Aesthetics, Ethics, and Objects in the Anthropocene

The era that has come after postmodernism seems to be seeking ground primarily in the nonhuman—in spite of, or perhaps because of, this thing called the “Anthropocene.” Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects offers some of this nonhuman ground, building on his own work in ecophilosophy (such as his 2009 Ecology without Nature and 2010 The Ecological Thought), as well as the object-oriented philosophy of Graham Harman. Merging these two approaches, Morton offers us the concept of the hyperobject: an entity that is “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans,” but that is nonetheless an object (1). The two clearest examples of hyper-objects that recur throughout the book are global warming and radiation, both of which profoundly impact humans without ever being fully graspable. For Morton, the hyperobject serves as a kind of key that opens the door to a better understanding of all objects in this object-oriented ontology (OOO), while also forcing humans to face the implications of the Anthropocene both ethically and aesthetically in a way that the ironic distance of modernity/postmodernity has failed to do. The book succeeds in these two respects: the concept of the hyperobject sticks in the mind in a way that will surely affect how we think about human-nonhuman relations alongside the current ecological crisis in the future.

In the first half of the book, Morton unpacks the qualities of the hyperobject itself: its viscosity, nonlocality, temporal undulation, phasing, and interobjectivity. Briefly, what these qualities mean is that hyperobjects are vastly distributed through both time and space, such that they are never fully accessible or conceivable in their entirety. Thus, we can feel wind and raindrops (local manifestations), but not “weather.” Hyperobjects pass in and out of our experience and awareness through these local manifestations (phasing), but they never go away. There is no away place for them to go; they stick to us and other objects inextricably (they are viscous). These five properties help to reveal the nature of objects writ large in Morton’s OOO: objects interact aesthetically with other objects (including humans), but they are never fully exhaustible in their aesthetic relationality. They reduce to neither some atomizing materialism, nor to a smooth underlying or overlying whole. Instead, “we will find that all entities whatsoever are interconnected in an interobjective system” that Morton calls the mesh (83). Yet objects also withdraw and hide, forming gaps between their appearance and essence such that the mesh is made of both connections and holes: there is both no distance and only distance at the same time. For some, this apparent contradiction may be unforgivable, dissolving into meaninglessness. But confronting this contradiction, he argues, is what we must do if we want to move beyond the endless rationalization and non-action that has marked modernity’s response to the ecological crisis, a task that he tackles in part two.

After explicating the somewhat abstract properties of hyperobjects, in his second section, “The Time of Hyperobjects,” Morton discusses the implications for human coexistence with these strange, withdrawn-yet-in-escapable entities. Here, Morton explains “the end of the world” not as a literal apocalypse of fire and brimstone, but as the death of the notion that humans are encircled by a Heideggerian world, and thus at the center of something, rather than enmeshed with objects on every imaginable scale. “What remains without a world is intimacy,” he explains (125). Ultimately, Hyperobjects amounts to a call for new object-oriented forms of both art and ethics that echo or embody this intimacy, and that will bring humans closer to caring for hyperobjects as such—as objects rather than as flows or phenomena, which are so often “managed” and redirected on to others. Here there is some faltering, an asymmetry between the attention paid to the practicalities of this emerging ethics, which receives little attention, and art, which receives quite a bit. Both, Morton suggests, should affectively move us to action without deliberation, to “stamp out the burning...