Poisoned Ground & Fallen Fruit - A Short Essay
Hyperobjects as per Timothy Morton - a real event or phenomenon so vast that it is beyond human comprehension, such as global warming.
Thus the art of the time of hyperobjects is an art that explores:
The uncanniness of beings. The uniqueness of beings. The irony of relationships between beings. The ironic secondariness of the intermeshing between beings.
The Anthropocene denotes our current geological age in the aftermath of the Holocene, when the effects of humanity are the dominant actor of change in the climate or environment. The later eighteenth century, commonly perceived as the beginning of “modernity,” symptomatically enacted that modernity via tangible consequences like depositing carbon via fossil fuel burning in the earth’s crust, increasing its temperature. This novel truth in which we inhabit, where our collective actions as a species actively corrupt the purity of our ecosystem, mandates a specific line of thought. At least, that’s what Timothy Morton, a scholar of object-oriented thought, is arguing. The sentiment or provocation is the dethroning of humanity as King in the hopes that this coup d’etat might hinder our species from wreaking any further havoc on the earth from which our existence is congruent.
Morton’s immediate remedy or philosophy is that of hyperobjects, “massively distributed entities that can be thought and computed, but not directly seen or touched.” In other words, hyperobjects are monumentally challenging to live with due to their ephemeral and elusive nature. Morton’s argument insists on the recalibration of these ideas. According to Morton, culturally and materially, the evidence of the time of hyperobjects in the age of art that we inhabit manifests via the asymmetrical coexistence of the vast human acquisition of knowledge and the hyperobjects. Elder romantic ideas popularized in early modernity have been inherited in the Anthropocene; it’s only that they show themselves reimagined around the new conditions brought on by the aforementioned realities of contemporaneous living.
What constitutes a hyperobject? Contextually, that question haunts a reader of Morton’s “Poisoned Ground.” He comes up with five things that definitively make up the idea. The first viscosity is “the end of free play.” The second, molten temporality, disrupts the idea of time and its infinity: the third, nonlocality, is an inability to be localized. The fourth phasing, impermanence, they come and go. And finally, the fifth, interobjectivity, is the shared vast space that he goes on to define as the mesh. The Dawn of Hyperobjects, this subsection in the study, raises the strongest cause for concern. Intentionality, in a work of this discipline with this particular disposition toward radical pivot, cannot be understated. Yet, the product of this particularly crucial section which aims to suspend the inaccessibility of metaphysical academia is extremely notional and ineffective at successfully tethering the following unmoored arguments to tangible ideas and realities. That said, the following views are extremely pertinent and relevant as we attempt to frame and aestheticize dystopia.
Visibility is Morton’s designated largest power player in the time of hyperobjects. It’s an earnestness that we’ve developed via the emancipation of our immediate manual labor in the digital age, which allows us room for ironic thought processes that engage with the examination of our condition and the mesh of everything and nothing that both envelops us and dwells within us. It is then that Morton embarks on a semiotic analysis of mesh, blossom from the word mask.
The consequent argument is an ontological study of mice as they pertain to permanence and legitimize the ambiguity of existence for hyperobjects and everything else. It’s a sincere awareness that makes the long-lasting potential of conceptual folklore, like the idea of a mouse, seem entirely possible and impossible simultaneously. After all, the mouse is only a collection of DNA and not a mouse itself, not really. This is effective at recontextualizing absolutism but leans heavily into the theoretical, ignoring the materiality and practicality of human banality.
Morton speaks on “the human mist,” a charming visual conjuring the mercurial lives of the natural world as a set of symptoms. In the time of hyperobjects, nonhumans exist in the invisible space outside the human mist’s line of sight. These indiscernible entities are not belittled in effect or influence merely by our inability to see them. The presupposition employed in this paper is that nonhuman objects, strangers, are left without a totalizing context since the latter is defined rigidly within the parameters of civility.
Art as demonic as demonic inspiration; this is the return to Platonic ideas of creation and thought that Morton is flirting with. He phones a metaphorical friend in order to recount the story of art’s lifespan chronologically. Symbolic art, the first, takes place in the dark ages. Classical art, the second phase, takes place in the early days of human comprehension. Romantic art, the third phase, takes place in the failure to embody outer things. The fourth, of course, is happening now. The induction of Hegel infuses Morton’s ideas with the historical precedent of everything which Hegel hopes to culminate. It doesn’t offer up clarity per se, and the aforementioned criticisms of highly theoretical ideology somehow corrupting the accessibility of the idea itself remains as true as ever. The nonhuman world that thinking can’t ever reach becomes a proverbial nonspace for idealism and nonhumans to flourish in the absence of the human mist.
The abstraction of language and space does not hinder the radical reality that we inhabit and the magnitude of these ideas. Rather, as life becomes more vivid and real through intellect and computation, it is also less knowable. Morton’s belief is that Nature has disappeared, as have its accompanying certainties, leaving a legacy of uncanny indecision and opacity. The realization of non-human entities with the ability to supersede our power and also define it leaves the person in disarray about their understanding of themselves. It isn’t that our human-centric -anthropocentrism- understanding of reality was ever true. It’s that we’ve become increasingly skilled at unmasking that fiction.
As we begin to grasp the symbiotic relationship between the human world and its counterpart, we realize that it isn’t symbiotic at all, and that shift leaves us stranded in the unknown. It is only a disservice to knowing that our means of acquiring knowledge are ridden in the safety of fauvism and abstraction, where change consequently becomes vague. Still, somehow the principle of decentralizing our species as the focal point of the existence experience, no matter how unclear or nonlinear, is propelling us somewhere closer to an efficient relationship with hyperobjects and the world at large.