![]() ![]() ![]() 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. ![]()
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