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P A R T I I

The Time of Hyperobjects

R Polla ta deina k’ouden anthrōpou deinoteron pelei

—S o p h o c l e s

Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects : Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uow/detail.action?docID=1477347. Created from uow on 2021-11-11 10:59:34.

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The End of the World

You are walking out of the supermarket. As you approach your car, a stranger calls out, “Hey! Funny weather today!” With a due sense of caution—is she a global warming denier or not?—you reply yes. There is a slight hesitation. Is it because she is thinking of saying something about global warming? In any case, the hesitation induced you to think of it. Congratulations: you are living proof that you have entered the time of hyperobjects. Why? You can no longer have a routine conversation about the weather with a stranger. The presence of global warming looms into the conversation like a shadow, introducing strange gaps. Or global warming is spoken or—either way the reality is strange.

A hyperobject has ruined the weather conversation, which functions as part of a neutral screen that enables us to have a human drama in the foreground. In an age of global warming, there is no background, and thus there is no foreground. It is the end of the world, since worlds depend on backgrounds and foregrounds. World is a fragile aesthetic effect around whose corners we are beginning to see. True planetary awareness is the creeping realization not that “We Are the World,” but that we aren’t.

Why? Because world and its cognates—environment, Nature—are iron - ically more objectified than the kinds of “object” I am talking about in this study. World is more or less a container in which objectified things float or stand. It doesn’t matter very much whether the movie within the

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context of world is an old-fashioned Aristotelian movie of substances decorated with accidents; or whether the movie is a more avant-garde Deleuzian one of flows and intensities. World as the background of events is an objectification of a hyperobject: the biosphere, climate, evo- lution, capitalism (yes, perhaps economic relations compose hyper- objects). So when climate starts to rain on our head, we have no idea what is happening. It is easy to practice denial in such a cognitive space: to set up, for example, “debates” in which different “sides” on global warming are presented. This taking of “sides” correlates all meaning and agency to the human realm, while in reality it isn’t a question of sides, but of real entities and human reactions to them. Environmentalism seems to be talking about something that can’t be seen or touched. So in turn environmentalism ups the ante and preaches the coming apoca- lypse. This constant attempt to shock and dismay inspires even more defiance on the opposite side of the “debate.”

Both sides are fixated on world, just as both sides of the atheism de - bate are currently fixated on a vorhanden (“present at hand”), objectively present God. As irritating for New Atheists such as Richard Dawkins to hear that atheism is just another form of belief, it nevertheless is—or at any rate, it holds exactly the same belief about belief as the fundamental- ists. Belief is a token, a mental object that you grip as hard as possible, like your wallet or car keys. In exactly the same way, it is annoying for environmentalists to talk about ecology without Nature. The argument is heard as nihilism or postmodernism. But really it is environmentalism that is nihilist and postmodernist, just as fundamentalism’s belief about belief marks it as a form of ontotheological nihilism. The ultimate envi- ronmentalist argument would be to drop the concepts Nature and world, to cease identifying with them, to swear allegiance to coexistence with nonhumans without a world, without some nihilistic Noah’s Ark.

In any weather conversation, one of you is going to mention global warming at some point. Or you both decide not to mention it but it looms over the conversation like a dark cloud, brooding off the edge of an ellip- sis.1 This failure of the normal rhetorical routine, these remnants of shat- tered conversation lying around like broken hammers (they must take place everywhere), is a symptom of a much larger and deeper ontological

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shift in human awareness. And in turn, this is a symptom of a profound upgrade of our ontological tools. As anyone who has waited while the little rainbow circle goes around and around on a Mac, these upgrades are not necessarily pleasant. It is very much the job of philosophers and other humanities scholars to attune ourselves to the upgrading process and to help explain it.

What is the upgrading process? In a word, the notion that we are liv- ing “in” a world—one that we can call Nature—no longer applies in any meaningful sense, except as nostalgia or in the temporarily useful local language of pleas and petitions. We don’t want a certain species to be farmed to extinction, so we use the language of Nature to convince a leg- islative body. We have a general feeling of ennui and malaise and create nostalgic visions of hobbit-like worlds to inhabit. These syndromes have been going on now since the Industrial Revolution began to take effect.

As a consequence of that revolution, however, something far bigger and more threatening is now looming on our horizon—looming so as to abolish our horizon, or any horizon. Global warming has performed a radical shift in the status of the weather. Why? Because the world as such—not just a specific idea of world but world in its entirety—has evap- orated. Or rather, we are realizing that we never had it in the first place.

We could explain this in terms of the good old-fashioned Aristotelian view of substance and accidents. For Aristotle, a realist, there are sub- stances that happen to have various qualities or accidents that are not intrinsic to their substantiality. In section Epsilon 2 of the Metaphysics Aristotle outlines the differences between substances and accidents. What climate change has done is shift the weather from accidental to substantial. Aristotle writes, “Suppose, for instance, that in the season of the Cynosure [the Dog Days of summer] arctic cold were to prevail, this we would regard as an accident, whereas, if there were a sweltering heat- wave, we would not. And this is because the latter, unlike the former, is always or for the most part the case.”2 But these sorts of violent changes are exactly what global warming predicts. So every accident of the weather becomes a potential symptom of a substance, global warming. All of a sudden this wet stuff falling on my head is a mere feature of some much more sinister phenomenon that I can’t see with my naked human eyes. I

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need terabytes of RAM to model it in real time (this has been available for about ten years).

There is an even spookier problem arising from Aristotle’s arctic sum- mer idea. If those arctic summers continue, and if we can model them as symptoms of global warming, then there never was a genuine, meaning- ful (for us humans) sweltering summer, just a long period of sweltering that seemed real because it kept on repeating for, say, two or three mil- lennia. Global warming plays a very mean trick. It reveals that what we took to be a reliable world was actually just a habitual pattern—a collu- sion between forces such as sunshine and moisture and humans expect- ing such things at certain regular intervals and giving them names, such as Dog Days. We took weather to be real. But in an age of global warming we see it as an accident, a simulation of something darker, more with- drawn—climate. As Harman argues, world is always presence-at-hand— a mere caricature of some real object.3

Now let’s think the evaporation of world from the point of view of foreground and background. A weather conversation provides a nice background to our daily affairs, nice to the extent that we don’t pay too much attention to it. Precisely for it to be a background, it has to operate in our peripheral vision. Thus, the conversation about the weather with a stranger is a safe way to acknowledge our coexistence in social space. It’s “phatic,” according to Roman Jakobson’s six-part model of commu- nication; that is, it draws attention to the material medium in which the communication is occurring.4 Likewise, the weather as such is a back- ground phenomenon. It might loom distressingly into the foreground as a tornado or as a drought, but most often those are temporary affairs— there is a larger temporal backdrop against which they seem to occur as isolated incidents.

Now what happens when global warming enters the scene? The back- ground ceases to be a background, because we have started to observe it. Strange weather patterns and carbon emissions caused scientists to start monitoring things that at first only appeared locally significant. That’s the old definition of climate: there’s the climate in Peru, the climate on Long Island, and so on. But climate in general, climate as the totality of derivatives of weather events—in much the same way as inertia is a

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derivative of velocity—is a beast newly recognized via the collaboration of weather, scientists, satellites, government agencies, and other entities. This beast includes the sun, since it’s infrared heat from the sun that is trapped by the greenhouse effect of gases such as CO2. So global warm- ing is a colossal entity that includes entities that exist way beyond Earth’s atmosphere, and yet it affects us intimately, right here and now. Global warming covers the entire surface of Earth, and 75 percent of it extends five hundred years into the future. Remember what life was like in the early 1500s?

Global warming is really here—even more spookily, it was already here, already influencing the supposedly real wet stuff falling on my head and the warm golden stuff burning my face at the beach. That wet stuff and that golden stuff, which we call weather, turns out to have been a false immediacy, an ontic pseudo-reality that can’t stand up against the looming presence of an invisible yet far more real global climate. Weather, that handy backdrop for human lifeworlds, has ceased to exist, and along with it, the cozy concept of lifeworld itself. Lifeworld was just a story we were telling ourselves on the inside of a vast, massively distributed hyperobject called climate, a story about how different groups were par- titioned according to different horizons—concepts now revealed as ontic prejudices smuggled into the realm of ontology. Global warming is a big problem, because along with melting glaciers it has melted our ideas of world and worlding. Thus, the tools that humanists have at their disposal for talking about the ecological emergency are now revealed, by global warming itself, to be as useless as the proverbial chocolate teapot. It is rather like the idea of using an antique (or better, antiqued) Christmas ornament as a weapon.

The spooky thing is, we discover global warming precisely when it’s already here. It is like realizing that for some time you had been conduct- ing your business in the expanding sphere of a slow-motion nuclear bomb. You have a few seconds for amazement as the fantasy that you inhabited a neat, seamless little world melts away. All those apocalyptic narratives of doom about the “end of the world” are, from this point of view, part of the problem, not part of the solution. By postponing doom into some hypothetical future, these narratives inoculate us against the

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very real object that has intruded into ecological, social, and psychic space. As we shall see, the hyperobject spells doom now, not at some future date. (Doom will assume a special technical meaning in this study in the “Hypocrisies” section.)

If there is no background—no neutral, peripheral stage set of weather, but rather a very visible, highly monitored, publicly debated climate— then there is no foreground. Foregrounds need backgrounds to exist. So the strange effect of dragging weather phenomena into the fore- ground as part of our awareness of global warming has been the gradual realization that there is no foreground! The idea that we are embedded in a phenomenological lifeworld, tucked up like little hobbits into the safety of our burrow, has been exposed as a fiction. The specialness we granted ourselves as unravelers of cosmic meaning, exemplified in the uniqueness of Heideggerian Dasein, falls apart since there is no meaningfulness possible in a world without a foreground–background distinction. Worlds need horizons and horizons need backgrounds, which need foregrounds. When we can see everywhere (when I can use Google Earth to see the fish in my mom’s pond in her garden in London), the world—as a significant, bounded, horizoning entity—disappears. We have no world because the objects that functioned as invisible scenery have dissolved.5

World is an aesthetic effect based on a blurriness and aesthetic dis- tance. This blurriness derives from ignorance concerning objects. Only in ignorance can objects act like blank screens for the projection of meaning. “Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight” is a charming old saw that evokes days when shepherds lived in worlds bounded by horizons on which things such as red sunsets occurred. The sun goes down, the sun comes up—of course now we know it doesn’t: Galileo and Coperni- cus tore holes in that notion of world. Likewise, as soon as humans know about climate, weather becomes a flimsy, superficial appearance that is a mere local representation of some much larger phenomenon that is strictly invisible. You can’t see or smell climate. Given our brains’ processing power, we can’t even really think about it all that concretely. At the very least, world means significantly less than it used to—it doesn’t mean “sig- nificant for humans” or even “significant for conscious entities.”

