The Invisible Reality

Part I

A lingering invisible reality has been silently surfacing in all aspects of our physical environment for at least two hundred and twenty years: the alteration and deterioration of the elements of the biosphere and of all living beings. This invisible force began gaining traction during the Industrial Revolution and has firmly been locked to the global capitalist economic system since the period of the Great Acceleration onwards.

The pervasive existence of this exponentially growing invisible reality has been more precisely delineated through the assistance of naming that which existed but did not have denomination: the notion of the Anthropocene around the year 2000, and that of the hyperobjects, in 2010 by Timothy Morton.

The nature of this invisible reality is related to four major characteristics of the problem: it could not be addressed if you cannot name its subject, it cannot be seen directly through our human eye because of the extensive scope it covers, its coalescence is time-bound to phenomena whose manifestation has been a buildup that occurred through several centuries, and finally, the problem is systemic and cannot be compartmentalized.

There is a deep interconnection between design, the history of capitalism, and the state of alteration of the most important biospheres of our planet. This study will explore the links between these thematic domains.

The essay will be divided into two parts. This first part will address the notion of the hyperobject and the era of the Anthropocene. It will analyze the concept of the hyperobject as defined by Morton in his book “Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World.” It will also unveil a brief history of the concept of the Anthropocene, its definition, and the consequences of its designation. The above-mentioned exploration will be the first step to uncover the invisible reality which is at the core of this investigation.

The hyperobjects that most threaten the survival of the human species on Earth are those that are interacting with the physical reality, altering it to the point where life could become unviable. In its second part, the essay will explore the most damaging industries to the environment and will analyze how design is collaterally but deeply involved in this process. It will examine more directly the interplay of design with the concepts of the Anthropocene and hyperobjects, inquiring first on the notions of the “object” and the “thing” as understood by authors of Thing Theory in order to understand the factors that differentiate objects and hyperobjects. It will proceed contrasting our hyper-production and consumption of objects with both hyperobjects and the Anthropocene. Finally, we will review the interaction of design with hyperobjects of the Anthropocene. The illumination of these themes will shed some light over the complex contemporary field of design and it is to be hoped that it will engage practitioners to act ethically, actively pursuing the best alternatives for all—humans and non-humans.

The Hyperobject as Defined by Timothy Morton

The term “hyperobject” was coined by Timothy Morton in 2010, in a book called “The Ecological Thought.” However, it is in his book called “Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology” published in 2013 that he makes the notion of “hyperobject” the center of his investigation and analysis. In the following section we unveil this concept in order to clarify what the term refers to. The denotations of the concept of the hyperobject will emerge in its multifaceted aspects of meanings as we uncover them one by one. However, we won’t be able to fully comprehend each aspect until we go through the whole round of explanations provided by the author.

The hyperobject is complex, and it is difficult to grasp since it is of massive proportions. The notion “hyperobject” refers to things that are astronomically spread out throughout space and time relative to our human scale. Its denomination could be used to characterize a nebula, black holes, and the Solar System, and yet it could also designate all the nuclear material on Earth, the plastic in the ocean, a mega coral reef, all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or global warming. Hyperobjects can be made by nature or by humans, but one of their overarching characteristics is that they are of colossal dimensions.

Morton also states that “hyperobjects are not just collections, systems, or assemblages of other objects. They are objects in their own right.” [1] The hyperobjects are real entities and their innate reality is hidden from humans. They are not a function of our knowledge, but rather they are constituents of the physical world. They exist outside of thinking. From a human perspective we can only see pieces of a hyperobjects at any given moment, never the whole, and hence thinking of them is particularly difficult.

Furthermore, hyperobjects collapse any possibility of our disentanglement with the physical world and force us to succumb to the admission of our deep-rooted obligation to thinking in relation to this physical world.

Another characteristic of the hyperobject is that the more we know about them, the stranger they become: they are what he calls “the strange stranger.” One of their peculiarities is that these non-humans are making definitive contacts with humans and are putting pressure on “normal” certainties, inverting them and even dissolving them. They are disturbing some essential ideas about the meanings of existence, and what our planet and cosmos is.

