What is Hyperobjects?
Timothy Morton
It is the first part of the book, Hyperobjects: philosophy and ecology after the end of the world, by Timothy Morton. The writer coins the term to any objects, substances, events, and phenomena that are massively distributed in spacetime relative to humans. I like that the book proposes awareness of how we live coexisting with each other and with nonhuman. He examines the term in relation to object-oriented ontology, ecological thinking, Buddhism, arts, and science. The first part explains about what Hyperobjects are through their five properties.
Viscosity
The pervasiveness of hyperobjects is what Morton calls their viscosity. He questions that environmentalist speech demands that we “ get back to nature “ could be only half way right, since the problems are not distant but are right here. While hyperobjects are near, they are also uncanny. They are vivid and are traces of unreality at the same time.
One of examples he gives which is perceptible to imagine viscosity is radioactive material. The more we try get rid off them, the more we realize we can’t be free from them. So, there is no distance, and that out of sight is not any more out of mind. If it was buried in a far away mountain, we know that it will absorb into water table. We would even never known where that mountain will be in the far future.
Nonlocality
Non-locality explains how hyperobjects can act simultaneously at more than one place. Morton wrote this part with considerable reliance on Quantum physic and the Plank scale, to explain causal link in world events. For example, genetic damage in plants affected from nuclear radiation, global warming affects on farming and food availability, threat of plastic pollution endangers birds and animals. Quantum theory views phenomena as discrete units (quanta). Non-locality at quantum level is a theory in which information is dispersed among particles in different spacetime.
Holographic universe, as a hyperobject, is mentioned to help picturing non-locality. Hologram is a physical structure that diffracts light into an image. It is a mesh of interference patterns created by light waves, which bouncing off the object and which passing through a beam splitter. Then, a three dimensional rendering image appears in front of the interference mesh, when light was passed through the mesh.
Below is a lecture by, artist and lecturer, Peter Rogina at Holocenter in NYC. I’ve found it is a good lecture explaining how holography works. Interestingly, a hologram can’t be seen directly. It involves four principles. Interference, Coherent Light, and Film Developing are involved to make a hologram. And, Diffraction is what enables it to be viewed.
Morton points out that if we cut a little piece of hologram out and shine light through it, we will still see a smaller version of the whole holographic image. So, every piece of hologram, like particle or unit, contains information of the whole. It is as if reality was pixelated or made of regular little dots of information. Nonlocality effects defied location and temporality. Cutting one into parts, it won’t loose coherency.
When we feel raindrops, we are experiencing climate change. In some sense, modernity is a story of how oil got into everything. Cancer is body’s expression of radioactive materials, in some sense. He is saying that we are never directly experiencing hyperobjects. This way we aren’t negating specificity of things, but distributed them into units of the whole and less local.
Temporal Undulation
Hyperobjects drop the idea that time and space is empty containers that objects sit in. Time is rather an undulating force field that emanates from objects themselves. Since Einstein proposed relativity theory, time and space has become imaginable effects of objects instead of absolute containers. A measurable scenario mentioned is - clocks run slighter faster when we are inside a plane moving at a high altitude, because the gravitational field of Earth makes clocks run slower closer to its surface. Beside this measurably human standpoint, relative motions between objects themselves also cause time, which ripples along their surfaces, to bend. So, objects entangle one another in a crossing mesh of spacetime fluctuation.
Yukultji Napangati
untitled (2011)
Phasing
Pertaining to Nonlocality and Temporality, Hyperobjects have transdimensional quality. They seems to come and go, phase in and out because of our limited ability to inspect them or to grasp them as a whole with our senses. Morton implies that a human perception of a Hyperobject is akin to the sectioning technique in architectural drawing. We only see pieces of them at a time as we only see them in snapshots. That is why we can’t see global warming itself, but pieces of its indexical signs like a tsunami, hurricane, drought or radiation sickness.
An example of painting, which he expresses his perceptual experience of layers of interference patterns is Yukultji Napangati’s untitled (2011).
" 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 or more than I am looking at it. As I approach it, it seems to surge toward me locking onto my optic nerve and holding me in its force field."
Interobjectivity
The Mesh is the word Morton uses to expound the interobjective system in which all entities are interconnected. A mesh consists of links and gaps between links, which enable causality to happen.
Hyperobjects leave indexical signs of causality in the ream of aesthetic appearance. He expounds here that emergent properties of relationships between subject and mind are interobjective effects. Systems of related objects are not opposed to system of related subjects. The mind is an aftereffect of objects for observer. To this view, we can’t experience Hyperobjects directly, since they mediated through other entities in some shared cognitive and sensual dimension.
An interesting analogy by Heidegger is mentioned here: “ We never hear the wind in itself, only the wind in the door, the wind in the trees“. It is a human reification of aesthetic-casual appearance-for. The ” for- “ that points to we are in an interobjective space.