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A simple experiment demonstrates plainly that world is an aesthetic phenomenon. I call it The Lord of the Rings vs. the Ball Popper Test. For this experiment you will need a copy of The Two Towers, the second part of director Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.6 You will also require a Playskool Busy Ball Popper, made by Hasbro. Now play the scene that I consider to be the absolute nadir of horror, when Frodo, captured by Faramir, is staggering around the bombed-out city Osgiliath when a Nazgul (a ringwraith) attacks on a “fell beast,” a terrifying winged dragon-like creature.

Switch on the Ball Popper. You will notice the inane tunes that the Popper plays instantly undermine the coherence of Peter Jackson’s nar- rative world.

The idea of world depends on all kinds of mood lighting and mood music, aesthetic effects that by definition contain a kernel of sheer ridic - ulous meaninglessness. It’s the job of serious Wagnerian worlding to erase the trace of this meaninglessness. Jackson’s trilogy surely is Wag- nerian, a total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk) in which elves, dwarves, and men have their own languages, their own tools, their own architec- ture, done to fascist excess as if they were different sports teams. But it’s easy to recover the trace of meaninglessness from this seamless world— absurdly easy, as the toy experiment proves. In effect, this stupid kids’ toy “translated” the movie, clashing with it and altering it in its own limited and unique way.

Objections to wind farms and solar arrays are often based on argu- ments that they “spoil the view.”7 The aesthetics of Nature truly impedes ecology, and a good argument for why ecology must be without Nature. How come a wind turbine is less beautiful than an oil pipe? How come it “spoils the view” any more than pipes and roads? You could see turbines as environmental art. Wind chimes play in the wind; some environmen- tal sculptures sway and rock in the breeze. Wind farms have a slightly frightening size and magnificence. One could easily read them as em - bodying the aesthetics of the sublime (rather than the beautiful). But it’s an ethical sublime, one that says, “We humans choose not to use car- bon”—a choice visible in gigantic turbines. Perhaps it’s this very visi- bility of choice that makes wind farms disturbing: visible choice, rather

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than secret pipes, running under an apparently undisturbed “landscape” (a word for a painting, not actual trees and water). As a poster in the office of Mulder in the television series The X-Files says, “The Truth Is Out There.” Ideology is not just in your head. It’s in the shape of a Coke bottle. It’s in the way some things appear “natural”—rolling hills and greenery—as if the Industrial Revolution had never occurred, and more- over, as if agriculture was Nature. The “landscape” look of agriculture is the original “greenwashing.” Objectors to wind farms are not saying “Save the environment!” but “Leave our dreams undisturbed!” World is an aesthetic construct that depends on things like underground oil and gas pipes. A profound political act would be to choose another aesthetic construct, one that doesn’t require smoothness and distance and coolness. World is by no means doing what it should to help eco- logical criticism. Indeed, the more data we have, the less it signifies a coherent world.

World is a function of a very long-lasting and complex set of social forms that we could roughly call the logistics of agriculture. New Zealand is an astonishing place where there are fifteen sheep for every human, a hyperbolic blowup of the English Lake District. It was deliberately man- ufactured that way. World is not just an idea in your head. It’s in the way the fields roll toward a horizon, on top of which a red setting sun augurs peace and contentment. It’s in the smooth, lawn-like texture of sheep- nibbled grass: “First the labourers are driven from the land, and then the sheep arrive.”8 Wind farms are an eyesore on this aestheticized land- scape. Agriculture, in this view, is an ancient technological world-picture, to use Heidegger’s terms: a form of framing that turns reality into so much stuff on tap (Bestand).9 Agriculture is a major contributor to global warming, not just because of flatulent cows, but because of the enormous technical machinery that goes into creating the agricultural stage set, the world. Perhaps the solution to this is suggested by the kinds of “perverse” technologies developed by pot farmers: to create intensive growth in a small space. Just as the porn industry accelerated the development of the Internet, so the drug industry might be our ecological savior. Stranger things have happened. Preserving the agricultural world picture just as it is, however, has already become a costly disaster.

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To return to an example close to New Zealand’s heart, The Lord of the Rings presents an agricultural landscape that never explains itself. Sure, the Rangers such as Aragorn protect it. But how does it work? For whom and with whom is the growing and the harvesting and the selling done? Hobbiton is constructed to induce nostalgia for a suburban future that thinks itself as a Georgic idyll. To do so requires all kinds of lighting, ren- dering, and mood music—it also requires the threats of Mordor and orcs that make us care about bland suburbia. Just changing the Wagnerian music would destroy its delicate “balance.”

Village Homes is a world-like real illusion that rests in the northwest area of Davis, California. Each street is named after a place or person in The Lord of the Rings: Evenstar Lane, Bombadil Lane. The streets are concentric yet nontopologically equivalent, so there is a real feeling of being lost in there. There are vineyards and pomegranate trees. There is a village-green-like space with an amphitheater built into the grass. There is a children’s day care called Rivendell. It is all very beautiful; it’s very well done. There is already a nostalgia for the present there, not simply for Tolkien, but for an ecological vision of the 1970s when Village Homes was designed. There is one slight problem: you have to have an awful lot of money to live there. And there is a rule that you have to work in the collective allotments. As a friend quipped, “One homeowner’s association to rule them all.”

There are many reasons why, even if world were a valid concept alto- gether, it shouldn’t be used as the basis for ethics. Consider only this: witch ducking stools constitute a world just as much as hammers. There was a wonderful world of witch ducking in the Middle Ages in which witches were “discovered” by drowning them, strapped to an apparatus that submerged them in the local stream: if the supposed witch didn’t drown, she was a witch—and should thus be burned at the stake. Witch ducking stools constituted a world for their users in every meaningful sense. There is a world of Nazi regalia. Just because the Nazis had a world, doesn’t mean we should preserve it. So the argument that “It’s good be - cause it constitutes a world” is flimsy at best. The reason not to interfere with the environment because it’s interfering with someone’s or some- thing’s world is nowhere near a good enough reason. It might even have

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pernicious consequences. World and worlding are a dangerously weak link in the series of late-Heideggerian concepts.10 It is as if humans are losing both their world and their idea of world (including the idea that they ever had a world) at one and the same time, a disorienting fact. In this historical moment, working to transcend our notion of world is important. Like a mannerist painting that stretches the rules of classicism to a breaking point, global warming has stretched our world to breaking point. Human beings lack a world for a very good reason: because no entity at all has a world, or as Harman puts it, “There is no such thing as a ‘horizon.’”11 The “world” as the significant totality of what is the case is strictly unimaginable, and for a good reason: it doesn’t exist.

What is left if we aren’t the world? Intimacy. We have lost the world but gained a soul—the entities that coexist with us obtrude on our awareness with greater and greater urgency. Three cheers for the so-called end of the world, then, since this moment is the beginning of history, the end of the human dream that reality is significant for them alone. We now have the prospect of forging new alliances between humans and non- humans alike, now that we have stepped out of the cocoon of world.

About six minutes into Pierre Boulez’s piece Répons, the percussive instruments come in. They surround the smoother instruments (brass, strings), which are playing in a square in the center of the concert hall. The percussive instruments (piano, dulcimer, harp, and so on) are pro - cessed through various delays and filters. The sound of their entry is now evocative of speculative realism: the sound of a vaster world bursting into the human, or the reverse, the sound of a trapdoor opening in a plane, or the plane itself disappearing so we find ourselves in the wide blue sky. A terrifying, wonderful sound, the Kantian sublime of inner free- dom giving way to a speculative sublime of disturbing intimacy. The sound of the end of the world but not an apocalypse, not a predictable conclusion. The sound of something beginning, the sound of discover- ing yourself inside of something. Boulez himself probably thought Répons was about the sound of modern human technology, Gesellschaft (mod- ern “society”) impinging on Gemeinschaft (the “organic community”), and so forth. Or the idea of a dialogue between equal partners, a dialec- tical play between the organic and electronic. The piece is much more

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that that. It’s the sound of real entities appearing to humans. But as I’ve been arguing, real nonhuman entities appear to humans at first as blips on their monitors. But they are not those blips. The sound of a higher- dimensional configuration space impinging on extreme Western music (total serialism). The sound of hyperobjects. The sound of a nonmusic. Listen to the very end: the sound echoes and reverberates, repeating glis- sandos; then, suddenly, it’s over. No fade out. Robert Cahen captures it well in his deceptively simple film of Répons, visualizing the “human sounds” as a traditional orchestral ensemble juxtaposed with revolving and panning shots of trees, and the percussive sounds as humans medi- ated by a luminous ocean.12 When the percussive instruments enter, the camera on the orchestra pans back to reveal them surrounding the other players, and we see the studio lighting rig, as if the structures that hold the fragile fiction of world together have evaporated. Just as most of Earth’s surface is water, the sonic space is surrounded by the chilling, sparkling sounds of piano, harp, and glockenspiel.