Morton states that in “the overall aesthetic ‘feel’ of the time of the hyperobject is a sense of asymmetry between the infinite powers of cognition and the infinite being of things.” [2] He detects an ongoing battle between what we know and what is, in which “the technology of what we know is turned against itself,” [3] changing the relationships between beings and setting new frameworks for both experiences and actions. He argues that we have entered a new era, an era of asymmetry between us humans and all other things that are out there in the physical world. We are now not merely on Earth but in the cosmos.

Humans have known multiple planetary disasters, such as volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, but these are disasters that have happened under stable backgrounds. However, hyperobjects are profoundly more challenging than these aforementioned types of disasters. Hyperobjects are shaking those stable planetary ecological backdrops, which is sending us into a fragile space of survival.

Hyperobjects are entities not accessible through our senses and can only become visible through statistical language or through technological extensions of our senses through instruments and measurements. There is no possibility of directly proving their existence. Therefore, one can remain in denial of their causality.

Morton identifies five properties that hyperobjects have in common: viscosity, non-locality, temporal undulation, phasing, and interobjectivity. These properties are described by the author in a circular way—the viscosity property makes these entities non-local, and both make them to undulate in time, and so forth. This essay will attempt to separate these qualities as much as possible, but the spiral thread of the narrative traced by the author is essential to understanding the notion of hyperobjects.

Viscosity

The characteristic of viscosity refers to the idea that hyperobjects are thick and sticky—fluid but also elastic. Morton focuses in the sticky aspect of them. To him, their viscous nature resembles latex, which equates them to a synthetic materiality. Hyperobjects cannot be accessed through distance, they are here, ever-present, and they have a menacing and otherworldly nature. It is their spectral nature that makes us believe that they are somewhere away from us. The author states that hyperobjects are “more than a little demonic in the sense that they appear to straddle worlds and times.” [4] They might present to us in the form of a couple of dozens of plastic bottles that show up at our closest beach. But those plastic bottles came from a huge conglomeration of plastic in the North Pacific Ocean, where they form a mass that has aggregated over decades. Due to their scale, hyperobjects are both here, in our closest environment, but they are also there in a much larger latitude. Their causes and effects flow like electricity in the sense that they are not accessible to human perception. They also appear to collect power over time and they incrementally grow, forcefully inserting themselves into our world. The bigger they become the more they seem to imply some form of death. Think of black holes or massive floods for instance.

Hyperobjects form a sticky and gooey mesh in which we find ourselves caught. As Morton states: “The more you get rid of them, the more you realize you can’t get rid of them. They seriously undermine the notion of ‘away.’ Out of site is no longer out of mind.”[5] For example, the plastic bottle you might have discarded in a recyclable bin might reappear in a sandy beach of the South Pacific. The biosphere for instance is a hyperobject from which nothing can be purged, it is a viscous surface where nothing can go away, and all elements adhere to one another in an invisible mesh. Without us noticing, we are inside hyperobjects and are integral part of them. Another example is radiation, which can permeate through us without us even noticing it.

Along with hyperobjects’ closeness comes a sense of unreality. Their monumental scale makes them seem like an illusion and it is their shadows that declare their existence: the hurricane here, the mortal floods there.

To us, time flows at our human scale, but events can also happen from the point of view of different things, things that might have different temporalities from us. To this the author adds that “viscosity is a feature of the way in which time emanates from objects, rather than being a continuum in which they float.” [6] Inspired by some relevant notions coming from modern physics, the author makes use of the concept of time developed by Einstein in his theory of relativity, time understood as being relative to objects and not a constant backdrop of the physical realm. As we will see as we proceed, the author makes use of other discoveries in the field of modern physics to assist himself in revealing the notion of the hyperobject.

Non-Locality

Morton asserts that the major discoveries of the twentieth century were initiated during the Victorian era. These are evolution, capital, the unconscious, spacetime, ecological interconnection, and non-locality. According to Morton, all these outstanding enlightenments have in common the fact that they abase humankind and its convictions of beings the center of the universe. He asserts that they force humans to rethink the anthropocentric view with which we have elaborated their explanations of existence. To him the most poignant aspect of this is the concept of non-locality, which in its most radical interpretations implies that being located entails a non-temporal order.

