Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World is a queasily vertiginous quest to synthesize the still divergent fields of quantum theory (the weirdness of small objects) and relativity (the weirdness of big objects) and insert them into philosophy and art, which he notes are far behind ontologically speaking (page 150). Morton’s wager is that for the first time, we in the Anthropocene are able to see snapshots of hyperobjects, and that these intimations more or less will force us to undergo a radical reboot of our ontological toolkit and (finally) incorporate the weirdness of physics.
So what is a hyperobject? Morton acknowledges that big objects have always already been there, nudging those who would listen toward an ontological reboot, but it has been possible for most people to ignore this. No longer. Morton argues that the ‘hyperobjects’ of the Anthropocene, objects like global warming, climate or oil that are “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” (page 1), have become newly visible to humans, largely as a result of the very mathematics and statistics that helped to create these disasters. As we glimpse them through our reams of data, “[h]yperobjects compel us to think ecologically, and not the other way around”.
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