thus, the “something deeper” from which the electron unfolds is also withdrawn (…) Objects would relate externally. Yet we can’t predict the future state of reality even in principle, because we can’t anticipate the position of every particle (…) there are no particles as such, no matter as such, only discretely quantized objects. If this is the case at the most fine-grained level we currently know, then it will be much more so at higher scales, the scales on which evolution, biology, and ecology happen.

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At the quantum level, genuine nonlocality operates: two entangled photons, two entangled electrons can indeed appear to influence one another at a distance. Einstein found precisely this aspect highly disturbing: he called it “spooky action at a distance.” The influence appears to be simultaneous: in other words, it could be faster than light.

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If there is indeed a physical basis for nonlocality—a subquantum level of which what appear to be two particles are simply the peaks of ripples— then this level is a hyperobject (…) the hypothetical subquantum hyperobject is “everywhere.”

(…) Quantum objects are massively distributed both in a conventional (yet still extraordinary) sense, and in a highly unconventional sense.

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Nonlocality is precisely a theory of textuality at the quantum level, in which information is dispersed among particles seemingly occupying different regions of spacetime.

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Nonlocality means just that—there is no such thing, at a deep level, as the local. Locality is an abstraction. Metaphorically this applies to hyperobjects.

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When you feel raindrops, you are experiencing climate, in some sense. In particular you are experiencing the climate change known as global warming. But you are never directly experiencing global warming as such. 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 (…) How can we account for this? By arguing that global warming, like all hyperobjects, is nonlocal: it’s massively distributed in time and space. What does this mean? It means that my experience of the weather in the hic et nunc is a false immediacy.

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(…) The object is already there. Before we look at it. Global warming is not a function of our measuring devices. Yet because it’s distributed across the biosphere and beyond, it’s very hard to see as a unique entity. And yet, there it is, raining on us, burning down on us, quaking the Earth, spawning gigantic hurricanes. Global warming is an object of which many things are distributed pieces (…)

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Like God taking a photograph, the nonhuman sees us, in the white light of its fireball, hotter than the sun. Like God, yet unlike a scholastic causa sui inhabiting a beyond: rather the prose reminds us that we are dealing with a physical entity. Yet this is a weird physical entity, with all the fateful force of that term. To what are we tuning when we attune to the hyperobject? Is this uncertainty not precisely what we are heeding? Isn’t it the case that the effect delivered to us in the rain, the weird cyclone, the oil slick, is something uncanny?

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The self, in this respect, is nothing more than the history of such wounds and the secretions we exuded to protect ourselves from them. Freud puts it this way: the ego is the “precipitate of abandoned object cathexes,” (…) In a sense, we can expect human egos to be pockmarked with the traces of hyperobjects. We are all burnt by ultraviolet rays. We all contain water in about the same ratio as Earth does, and salt water in the same ratio that the oceans do. We are poems about the hyperobject Earth.

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What interests me here is not so much an answer to the question of exactly how lifeforms arose, but the fact that lifeforms themselves are poems about nonlife, in particular highly dangerous entities that could destroy life.

Yet the very attempt to find a solution—to erase the stain of itself from existence—is what results in its continued existence as a copy of itself. In trying to cancel itself out, the replicator becomes beautifully defended against its environment. Our existence is due to more than a little bit of death, the headlong rush toward equilibrium.

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Art sends us information from another place. Snow falls in a poem, but it is not really falling. Readers wonder about the intention of a ghostly author whom they think they see behind or within the poem. Painters of paintings live in a society: perhaps the paintings are distorted records of the way that society organized its enjoyment—otherwise known as economics. Or maybe the music we are hearing tells us about the unconscious, coming from some place of archetypes or from the trauma of unspeakable secrets. Here is the poem. But the poem is not here.

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From the standpoint of the end of the universe, everything is equally meaningless, smoothed out into maximum entropy (…) From evolution’s point of view, I’m just an ephemeral expression of DNA. Yet from my point of view, I inhabit an extended phenotype that consists of computers, desks, lights, streets, children, and dinner plates.

When I think nonlocality in this way, I am not negating the specificity of things, evaporating them into the abstract mist of the general or the larger or the less local. Nonlocality is far weirder than that. When it comes to hyperobjects, nonlocality means that the general itself is compromised by the particular.