Morton derives the notion of non-locality from quantum physics, which states that on a microscopic level, particles can be here or there, and also here and there. While some take quantum physics to imply that part of the world is mind-dependent, according to him, quantum theory does demonstrate that things exist beyond our minds, and that real objects do exist. In quantum theory, at a quantum level, actual non-locality operates when two particles appear to influence one another at a distance, even at a cosmic scale level. Einstein called it the “spooky action at a distance.”

However, Morton is not suggesting that true non-locality, in the quantum theory sense, applies to all hyperobjects. However, the action at a distance that hyperobjects manifest is non-local in another sense. Like the particle that is both here and there, all the carbon dioxide emitted by the United States, is widely distributed in all the atmosphere—it does not stay perched just above it. In this sense it affects here and over there at the other end of the planet as well.
Morton also asserts that, given these entities are not local, they do not necessarily form a cohesive mass: instead, they are here and there. For instance, in the case of the hyperobject of all chemicals used by the textile industry, they are in the local industrial plant nearest you, but they are also disseminated all over the globe through rivers and oceans, and deposited in waterbody beds and soil. Hyperobjects are so vast and dispersed that humans do not have the necessary perspective to see them as a whole.

For humans, the only way to have access to them is through association, correlation, and probability, operations that demand knowledge and elaborate mental abilities to access deferred sources of data and information. Essentially, in order to study climate change, for instance, scientists have to gather all the information accumulated about weather patterns by continent and country and translate that information into graphs to see what is the global trend as a whole.

Morton maintains that hyperobjects cast a cloud of themselves at the same time that they withdraw from themselves from access. This cloud is a specter of effects and affects. It involves action at a distance. The example he cites is the gamma particles, which are specific to atomic bombs and are ultra-high frequency photons that can alter organisms. When released, they are present in the environment for a long time, but they are not visible to the human eye. Nevertheless, after decades lingering around the area where they were released, people die from their inconspicuous and mortal actions.

In this era when hyperobjects are starting to tyrannize us with their terrifying eccentricities, we need to learn that locality contains a false immediacy. For instance, we cannot see global warming because it is an object that is widely distributed. We may see its local manifestations, the flood here, the tsunami there, the earthquake on the other side of the globe. However, global warming as a hyperobject is not just a phenomenon whose manifestations you can see in separate measurements, it is a wide spread physical phenomenon. Yet because of its worldwide distribution, it is challenging to see it as a whole entity. Comprehending it involves an exercise in transferring elaborate counterintuitive perspectives, which includes piecing together information from the micro to the macro. This way we might aggregate and thereby eliminate the multiple differing views of the object according to the different positions in which it is observed. For another example, in order to comprehend the hyperobject of the toxic chemicals released in bodies of water and air, it takes an in-depth analysis of all the industries spread around the globe to study the total amount released in a given year (e.g., In the USA, 3,977.55 million pounds of toxic chemicals into waterways in 2117; see https://www.epa.gov/trinationalanalysis/releases-chemicals.)

Finally, to Morton, non-locality reveals there is no such thing as the local, locality being an abstraction involving the perspective of a subject. One eliminates the human subject and the single point of view and the perspective vanishes, flattening locality and temporality. Additionally, Morton views quantum theory as the proof that we need to revise our ideas about matter and materialism. He seems to intuitively suspect that there is more to come from physics that will continue altering our fundamental notions of the physical world.

Temporal Undulation

The large scale of hyperobjects means they have a special relationship to temporality. For humans they seem to fade off into the distance contained in a temporality that our brain cannot apprehend. It is a problem of scale and also of perspective. The smaller the subject positioned in front or inside of a massive object, whose existence might encompass thousands of years, the less he can observe it, analyze it, study it. The massive temporality of these hyperobjects makes the full knowledge of them impossible.

