Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World

Objects such as light bulbs, a microwave oven, wire, fuses, three computers, solar panels, and plugs are distributed so that energy flows among them as evenly and as equally as possible.

The phenomenon we call intersubjectivity is just a local, anthropocentric instance of a much more widespread phenomenon, namely interobjectivity

In a gigantic bamboo forest on Qi Lai Mountain in central Taiwan, it is as if one is surrounded by a theater of air, leaves, and stalks. The bamboo sways, sometimes violently, sometimes delicately, to the wind that rushes through it. Each gust causes a cascade of bamboo clicks to sound in front, to the right, to the left, and behind. A ridiculously complex assemblage of high-pitched frequencies floats, resembling something between percussion and a hand stirring a bowlful of pebbles or small crystals. The wind is heard in the bamboo. The bamboo forest is a gigantic wind chime, modulating the wind into bambooese. The bamboo forest ruthlessly bamboo-morphizes the wind, translating its pressure into movement and sound. It is an abyss of bamboo-wind.

t’s a matter of how entities manifest for other entities, whether they are human, or sentient, or not. Nuclear radiation-for the flower turns its leaves a strange shade of red. Global warming-for the tomato farmer rots the tomatoes. Plastic-for the bird strangles it as it becomes entangled in a set of six-pack rings. What we are dealing with here are aesthetic effects that are directly causal

Hyperobjects are nonlocal.

Light itself is the most viscous thing of all, since nothing can surpass its speed. Radiation is Sartre’s jar of honey par excellence, a luminous honey that reveals our bone structure as it seeps around us.

Knowledge of the hyperobject Earth, and of the hyperobject biosphere, presents us with viscous surfaces from which nothing can be forcibly peeled. There is no Away on this surface, no here and no there.

For some time we may have thought that the U-bend in the toilet was a convenient curvature of ontological space that took whatever we flush down it into a totally different dimension called Away, leaving things clean over here.

When the inside of a thing coincides perfectly with its outside, that is called dissolution or death.

Hyperobjects are agents.