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Temporal Undulation

When you approach an object, more and more objects emerge (…) Hyperobjects envelop us, yet they are so massively distributed in time that they seem to taper off, like a long street stretched into the distance. Time bends them and flattens them (…) hyperobjects seem to beckon us further into themselves, making us realize that we’re already lost inside them. The recognition of being caught in hyperobjects is precisely a feeling of strange familiarity and familiar strangeness.

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Harman writes that, because objects withdraw irreducibly, you can’t even get closer to objects. This becomes clearer as we enter the ecological crisis—“Has it started yet? How far in are we?” This anxiety is a symptom of the emergence of hyperobjects.

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When you look at oil you’re looking at the past. Hyperobjects are time-stretched to such a vast extent that they become almost impossible to hold in mind.

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The half-life of plutonium-239 is 24,100 years. These periods are as long as all of visible human history thus far. The paintings in the Chauvet Cave in France date back thirty thousand years (…). But 7 percent of global warming effects will still be occurring one hundred thousand years from now as igneous rocks slowly absorb the last of the greenhouse gases. I have decided to call these timescales the horrifying, the terrifying, and the petrifying. The last is particularly appropriate given that all that will remain of human beings in the flesh one hundred thousand years from now may indeed be fossils; and that the new “minerals” such as concrete, created with extreme rapidity by humans (we have doubled the number of such minerals on Earth), form built structures (skyscrapers, overpasses, garnets for lasers, graphene, bricks) that will indeed be a layer of geological strata at that point; not to mention the “mineraloids” such as glasses and ceramics, and materials such as plastics. The timescale is a Medusa that turns us to stone. We know this now, just as we know that we have changed the future fossils of Earth. The future hollows out the present.

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But hyperobjects are not forever. What they offer instead is very large finitude.

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Einstein’s discovery of spacetime was the discovery of a hyperobject— the way in which mass as such grips space, distorts it from within, stretching space and time into whorls and vortices.

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The physical universe consists of objects that are more like turbulence in a stream than (gooey or hard) extended bodies.

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The totality of the Einsteinian universe is like a stream filled with countless vortices of energy. It only makes a relative sense to differentiate one vortex from another, so that the significance of such an object changes depending on circumstances. This is much more strange than saying that you can read an object any way you like, that you can walk around a single, solid-seeming object and view it just how you like. Power is on the side of the object apprehended, not on the side of the apprehending thing (whether it’s us or a pencil or a reverse thruster). What we have is the inverse of perspectivism, a world of compulsion (…)

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The undulating fronds of space and time float in front of objects. Some speculative realism maintains there is an abyss, an Ungrund (unground) deeper than thought, deeper than matter, a surging vortex of dynamism. To understand hyperobjects, however, is to think the abyss in front of things.

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Hyperobjects are Gaussian, disturbingly squishy and mollusk-like. The undulations of the mollusk flesh of spacetime fail to drop to zero. Gravity waves from the “beginning of time” are right now passing through my body from the edge of the universe (…) The contemporary philosophical obsession with the monstrous provides a refreshing exit from human-scale thoughts. It is extremely healthy to know not only that there are monstrous beings, but that there are beings that are not purely thinkable, whose being is not directly correlated with whatever thinking is.

(…) Relativity is what guarantees that objects are never as they seem, and not because they are ideas in my head—but because they aren’t. Large objects emit gravitational fields that bend light, giving rise to the red shift from distant stars that remained a mystery until Einstein proposed relativity theory. Spacetime isn’t an empty box, but rather an undulating force field that emanates from objects. Now the thing about undulating temporality is that it really is measurably obvious in hyperobjects, objects that are massive from a human standpoint.

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This has nothing to do with idealism or correlationism. This relativity is hardwired into things themselves. Objects entangle one another in a crisscrossing mesh of spacetime fluctuations.

(…) Hyperobjects end the idea that time and space are empty containers that entities sit in.

(…) It’s not until 1900 that time and space become thinkable as effects of objects, rather than as absolute containers.

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(…) Since objects don’t float in an infinite void, every entity has its own time, both in a physical and in a deep ontological sense.