Some of these hyperobjects are near us, enveloping us and roaming around us. Many times, we are not conscious of their proximity and when we are, they awaken in us a feeling of strange familiarity and simultaneously of mysterious unearthliness. For example, think again of the hyperobject of plastic and its omnipresence in our environment. You might find it in the plastic bags you brought from the supermarket, in the bottle of water you are carrying, in parts of the office chair you are using, in the sole of your sneakers and so on, in countless additional objects or parts of them. When we learn that a large portion of all the plastic we have fabricated will last longer than the last human being on earth, we realize of the profound truth of this fact, and we might get a feeling of eeriness and uncomfortable astonishment.

However, concerning hyperobjects, space cannot any longer be the absolute container of all things. It should be thought of as a manifold spacetime instead, and as demonstrated by Einstein, spacetime really does exists in the universe. The backdrop notion of time as it was understood until the elaboration of the theory of relativity, depicted a stable scenery with just one enormous time constantly clicking at a steady pace, an imperceptible abstract element that could only be apprehended mathematically. The new concept of spacetime implies the multiplicity of its possibilities, events occurring simultaneously at different scales in different realms: at a particle level, at a human scale level, at a planetary level, at a cosmic level, with phenomena crisscrossing multiple strata in a perfect and coordinated material dance. This particularity of the physical world also permeates the temporal undulation of hyperobjects. Hyperobjects are vast enough to exist in many layers and confines at the same time. Therefore, given the immense temporality hyperobjects occupy, this undulating temporality is markedly obvious.

Einstein demonstrated that time and space emerge from objects. Morton states “Relativity is what guarantees that objects are never as they seem, and not because they are ideas in my head, but because they aren’t.” [7] Spacetime is a wobbly force field emitted by objects and not a container or receiver of objects.

Since we are inside of many of these hyperobjects, we cannot observe them in their entirety. We perceive just a fraction of their temporality, and in many cases their scope is unimaginable to the human mind. They are stretched in time to such ample extensions that we cannot fit them into our thoughts, and hence we can never really know them. Here Morton provides us with one example: seventy-five percent of global warming effects will persist until five hundred thousand years from now. The author calls these type of time scales the horrifying, the terrifying, and the petrifying.

However, while hyperobjects will persist long after us, they are not to stay forever. But they present us with a new kind of temporality: the astronomical finitude, which to our mind is a more complex concept to grasp than the notion of the infinite. And to the author it is bewildering that this monumental future will be affected by the smallest of our human actions.

Finally, the strangeness of hyperobjects is further stretched when we realize that their shadows rise out of the future into the present. To Morton their temporality is so vast that their future curls up to reach us into our present in the form of a shade. Our time of existence being so minuscule that our position in time in relationship to hyperobjects might be that their future casts a shadow into our present time. Because of temporal restraints, we will never have sufficient time to learn about them comprehensively. As a consequence, and most importantly, we could never get a hold on hyperobjects in just the right way.

Phasing

When the time emitted by one hyperobject traverses with the time emitted by another hyperobject, we get an interference pattern, and this pattern is known as phasing, and the vastness of hyperobjects makes phasing very striking. Hyperobjects have the quality of phasing in and out of the earthly realm, engaging high-dimensional phase spaces that make them impossible to be seen as a whole from a human scale perspective. We experience the hurricane, the extensive fire, and the melting of glaciers as separate events and not as phasing instances of a bigger body.

Hyperobjects live in a higher dimensional structure. They are trans-dimensional, so we can see just a piece of them at once, like a lake that disappeared or the extinction of thousands of species. We only see chunks of this gargantuan object as it intersects with our world and those chunks do not necessarily look like the massive hyperobject at all.

We can aid ourselves with graphs, plots, maps or algorithms to try to glance into the world of the hyperobject, but the problem is that we can never see such entities when conceived in such ways. The rendered data can reveal them for us, and those aspects they are showing are undoubtedly real, but we could never perceive them for ourselves. We perceive gaps and ruptures that are the invisible presence of the hyperobject, which constantly roams around us. The appearance and disappearance of the hyperobject are only illusions of the human mind. The hyperobject categorically stays in place. As Morton argues “phasing is an indexical sign of an object that is massively distributed in a phase space that is higher dimensional than the equipment . . . used to detect it. An index is a sign that is directly a part of what it indicates.” [8] In other words the indexical sign of a hyperobject is the appearance of it through phasing, the way that for example a hail storm during the summer in Northen Italy is a mark or sign produced by the hyperobject of climate change.