Instead of trying constantly to tweak an illusion, thinking and art and political practice should simply relate directly to nonhumans. We will never “get it right” completely. But trying to come up with the best world is just inhibiting ecological progress. Art and architecture in the time of hyperobjects must (automatically) directly include hyperobjects, even when they try to ignore them. Consider the contemporary urge to max- imize throughput: to get dirty air flowing with air conditioners. Air con- ditioning is now the benchmark of comfort; young Singaporeans are starting to sweat out of doors, habituated to the homogeneous thermal comfort of modern buildings.13 Such architecture and design is predicated on the notion of “away.” But there is no “away” after the end of the world. It would make more sense to design in a dark ecological way, admitting our coexistence with toxic substances we have created and exploited. Thus, in 2002 the architectural firm R&Sie designed Dusty Relief, an electrostatic building in Bangkok that would collect the dirt around it, rather than try to shuffle it somewhere else (Figures 11 and 12).14 Even- tually the building would be coated with a gigantic fur coat of dirt.15

Such new ideas are counterintuitive from the standpoint of regular post-1970s environmentalism. Process relationism has been the presiding

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deity of this thinking, insofar as it thinks flows are better than solids. But thinking this way on a planetary scale becomes absurd. Why is it bet- ter to stir the shit around inside the toilet bowl faster and faster rather than just leaving it there? Monitoring, regulating, and controlling flows: Is ecological ethics and politics just this? Regulating flows and send- ing them where you think they need to go is not relating to nonhumans. Regulation of flows is just a contemporary mode of window dressing of the substances of ontotheological nihilism, the becomings and processes with which Nietzsche wanted to undermine philosophy.

Figure 11. New Territories/R&Sie, Dusty Relief (2002). By François Roche, Stephanie Lavaux, and Jean Navarro. Contemporary architecture and design is thinking beyond models based on vectors and flow. When one considers Earth or the biosphere as a whole, pushing pollution “somewhere else” is only redistributing it, sweeping it under the carpet. Reproduced by permission.

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The common name for managing and regulating flows is sustainability. But what exactly is being sustained? “Sustainable capitalism” might be one of those contradictions in terms along the lines of “military intelligence.”16 Capital must keep on producing more of itself in order to continue to be itself. This strange paradox is fundamentally, structurally imbalanced. Consider the most basic process of capitalism: the turning of raw mate- rials into products. Now for a capitalist, the raw materials are not strictly natural. They simply exist prior to whatever labor process the capitalist is going to exert on them. Surely here we see the problem. Whatever exists prior to the specific labor process is a lump that only achieves defi- nition as valuable product once the labor has been exerted on it.

Figure 12. New Territories/R&Sie, Dusty Relief (2002). By François Roche, Stephanie Lavaux, and Jean Navarro. An electrostatic building attracts pollution rather than redistributing it. The proposed building is an art gallery, speaking to ways in which care for hyperobjects is now redefining the aesthetic. Reproduced by permission.

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What capitalism makes is some kind of stuff called capital. The very definition of “raw materials” in economic theory is simply “the stuff that comes in through the factory door.” Again, it doesn’t matter what it is. It could be sharks or steel bolts. At either end of the process we have fea- tureless chunks of stuff—one of those featureless chunks being human labor. The point is to convert the stuff that comes in to money. Industrial capitalism is philosophy incarnate in stocks, girders, and human sweat. What philosophy? If you want a “realism of the remainder,” just look around you. “Realism of the remainder” means that yes, for sure, there is something real outside of our access to it—but we can only classify it as an inert resistance to our probing, a grey goo, to adapt a term suggested by thinking about nanotechnology—tiny machines eating everything until reality becomes said goo.

It’s no wonder that industrial capitalism has turned the Earth into a dangerous desert. It doesn’t really care what comes through the factory door, just as long as it generates more capital. Do we want to sustain a world based on a philosophy of grey goo? (Again, the term that some futurologists use to describe the nightmare of nanoscale robots mashing everything up into a colorless morass.) Nature is the featureless remain- der at either end of the process of production. Either it’s exploitable stuff, or value-added stuff. Whatever it is, it’s basically featureless, abstract, grey. It has nothing to do with nematode worms and orangutans, organic chemicals in comets and rock strata. You can scour the earth, from a mountaintop to the Marianas Trench. You will never find Nature. It’s an empty category looking for something to fill it.

Rather than only evaporating everything into a sublime ether (Marx via Macbeth: “All that is solid melts into air”), capitalism also requires and keeps firm long-term inertial structures such as families, as Fernand Braudel explored.17 The Koch brothers and GE are two contemporary examples. One part of capital, itself a hyperobject, is its relentless revo- lutionizing of its mode of production. But the other part is tremendous inertia. And the tremendous inertia happens to be on the side of the modern. That is, the political ontology in which there is an “away.” But there is no “away” in the time of hyperobjects.

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Capitalism did away with feudal and prefeudal myths such as the divine hierarchy of classes of people. In so doing, however, it substituted a giant myth of its own: Nature. Nature is precisely the lump that exists prior to the capitalist labor process. Heidegger has the best term for it: Bestand (standing reserve). Bestand means “stuff,” as in the ad from the 1990s, “Drink Pepsi: Get Stuff.” There is an ontology implicit in capitalist production: materialism as defined by Aristotle. This specific form of materialism is not fascinated with material objects in all their manifold specificity. It’s just stuff. This viewpoint is the basis of Aristotle’s problem with materialism. Have you ever seen or handled matter? Have you ever held a piece of “stuff”? To be sure one has seen plenty of objects: Santa Claus in a department store, snowflakes, photographs of atoms. But have I ever seen matter or stuff as such? Aristotle says it’s a bit like searching through a zoo to find the “animal” rather than the various species such as monkeys and mynah birds.18 Marx says exactly the same thing regard- ing capital.19 As Nature goes, so goes matter. The two most progressive physical theories of our age, ecology and quantum theory, need have nothing to do with it.

What is Bestand? Bestand is stockpiling. Row upon row of big box houses waiting to be inhabited. Terabyte after terabyte of memory wait- ing to be filled. Stockpiling is the art of the zeugma—the yoking of things you hear in phrases such as “wave upon wave” or “bumper to bumper.” Stockpiling is the dominant mode of social existence. Giant parking lots empty of cars, huge tables in restaurants across which you can’t hold hands, vast empty lawns. Nature is stockpiling. Range upon range of mountains, receding into the distance. Rocky Flats nuclear bomb trig- ger factory was sited precisely to evoke this mountainous stockpile. The eerie strangeness of this fact confronts us with the ways in which we still believe that Nature is “over there”—that it exists apart from technology, apart from history. Far from it. Nature is the stockpile of stockpiles.

What exactly are we sustaining when we talk about sustainability? An intrinsically out-of-control system that sucks in grey goo at one end and pushes out grey value at the other. It’s Natural goo, Natural value. Result? Mountain ranges of inertia, piling higher every year, while humans boil

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away in the agony of uncertainty. Look at Manufactured Landscapes, the ocean of telephone dials, dials as far as the eye can see, somewhere in China.20 Or consider the gigantic billowing waves of plastic cups created by Tara Donovan in Untitled (Plastic Cups) (2006; Figure 13). In massive piles, the cups reveal properties hidden from the view of a person who uses a single cup at a time, a viscous (in my terms) malleability. In Dono- van’s title, “cups” are in parentheses, the “untitled” outside parenthesis, as if to highlight the way the cups are “saying” something beyond their human use: something unspeakable for a human. The title of no-title places the work both inside and outside human social and philosophical space, like a garbage dump, an idea the gigantic pile surely evokes.

Societies embody philosophies. What we have in modernity is consid- erably worse than just instrumentality. Here we must depart from Hei- degger. What’s worse is the location of essence in some beyond, away from any specific existence. To this extent, capitalism is itself Heideggerian!

Figure 13. Tara Donovan, Untitled (Plastic Cups) (2006), plastic cups, dimensions variable. A billowing cloud of plastic made of mundane cups. Donovan plays with the disorienting way in which the human ability to calculate scale evokes strange entities that exist as much as a single plastic cup, but that occupy a dimension that is less available (or wholly unavailable) to mundane human perception. Photograph by Ellen Labenski. Copyright Tara Donovan, courtesy of Pace Gallery. Reproduced by permission.

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Whether we call it scientism, deconstruction, relationism, or good-old- fashioned Platonic forms, there is no essence in what exists. Either the beyond is itself nonexistent (as in deconstruction or nihilism), or it’s some kind of real away from “here.” The problem, then, is not essential- ism but this very notion of a beyond. This beyond is what Tara Donovan’s work destroys.

Tony Hayward was the CEO of BP at the time of the Deepwater Hori- zon oil pipe explosion, and his callousness made international headlines. Hayward said that the Gulf of Mexico was a huge body of water, and that the spill was tiny by comparison. Nature would absorb the industrial accident. I don’t want to quibble about the difference in size between the Gulf and the spill, as if an even larger spill would somehow have gotten it into Hayward’s thick head that it was bad news. I simply want to point out the metaphysics involved in Hayward’s assertion, which we could call capitalist essentialism. The essence of reality is capital and Nature. Both exist in an ethereal beyond. Over here, where we live, is an oil spill. But don’t worry. The beyond will take care of it.

Meanwhile, despite Nature, despite grey goo, real things writhe and smack into one another. Some leap out because industry malfunctions, or functions only too well. Oil bursts out of its ancient sinkhole and floods the Gulf of Mexico. Gamma rays shoot out of plutonium for twenty-four thousand years. Hurricanes congeal out of massive storm systems, fed by the heat from the burning of fossil fuels. The ocean of telephone dials mounts ever higher. Paradoxically, capitalism has unleashed myr- iad objects upon us, in their manifold horror and sparkling splendor. Two hundred years of idealism, two hundred years of seeing humans at the center of existence, and now the objects take revenge, terrifyingly huge, ancient, long-lived, threateningly minute, invading every cell in our body. When we flush the toilet, we imagine that the U-bend takes the waste away into some ontologically alien realm.21 Ecology is now begin- ning to tell us about something very different: a flattened world with- out ontological U-bends. A world in which there is no “away.” Marx was partly wrong, then, when in The Communist Manifesto he claimed that in capitalism all that is solid melts into air. He didn’t see how a hypersolidity oozes back into the emptied-out space of capitalism. This oozing real can

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no longer be ignored, so that even when the spill is supposedly “gone and forgotten,” there it is, mile upon mile of strands of oil just below the sur- face, square mile upon square mile of ooze floating at the bottom of the ocean.22 It can’t be gone and forgotten—even ABC News knows that now.