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Since the speed of light is an unbreakable limit, every event takes place within a light cone that specifies what counts as past and future. Within the light cone, events relative to the event in question can be specified as taking place in the past or in the present, here or elsewhere. But outside the light cone, differentiating between now and then becomes meaningless, as does differentiating between here and there. An event outside the light cone cannot be specified as happening at a certain place and at a certain time. I just can’t tell whether it occurs in the “present” or the “past.” Time as such, construed as a series of points that extends like Cartesian substances “into” the future “from” the past, is itself an aesthetic phenomenon, not a deep fact that underlies things.

(…) Thus, like the strange stranger, there is a future future. There is a time that is beyond predictability, timing, or any ethical or political calculation. There is an elsewhere elsewhere. There is a place that is “nowhere” and yet real: not a Neoplatonic beyond, but a real entity in the real universe. We should then entertain the possibility that hyperobjects allow us to see that there is something futural about objects as such. If time is not a neutral container in which objects float, but is instead an emission of objects themselves, it is at least theoretically more plausible that an object could exert a backward causality on other entities, than if objects inhabit a time container that slopes in one particular direction. This wake of causality would appear to flow backward “into” the present. The strange strangeness of things is futural (…)

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Like all objects, hyperobjects compel us to handle them in certain ways. They forcefully exert what Lingis calls the imperative. But because of temporal foreshortening, hyperobjects are impossible to handle just right. This aporia gives rise to a dilemma: we have no time to learn fully about hyperobjects. But we have to handle them anyway. This handling causes ripples upon ripples. Entities that are massively distributed in time exert downward causal pressure on shorter-lived entities. Thus, one vivid effect of global warming has been phenological asynchrony: the way plant and animal life events have gone out of sync. When the time that one entity emits intersects with the time another entity emits, we get an interference pattern (…) This interference pattern is known as phasing. Humans are caught in intersecting phases of time.

 

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Phasing

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My sense of being “in” a time and of inhabiting a “place” depends on forms of regularity. The periodic rhythms of day and night, the sun “coming up” (…)

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Hyperobjects seem to phase in and out of the human world. Hyperobjects are phased: they occupy a high-dimensional phase space that makes them impossible to see as a whole on a regular three-dimensional humanscale basis.

We can only see pieces of hyperobjects at a time. The reason why they appear nonlocal and temporally foreshortened is precisely because of this transdimensional quality. We only see pieces of them at once, like a tsunami or a case of radiation sickness (…)

What we experience as a lava-lamp fluidity—flowing and oozing metaphors abound in the new materialism—is precisely a symptom of our less than adequate perception of higher dimensions of structure, which is where the hyperobjects live.

That’s why you can’t see global warming. You would have to occupy some high-dimensional space to see it unfolding explicitly.

(…)

A process just is a real object, but one that occupies higher dimension than objects to which we are accustomed.

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A phase space is the set of all the possible states of a system. Objects in phase space are intriguing and strange.

(…)

What horrifyingly complex tentacles would such an entity have, this high-dimensional object we call global warming?

As it is, I only see brief patches of this gigantic object as it intersects with my world. The brief patch I call a hurricane destroys the infrastructure of New Orleans.

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Thinking things as Nature is thinking them as a more or less static, or metastable, continuity bounded by time and space. The classic image of Nature is the Romantic or picturesque painting of a landscape.

(…)

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A process is simply an object seen from a standpoint that is 1 + n dimensions lower than that object’s dimensionality.

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Process philosophy helps us to visualize how high-dimensional entities execute. Thus, a slightly upgraded way of seeing hyperobjects would be the plot or graph (…) Time is now radically inside objects (…) And space is inside objects, differentiating their parts from one another.

(…) Thinking hyperobjects as transdimensional real things is valuable (…) Hyperobjects don’t inhabit some conceptual beyond in our heads or out there. They are real objects that affect other objects.

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Hyperobjects seem to come and go, but this coming and going is a function of our limited human access to them.

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A hyperobject exists for us as a map in a high-dimensional phase space, because it is impossible for us to grasp as a whole with our senses. But this means the opposite of a Platonism that says that mathematical relationships underlie things. It only means that the mathematical as such just is mathēsis, which is a Greek term that comes close to the Tibetan gom, the term for meditation. Gom and mathēsis both mean something like “getting used to,” “growing accustomed.” Mathematics in this sense, beyond number, is the way the mind acclimatizes itself to reality.