What we find when we inspect hyperobjects is a strange relation between their parts, in which sections do not integrate into wholes, but quite the opposite. This phenomenon presents a dislocation between the hyperobject and its indexical signs. For example, the data of the weather in a section of the terrestrial globe in a specific month of a specific year does not reveal the hyperobject of global warming, but the data is, at the same time, part of the global warming. That is what Morton calls the rift, an intersection between a thing and its appearance for another thing or things. This rupture discloses a double-sided reality where on one side we have the here, and on the other side you have the there, the beyond, or the remote.

We might be operating in our human world in a “normal way.” We use our cars, we fill it with gas, we buy sodas in plastic containers every day, we use pesticides, we continue extracting minerals all over the globe. And in this sense, normalized functioning in our world can thus become, from a high-dimensional perspective, malfunctioning, in which the normalized reality can reveal itself as a distortion or as a mistake. According to Morton this strange mechanism is profoundly disturbing.

Interobjectivity

It is the trans-dimensionality of the hyperobjects that makes us understand the profound depth, the obscure and incalculable quality of them: the abyssal quality as Morton defines it. This abyssal quality in front of the hyperobject is interobjective. In his view, the intersubjective space, shared among humans where meanings are exchanged, is a small region of a much larger interobjective space alignment. In other words, intersubjectivity is human (or anthropocentric) and interobjectivity is non-human. Intersubjectivity excludes the non-human and interobjectivity includes it.

All entities of any scale are interconnected in an interobjective system that the author calls the mesh. When an object is born, is it simultaneously entangled in the mesh. This mesh floats on top and in front of things. It consists of links and gaps. The links allow causality to take place and the gaps between and within things facilitate entities to grab them. In this abyssal space, nothing is ever experienced directly but is always mediated by other entities in some “sensual space” where there is at least one entity that is withdrawn. As examples, the author mentions that we never hear the wind in itself, only the wind as it passes through a door or a forest. When a dinosaur’s footprint is discovered, we do not see the dinosaur, we see just the footprint on a rock. The wind and the animal are withdrawn. This fact reveals that the total of all samplings by which an object inscribes itself on other objects is history, in both senses, as events, and as recordings. These inscriptions constitute vivid textbooks intertwined with what Morton calls “interobjective calligraphy.” [9] Hyperobjects disperse footprints which are signs of causality. Causality and the aesthetic, in the sense of perception, are one and the same, since interobjectivity suppresses the difference between the cause and the sign.

The eeriness of hyperobjects, their invisibility, is their transmission of the future into the present. This future radiation into the present is what Morton calls attractor, which, the author says, is also a destination or an end. Any local manifestation of an attractor is simply an old appearance; hence appearance is the past and essence is the future. The present is nowhere to be found. There is a crack between the essence and appearance.

To conclude his section on the definition of the hyperobjects Morton states: “The cataclysm is such that it forces us to see. Hyperobjects bring about the end of modernity . . . Futurality is reinscribed into the present, ending the metaphysics of presence: because the very large finitude of hyperobjects forces as humans to coexist with a strange future ‘without us.’” [10]

The Anthropocene: Definition and Brief History

The notion of the hyperobject is intimately related to the Anthropocene. As stated by Morton, hyperobjects are firmly inserted in our physical reality, interacting with our biosphere. Their invisibility, lack of definition, their trans-dimensionality, massive scope and their interobjectivity give them a spectral presence in our local planetary environment. Humankind neither is addressing them, nor is able to truly comprehend their menacing effects over our future existence and the urgency of doing so. In this following section we will explore the definition and history of the concept of the Anthropocene which arose at the beginning of the current millennia out of necessity to name a phenomenon that needed to be properly defined.

Geochronology traces the geological history of Earth and traces back billions of years ago. An Epoch is a subdivision of the geological timescale. It is longer than an Age but shorter than a Period. We currently are in the Quaternary Period which is divided into two epochs: The Pleistocene (2.588 million years ago to 11.7 thousand years ago) and the Holocene (11.5 thousand years ago to the 20th century). The Holocene is the epoch of the last ten to twelve millennia, in which outstanding climate stability allowed for life, flora and fauna to develop and proliferate all over the planet. During this epoch, homo sapiens thrived.

