Hyperobjects | Critical Theory Wiki

Introduction

Hyperobjects are entities so massively distributed in time and space that they transcend human perceptual and conceptual scales, yet they viscously stick to everything they touch. Timothy Morton coined the term in The Ecological Thought (2010) and developed it systematically in Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013) to describe things like climate change, mass extinction, radioactive plutonium-239, the biosphere, capitalism, and evolution—phenomena that exceed human grasp while profoundly affecting us.

Hyperobjects are neither distant abstractions nor immediate presences but something stranger: they’re literally everywhere (suffusing every breath, transaction, moment) yet nowhere graspable as unified wholes. You can’t see climate change itself—only heat waves, hurricanes, droughts, and melting ice (local manifestations of distributed process). Yet you’re always-already inside it, complicit in it, unable to exit or gain external perspective. Hyperobjects break modern assumptions about knowledge, agency, causality, and subjectivity—revealing we’ve never been as sovereign, bounded, or separate as Enlightenment humanism claimed.

Understanding hyperobjects is essential for confronting ecological catastrophe without retreating into denial, despair, or false solutions. Morton’s concept illuminates why climate politics seems paralyzed (hyperobjects overwhelm normal political frameworks), why individual guilt feels misplaced (you can’t opt out of capitalism’s metabolic rift), and why technical fixes miss the point (engineering can’t master processes exceeding human control). Hyperobjects demand acknowledging humanity’s entanglement with vast, inhuman systems and developing ecological thought adequate to damaged, contaminated, post-natural conditions we inhabit.

Key Figures

Related Thinkers:

Timothy Morton (1968-present) - Coined and developed concept, Hyperobjects (2013)

Graham Harman (1968-present) - Object-Oriented Ontology, withdrawn objects

Bruno Latour (1947-2022) - Actor-Network Theory, Earth system science

Donna Haraway (1944-present) - Cyborg, Chthulucene, staying with the trouble

Karl Marx (1818-1883) - Metabolic rift between humans and nature

📖 Essential Reading: Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (University of Minnesota Press, 2013)

Defining Characteristics

Morton identifies five key characteristics of hyperobjects:

1. Viscosity

Hyperobjects are viscous—they stick to beings that come into contact with them. You can’t wash off climate change, step outside capitalism, or exit the biosphere. Every action, consumption, and relationship occurs within hyperobjects—they suffuse existence, coating everything.

Example: Carbon

Breathing inhales carbon molecules circulating globally
Food contains carbon from industrial agriculture
Clothes are petroleum products (oil is ancient carbon)
Digital communication requires server farms (carbon emissions)
Even “carbon-neutral” actions remain within carbon cycle

You can’t achieve pristine exterior relationship to hyperobjects. They’re always already conditioning existence. This viscosity generates existential anxiety—realizing complicity can’t be escaped through consumer choices or lifestyle adjustments.

Viscosity explains why environmental guilt is both unavoidable and insufficient. You’re sticky with hyperobjects regardless of actions—vegetarianism doesn’t exit animal agriculture’s systemic effects; renewable energy doesn’t escape capitalist growth logic. This doesn’t counsel resigned acceptance but recognizes individual purity is impossible fantasy.

2. Nonlocality

Hyperobjects are nonlocal—they exist as massively distributed phenomena encountered only through local manifestations. The totality never appears; only partial, localized effects manifest.

Example: Global Warming Nobody has experienced “global warming” itself—only heat waves in Phoenix, floods in Bangladesh, hurricanes in New Orleans, droughts in California. These are local manifestations of distributed hyperobject. Yet the hyperobject isn’t sum of manifestations either—it has systemic properties (feedback loops, tipping points, emergent dynamics) exceeding additive collection.

This nonlocality makes hyperobjects cognitively difficult. We evolved for local, immediate, graspable threats—not distributed, deferred, systemic processes. Hyperobjects demand different epistemology—accepting we’ll never directly perceive them while acting on incomplete, localized knowledge.

Nonlocality also explains political paralysis. Local manifestations seem isolated incidents (just this hurricane, just this heat wave) rather than interconnected system. Grasping hyperobject requires connecting local experiences to global systems—difficult when hyperobject exceeds perceptual capacities.

3. Temporal Undulation

Hyperobjects exhibit temporal undulation—they phase in and out of human timescales, appearing and disappearing from awareness while remaining constant. They’re simultaneously too slow (climate change over decades/centuries) and too fast (tipping points arriving before adaptation) for human temporal experience.

