Morton, Timothy; Boyer, Dominic (2021): Hyposubjects. On becoming human

 

Morton, Timothy; Boyer, Dominic (2021): Hyposubjects. On becoming human

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0.00001: a socially distanced preface

(…) structure of feeling is to ideology as visualization is to an image.

(…) Social distancing should be called social intimacy. My decision to avoid you and wear a mask means I want you to live.

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(…) white men (trust us, together we’ve been to about twelve airports since March) are the ones who think they don’t need or shouldn’t wear a mask, that a mask is a gag, not mercy-wear. That tells you everything you need to know about their idea of what a “subject” is (a master) and what an “object” is (a slave).

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We wrote a few years before “climate change” became “climate emergency.” Premonitions and underestimations abound in what follows. But we believe our original intuition still holds. The time of hypersubjects is ending (…) Meanwhile the time of hyposubjects is beginning.

(…) What do we think of human beings? We think they would be a very good idea.

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We live in a time of hyperobjects, of objects too massive and multiphasic in their distribution in time and space for humans to fully comprehend or experience them in a unitary way. A black hole is a kind of hyperobject, a biosphere is another. But many of the hyperobjects that concern us have human origins. For example, global warming. Or antibiotics. Or plastic bags. Or capitalism. These hyperobjects exceed and envelop us like a viscous fog, they make awkward and unexpected appearances, they inspire hypocrisy and lameness and dread.

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A certain kind of human has helped usher the world into the hyperobjective era. Let’s call them hypersubjects. You will recognize them as the type of subjects you are invited to vote for in elections, the experts who tell you how things are, the people shooting in your schools, the mansplainers from your Twitter feed. Hypersubjects are typically but not exclusively white, male, northern, well-nourished, modern in all senses of the term. They wield reason and technology, whether cynically or sincerely, as instruments for getting things done. They command and control, they seek transcendence, they get very high on their own supply of dominion. Do you want to know what is increasingly irritating hypersubjects? That hyperobjects are whispering in their ears that this being and time they have fashioned in their own image and for their own convenience is dying. The voices in their heads say that there is no time for hypersubjects any more. It is hyposubjectivity rather than hypersubjectivity that will become the companion of the hyperobjective era.

So, as hypersubjects seeking to reform, we have begun in a Roomba-like way to consider the political potentiality of hyposubjects. Although hyposubjectivity sounds a bit like an abject condition of being forced to endure and suffer the effects of viscous forces like climate change and capital, we wonder whether that sense of weakness and insignificance and lack of knowledge and agency is actually what needs embracing (…)

-        Hyposubjects are the native species of the Anthropocene and only just now beginning to discover what they may be and become.

-        Like their hyperobjective environment, hyposubjects are also multiphasic and plural, not-yet, neither here nor there, less than the sum of their parts. They are in other words subscendent rather than transcendent. They do not pursue or pretend to absolute knowledge and language let alone power. Instead they play, they care, they adapt, they hurt, they laugh.

-        Hyposubjects are necessarily feminist, antiracist, colorful, queer, ecological, transhuman and intrahuman. They do not recognize the rule of androleukoheteropetromodernity and the apex species behavior it epitomizes and reinforces. But they also hold the bliss-horror of extinction fantasies at bay because hyposubjects’ befores, nows and afters are many.

-        Hyposubjects are squatters and bricoleuses. They inhabit the cracks and hollows. They turn things inside out and work with scraps and remains. They unplug from carbon gridlife and hack and redistribute its stored energies for their own purposes.

-        Hyposubjects make revolutions where technomodern radar can’t glimpse them. They patiently ignore expert advice that they don’t or can’t exist. They are skeptical of efforts to summarize them, including everything we have just said.

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I hyperobjects, narcissism, white boys, looping, teenagers, toys, games, squats, gut bacteria

 

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(…) realizing that you are human is really only possible in light of these hyperobjects. Sure.

In other words, I now know that I’m made of nonhumans, and that that entails evolution. And I also know that when I turn the ignition in my car, that’s a statistically meaningless action. I don’t mean to harm anything when I do that. And yet at the same time, scaled up to earth magnitude—and now we’re talking about billions of key turnings every few minutes, ongoing for several decades—I am contributing to global warming. And not little me. But me, as a member of this thing called human, which is not an abstract concept anymore, you know, as with many of our beloved philosophers, but actually as a physical entity. And, of course, as a force.

(…) And so, these things are very unthinkable, and yet necessary to think. As the human species, we are a hyperobject insofar as we are this gigantic thing distributed across space-time.

What got me thinking about the hyposubject was the extent to which that hyperobjective condition, which I think is a very good diagnosis, implicates life in the Anthropocene. It’s more than that, too—but just to stay within the context of the Anthropocene and global warming for a moment—that it creates a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, we’re massive, and have this activity that is global in scale and geological, perhaps. And at the same time, we’re also smaller than we’ve ever been, less than we’ve ever been, too. For me the hyperobjective condition also summons the hyposubjective as its companion. I mean, we exist as both at the same time.

A hyposubject is how a hyperobject feels about itself.

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Indeed, partly. The other side of it is that we still have to cope with the fact that we have this sort of massive, narcissistic attachment to our own sense of distinctiveness as a species, and this sense that we’re at the top of a great chain of being, and that we are the ones who may have gotten ourselves into the Anthropocene but we’re also the saviors, the only ones who are going to get us out of this situation. Those attachments are hyperobjective as well (…)

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(…) part of the question here is whether we can also discern for the hyposubject a non-abject condition? Is there a way of being hyposubjective that can actually help to defeat hypersubjectivity?

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(…) one neat thing that you just did is to confuse, a little bit, subject and object, which are the perennial boxes that we put things in.