However, since the late nineteenth century, scientists began observing that carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere were influencing climate. Ecological awareness and discourse have been around for centuries, nevertheless, it was only in the year 2000 that Paul Crutzen, an atmospheric chemist, and Eugene Stoermer, a Doctor of Science, first introduced the basic ideas about the Anthropocene. The term was coined to legitimize the idea of the ongoing process of climate change generated by human activity, which by the beginning of the twenty-first century was still predominantly questioned.

The Anthropocene is a new geological era, where the activities of humankind have impacted the planet to such an extent that the crust of our planet is showing a layer of sediments which are human-made, and the healthy climate patterns observed during the Holocene are beginning to break down. Humans are now the dominant geological force, and there does not seem to be a possibility of a withdrawal of this influence. When the term Anthropocene was first introduced, it had a flashing impact first on the biological and geological sciences, and then it transcended to anthropology, theology, geography, paleology, philosophy, art, and culture. The world was hungry to comprehend this new reality through language, to be able to name it and begin to understand it.

The beginning of this new era has been heavily contested. Some scientists postulate that it began with the first permanent human settlements around 12,000 years ago when humans started altering the landscape with advancements in agriculture. Another group of scientists traces the beginning of the Anthropocene to the Industrial Revolution (around the year 1800) where the pace of transformation of the landscape by humankind rose to new levels. The third group of scientists date the beginning of the human-made epoch to the Great Acceleration period, in the middle of the twentieth century where the curves of many somewhat stable parameters began to grow exponentially, namely, on the one hand the Earth System trends, [11] and on the other hand the Socio-Economic trends. [12] The dating controversy is still ongoing in the scientific community, but for this paper it is sufficient to know that two major events are at the center of the beginning of this new epoch: industrialization in Great Britain and the Great Acceleration in the twentieth century.

One indicator that has been central to the climate change debate is the carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere since it directly correlates with rising temperatures. This indicator is pivotal to the sustainability of life on the planet, and its rising measurements have preoccupied the scientific community for more than half a century and is the reason for the proponents of the notion of the Anthropocene to proclaim the end of the Holocene. In the pre-industrial period, carbon dioxide levels measured between 270 to 275 parts per million (ppm). By the middle of the twentieth century they were at 310 ppm, by 2014 they were at above 400 ppm, and in 2018 they reached 412.37 ppm.

According to Helmuth Trischler, today the term Anthropocene has a dual meaning, first as a geological concept and second as a cultural one. The geological concept has already been addressed in the previous paragraphs. As for the cultural realm, it is in political science, anthropology, sociology, history, and philosophy where the term has ignited the most profound debates creating a source of interdisciplinary scrutiny of what the term means and what the consequences of its definition are. The term has been met with acceptance and has been positively embraced by some, but it has also been met with fear and rejection by others. Fears have stemmed from the possibility that the naming of such an epoch could encourage increased denialism and an even more forceful anthropocentric response with the consequences of further natural devastation.

On the other hand, some anthropologists are uncomfortable with the term in the sense that it includes all human actors whereas they argue it is only a group of people from industrialized countries that generated this epoch and are responsible for the environmental disruptions that we are witnessing.

Thrischler also notes that the term Anthropocene has infiltrated the arts and architecture, influencing their practitioners to respond to this new reality in their work. Moreover, the Anthropocene has also infiltrated museums, education, and teaching. There is now a tool for explaining to a broader public a phenomenon that existed but was not previously named.

The Anthropocene as a concept has opened up a particularly distinct debate among post-humanist thinkers. These thinkers propose a decentering of the anthropocentric view of the world, redistributing human power with non-humans and equalizing our nature with all the rest of physical existence, animated or not. That has resulted in the opening of a forum of ethical discussions where quintessential shifts could eventually occur, democratizing the relationship of humankind with nature.

