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It's Hyperobjects All the Way Down

Do you feel lost? Alone? Powerless in the face of forces beyond your control? Timothy Morton can help—if you’re ready to have your reality blown apart.

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. 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. One moment they’re talking about planet death and the finer points of Heidegger and Derrida, and the next they’re persuasively explaining to me why P.M. Dawn’s 1991 R&B hit “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss” is one of the greatest artistic achievements of all time, and why Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon is a radically democratic ecological being that “announces the possibility of a new age.” None of it is non sequitur, but the ideas can feel just out of reach, like a magic-eye picture that’s on the cusp of snapping into view.

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