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The gaps and ruptures are simply the invisible presence of the hyperobject itself, which looms around us constantly (…) The notion of “background” and its “foreground” are only phases of an object that doesn’t “go anywhere” at all, at least not on a human- or town-sized scale.

(…)

A claustrophobic universe unveils itself to us, crammed with things: radiation, solar flares, interstellar dust, lampposts, and lice. Expressionism abolishes the play between background and foreground. Objects thrust themselves towards us in a cramped or claustrophobic pictorial space. The sensation of world, on this view, is the false consciousness of gaps and backgrounds between and behind things. In this way hyperobjects bring about the end of the world (…)

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Phasing happens because one object translates another one. This is a feature of how objects affect one another in general, and we should explore this a little before accounting more fully for how hyperobjects are phased.

(…) A hyperobject passes through a thousand sieves, emerging as translated information at the other end of the mesh (…) Phasing is an indexical sign of an object that is massively distributed in a phase space that is higher dimensional than the equipment (…) used to detect it. An index is a sign that is directly a part of what it indicates. In the mesh of interconnectivity, the sieve through which hyperobjects pass, smaller things become indexes of the hyperobjects inside which they exist.

(…) What we are dealing with, with the phenomenon of phasing, is an indexical sign that is a metonymy for the hyperobject.

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There is an inevitable dislocation between the hyperobject and its indexical signs. Otherwise, what’s the fuss all about? Gaia will eliminate its pathogens and get on with the business of being itself. But an object is and is not itself, at the same time, because it has parts that cannot be wholly subsumed into it (…) A phasing object is a sign of a rupture at the heart of being.

This rupture is not a physically definable place, like a crack or a seam. It cannot be physically located “in” space or time, since space and time are precisely on “this” side of it. Hyperobjects are big enough relative to us that they cause us to become aware of the rupture, which following Heidegger I have begun to call the Rift. The Rift exists at an ontological intersection, not a physical one. The intersection is between a thing and its appearance-for another thing, or things. Thus, the mesh of relations is on one side of the Rift, the hither side, while what I call the strange stranger is on the yonder side—again, not spatially but ontologically.

Now because of the strange mereology we have spoken of, one of these “other things” can be the very object in question! An object can be a member of itself thus giving rise to set theoretical paradoxes that plagued Russell. If a set can be a member of itself, then one can imagine a set of sets that are not members of themselves. In order to cope with such paradoxes we can do one of two things. One is to forget everything we have just found out about hyperobjects. The other is to allow for the existence of contradictory entities.

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If it is the case that an entity has more parts than it can encompass in a whole, then objects are transfinite in some sense, fractals that contain more of themselves than they let on on the outside.

The abyss opens up in the interaction of any two or more objects. Indeed, since objects are inherently inconsistent (a fact to which we shall return), an abyss opens up simply because of the Rift, the fact that an object can “interact with itself” because it is a spacing and a timing, not a given, objectified entity. We have seen already how at the quantum level systems seem to auto-affect, looping around on themselves. Phasing is evidence of some interaction between things, or between a thing (…)

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An object times another one, in a transitive sense (…) The daylight and the night time the house, with its sunny and shady sides (…) Phasing is an aesthetic event, a sensual entity-for some other entity or more.

 

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Interobjectivity

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The abyss in front of things is interobjective. It floats among objects, “between” them; though this between is not “in” spacetime—it is spacetime. On this view, what is called intersubjectivity—a shared space in which human meaning resonates—is a small region of a much larger interobjective configuration space. Hyperobjects disclose interobjectivity. The phenomenon we call intersubjectivity is just a local, anthropocentric instance of a much more widespread phenomenon, namely interobjectivity (…) In other words, “intersubjectivity” is really human interobjectivity with lines drawn around it to exclude nonhumans.

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We will find that all entities whatsoever are interconnected in an interobjective system that elsewhere I call the mesh.

(…) Meshes are potent metaphors for the strange interconnectedness of things, an interconnectedness that does not allow for perfect, lossless transmission of information, but is instead full of gaps and absences. When an object is born it is instantly enmeshed into a relationship with other objects in the mesh. Heidegger calls this mesh the contexture of equipment, a term that has roughly the same metaphorical provenance. Ontologically speaking (from the standpoint of OOO), the mesh does not subtend things, but rather it floats “on top of ” them, “in front of ” things.