Example: Plutonium-239

Half-life: 24,110 years
Created in 1940s nuclear reactions
Will remain radioactive for 240,000+ years
Humans encounter it momentarily (Hiroshima, Chernobyl, Fukushima)
Yet it persists across timescales exceeding civilizations

Plutonium undulates into human time through nuclear disasters, then recedes from awareness while remaining radioactively present. It’s everywhere (dispersed through nuclear testing) yet temporally inaccessible—you can’t experience 240,000-year half-life directly.

Temporal undulation generates peculiar affects: catastrophe feels both imminent and impossibly distant; urgency coexists with paralysis; the future is already-here yet still-arriving. Hyperobjects scramble linear temporal experience—they’re simultaneously past (accumulated emissions), present (current warming), and future (committed warming from existing emissions).

4. Phasing

Hyperobjects create phasing—they appear differently to different observers at different scales. What seems solid dissolves at another scale; patterns invisible locally emerge globally; causes and effects separate across vast distances.

Example: Capitalism

Worker experiences: wage labor, unemployment, precarity
Capitalist experiences: profit rates, competition, investment
Economist observes: GDP growth, market cycles, statistics
Historian sees: long waves, structural transformations, systemic tendencies
Each perspective is real yet partial—capitalism phases differently across scales

Phasing explains why hyperobjects seem contradictory. Is capitalism accelerating or in crisis? Both/neither—it phases differently depending on scale and position. Local boom coexists with global stagnation; individual success with systemic failure.

Phasing frustrates attempts at total knowledge. No single perspective captures hyperobject—it necessarily appears differently from different positions/scales. This doesn’t mean hyperobjects are subjective constructions (they’re real, obdurate) but that they exceed unified representation.

5. Interobjective

Hyperobjects are interobjective—they exist in relations between objects, not just between objects and humans. Hyperobjects form meshes connecting entities across scales, times, and spaces.

Example: Evolution Evolution isn’t relationship between humans and nature but process connecting bacteria, viruses, plants, animals, ecosystems across billions of years. Humans are nodes in evolutionary hyperobject, not its observers or masters.

This challenges anthropocentrism. Hyperobjects don’t require human perception to exist—they’re formed through interobjective relations (carbon cycle, trophic cascades, planetary systems) independent of human knowledge. We’re inside hyperobjects, affected by them, without being central to them.

Interobjectivity also means hyperobjects have their own dynamics, emergent properties, and autonomy. Climate change isn’t just human problem—it’s planetary system with nonlinear feedbacks, tipping points, and surprising behaviors. We can influence but not master it; we’re participants, not controllers.

Philosophical Implications

The End of the World

Morton provocatively claims hyperobjects herald “the end of the world”—not planetary destruction but collapse of “the world” as modern concept. “World” signified unified, totalizable context for human existence—comprehensive background enabling meaning, agency, and knowledge.

Hyperobjects break this. They’re so vast, complex, and inhuman that they exceed worlding capacities. We can’t integrate them into coherent world-picture—they overflow, exceed, and scramble attempts at totalization. Post-hyperobject, we inhabit damaged, partial, contaminated situations rather than world as such.

This “end of world” is simultaneously catastrophic (loss of meaning-giving totality) and liberating (release from human exceptionalism’s burden). Without world as stable background, we confront more honest relationship to actually-existing ecological devastation—no pristine nature to restore, no exterior position to occupy, no world to save. Only navigation of ruin we inhabit.

Thinking Big and Thinking Small

Hyperobjects demand thinking at incompatible scales simultaneously:

Thinking big: Planetary systems, geological time, evolutionary processes, capitalist totality Thinking small: Molecular flows, microbial agencies, intimate attachments, local practices

Both are necessary yet mutually destabilizing. Think too big and agency vanishes (what can individual do against hyperobject?). Think too small and systemic patterns disappear (optimizing household carbon while ignoring fossil capital).

Morton argues hyperobjects force “strange realism”—accepting we must think/act within scales that exceed comfortable anthropocentric frames. We’re neither sovereign subjects mastering systems nor passive victims of impersonal forces. We’re awkwardly entangled in processes that use us as much as we use them.

Subscendence vs. Transcendence

Traditional Western thought emphasized transcendence—rising above material conditions toward higher reality (God, Ideas, Spirit, Reason). Modernity secularized this: humanity transcends nature through technology; consciousness transcends matter; culture transcends biology.

Hyperobjects enforce subscendence (Morton’s neologism)—we’re always-already beneath, behind, within vast processes we can’t transcend. Rather than rising above material conditions, we discover we’re thoroughly material beings stuck in material processes exceeding us.

This isn’t pessimistic but realist—accepting subscendence enables appropriate response. Fantasies of transcendence (geoengineering mastering climate, capitalist growth solving its contradictions, technology overcoming limits) are dangerous distractions. Subscendence acknowledges embeddedness while seeking livable ways to be stuck.