Timothy Morton adheres to an emerging philosophical movement called object-oriented ontology (OOO) which is committed to a distinct form of realism and non-anthropocentric reasoning. It is from this perspective that he asserts that Einstein’s relativity liberates non-humans from their "exclusive" link to humankind in the sense that our perspective in the universe, no matter our position in it, is now recognized as one among an infinite number of perspectives based on relative positions and velocities. He mentions a movement embraced by many scholars such as Graham Harman, Jane Bennett, Quentin Meillassoux, to name the most relevant, whose line of thought is one that is determined to break free from intersubjectivity, opening the boundaries of the human/non-human correlation and daring to plunge into the profound depths of the outer world in which our tiny world exists. This line of thoughts, if endorsed by the majority, over time could represent a paradigmatic transformation in the way our specie relates to the physical surroundings and could trigger one of the most profound changes in the way we go about our existence, in our economic and political systems, and in the organization of our society.

Conclusion

Here we have come full circle in understanding that the notion of the hyperobject is intersecting with the era of the Anthropocene. As mentioned above, in this new era, the Earth Systems such as the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, geosphere, pedosphere, biosphere, and, the magnetosphere, [13] which could all be called hyperobjects, are being destabilized. On the other hand the socio-economic parameters such as world population, urban population, real GDP, foreign direct investment, primary energy use, large dams, water use, paper production, fertilizer consumption, transportation, telecommunications, international tourism are growing in an exponential fashion, putting enormous pressure on our finite resources and the equilibrium of the biosphere.

These measurable factors are tightly related to our present human activities and economic system, which depend on the churning of resources extracted from the crust of our planet to turn them into new “things,” exhausting the natural equilibrium of Planet Earth.

The notion mentioned by Morton that is of particular importance is the concept of the mesh where everything is entangled and nothing is loose, or out there. The physical world is a whole, from which nothing can escape or can be purged, and everything is related to everything. This notion of entanglement is crucial for revealing the unsustainable nature of our disposal-oriented society. As Morton argues, there is no “away” when we flush chemicals down the drain, when we send fumes into the air, when we throw away everything. It is precisely this misconception that is feeding the hyperobject of all “the trash in the world,” which is growing and growing, putting pressure on us and our resources, and at the same time inflicting fear and confusion.

The other axis of relevance revealed by Morton is the conception that intersubjectivity is local and human, hence limited and small. In contrast, interobjectivity is cosmic, and our intersubjectivity is contained in it, constituting a grain of sand in an infinite cosmic structure. As a species, especially because of Western culture, we had it all wrong. We always thought of ourselves as being immensurable. This fact demands a paradigmatic change in our conception of ourselves, in addition to a consensual agreement as a race in order to redress our destiny and secure our survival.

Here we conclude the first part of our investigation in relation to the invisible reality that we demarcated at the beginning of the essay and which our humanity has not yet comprehensively addressed. The analysis of the hyperobject has illuminated some of the reasons why this type of entity is particularly tricky for mankind to confront: they are massive, viscous, non-local, they exist in a different temporality than ours, they phase out, we only see bits of them and never in their totality, and they are interobjective and not intersubjective. Hyperobjects exist in such an obscure and inaccessible realm to humans, it is certainly a useful tool to be able to name them, so they can begin to be thought about, addressed and studied in order that we may devise feasible solutions against climate change.

Notes

[1] Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 2.
[2] Morton, Hyperobjects, 22.
[3] Morton, Hyperobjects, 22.
[4] Morton, Hyperobjects, 29.
[5] Morton, Hyperobjects, 36.
[6] Morton, Hyperobjects, 33.
[7] Morton, Hyperobjects, 64.
[8] Morton, Hyperobjects, 77.
[9] Morton, Hyperobjects, 88.
[10] Morton, Hyperobjects, 94.
[11] Parameters such as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, surface temperature, stratospheric ozone, marine fish capture, ocean acidification, coastal nitrogen, tropical forest loss, domesticated land.
[12] Parameters such as world population, urban population, real GDP, foreign direct investment, primary energy use, large dams, water use, paper production, fertilizer consumption, transportation, telecommunications, international tourism.
[13] Including its parameters such as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, surface temperature, stratospheric ozone, marine fish capture, ocean acidification, coastal nitrogen, tropical forest loss, domesticated land.

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