A mesh consists of links, and also of gaps between links. These links and gaps are what enable causality to happen, when we think causality in an expanded way, to include what I have been calling translation. An MP3 is a highly perforated version of a sound, a JPEG is a highly perforated version of a picture. The meshwork that each object demonstrates is common to less perforated sets of links, and less regular ones too. It is precisely the gaps between and within things that enable entities to grip them (…) Mesh means the threads and the holes between the threads.

This fact profoundly affects our understanding of causality. It is the causal dimension in which things are able to happen, and not happen (…) Happily, mesh has etymological associations both with mass and with mask: that is, the heft of a thing, and its illusory qualities (qualities that, as I argue briefly here, have a causal reach).

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Authors of integral studies in the vein of Ken Wilber have coined the term interobjectivity to refer to systems of related objects, as opposed to systems of related subjects. To use the term in this way is to cause nothing whatsoever to change. On the view I expound here, by contrast, what is called subject and what is called mind just are interobjective effects, emergent properties of relationships between enmeshed objects.

(…)

The view that mind is interobjective is shared by enactive theories of intelligence that have arisen from “connectionist” thinking in artificial intelligence. On this view, if you walk and quack like a mind, then you are one. This means that your mind is an effect-for some “observer.” It is not “in” anything and it is not prior to objects but is rather an aftereffect of them.

(…) Personhood then is also an effect in the mesh—it may look solid from a distance, but as we approach it we find that it is full of holes.

(…) What is called consciousness is an aesthetic effect: it is consciousness for. Yet this does not make it unreal.

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Intelligence need not be thought of as having a picture of reality in the mind, but as an interaction between all kinds of entities that is somewhat “in the eye of the beholder” (…)

But it’s hyperobjects that give us the most vivid glimpse of interobjectivity. Since we only see their shadow, we easily see the “surface” on which their shadow falls as part of a system that they corral into being. We see a host of interacting indexical signs.

(…) is it not highly likely that the way our minds are is to some extent, perhaps a large extent, influenced by hyperobjects? So that when we think the hyperobject, we are in some sense thinking the conditions of possibility for the human mind? (…) My thinking is thus a mental translation of the hyperobject—of climate, biosphere, evolution—not just figuratively, but literally.

(…) Interobjectivity provides a space that is ontologically “in front of ” objects, in which phenomena such as what is called mind can happen.

 

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Hyperobjects provide great examples of interobjectivity— namely, the way in which nothing is ever experienced directly, but only as mediated through other entities in some shared sensual space. We never hear the wind in itself, argues Heidegger, only the wind in the door, the wind in the trees. This means that for every interobjective system, there is at least one entity that is withdrawn. We see the footprint of a dinosaur left in some ancient rock that was once a pool of mud (…) The dinosaur’s reality exists interobjectively: there is some form of shared space between the rock, ourselves, and the dinosaur, even though the dinosaur isn’t there directly (…) There is some sensuous connection, then, between the dinosaur, the rock, and the human, despite their vastly differing timescales.

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Now, when we return in our mind’s eye to the time of the dinosaur herself, we discover something very strange. All we find there is another region of interobjective space in which impressions of the dinosaur are transmitted—tooth marks in some hapless prey, the frozen stare of the dinosaur as she looks at her next victim, the smooth, scaly feel of her skin. The dinosaur leaves a footprint in some mud. The footprint is not the dinosaur. A fly lands on the dinosaur’s left eyelid. The fly’s apprehension of the dinosaur’s eyelid is not the dinosaur. The dinosaur blinks. Her blink is not the dinosaur (…)

Because there is a real dinosaur, withdrawn even from herself. The real dinosaur is a mystery, yet not nebulous—just this dinosaur, this actual one, she who stepped in the mud. Mystery comes from the Greek muein (to close). The dinosaur is closed off, secret, unspeakable—even to herself. Whatever happens concerning her—the gyrations of her tiny mind, the imprint of the foot, the delicate tracery of the fly, my thinking about dinosaurs—occurs in an interobjective space that is ontologically in front of this mystery realm. Evolution and geological time are simply large enough beings to make this interobjective space visible.