Humans as Hypocrites

Hyperobjects make humans constitutively hypocritical (Morton uses etymological sense: hypokrites, actor). We must act “as if” our actions matter (reduce consumption, organize politically, transform systems) while knowing our actions are inadequate to hyperobjects’ scales.

This isn’t grounds for inaction but recognition of ecological condition. Purity is impossible; efficacy is uncertain; complicity is unavoidable. Yet acting remains necessary. Hyperobject-awareness means acting without illusions of mastery, transcendence, or clean hands—acting from within contaminated, compromised, sticky situations.

Dark Ecology

Morton’s “dark ecology” accepts:

No pristine nature to protect or return to
Humans are always-already part of “nature” (itself misleading concept)
Ecological relationships are asymmetric, exploitative, and uncomfortable
No escape from ecological crisis—only navigation of damage
Irony, weirdness, and darkness are appropriate affects—not hope or despair

This dark ecological realism refuses both techno-optimism (innovation will save us) and pastoral romanticism (return to nature). Instead: acknowledge we’re stuck in hyperobjects, complicit in destruction, unable to achieve purity, yet still responsible for responding. It’s ecology without nature—accepting compromised, contaminated, damaged conditions as only available reality.

Examples of Hyperobjects

Climate Change

Paradigmatic hyperobject:

Viscous: Every breath, consumption, action within carbon cycle
Nonlocal: Never experienced as totality—only through heat waves, storms, droughts
Temporally undulating: Decades of warming, instant tipping points, centuries of committed change
Phasing: Appears different from Phoenix (heat death) vs. Maldives (sea rise) vs. Arctic (ice melt)
Interobjective: Relationship between CO2, oceans, ice sheets, forests, bacteria

Climate change exemplifies why hyperobjects paralyze politics. It’s:

Too big for individual action yet demanding immediate response
Too slow for political cycles yet faster than adaptation
Too complex for simple causality yet requiring accountability
Everywhere yet nowhere directly perceivable

Capitalism

Capitalism as hyperobject:

Viscous: You can’t opt out—even anti-capitalist organizing occurs within capitalist conditions
Nonlocal: Never see “capitalism itself”—only wages, commodities, markets, factories (local manifestations)
Temporally undulating: Centuries-long accumulation, instant crashes, long waves emerging/disappearing
Phasing: Appears differently to worker vs. capitalist vs. economist vs. historian
Interobjective: Relations between commodities, workers, capital, states, technologies

Capitalism’s hyperobject-character explains its apparent inevitability (viscosity makes exit seem impossible) while revealing it as historical—hyperobject with beginning, transformation, and potential ending.

Mass Extinction (Sixth Extinction)

Current mass extinction event:

Species dying at 1000x background rate
Caused by human activities (habitat destruction, climate change, pollution)
Yet no single human caused it—emergent from systemic processes
Temporally extended (centuries of accelerating extinction) yet sudden (species disappear before documentation)
Interobjective mesh of dying populations, disrupted ecosystems, cascading collapses

Mass extinction’s hyperobject-character generates peculiar affects: grief for species we’ll never know existed; guilt for destruction we didn’t directly cause yet benefit from; paralysis at scale of loss; absurdity of continuing “business as usual” amid ongoing catastrophe.

Radioactive Materials

Plutonium, uranium, and nuclear waste exemplify temporal undulation:

Created in decades; persist for millennia
Concentrated in weapons/reactors; dispersed through testing/accidents
Invisible to senses yet deadly to cells
Demand institutional continuity across timescales exceeding civilizations (waste storage for 100,000+ years)

How do you warn people 10,000 years future about nuclear waste? What language, symbols, or monuments survive that long? Radioactive hyperobjects expose hubris of controlling processes exceeding human temporal scales.

The Biosphere

Life itself as hyperobject:

Every organism exists within/through biosphere
Distributed across planet, 4 billion years
Emerges through interobjective relations (predation, symbiosis, competition, cooperation)
Humans are nodes in biosphere, not its masters or observers
Damaged biosphere (climate change, extinction, pollution) conditions all life

Understanding biosphere as hyperobject challenges human exceptionalism—we’re thoroughly biological beings within biological systems we can’t exit or transcend.

Petroleum

Oil as hyperobject:

Ancient sunlight (from organisms millions of years ago) powering present
Viscously coating everything (plastics, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, transportation, food)
Nonlocally distributed yet concentrated in specific formations
Temporally connecting deep past (formation), present (extraction/combustion), and long future (climate impacts)
Interobjective: Relations between geology, biology, chemistry, economy, politics

Petroleum exemplifies how hyperobjects bind us to deep time and planetary processes—burning fossil fuels releases ancient carbon, linking contemporary actions to both distant past and long future.

