Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World

The End of the World

The End of the World R 99 You are walking out of the supermarket. As you approach your car, a stranger calls out, “Hey! Funny weather today!” With a due sense of caution—is she a global warming denier or not?—you reply yes. There is a slight hesitation. Is it because she is thinking of saying something about global warming? In any case, the hesitation induced you to think of it. Congratulations: you are living proof that you have entered the time of hyperobjects. Why? You can no longer have a routine conversation about the weather with a stranger. The presence of global warming looms into the conversation like a shadow, introducing strange gaps. Or global warming is spoken or—either way the reality is strange. A hyperobject has ruined the weather conversation, which functions as part of a neutral screen that enables us to have a human drama in the foreground. In an age of global warming, there is no background, and thus there is no foreground. It is the end of the world, since worlds depend on backgrounds and foregrounds. World is a fragile aesthetic effect around whose corners we are beginning to see. True planetary awareness is the creeping realization not that “We Are the World,” but that we aren’t. Why? Because world and its cognates—environment, Nature—are ironically more objectified than the kinds of “object” I am talking about in this study. World is more or less a container in which objectified things float or stand. It doesn’t matter very much whether the movie within the 100 The End of the World context of world is an old-fashioned Aristotelian movie of substances decorated with accidents; or whether the movie is a more avant-garde Deleuzian one of flows and intensities. World as the background of events is an objectification of a hyperobject: the biosphere, climate, evolution , capitalism (yes, perhaps economic relations compose hyperobjects ). So when climate starts to rain on our head, we have no idea what is happening. It is easy to practice denial in such a cognitive space: to set up, for example, “debates” in which different “sides” on global warming are presented. This taking of “sides” correlates all meaning and agency to the human realm, while in reality it isn’t a question of sides, but of real entities and human reactions to them. Environmentalism seems to be talking about something that can’t be seen or touched. So in turn environmentalism ups the ante and preaches the coming apocalypse . This constant attempt to shock and dismay inspires even more defiance on the opposite side of the “debate.” Both sides are fixated on world, just as both sides of the atheism debate are currently fixated on a vorhanden (“present at hand”), objectively present God. As irritating for New Atheists such as Richard Dawkins to hear that atheism is just another form of belief, it nevertheless is—or at any rate, it holds exactly the same belief about belief as the fundamentalists . Belief is a token, a mental object that you grip as hard as possible, like your wallet or car keys. In exactly the same way, it is annoying for environmentalists to talk about ecology without Nature. The argument is heard as nihilism or postmodernism. But really it is environmentalism that is nihilist and postmodernist, just as fundamentalism’s belief about belief marks it as a form of ontotheological nihilism. The ultimate environmentalist argument would be to drop the concepts Nature and world, to cease identifying with them, to swear allegiance to coexistence with nonhumans without a world, without some nihilistic Noah’s Ark. In any weather conversation, one of you is going to mention global warming at some point. Or you both decide not to mention it but it looms over the conversation like a dark cloud, brooding off the edge of an ellipsis .1 This failure of the normal rhetorical routine, these remnants of shattered conversation lying around like broken hammers (they must take place everywhere), is a symptom of a much larger and deeper ontological The End of the World 101 shift in human awareness. And in turn, this is a symptom of a profound upgrade of our ontological tools. As anyone who has waited while the little rainbow circle goes around and around on a Mac, these upgrades are not necessarily pleasant. It is very much the job of philosophers and other...