When I hear the word “sustainability” I reach for my sunscreen. The deep reason for why sustainability fails as a concept has to do

with how we are not living in a world. It is thus time to question the very term ecology, since ecology is the thinking of home, and hence world (oikos plus logos). In a reality without a home, without world, what this study calls objects are what constitute reality. Objects are unique. Objects can’t be reduced to smaller objects or dissolved upward into larger ones. Objects are withdrawn from one another and from themselves. Objects are Tardis-like, larger on the inside than they are on the outside. Objects are uncanny. Objects compose an untotalizable nonwhole set that defies holism and reductionism. There is thus no top object that gives all objects value and meaning, and no bottom object to which they can be reduced. If there is no top object and no bottom object, it means that we have a very strange situation in which there are more parts than there are wholes.23 This makes holism of any kind totally impossible.

Even if you bracket off a vast amount of reality, you will find that there is no top and bottom object in the small section you’ve demarcated. Even if you select only a sector of reality to study somewhere in the middle, like they do in ecological science (the mesocosm), you will also find no top or bottom object, even as it pertains to that sector alone. It’s like a magnet. If you cut it, the two halves still have a north and a south pole. There is no such thing as “half ” a magnet versus a “whole” one.

Why is holism such a bad idea? Surely there could be other possible holisms that adopt some version of both–and thinking so that neither the parts nor the whole—whatever the whole might be—are greater. Perhaps the parts are not necessarily lesser than the whole but exist in some both–and synergistic fashion; you could have—simultaneously— “withdrawn” objects and something else (just to satisfy our modern need for things that aren’t static, let’s say an open-ended, possibly always- expanding, something else).

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First, we must walk through some semirelated points about this line of questioning. It sounds like good value to have “both–and” rather than “either–or,” to our somewhat consumerist minds (“buy one get one free”). But I’m afraid this is a case of either–or: holism or not. The parts are not replaceable components of the whole. The more we open up the Russian doll of an object, the more objects we find inside. Far more than the first object in the series, because all the relations between the objects and within them also count as objects. It’s what Lacanians call a not-all set. Objects in this sense are fundamentally not subject to phallogocentric rule. (Commercial break: If you’re having trouble with “object” at this point, why not try another term, such as “entity”?) What we encounter in OOO, which I have been expounding in these last couple of pages, is a Badiou-like set theory in which any number of affiliations between objects can be drawn. The contents of these sorts of sets are bigger than the container.

Sometimes children’s books explore deep ontological issues. The title of A House Is a House for Me couldn’t be better for a book about ecology (see my observation above about oikos and logos). The text is a wonder- fully jumbly plethora of objects:

Cartons are houses for crackers. Castles are houses for kings. The more that I think about houses, The more things are houses for things.24

Home, oikos, is unstable. Who knows where it stops and starts? The poem presents us with an increasingly dizzying array of objects. They can act as homes for other objects. And of course, in turn, these homes can find themselves on the inside of other “homes.”

“Home” is purely “sensual”: it has to do with how an object finds itself inevitably on the inside of some other object. The instability of oikos, and thus of ecology itself, has to do with this feature of objects. A “house” is the way an object experiences the entity in whose interior it finds itself. So then these sorts of things are also houses:

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A mirror’s a house for reflections . . . A throat is a house for a hum . . . . . . A book is a house for a story. A rose is a house for a smell. My head is a house for a secret, A secret I never will tell. A flower’s at home in a garden. A donkey’s at home in a stall. Each creature that’s known has a house of its own And the earth is a house for us all.25

The time of hyperobjects is the time during which we discover our- selves on the inside of some big objects (bigger than us, that is): Earth, global warming, evolution. Again, that’s what the eco in ecology origi- nally means: oikos, home. The last two lines of A House Is a House for Me make this very clear.

To display the poem’s effortless brio, a lot of silly, fun “houses” are pre- sented in the penultimate section as we hurry toward the conclusion, which then sets the record straight by talking about a “real” house, the Earth. But this is not the case. OOO doesn’t claim that any object is “more real” than any other. But it does discount some objects, which it calls sen- sual objects. What is a sensual object? A sensual object is an appearance-for another object. The table-for my pencil is a sensual object. The table-for my eyes is a sensual object. The table-for my dinner is a sensual object. Sensual objects are wonderfully, disturbingly entangled in one another. This is where causality happens, not in some mechanical basement. This is where the magical illusion of appearance happens. A mirror’s a house for reflections. Yes, the mesh (the interrelatedness of everything) is a sen- sual object! Strange strangers are the real objects! Some very important entities that environmentalism thinks of as real, such as Nature, are also sensual objects. They appear “as” what they are for an experiencer or user or apprehender. They are manifestations of what Harman calls the as- structure.26 They are as-structured even though they appear to be some deep background to (human) events.

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This confusion of sensual and real, in the terms of A House Is House for Me, is like thinking that bread really is a house for jam, and jam alone. Rather than simply an idea that occurs to me, and perhaps to the jam, when it finds itself slathered in there. Marmalade wants in on the bread? Too bad, marmalade is an artificial, unnatural parasite! Peanut butter? Illegal alien! Only jam is “natural,” such that bread is only made-for- jam. See the problem with Nature? In OOO-ese, reification is precisely the reduction of a real object to its sensual appearance-for another object. Reification is the reduction of one entity to another’s fantasy about it.

Nature is a reification in this sense. That’s why we need ecology with- out Nature. Maybe if we turn Nature into something more fluid, it would work. Emergence is also a sensual object. And thus it’s in danger of doing the work of reifying—strangely enough, given its reputation as an un- reified, flowy thing, despite its popularity as a replacement for terms such as nature. Emergence is always emergence-for. Yet there is a deeper way to think emergence. Physis, emergence, sway, the way a flower unfurls, seeming, upsurge of Being, are some of the terms Heidegger uses to char- acterize what he considers to be the primary notion of the ancient Greek philosophers. There is an appearing-to, an emerging-for, going on. Being is not separated from seeming, at the most fundamental stage of Heideg- ger’s account. And so there is no reason why a poem can’t be construed as a physical object in as rich a sense as you like. It’s only counterintuitive if you think that entities come with two floors: basement mechanics and a pretty living room on top. But for OOO, Heidegger’s terms for being are simply elaborations on the as-structure. Whether you call it emer- gence or appearance, what we are talking about is a sensual object.

Thinking on a planetary scale means waking up inside an object, or rather a series of “objects wrapped in objects”: Earth, the biosphere, cli- mate, global warming.27 Ecological being-with does not mean dusting some corner of an object so one doesn’t feel too dirty. Ecological being- with has to do with acknowledging a radical uniqueness and withdrawal of things, not some vague sludge of apeiron (using Anaximander’s term for “the limitless”). A circle, not an endless line, is a better emblem for the constraint, yet openness, of things.28 Indeed, the vague sludge is pre- cisely the problem of pollution. Process relationism is simply the last

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philosophical reflex of the modernity that creates the sludge. We need a philosophy of sparkling unicities; quantized units that are irreducible to their parts or to some larger whole; sharp, specific units that are not dependent on an observer to make them real.

These are considerations concerning the normative value of differ- ent ontologies. But there is a deeper reason why hyperobjects are best seen not as processes, but as real entities in their own right. Seen from a suitably high dimension, a process just is a static object. I would appear like a strange worm with a cradle at one end and a grave at the other, in the eyes of a four-dimensional being. This is not to see things sub specie aeternitatis, but as I argued previously, sub specie majoris: from a slightly higher-dimensional perspective. Processes are sophisticated from a lower-dimensional viewpoint. If we truly want to transcend anthro- pocentrism, this might not be the way to go. To think some things as processes is ironically to reify them as much as the enemy of the process philosopher supposedly sees things as static lumps. As static lumps go, Lorenz Attractors are pretty cool. Processes are equally reifications of real entities. A process is a sensual translation, a parody of a higher- dimensional object by a lower-dimensional being. A hyperobject is like a city—indeed a city such as London could provide a good example of a hyperobject. Cities and hyperobjects are full of strange streets, aban- doned entrances, cul-de-sacs, and hidden interstitial regions.

The Nuclear Guardianship movement advocates an approach to nuclear materials that is strikingly similar to the way in which the elec- trostatic building simply accumulates dirt without shunting it under the rug.29 There is no away to which we can meaningfully sweep the radio- active dust. Nowhere is far enough or long-lasting enough. What must happen instead is that we must care consciously for nuclear materials, which means keeping them above ground in monitored retrievable stor- age until they are no longer radioactive. Remember that the half-life of plutonium-239 is 24,100 years. That’s almost as long into the future as the Chauvet Cave paintings are in our past. The future of plutonium exerts a causal influence on the present, casting its shadow backward through time. All kinds of options are no longer thinkable without a deliberate concealment of the reality of radioactive objects. Far, far more effort

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must be put into monitored retrievable storage than Thomas Sebeok’s disturbing idea of an “atomic priesthood” that enforces ignorance about the hyperobject in question.30 The documentary Into Eternity explores the immense challenge that the now immense heap of nuclear materials on Earth pose to thinking and to democracy.31 The film is narrated for a far future addressee, displacing the spurious now, which we habitually think as a point or a small, rigid bubble.

Guardianship, care—to curate is to care for. We are the curators of a gigantic museum of non-art in which we have found ourselves, a spontaneous museum of hyperobjects. The very nature of democracy and society—Whom does it contain? Only humans? Whom, if any, can it exclude?—is thrown into question. The atomic priesthood would pre- vent others from knowing the truth.32 The attempt to care for hyper- objects and for their distant future guardians will strikingly change how humans think about themselves and their relationships with nonhumans. This change will be a symptom of a gradually emerging ecological the- ory and practice that includes social policy, ethics, spirituality, and art, as well as science. Humans become, in Heidegger’s words, the guard- ians of futurality, “the stillness of the passing of the last god.”33 Nuclear Guardianship has suggested encasing plutonium in gold, that precious object of global reverence and lust, rather than sweeping it away out of view. Encased in gold, which has the advantage of absorbing gamma rays, plutonium could become an object of contemplation. Set free from use, plutonium becomes a member of a democracy expanded beyond the human. Nature as such is a byproduct of automation. By embracing the hyperobjects that loom into our social space, and dropping Nature, world, and so on, we have a chance to create more democratic modes of coexistence between humans and with nonhumans. But these modes are not discernible within traditional Western parameters, since future generations—and further futures than that, are now included on “this” side of any ethical or political decision.34

Nuclear Guardianship sees nuclear materials as a unit: a hyperobject. This vision summons into human fields of thinking and action some- thing that is already there. The summoning is to nuclear materials to join humans in social space, rather than remain on the outside. Or better, it’s

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an acknowledgment by humans that nuclear materials are already occu- pying social space. It’s an intrinsically scary thought. But wishing not to think it is just postponing the inevitable. To wish this thought away is tantamount to the cleanup operations that simply sweep the contami- nated dust, garbage, and equipment away to some less politically power- ful constituency. As a member of society, nuclear materials are a unit, a quantum that is not reducible to its parts or reducible upward into some greater whole. Nuclear materials constitute a unicity: finitude means just this. Nuclear materials may present us with a very large finitude, but not an infinitude. They simply explode what we mean by finitude. They are not objective lumps limited in time and space, but unique beings.35 They have everything that Heidegger argues is unique to Dasein.