Political and Ethical Implications

Beyond Individual Solutions

Hyperobjects demolish “vote with your dollar” environmentalism. Individual consumption choices (recycling, vegetarianism, electric cars) remain within hyperobject (capitalism, carbon cycle, industrial agriculture). They don’t exit or overcome hyperobjects but navigate within them.

This doesn’t mean individual actions are meaningless—they’re necessary but insufficient. Hyperobjects demand systemic, collective transformation beyond individual consumer choice. Yet systemic change requires aggregated individual/collective actions. The paradox is real—we must act individually while recognizing individual action’s inadequacy.

Solidarity Without Unity

Hyperobjects enforce solidarity through mutual entanglement. We’re all stuck in climate change, capitalism, biosphere together—no sovereign position, no escape, no pure victims or villains. This solidarity isn’t warm fuzzy togetherness but cold fact of common embeddedness.

Yet this commonality doesn’t erase difference. Climate change affects Phoenix millionaire and Bangladesh farmer differently; capitalism exploits racialized labor specifically; extinction impacts Indigenous peoples maintaining biodiversity differently than developers destroying it.

Hyperobject solidarity means: acknowledging mutual entanglement while respecting asymmetric impacts; collective responsibility without equivalence; action from within complicity rather than from moral high ground.

Irreductionism vs. Reductionism

Hyperobjects are irreducible—to physical components, human perceptions, mathematical models, or simple causality. Climate change isn’t just CO2 molecules (though it includes them); capitalism isn’t just individual greed (though it leverages it); mass extinction isn’t just habitat loss (though that’s factor).

This irreductionism frustrates reductionist solutions. You can’t simply:

Technologically fix climate (it’s more than engineering problem)
Regulate capitalism away (it’s more than policy failure)
Protect species individually (extinction is systemic)

Hyperobjects demand holistic, systemic, multi-scalar responses acknowledging complexity rather than seeking silver bullets.

Beyond Hope and Despair

Hyperobjects break “hope vs. despair” binary. Hope (things will work out, solutions exist, progress is possible) seems naive given hyperobject scales. Despair (nothing matters, we’re doomed, give up) seems cowardly given ongoing suffering demanding response.

Morton advocates moving beyond both: acknowledging catastrophe is here (not future threat but present reality) while acting anyway—not from hope things will improve but from solidarity with suffering, commitment despite futility, action without guarantee.

This isn’t uplifting but might be honest. Living with hyperobjects means accepting damaged, partial, compromised conditions as only available reality and responding from within those conditions rather than from fantasized exteriors.

Critiques and Debates

Is This Just Defeatism?

Critics charge hyperobjects counsel resignation—if hyperobjects are inescapable, what’s the point of resistance? Doesn’t emphasizing complicity and subscendence disable political action?

Morton responds that acknowledging embeddedness enables better action. Fantasies of transcendence, purity, or mastery are politically dangerous—they justify geoengineering hubris, green capitalism’s false solutions, or paralysis when purity proves impossible. Subscendent awareness means acting from within compromised conditions rather than awaiting ideal circumstances.

Mystifying or Clarifying?

Some argue “hyperobjects” mystifies rather than clarifies—dressing obvious phenomena (climate change is complex and distributed) in obscure jargon. Why not just say “complex systems” or “wicked problems”?

Defenders argue hyperobjects’ conceptual specificity (viscosity, nonlocality, temporal undulation, phasing, interobjectivity) provides tools for thinking phenomena that exceed existing frameworks. It’s not just saying “it’s complicated” but analyzing specific ways these phenomena challenge cognition, perception, and politics.

Anthropocentric Despite Itself?

Paradoxically, hyperobjects might be anthropocentric—they’re defined by exceeding human scales. But why privilege human scales as baseline? From bacteria’s perspective or geological perspective, nothing is “hyper”—these are just objects at their scales.

Morton acknowledges this but argues we must start from human limitations to move beyond them. Recognizing how hyperobjects exceed human capacities is step toward decentering humanity, even if recognition itself remains anthropocentrically framed.

Where’s the Politics?

Critics want clearer political program. Hyperobjects diagnose condition but offer uncertain prescriptions. What should we actually do?

Morton resists programmatic politics, arguing prescriptions often reproduce problems (technocratic mastery, sovereign agency, pure position). Dark ecology’s contribution is adjusting thought and affect to actual conditions—accepting embeddedness, complicity, and subscendence as starting points for action rather than obstacles to overcome.