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All the way up full#
Talking with Morton, much like reading their writing, is a slightly psychedelic experience full of poetic leaps and circumlocutory spirals through a dizzying array of topics: Star Wars, Buddhist meditation, Romantic poetry, David Lynch, quantum physics, The Muppet Show. There’s no way to persuade people in a dream to wake up, Morton tells me as we set out across sprawling highways, the stereo blasting a mix of ’70s prog rock, deep house, and shoegaze. On the day we meet, they’re wearing a shirt covered in green leaves that fade in and out of existence. Art by Frank Nitty 3000īorn in London and educated at Oxford, Morton-who moved to Texas in 2012 for the job at Rice-is soft-spoken but intense. Morton describes the origin of Hyperobjects as oracular-like a radio transmission sent from the future. Every page of their writing has that feeling.” “You can feel your brain changing ever so slightly because you never even considered that possibility,” McKay tells me.
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In 2019, Adam McKay, the former Saturday Night Live head writer and cocreator of a heap of hit Hollywood comedies, was so inspired by Morton’s work that he named his production company Hyperobject Industries. The Icelandic musician Björk has reached out to Morton to talk hyperobjects, and their email correspondence became part of a MoMA exhibit. Technology writers invoke the term as a way to talk about the incomprehensibility of algorithms and the internet science fiction author Jeff VanderMeer has said it neatly describes the bizarre alien phenomenon he wrote about in Annihilation, his surreal novel turned 2018 movie. In the near-decade since its publication, Hyperobjects has been referenced in a Buddhist blog post about ecological crisis, a New York Times op-ed on digital privacy, and a BBC report about how concrete will soon outweigh all living matter on the planet. While they are not, in every case, bad things, the most talked-about hyperobjects tend to be the most vivid and disturbing, particularly as they clip in and out of our vision like malevolent ghosts. Hyperobjects speak to the immense, structural forces all around us, and even inside us, that we cannot see with our eyes but strive to comprehend through data or computer modeling. The word hyperobject offers a useful shorthand for why threats like global warming are so difficult to understand or accept: They threaten our survival in ways that defy traditional modes of thinking about reality and humiliate our cognitive powers, a disorienting shift that sends many people reeling into superstition, polarization, and denial. But it’s precisely those squishy, elusive qualities that give it its explanatory power. It’s an enigmatic term, one whose meaning is by definition hard to grasp it often seems more label than description. This article appears in the December 2021/January 2022 issue. Hyperobjects, as Morton says, emerge only in fragments and patches that do not always seem to connect up from our view on the ground. A human being may see evidence of hyperobjects-pollution here, a hurricane there-but try gazing off into the distance to see the totality of them, or to the very end of them, and they disappear into a vanishing point. Hyperobjects are often ancient or destined to be, like the sum total of Styrofoam and plutonium we have littered across the Earth over the past century, which will remain for millennia. When Morton sat down to write a book on the subject in 2012, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World poured out of them in just 15 days.Įxamples of hyperobjects include: black holes, oil spills, all plastic ever manufactured, capitalism, tectonic plates, and the solar system. If you’ve spent any time on more metaphysically inclined corners of the internet, you may have encountered the term: hyperobjects. In 2008, Morton was struck by a strange, existential feeling, one that helped them formulate a word for phenomena that are too vast and fundamentally weird for humans to wrap their heads around. But they are known less for their contributions to Romantic scholarship-which are many and insightful-and more as a kind of poet-philosopher for our age of ecological crisis. Morton, a kind-faced, 53-year-old professor and author with uncannily penetrating blue eyes, has spent the past nine years teaching in the English department at Rice University in Houston, Texas. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.