Hyperobjects are futural, as the section “Interobjectivity” demon- strated. They scoop out the objectified now of the present moment into a shifting uncertainty. Hyperobjects loom into human time like the length- ening shadow of a tree across the garden lawn in the bright sunshine of an ending afternoon. The end of the world is not a sudden punctua- tion point, but rather it is a matter of deep time. Twenty-four thousand years into the future, no one will be meaningfully related to me. Yet everything will be influenced by the tiniest decisions I make right now.36 Inside the hyperobject nuclear radiation, I am like a prisoner, and a future person is like another prisoner. We are kept strictly apart, yet I guess his existence. There is a rumor going around the prison. If I make a deal with the police and pin the blame for my crime on the other pris- oner, and he says nothing, I can go free and he receives a longer sentence. However, if I say nothing and he says nothing together, we both get a minor sentence. Yet if we both betray the other, we receive an even longer sentence. I can never be sure what the other will do. It would be optimal if I emphasize my self-interest above all other considerations. Yet it would be best if I act with a regard to the well-being of the other prisoner.

This is the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In 1984 Derek Parfit published the groundbreaking Reasons and Persons, a book that exploded long-held prejudices about utility and ethics from within utilitarianism itself. Parfit showed that no self-interest ethical theory, no matter how modified,

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can succeed against such dilemmas.37 Specifically Parfit has in mind hyperobjects, things such as pollution and nuclear radiation that will be around long after anyone meaningfully related to me exists. Since in turn my every smallest action affects the future at such a range, it is as if with every action I am making a move in a massive highly iterated Pris- oner’s Dilemma game. We might as well rename it Jonah’s Dilemma or the Dilemma of the Interior of a Hyperobject. Default capitalist econom- ics is rational choice theory, which is deeply a self-interest theory. Yet the Prisoner’s Dilemma indicates we’re profoundly social beings. Even self- interest accounts for the other somehow.

Parfit subjects an astonishing array of self-interest theories (variously modified to include relatives, friends, neighbors, descendants, and so on) to numerous tests based on the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The Prisoner’s Dilemma encourages one to think about how change begins: one thinks of the other, one brings the other into decisions that are supposedly about one’s self-interest. To this extent the Prisoner’s Dilemma is formally col- lectivist even though it lacks a positive collectivist or socialist content. The kinds of compromise necessitated by the Prisoner’s Dilemma may strike ideological purists as weak. It is precisely this weakness that makes the so-called compromises workable and just. Imagine a future self with interests so different from one’s own that to some extent she or he consti - tutes a different self: not your reincarnation or someone else—you your- self. This person in the future is like the prisoner being interrogated in the other room. The future self is thus unimaginably distant in one sense, and yet hyperobjects have brought her into the adjoining prison cell. She is strange yet intimate. The best course of action is to act with regard to her. This radical letting go of what constitutes a self has become nec- essary because of hyperobjects. The weakness of this ethical position is determined by the radical withdrawal of the future being: I can never fully experience, explain, or otherwise account for her, him, or it. The end of the world is a time of weakness.

The ethics that can handle hyperobjects is directed toward the un - known and unknowable future, the future that Jacques Derrida calls l’avenir.38 Not the future we can predict and manage, but an unknowable future, a genuinely future future. In the present moment, we must develop

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an ethics that addresses what Derrida calls l’arrivant, the absolutely un - expected and unexpectable arrival, or what I call the strange stranger, the stranger whose strangeness is forever strange—it cannot be tamed or rationalized away. This stranger is not so unfamiliar: uncanny familiar- ity is one of the strange stranger’s traits. Only consider anyone who has a long-term partner: the person they wake up with every day is the strangest person they know. The future future and the strange stranger are the weird and unpredictable entities that honest ecological thinking compels us to think about. When we can see that far into the future and that far around Earth, a curious blindness afflicts us, a blindness far more mysterious than simple lack of sight, since we can precisely see so much more than ever. This blindness is a symptom of an already- existing intimacy with all lifeforms, knowledge of which is now thrust on us whether we like it or not.

Parfit’s assault on utilitarian self-interest takes us to the point at which we realize that we are not separate from our world. Humans must learn to care for fatal substances that will outlast them and their descendants beyond any meaningful limit of self-interest. What we need is an ethics of the other, an ethics based on the proximity of the stranger. The deci- sion in the 1990s, rapidly overturned, to squirrel plutonium away into knives and forks and other domestic objects appears monstrous, and so would any attempt to “work” it into something convenient. Hyperobjects insist that we care for them in the open. “Out of sight, out of mind” is strictly untenable. There is no “away” to throw plutonium in. We are stuck with it, in the same way as we are stuck with our biological bod- ies. Plutonium finds itself in the position of the “neighbor” in Abrahamic religions—that awkward condition of being alien and intimate at the very same time.

The enormity of very large finitude hollows out my decisions from the inside. Now every time I so much as change a confounded light bulb, I have to think about global warming. It is the end of the world, because I can see past the lip of the horizon of human worlding. Global warm- ing reaches into “my world” and forces me to use LEDs instead of bulbs with filaments. This aspect of the Heideggerian legacy begins to teeter under the weight of the hyperobject. The normative defense of worlds

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looks wrongheaded.39 The ethical and political choices become much clearer and less divisive if we begin to think of pollution and global warming and radiation as effects of hyperobjects rather than as flows or processes that can be managed. These flows are often eventually shunted into some less powerful group’s backyard. The Native American tribe must deal with the radioactive waste. The African American family must deal with the toxic chemical runoff. The Nigerian village must deal with the oil slick. Rob Nixon calls this the slow violence of ecological oppres- sion.40 It is helpful to think of global warming as something like an ultra slow motion nuclear bomb. The incremental effects are almost invisible, until an island disappears underwater. Poor people—who include most of us on Earth at this point—perceive the ecological emergency not as degrading an aesthetic picture such as world but as an accumulation of violence that nibbles at them directly.

Without a world, there are simply a number of unique beings (farm- ers, dogs, irises, pencils, LEDs, and so on) to whom I owe an obligation through the simple fact that existence is coexistence. I don’t have to run through my worlding checklist to ensure that the nonhuman in question counts as something I could care for. “If you answered mostly (A), then you have a world. If you answered mostly (B), then you are poor in world (German, weltarm). If you answered mostly (C), then you have no world whatsoever.” What remains without a world is intimacy. Levinas touches on it in his ethics of alterity, although he is incorrect to make this other- ness as vague as the “rustling” of blank existence, the “there is” (il y a).41 The other is fully here, before I am, as Levinas argues. But the other has paws and sharp surfaces, the other is decorated with leaves, the other shines with starlight. Kafka writes:

At first glance it looks like a flat star-shaped spool for thread, and indeed it does seem to have thread wound upon it; to be sure, they are only old, broken-off bits of thread, knotted and tangled together, of the most varied sorts and colors. But it is not only a spool, for a small wooden crossbar sticks out of the middle of the star, and another small rod is joined to that at a right angle. By means of this latter rod on one side and one of the points of the star on the other, the whole thing can stand upright as if on two legs.42

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“The idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful.”43 Kafka’s Odradek resembles the hyperobject in this respect. Indeed we have let him into our home somehow, like mercury and microwaves, like the ultraviolet rays of the sun. Odradek is what confronts us at the end of the world, not with a shout but with a breathless voice “like the rustling of fallen leaves.”44 Things appear in their disturbing weakness and lameness, technical terms describing the human attunement to hyperobjects that I have begun to elucidate.

Without a world, there is no Nature. Without a world, there is no life. What exists outside the charmed circles of Nature and life is a charnel ground, a place of life and death, of death-in-life and life-in-death, an undead place of zombies, viroids, junk DNA, ghosts, silicates, cyanide, radiation, demonic forces, and pollution. My resistance to ecological awareness is a resistance to the charnel ground. It is the calling of the shaman to enter the charnel ground and to try to stay there, to pitch a tent there and live there, for as long as possible. Since there are no char- nel grounds to speak of in the West, the best analogy, used by some Tibetan Buddhists (from whom the image derives), is the emergency room of a busy hospital. People are dying everywhere. There is blood and noise, equipment rushing around, screams. When the charm of world is dispelled, we find ourselves in the emergency room of ecological coexistence.

In the charnel ground, worlds can never take root. Charnel grounds are too vivid for that. Any soft focusing begins to look like violence. Haunting a charnel ground is a much better analogy for ecological co- existence than inhabiting a world. There is something immensely sooth- ing about charnel grounds. It is what is soothing about Buddhism’s First Noble Truth, the truth of suffering. Traditionally, Buddhism recognizes three types of suffering. There is the pain of pain, as when you hit your thumb with a hammer, and then you close your whole hand in the door as you rush into the car to get to the doctor’s because of your thumb. Then there is the pain of alteration, in which you experience first plea- sure, then pain when pleasure evaporates. Then there is “all-pervasive pain,” which Chögyam Trungpa beautifully describes as a “fundamen- tal creepy quality” akin to Heidegger’s description of Angst.45 It is this

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quality that comes close to the notion of world. All-pervasive pain has to do with the fixation and confusion that constitute the Six Realms of Exis- tence (traditionally, animals, humans, gods, jealous gods, hungry ghosts, and hell). In paintings of the Wheel of Life, the Six Realms are held in the jaws of Yama, the Lord of Death.

