Timothy Morton: Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World

I do not access hyperobjects across a distance, through some transparent medium. Hyperobjects are here, right here in my social and experiential space. Like faces pressed against a window, they leer at me menacingly: their very nearness is what menaces. From the center of the galaxy, a supermassive black hole impinges on my awareness, as if it were sitting in the car next to me at the traffic lights. Every day, global warming burns the skin on the back of my neck, making me itch with physical discomfort and inner anxiety. Evolution unfolds in my genome as my cells divide and mutate, as my body clones itself, as one of my sperm cells mixes it up with an egg. 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 mirror 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.


When I look at Untitled 2011 by the Aboriginal artist Yukultji Napangati, I am gripped immediately in the tractor beam of the painting, which seems to be gazing at me as much as or more than I am looking at it. A simple JPEG of the painting doesn’t look like much. It’s a larg ish square of thin brown waving lines, hand drawn. Yet as I approach it, it seems to surge toward me, locking onto my optic nerve and holding me in its force field. Napangati’s painting strafes me with layer upon layer of interference patterns. Her work makes Bridget Riley’s op art look simple by comparison, though I find both painters astonishing. I don’t experience Napangati’s painting as a series of lines that I resolve into a whole. The whole painting leaps at me, as a unit. The painting is a slice of the Dreamtime, the Aboriginal hyperobject, and a map of desert sand hills where a small group of women gathered food and performed rituals. Even though Untitled 2011 is a piece about a larger space, both cosmic and earthly, the painting is a quantum all to itself, not an incomplete part. In no sense do I assemble the painting. Nothing about the painting is passive, inert, waiting to be interpreted or completed. I find it impossible to leave the painting. Hairs standing up on my body, tears streaming down my face, slowly I tear myself away, only to return an hour later to be drenched in its resonance.

When I look at the sun gleaming on the solar panels on my roof, I am watching global warming unfold. Carbon compounds and other molecules in the upper atmosphere magnify the burning intensity of the sun in the Great Central Valley of California. Yet I do not see global warming as such. I see this brilliant blade of sunlight, burning the top of my head as I watch it with half-closed eyes reflecting off the burnished, sapphire surface of the solar panels.


In 2002 three wandering woodcutters in a north Georgian forest near the village of Liya discovered two small cylinders of radioactive strontium-90 that kept them warm for a few hours’ sleep before they succumbed to radiation sickness and burning. Strontium-90 emits beta rays, quanta that can pass through skin; beta rays release a great deal of heat when they strike other quanta. The exposed Strontium-90 sources emitted thirty-five thousand curies each, giving a fatal dose of radiation in two minutes.


In the final episode of Twin Peaks, Dale Cooper enters the demonic Black Lodge. He is offered a cup of coffee, his favorite beverage, the drink with which we often mark time (as with the coffee break or morning coffee). Yet when he tries to drink it, he finds that the coffee has frozen into a solid plastic lump of darkness. It is as if time has stopped. Then he tries to pour it again, and it spills on his legs, burning him. Time flows at a human speed. Then when he pours it once again, it oozes out of the cup like the “burnt engine oil” whose smell coats the surface of the entrance to the Black Lodge. What is real? It is as if we are seeing the same events
happening from the points of view of different beings, with very different temporalities.