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There is something even more startling about the footprints of hyperobjects. These footprints are signs of causality, and of here is both subjective and objective genitive. Causality and the aesthetic, the realm of signs and significance and sensation, are one and the same. Hyperobjects are so big that they compel us toward this counterintuitive view. Interobjectivity eliminates the difference between cause and sign.

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(…) for every system of meaning, there must be some opacity for which the system cannot account, which it must include–exclude in order to be itself.

(…) Every interobjective space implies at least one more object in the vicinity: let us call this the 1 + n.Writing depends on 1 + n entities: paper, ink, letters, conventions. The human anthropomorphizes the cup and the cup cup-omorphizes the human, and so on. In this process there are always 1 + n objects that are excluded.

(…) “Mind” emerges from interactions between neurons and other objects precisely because those interactions themselves are always-already aesthetic–causal. The magic of systems thinking evaporates in the face of a deeper magic, the magic of real objects that subtend the object system, objects that emit time, space, and causality.

Hyperobjects simply enable us to see what is generally the case:

(1) Protagoras notwithstanding, objects are not made-to-measure for humans.

(2) Objects do not occur “in” time and space, but rather emit spacetime.

(3) Causality does not churn underneath objects like a machine in the basement, but rather floats in front of them.

(4) The causal dimension, in which things like explosions are taken to happen, is also the aesthetic dimension, in which things like Nude Descending a Staircase are taken to happen.

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Now we are in a position to reach quite a stunning conclusion about the nature of temporality when it comes to thinking hyperobjects. As was just noted, the apparent traces of hyperobjects appear as indexical signs, like the footprints of an invisible person walking across the sand: Astraea, “constantly departing from the world.” From this we can draw a conclusion that startlingly strikes against the metaphysics of presence (the idea that time is a succession of now points, that being present is being real, and so on). Instead, we discover that the “present moment” is a shifting, ambiguous stage set, like the beach washed by the tide and imprinted by the footsteps of Astraea. The appearance of things, the indexical signs on the seashore, is the past of a hyperobject. What we commonly take to lie underneath a present thing, its past state, is its appearance-for some entity (a rain gauge, a sensor, a philosopher). Its causal traces float in front of it, in the realm of appearance, the aesthetic dimension.

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Just as a hard drive is a surface on which data is inscribed, so London is a series of surfaces on which causality has been in scribed. There is no difference between causality and aesthetic appearance (aisthēsis).

(…) Appearance is the past. Essence is the future. The strange strangeness of a hyperobject, its invisibility—it’s the future, somehow beamed into the “present.”

(…) The futurality is what is meant by the term attractor, as in the Lorenz Attractor, an entity occupying a high-dimensional phase space that traces weather patterns. It is hard to think an attractor as the precise opposite of a telos, a destiny or destination or end. But this is exactly  what an attractor is. An attractor does not pull things toward it through time. In this sense, attractor is a misleading term. Rather, the attractor radiates temporality from the future into the present. An attractor is the future future of a hyperobject (…) The future future lies ontologically “underneath” the past! Any local manifestation of an attractor is simply an old photograph, an appearance-for that exists in an interobjective space. Even more astonishing than the fact that appearance is the past, essence is the future.

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What we need, then, is not only ecology without Nature, for which I have argued. We also need, as I shall argue later in this study, ecology without matter. And just to cap it all, we need ecology without the present. Indeed, one could successfully argue that it’s the presentism of contemporary environmentalisms that put them on the wrong side of history.

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(…) The present does not truly exist. We experience a crisscrossing set of force fields, the aesthetic–causal fields emanated by a host of objects. Anyone familiar with relativity theory will find this idea reasonably intuitive. What is called the present is simply a reification, an arbitrary boundary drawn around things by a particular entity—a state, philosophical view, government, family, electron, black hole.

(…) Time is a flurry of spells and counterspells cast by objects themselves (…) What

we have instead is a nonspatial rift between past and future that corresponds to the Rift between appearance and essence. Between these two fundamental forces, the present is nowhere: objects are never present.

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By no means should we be happy that we exploded a nuclear bomb that day. It is more like this: the cataclysm was such that it forced us to see. Hyperobjects bring about the end of modernity.