It is this outermost perspective of the jaws of death that provides an entry point into the charnel ground. To a Buddhist, ecophenomeno- logical arguments that base ethics on our embeddedness in a lifeworld begin to look like a perverse aestheticization, celebrations of confusion and suffering for confusion’s and suffering’s sake. It doesn’t really matter what is on the TV (murder, addiction, fear, lust). Each realm of existence is just a TV show taking up “space” in the wider space of the charnel ground of reality, “the desert of the real.”46 Trebbe Johnson and others have established the practice of Global Earth Exchanges, actions of find- ing, then giving something beautiful in a “wounded place,” such as a toxic dump or a nuclear power facility.47 Or consider Buddhist practi- tioners of tonglen: “sending and taking,” a meditation practice in which one breathes out compassion for the other, while breathing in her or his suffering. Tonglen is now used in the context of polluted places. Con- sider Chöd, the esoteric ritual of visualizing cutting oneself up as a feast for the demons, another practice that has been taken on with reference to ecological catastrophes. Or consider the activities of Zen priests at the Rocky Flats nuclear bomb trigger factory, such as walking meditation.

Our actions build up a karmic pattern that looks from a reified dis- tance like a realm such as hell or heaven. But beyond the violence that we do, it’s the distance that reifies the pattern into a world picture that needs to be shattered. Whether it’s Hobbiton, or the jungles of Avatar, or the National Parks and conservation areas over yonder on the hither side of the screen (though possibly behind the windshield of an SUV), or the fields and irrigation channels on the hither side of the wilderness—it’s all a world picture. I’m not saying we need to uproot the trees—I’m saying that we need to smash the aestheticization: in case of ecological emer- gency, break glass.

Our increasing knowledge of global warming ends all kinds of ideas, but it creates other ones. The essence of these new ideas is the notion of

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coexistence—that is after all what ecology profoundly means. We co- exist with human lifeforms, nonhuman lifeforms, and non-lifeforms, on the insides of a series of gigantic entities with whom we also coexist: the ecosystem, biosphere, climate, planet, Solar System. A multiple series of nested Russian dolls. Whales within whales within whales.

Consider the hypothetical planet Tyche, far out in the Oort Cloud beyond Pluto. We can’t see it directly but we can detect evidence of its possible existence. Planets are hyperobjects in most senses. They have Gaussian geometry and measurable spacetime distortion because they are so massive. They affect everything that exists on and in them. They’re “everywhere and nowhere” up close (viscosity). (Point to Earth right now—you have a number of options of where to point.) They are really old and really huge compared with humans. And there’s something dis- turbing about the existence of a planet that far away, perhaps not even of “our” solar system originally, yet close enough to be uncanny (a very large finitude). And it’s unseen except for its hypothetical influence on objects such as comets: “The awful shadow of some unseen power,” in Shelley’s words. Tyche is a good name. It means contingency in Greek, so it’s the speculative realism planet par excellence. (“Luck” and “chance” are rather tame alternative translations. Tyche is what happens to you in a tragedy if your name is Oedipus.) And for now, what could be more obviously withdrawn?

The historic moment at which hyperobjects become visible by humans has arrived. This visibility changes everything. Humans enter a new age of sincerity, which contains an intrinsic irony that is beyond the aestheti- cized, slightly plastic irony of the postmodern age. What do I mean?

This is a momentous era, at which we achieve what has sometimes been called ecological awareness. Ecological awareness is a detailed and increasing sense, in science and outside of it, of the innumerable inter- relationships among lifeforms and between life and non-life. Now this awareness has some very strange properties. First of all, the awareness ends the idea that we are living in an environment! This is so bizarre that we should dwell on it a little. What it means is that the more we know about the interconnection, the more it becomes impossible to posit some entity existing beyond or behind the interrelated beings. When we look

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for the environment, what we find are discrete lifeforms, non-life, and their relationships. But no matter how hard we look, we won’t find a con- tainer in which they all fit; in particular we won’t find an umbrella that unifies them, such as world, environment, ecosystem, or even, astonish- ingly, Earth.

What we discover instead is an open-ended mesh that consists of grass, iron ore, Popsicles, sunlight, the galaxy Sagittarius, and mushroom spores. Earth exists, no doubt, but not as some special enormous bowl that contains all the “ecological” objects. Earth is one object coexisting with mice, sugar, elephants, and Turin. Of course there are many scen- arios in which if Earth ceased to exist, Turin and mice would be in trou- ble. But if the mice were shot into space aboard a friendly extraterrestrial freighter, Earth wouldn’t be the cause of their death. Even Turin might be rebuilt, brick by brick, on some other world.

Suddenly we discover the second astonishing thing. Mice are surely mice no matter what we call them. But mice remain mice as long as they survive to pass on their genome—it’s what neo-Darwinism calls satisfic- ing. Satisficing is a performative standard for existing. And there is no mouse-flavored DNA. There isn’t even any DNA-flavored DNA—it’s a palimpsest of mutations, viral code insertions, and so on. There isn’t even any life-flavored life. DNA requires ribosomes and ribosomes require DNA, so to break the vicious cycle, there must have been an RNA world of RNA attached to a nonorganic replicator, such as a silicate crystal. So there is a mouse—this is not a nominalist nor is it an idealist argument. But the mouse is a non-mouse, or what I call a strange stranger.48 Even more weirdly: this is why the mouse is real. The fact that wherever we look, we can’t find a mouse, is the very reason why she exists! Now we can say this about everything in the universe. But one of the most obvi- ous things we can say this about is a hyperobject. Hyperobjects are so huge and so long-lasting, compared with humans, that they obviously seem both vivid and slightly unreal, for exactly the same reasons.

Hyperobjects such as global warming and nuclear radiation surround us, not some abstract entity such as Nature or environment or world. Our reality has become more real, in the sense of more vivid and intense, and yet it has also become less knowable as some one-sided, facile thing—

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again, for exactly the same reasons. In Berkeley, California, in early 2011, radiation levels in water spiked 181 times higher than normal because of the Sendai reactor meltdowns. We know this. We know we are bathed in alpha, beta, and gamma rays emanating from the dust particles that now span the globe. These particles coexist with us. They are not part of some enormous bowl called Nature; they are beings like us, strange strangers.

Should we stop drinking water? Should we stop drinking cow’s milk because cows eat grass, which drinks rainwater? The more we know, the harder it is to make a one-sided decision about anything. As we enter the time of hyperobjects, Nature disappears and all the modern certain- ties that seemed to accompany it. What remains is a vastly more complex situation that is uncanny and intimate at the same time.

There is no exit from this situation. Thus the time of hyperobjects is a time of sincerity: a time in which it is impossible to achieve a final distance toward the world. But for this very reason, it is also a time of irony. We realize that nonhuman entities exist that are incomparably more vast and powerful than we are, and that our reality is caught in them. What things are and how they seem, and how we know them, is full of gaps, yet vividly real. Real entities contain time and space, exhi- biting nonlocal effects and other interobjective phenomena, writing us into their histories. Astonishingly, then, the mesh of interconnection is secondary to the strange stranger. The mesh is an emergent property of the things that coexist, and not the other way around. For the mod- ernist mind, accustomed to systems and structures, this is an astound- ing, shocking discovery. The more maps we make, the more real things tear through them. Nonhuman entities emerge through our mapping, then they destroy them.

Coexistence is in our face: it is our face. We are made of nonhuman and nonsentient and nonliving entities. It’s not a cozy situation: it’s a spooky, uncanny situation. We find ourselves in what robotics and CGI designers call the uncanny valley (Figure 14). It’s a commonly known phenomenon in CGI design that if you build figures that look too much like humans, you are at risk of crossing a threshold and falling into the uncanny valley (Plate 2). In the uncanny valley, beings are strangely familiar and familiarly strange. The valley seems to explain racism quite

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well, because the dehumanization suffered by victims of racism makes them more uncanny to the racist than, say, a dog or a faceless robot. Hitler was very fond of his dog Blondi and yet dehumanized Jews and others. That’s the trouble with some kinds of environmentalist language: they skip blithely over the uncanny valley to shake hands with beings on the other side. But, as I’m going to argue, there is only another side if you are holding on to some fictional idea of humanness, an idea that eco- logical awareness actually refutes. The uncanny valley, in other words, is only a valley if you already have some quite racist assumptions about lifeforms.

With ecological awareness there is no “healthy person” on the other side of the valley. Everything in your world starts to slip into the uncanny

Figure 14. Masahiro Mori’s diagram of the uncanny valley. Intimacy implies the grotesque. Since ecological awareness consists in a greater intimacy with a greater number of beings than modernity is capable of thinking, humans must pass through the uncanny valley as they begin to engage these beings. For reasons given in the book, this valley might be infinite in extent.

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valley, whose sides are infinite and slick. It’s more like an uncanny charnel ground, an ER full of living and dying and dead and newly born people, some of whom are humans, some of whom aren’t, some of whom are liv- ing, some of whom aren’t. Everything in your world starts to slip into this charnel ground situation, including your world.

Isn’t it strange that we can admire comets, black holes, and suns— entities that would destroy us if they came within a few miles of us—and we can’t get a handle on global warming? Isn’t global climate now in the uncanny valley? Doesn’t this have something to do with art? Because when you look at the stars and imagine life on other planets, you are looking through the spherical glass screen of the atmosphere at objects that appear to be behind that glass screen—for all the developments since Ptolemy, in other words, you still imagine that we exist on the inside of some pristine glass sphere. The experience of cosmic wonder is an aesthetic experience, a three-dimensional surround version of looking at a picturesque painting in an art gallery. So Jane Taylor’s Romantic- period poem “The Star” is about seeing stars through the atmosphere, in which they seem to “Twinkle, twinkle.”

