Hyperobjects
Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World
Timothy Morton
Global warming is perhaps the most dramatic example of what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects”—entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place. Morton explains what hyperobjects are and their impact on how we think, how we coexist, and how we experience our politics, ethics, and art.
In Hyperobjects, Timothy Morton brings to bear his deep knowledge of a wide array of subjects to propose a new way of looking at our situation, which might allow us to take action toward the future health of the biosphere. Crucially, the relations between Buddhism and science, nature and culture, are examined in the fusion of a single vision. The result is a great work of cognitive mapping, both exciting and useful.
Kim Stanley Robinson, author of Shaman, 2312, and the Mars trilogy
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Having set global warming in irreversible motion, we are facing the possibility of ecological catastrophe. But the environmental emergency is also a crisis for our philosophical habits of thought, confronting us with a problem that seems to defy not only our control but also our understanding. Global warming is perhaps the most dramatic example of what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects”—entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place. In this book, Morton explains what hyperobjects are and their impact on how we think, how we coexist with one another and with nonhumans, and how we experience our politics, ethics, and art.
Moving fluidly between philosophy, science, literature, visual and conceptual art, and popular culture, the book argues that hyperobjects show that the end of the world has already occurred in the sense that concepts such as world, nature, and even environment are no longer a meaningful horizon against which human events take place. Instead of inhabiting a world, we find ourselves inside a number of hyperobjects, such as climate, nuclear weapons, evolution, or relativity. Such objects put unbearable strains on our normal ways of reasoning.
Insisting that we have to reinvent how we think to even begin to comprehend the world we now live in, Hyperobjects takes the first steps, outlining a genuinely postmodern ecological approach to thought and action.
$24.95 paper ISBN 978-0-8166-8923-1
$75.00 cloth ISBN 978-0-8166-8922-4
240 pages, 15 b&w photos, 8 color plates, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2, November 2013
Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. He is the author of many books, including The Ecological Thought and Ecology without Nature. He blogs frequently at Ecology without Nature.
In Hyperobjects, Timothy Morton brings to bear his deep knowledge of a wide array of subjects to propose a new way of looking at our situation, which might allow us to take action toward the future health of the biosphere. Crucially, the relations between Buddhism and science, nature and culture, are examined in the fusion of a single vision. The result is a great work of cognitive mapping, both exciting and useful.
Kim Stanley Robinson, author of Shaman, 2312, and the Mars trilogy
With the concept of world melted by global warming, Timothy Morton gives us a new and much needed concept, the hyperobject, and surrounds it with a consciousness of the planet that is not ours. In these times, there can be no critical theory or philosophical meditation without turning to Morton's writings; at once political, poetic, and personal, they offer a brilliant elaboration of object-oriented ontology.
Patricia Ticineto Clough, author of Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology
Not only does Morton range from William Wordsworth to the Velvet Underground to Nagasaki to Republican denialism, he does it in a way that marshals these disparate allusions in the service of a cogent idea, one that manages to come off as both intuitive and radical.
Newsweek
[This book] is bold, stimulating, and provocative. With extraordinary verve and audacity, Morton makes his hyperobjects into harbingers for a new epoch, on a planetary scale, a task in which he is assisted by the general consensus about the Anthropocene, the current era of human-induced planetary change.
Los Angeles Review of Books
Whatever your hopes or fears for the next major era in human history, Morton is telling us that it has already happened and it is us.
3 Quarks Daily
A relentless torrent of commentary that presents challenges to most contemporary scholarship on both sides of the still upheld nature/culture divide.
Qui Parle
Morton’s work bridges a gap between academia and the global warming movement with a postmodern angle.
Vogue
Morton is unafraid to mix theory with personal and often confessional material, anchoring his arguments to his own experience of the world.
A Year’s Work in Critical Culture and Theory
Contents
Acknowledgments
A Quake in Being: An Introduction to Hyperobjects
Part I. What Are Hyperobjects?
Viscosity
Nonlocality
Temporal Undulation
Phasing
Interobjectivity
Part II. The Time of Hyperobjects
The End of the World
Hypocrisies
The Age of Asymmetry
Notes
Index
About This Book
Related Publications
Related News & Events
Working paper: Reading Hyperobjects
Diet Soap Podcast #197: Hyperobjects and the New Neurotic Ecology
LA Review of Books: Global Warming and Other Hyperobjects
Working paper: Reading Hyperobjects
New Savannah blogger compiles thoughts of Timothy Morton's HYPEROBJECTS into a working paper.
Diet Soap Podcast #197: Hyperobjects and the New Neurotic Ecology
Podcast interview with Timothy Morton, author of HYPEROBJECTS.
LA Review of Books: Global Warming and Other Hyperobjects
Stephen Muecke reviews Timothy Morton's HYPEROBJECTS.
New Books in Science, Technology, and Society interviews with the HYPEROBJECTS author.
electronic book review: Nature is What Hurts
In this review of Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects, Robert Seguin contemplates the implication of the text’s eponymous subject on art, philosophy, and politics. The “hyperobject,” a hypothetical agglomeration of networked interactions with the potential to produce inescapable shifts in the very conditions of existence, emerges as the key consideration for the being in the present.
The New Yorker: Timothy Morton's Hyper-Pandemic.
For the philosopher of “hyperobjects”—vast, unknowable things that are bigger than ourselves—the coronavirus is further proof that we live in a dark ecology.
High Country News: How do you make a movie about a hyperobject?
The film ‘Don’t Look Up’ turns climate change into an allegorical comet.
The Guardian: Climate change is the fight of our lives – yet we can hardly bear to look at it
Mention of Timothy Morton, author of HYPEROBJECTS.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space on Hyperobjects and "Morton's Wager"
Review of Timothy Morton's HYPEROBJECTS.
Glasgow Review of Books: Hyperobjects and Prismatic Ecology
"In an academic context, green cultural studies has developed over the last three decades from a small sub-genre of literary criticism largely focused on nature writing to a keyword of the order of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity."
Sing Me a Song of Hyperobjects: Starting over with Humans and Other Creatures in the 21st Century CE
3 Quarks Daily reviews Timothy Morton's HYPEROBJECTS.
Announcing Avant Museology, a symposium at the Walker Art Center
Announcing Avant Museology, a symposium at the Walker Art Center
This two-day symposium on November 20-21, 2016, features University of Minnesota Press authors Timothy Morton, Cary Wolfe, and Arseny Zhilyaev.