At the End of the World, Hyperobjects Down

Perhaps not surprisingly, reactions to Morton have been intense and polarized. Hyperobjects (and hyperobjects) have been called “pessimistic,” “provocative,” “powerless,” “groundbreaking,” “offensive,” and simply “rare.” At the same time, Morton’s ideas have found a passionate — and growing — reader outside of traditional academia, from artists and musicians to science fiction writers, architects, and students.

almost a decade after its publication, Hyperobjects referred to in a Buddhist blog about the ecological crisis, a New York Times an opinion on digital privacy, and a report on how concrete soon surpasses all living matter on the planet. Technology writers call the term as a way of talking about the incomprehensibility of algorithms and the internet; Science fiction author Jeff VanderMeer has said he neatly describes this strange alien phenomenon he wrote about. Disposal, turned his surreal novel into a 2018 film. Icelandic musician Björk has turned to Morton to talk about hyperobjects, and their email correspondence has become part of a MoMA exhibition. In 2019, Adam McKay, the first Saturday Night Live The lead writer and creator of many of Hollywood’s most successful comedies, he was so inspired by Morton’s work that he named his production house Hyperobject Industries. “You can feel your brain changing a little bit because you’ve never considered that option,” McKay told me. “That’s Timothy. Every page of their writing has that feeling. ”

Then came Covid, along with the accelerated number of destructive natural disasters attributed to climate change, and Morton’s ideas became as well known as possible for enigmatic philosophical concepts. They also appeared in a Canadian parliamentary debate on the pandemic. “We see something bigger than us, bigger than we could have imagined,” said lawmaker Charlie Angus. “Timothy Morton calls it a hyperobject, something we can’t fully understand. That is the strength of this pandemic. ” To understand these interconnected giant forces — or could not accept them — more and more people found an echo of what Morton had said. “Hyperobjects were already here,” as Morton wrote in his book, “and we slowly but slowly understood what they were saying. They contacted us. ”

The message that some readers heard about the advent of these phenomena was frightening: Look at our works, powerful and desperate. But there is another message in Morton’s book, which Morton praises more and more, insofar as it threatens to stop so much hopelessness: It may end our sense of “world,” but human beings are not doomed. In fact, even the end of this limited notion of the world may be the only thing that can save us from it.

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“How do you do “Does Morton ask me for the first time I know him? We’re in the same little neighborhood of Houston, where I spent a year with my brother in the pandemic blockade. It’s August, and heat like Houston is always hot in summer because it feels like getting into a darker and slightly thicker one.Morton took me in his Mazda3, and we go to the Menil Collection, a museum and art collection housed in five buildings, including a chapel, on 30 acres.

Born in London and educated in Oxford, Morton – who moved to Texas in 2012 to work at Rice – is oral but lively. On the day we meet, they wear a shirt covered with green leaves, which fade and disappear. There’s no way to convince people to wake up in a dream, Morton told me as we set off across the wide freeways, mixing stereo 70s rock prog, deep house and shoegaze. “You can’t negotiate with them. You have to blow your mind. ‘

Talking to Morton, like reading their writing, is a bit of an experience filled with poetic leaps and circumlocutionary spirals, through a dizzying range of topics: Star Wars, Buddhist meditation, romantic poetry, David Lynch, quantum physics, The Muppet Show. At one point they talk about the death of the planet and the finer points of Heidegger and Derrida, and the next they convincingly explain to me why PM Dawn’s successful 1991 R&B is one of the greatest artistic achievements of “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss”. time, and why Han Solo The Millennium Hawk It is a radical democratic ecological being that “heralds the possibility of a new era”. None of them are where the sequitur is, but the ideas can be felt by those who are not available, like an image of the magic eye, which is on the way to display. Because Morton often talks about things that can’t be talked about directly, the only way to position them is to orbit them, gesturing with metaphors that are almost untouched but not entirely.