Two and a half thousand people showed up at the University of Ari- zona in Tucson for a series of talks on cosmology.49 Evidently there is a thirst for thinking about the universe as a whole. Why is the same fas- cination not there for global warming? It’s because of the oppressive claustrophobic horror of actually being inside it. You can spectate “the universe” as an ersatz aesthetic object: you have the distance provided by the biosphere itself, which acts as a spherical cinema screen. Habit tells us that what’s displayed on that screen (like projections in a planetarium) is infinite, distant—the whole Kantian sublime. But inside the belly of the whale that is global warming, it’s oppressive and hot and there’s no “away” anymore. And it’s profoundly regressing: a toxic intrauterine ex - perience, on top of which we must assume responsibility for it. And what neonatal or prenatal infant should be responsible for her mother’s exis- tence? Global warming is in the uncanny valley, as far as hyperobjects go. Maybe a black hole, despite its terrifying horror, is so far away and so wondrous and so fatal (we would simply cease to exist anywhere near it) that we marvel at it, rather than try to avoid thinking about it or feel grief

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about it. The much smaller, much more immediately dangerous hole that we’re in (inside the hyperobject global warming) is profoundly disturb- ing, especially because we created it.

Now the trouble with global warming is that it’s right here. It’s not behind a glass screen. It is that glass screen, but it’s as if the glass screen starts to extrude itself toward you in a highly uncanny, scary way that violates the normal aesthetic propriety, which we know about from philosophers such as Kant—the propriety in which there should be a Goldilocks distance between you and the art object, not too close, not too far away. Global warming plays a very mean trick. It comes very, very close, crashing onto our beaches and forcing us to have cabinet meet- ings underwater to draw attention to our plight, and yet withdrawing from our grasp in the very same gesture, so that we can only represent it by using computers with tremendous processing speed.50 The whale that Jonah is inside is a higher-dimensional being than ourselves, like two- dimensional stick people relative to a three-dimensional apple. We see that we are weak, in the precise sense that our discourse and maps and plans regarding things are not those things. There is an irreducible gap.

Spookily, the picture frame starts to melt and extrude itself toward us, it starts to burn our clothing. This is not what we paid twelve bucks to see when we entered the art gallery. Human art, in the face of this melting glass screen, is in no sense public relations. It has to actually be a science, part of science, part of cognitively mapping this thing. Art has to be part of the glass itself because everything inside the biosphere is touched by global warming.

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A small boy runs in front of an oncoming truck. You watch in horror as you realize the truck can’t slow down in time. You think you should save the boy, but you are unsure. Still, the moment compels you to act: you rush into the street and grab the boy, yanking him out of the way just in time. As the truck bears down on you both, you manage to half stumble, half jump clear. The boy is safe.

You have no idea why you just did what you did. You just did it. It seemed like the right thing to do. A certain immediacy was involved, but you feel strange. You had no good reason to save the boy.

I walk down the same street two weeks later. Not having learned his lesson, the same small boy runs out in front of an oncoming truck. I think I should save him, but I’m not sure. I hesitate. I do a quick moral calculation. I believe that ethical action is based on utility, and existing as such is a good, so I think I should save the boy. Or the boy is related to me: he is my cousin, or he is my doctor’s niece’s school friend. In any case, I decide to save the boy: too late, the boy is dead.

Two weeks after that, in exactly the same spot (people wonder why accidents happen there for years afterward), another small child, a girl, runs out in front of another truck. A stranger is walking down the street. She thinks she should save the girl, but she is unsure. She does a quick series of calculations. Is the truck going so fast that it won’t be able to slow down in time? Perhaps it can slow down. Does the truck have sufficient

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momentum that even if it slowed down, it would still plough into the girl? Is the friction of the road surface enough to weaken the truck’s in- ertia and bring it to a halt even though it would continue to slide toward the girl even if the driver jammed on the breaks, all things being equal? The stranger decides that the truck will inevitably hit the girl, and she is correct: the truck did just hit the girl, killing her instantly.

It would be easy to confuse your actions—you are the one who just saves the boy, without a well-formed reason—for an irrationalist “just do it” attitude, an anti-intellectual or pseudo-Zen valuation of immediacy over reflection, doing versus thinking. But you are very intelligent. You know that all the reasons in the world are not enough of a reason to love. You just save the boy, but in doing so you experience an extraordinary feeling of uncanniness. A variation of the Talking Heads’ song “Once in a Lifetime” springs to mind: “This is not my beautiful boy, / This is not my beautiful street, / This is not my beautiful action.”1

Isn’t this precisely the situation we are in when confronted with hyper- objects? When it comes to global warming, finding a good reason for tackling it may be one of the greatest factors inhibiting actually doing anything about it. There are just not enough reasons. Global warming is what some philosophers have called a wicked problem: this is a prob- lem that one can understand perfectly, but for which there is no rational solution.2 Global warming has now been labeled a super wicked problem: a wicked problem for which time is running out, for which there is no central authority, where those seeking the solution to it are also creating it, and where policies discount the future irrationally.3

Utilitarianism is deeply flawed when it comes to working with hyper- objects. The simple reason why is that hyperobjects are profoundly futural. No self-interest theory of ethical action whatsoever, no matter how ex - tended or modified, is going to work when it comes to an object that lasts for a hundred thousand years. There is a radical asymmetry between the urgency and the passion and the horror that we feel when confronted with a hyperobject that could profoundly alter life on Earth, and the sense of cognitive weirdness and irony that we feel for exactly the same reason. The asymmetry is very refreshing, really. Hyperobjects reduce conser- vatism (what does it ever conserve?) to a vague abstraction, the sliver of

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the tip of an iceberg of false immediacy. But hyperobjects make hyp- ocrites of us all.

The weirdness and irony derive from the fact that, to adapt a telling idea of Søren Kierkegaard’s, “Inside the hyperobject we are always in the wrong.”4 Doing nothing evidently won’t do at all. Drive a Prius? Why not (I do)? But it won’t solve the problem in the long run. Sit around criti- cizing Prius drivers? Won’t help at all. Form a people’s army and seize control of the state? Will the new society have the time and resources to tackle global warming? Solar panels? They take a lot of energy to make. Nuclear power? Fukushima and Chernobyl, anyone? Stop burn- ing all fossil fuels now? Are we ready for such a colossal transition? Every position is “wrong”: every position, including and especially the know- it-all cynicism that thinks that it knows better than anything else.

The “insideness” is not (simply) a physical location. Even if you go to Mars, you have the same problem; in fact, it’s magnified since you must create a biosphere from scratch. No, this “within” the hyperobject has to do with the way in which the hyperobject distorts my idea of time. Recall the three timescales of global warming: the horrifying, the terrify- ing, and the petrifying—five hundred, thirty thousand, and one hundred thousand years respectively. These very large finitudes collapse my clichéd ideas of time from within. It isn’t that hyperobjects are special beings, like an angel or a demon or a god, sent to slap my objectification of real- ity upside the head by hurtling me into contact with a transcendental be - yond. Far from it. Hyperobjects are real things, really existing, in this physical realm. And what they perform is far subtler and more effective than an angel or a god, or a traditional Heideggerian, for whom the human is the only shepherd of being, the most uncanny of the uncanny things on Earth. Five hundred years is a “real” timescale, in the sense that it has been measured using scientific instruments to a certain degree of precision. Three hundred and fifty parts per million is a “real” num- ber, real in the sense that it fits the reified view of particles occupying points in an objective space and time. In this case, 350ppm is the upper bound of particles of carbon compounds in air that provides for a rela- tively recognizable Earth for the foreseeable future. (Earth is currently exceeding 400ppm.)

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These numbers, these reified timescales, eat away at my reification from within. Like aikido masters, they use my energy against itself. I become convinced of the uncanny futurality of nonhumans, not through some religious conversion, but through reification itself. It “sticks” much better that way. I have not been converted to the belief in a nonobjecti- fied beyond, but rather my prejudices have collapsed from within, through their very objectification. Is it possible, to lapse into Heideggerese, that hyperobjects are indeed the “last god” that appears in our world to save us from our technological manipulation? That, precisely as Heidegger argues, the cure for nihilism comes from within nihilism itself, from within the reified hyperobjects we have in part created through that very technology, whose measurements are products of the very latest, fastest, most complex performances of that same technology (complexity the- ory, mapping climate using supercomputers, and particle accelerators, for example)? This would indeed be a case of being healed by the spear that smote you (as in Wagner’s Parsifal).5

Think of the weight of the sheer numbers with which global warming is thrust on us: like something from a book of records, global warming is spectated as the biggest, the most, the hugest. This “number crunching” stance toward global warming is far from simply “scientific” or “infor- mational,” which is not to say that this is merely a matter of “culture” or “worldview.” Indeed, it directly embodies a philosophical stance that gave rise to global warming in the first place. Earth and actually existing beings that live here are bathed in a giant sea of numbers. Yet from within the nihilism of this phenomenon, which is what Heidegger calls the gigan- tic—the rise of sheer quantity—emerges the “other beginning” of history, not its end.6 The ontological, not to mention the psychic and social, econ- omy of such an arrangement is startling. I need no special props, no deus ex machina. I don’t need the apocalypse—indeed, as we saw in the previ - ous section, such thoughts inhibit intimacy with the strange strangeness of nonhumans. The trivially mathematized fact of hyperobjects’ longevity is all the help I need. It is simply a matter of getting used to this mathe- matical fact—getting used to is a fair translation of the Greek mathēsis.

Derek Parfit’s main reason for writing Reasons and Persons, as I showed in the previous section, was the existence of phenomena such

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as nuclear radiation and pollution: hyperobjects. What to do about them? Since no one meaningfully related to me will be living 24,100 years from now (the half-life of plutonium), my cognitive, ethical, and political dis- positions toward plutonium must transcend my self-interest, however widely defined. Moreover, hyperobjects last so long that utilitarian con- cepts such as the social discount rate, a sliding scale for determining the value of future people for present actions, cannot be ethically or even meaningfully applied to them.7 Hyperobjects compel us to adopt atti- tudes for which humans are not well prepared in an age of advanced con- sumer capitalism.

There is a further problem with timescales concerning global warm- ing—there are lots of them. We are dealing with an object that is not only massively distributed, but that also has different amortization rates for different parts of itself. Hyperobjects are messages in bottles from the future: they do not quite exist in a present, since they scoop the standard reference points from the idea of present time. In order to cope with them, we require theories of ethics that are based on scales and scopes that hugely transcend normative self-interest theories, even when we modify self-interest by many orders of magnitude to include several gen- erations down the line or all existing lifeforms on Earth.

Yet in transcending self-interest theories we need not throw the baby of intimacy out with the bathwater of self. Indeed, dropping self-interest theories involves us in what Parfit himself refers to as a more intimate contact with other lifeforms and future selves. In a moving passage in the middle of Reasons and Persons, a passage that is startlingly personal compared with the blisteringly rational mode of Oxbridge utilitarianism that his work exemplifies, Parfit writes:

Is the truth [of no-self ] depressing? Some may find it so. But I find it lib- erating, and consoling. When I believed that my existence was [a “deep further fact, distinct from physical and psychological continuity, and a fact that must be all-or-nothing”], I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is

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still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But that difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.8

Parfit’s words themselves exemplify the intimacy and openness to the future that a no-self view bestows. On this view, “self ” is reduced to mere physical and psychological continuity.

The no-self view is not a faceless, dehumanized abstraction, but a radical encounter with intimacy. What best explains ecological aware- ness is a sense of intimacy, not a sense of belonging to something big- ger: a sense of being close, even too close, to other lifeforms, of having them under one’s skin. Hyperobjects force us into an intimacy with our own death (because they are toxic), with others (because everyone is affected by them), and with the future (because they are massively dis- tributed in time). Attuning ourselves to the intimacy that hyperobjects demand is not easy. Yet intimacy and the no-self view come together in ecological awareness. The proximity of an alien presence that is also our innermost essence is very much its structure of feeling.

Consider symbiosis, as explored by Lynn Margulis and others. One feature of symbiosis is endosymbiosis, the fact that lifeforms do not sim- ply live alongside us: they are within us, so much so that on many levels the host–parasite distinction collapses. Our mitochondria are symbionts hiding from their own catastrophe, the environmental disaster called oxygen. Many cell walls are double, hinting at some ancient symbiotic coupling. To a great extent others are us: or as the poet Rimbaud put it, “Je est un autre.”9 On a nonphenomenological level (that is, one not dependent on experience), a level an extraterrestrial with a microscope could validate, we are strangers to ourselves. That is how close the other is. Ecology is about intimacy.

As well as being about mind-bending time- and spatial scales, hyper- objects do something still more disturbing to our conceptual frames of reference. Hyperobjects undermine normative ideas of what an “object” is in the first place. This sudden turnaround has an uncanny effect. Knowledge about radiation makes us question commonsensical ideas about the utility and benefits of the sun. Unlike sunlight we cannot

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directly see radiation. Yet it affects us far more intensely than visible light. Knowledge about ozone depletion, global warming, and radiation have turned ordinary reality into a dangerous place that Ulrich Beck calls “risk society,” a place in which government policy now involves the dis- tribution of risk across populations, often unevenly.10 In the long run, no one is exempt from risk. Once we become aware of the long-term effects of hyperobjects, we cannot abolish this awareness, and so it corrodes our ability to make firm decisions in the present.11

The fact that we need devices such as computers and Geiger coun- ters to see hyperobjects, objects that will define our future, is humbling in the same way Copernicus and Galileo brought humans down to Earth by insisting that the universe was not rotating around us.12 In their era, “common sense” told people that the sun revolved around the earth once a day. Common sense also assured people that weird old ladies who proffered herbal remedies and failed to drown when thrown in water should be burnt, because they were witches. Common sense has a lot to answer for.

The problem of human society, wrote Jacques Lacan, is what to do with one’s shit. Putting it this way is rather anthropocentric: many non- humans also appear concerned about what to do with their waste.13 Hyperobjects present us with the same problem, hugely amplified. A Styrofoam cup will take about five hundred years to biodegrade. Even the massive density of the exponentially increasing human population itself could be seen as a hyperobject created by leaps in agricultural tech- nology and logistics since the eighteenth-century Agricultural Revolu- tion, and even more so since 1945. What should we do about substances that will be around many centuries after our culture has either radically changed or disappeared entirely? The problem goes beyond how to dis- pose of human-sized things, like the stuff that gets flushed down a toilet. What should we do about substances on whose inside we find ourselves?

So what is it indeed like, inside the hyperobject, in which we are always in the wrong? Let us consider Lingis’s reworking of Kantian ethics. Lingis does this by situating the transcendental a priori in what he calls the level generated by an object, its physical grip on me, a grip that sends directives to me. Here is Lingis’s own example, which is compelling in an ecological

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way. You are walking through a sequoia forest in Northern California. The gigantic trees surround you with their ancient forms. Vast networks of lichen spread themselves around the branches. You smell smoke, and look in the direction of the smell, to see the glowing tip of a cigarette butt like a bright orange bead in the ferny undergrowth. You leap over toward the ferns, parting them with your foot, and stamp on the cigarette, before pouring water from your water bottle over the area to ensure that no fire can start again.

It’s significant that Lingis chose the burning cigarette.14 Not only does the ecological emergency confront us with countless moments such as this—you leave your house and realize you left the lights on, or you stop at a carwash and wonder whether you should turn the engine off and swelter in the drought outside, without air conditioning. Ecological issues more deeply present us with very pure versions of Lingis’s levels and directives. Nonhumans, argues Lingis, tell us how to dispose our- selves toward them.15 A hammer “wants” to be held in a certain way. A forest path issues directives to my body to walk at a particular pace, listen for animals, avoid obstacles. A cigarette butt demands that I put it out. These directives grip me already, before I can reflect (rationally or not) on the right course of action. The Kantian notion of synthetic judg- ments presupposes the levels. The directives issue from entities that establish zones of aesthetic causality in which I find myself caught (the levels). These directives ground the categorical imperative, not some decision in a void. We find ourselves thinking belatedly of how to dis- pose ourselves toward things.

Why do I step up to stamp out the burning cigarette? From this point of view, free will is overrated.16 We are seduced and induced by leaves, tennis rackets, gas pedals, and passersby. I do not find myself in a (single, solid) world, but rather in a shifting set of zones emitted by specific objects. The hyperobject must also emit zones that gather us in like the tractor beam that locks onto the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars. I shall use the term zone rather than level from now on, since to my ear zone eliminates a sense of flatness and structure. In this notion of the emer- gence of time and space from an object we can begin to understand the term zone. Zone can mean belt, something that winds around something

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else. We talk of temperate zones and war zones. A zone is a place where events are happening: the zone winds around, it radiates heat, bullets fly, armies are defeated.

What action is taking place? “Not something that just is what it is, here and now, without mystery, but something like a quest . . . a tone on its way calling forth echoes and responses . . . water seeking its liquidity in the sunlight rippling across the cypresses in the back of the garden.”17 If, as suggested earlier, there is no functional difference between substance and accidence, if there is no difference between perceiving and doing, if there is no real difference between sentience and non-sentience, then causality itself is a strange, ultimately nonlocal aesthetic phenomenon. A phenomenon, moreover, that emanates from objects themselves, waver- ing in front of them like the astonishingly beautiful real illusion conjured in this quotation. The sentence does what it says, casting a compelling, mysterious spell, the spell of causality, like a demonic force field. Yet if we knew it as simply an illusion, it would cease to waver. It would not be an illusion at all. We would be in the real of noncontradiction. Since it is like an illusion, however, we can never be sure: “What constitutes pre- tense is that, in the end, you don’t know whether it’s pretense or not.”18

A zone is not entirely a matter of “free will.” Objects are far more threateningly autonomous, and sensually autonomous, than the Kantian version of autonomy. Objects are, in a sense, like the temporary auton - omous zone celebrated by Hakim Bey.19 The birth of a fresh object is a “political” interruption, a revolution that changes all the other objects, no matter how slightly.20 A zone is not studiously decided on by com- mittee before it goes into action. Irreducibly, it is already happening. We find ourselves in it, all of a sudden, in the late afternoon as the shadows lengthen around a city square, giving rise to an uncanny sensation of having been here before.

In the basement of the Chernobyl reactor, there is a gigantic “ele- phant’s foot” of corium, a radioactive mash of metals and glass from the core. It cannot be seen directly, unless one wants to die quickly. The first attempt to photograph it with a camera on wheels was a failure, because the camera was destroyed by the emissions from this object. Eventu- ally it had to be photographed in a mirror with the camera around the

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corner. Objects emit zones. Wherever I find myself, a zone is already happening, an autonomous zone, like a pair of carefully tuned sine waves that fills a house with a crisscrossing field of interference patterns (a brief description of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Dream House in New York). Eliane Radigue’s astonishingly layered ARP synthesizer tones fill a church with resonances whose lowest frequencies are felt physi- cally as much as heard. A dissonance at that sonic depth results in the body being physically shaken, literalizing what Adorno says about how art shudders and shatters the subject.21 The music is not “about” the environment: it is an environment. Biogenesis is simply a recording of Radigue’s heartbeat, alongside which the sound of the heartbeat of the baby in her uterus begins to be heard.22 Played through speakers cap- able of transmitting the bass frequencies, such as the ones used at the 33 1/3 exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2003, Biogenesis reaches into the listener’s body. Coexistence is forced on us, whether we like it or not. With their vibrant lines, the paintings of Riley and Napangati emit zones that grip me in their wake, unleashing powers on my optic nerve. A human ethical or political decision is made caught in the force fields of intermeshed zones. There is no way to find oneself already having achieved a transcendental purchase on the zone. Kantian synthetic judgment a priori, in which I have decided what an object is, what object-ness is, is possible (if at all) only because I have already found myself strafed by the zones that objects emit. The simplest ciga- rette butt or a child running into the street reduces every ethical or polit- ical stance to the status of hypocrisy. It is the hyperobject that forces us to sense this hypocrisy most exquisitely. Hyperobjects are simply so large and so long lasting that the zones that cascade from them are rich and intense enough for us to become aware of them; and to become aware of the irreducible gap between zone and object, which Kant calls the gap between the phenomenon and thing.

Because of this gap, I am far from saying that we immediately en - counter situations in which we know exactly what to do, as if everything were mechanically automated. Rather, my sense of distance and irony, my hesitation, becomes more pronounced when I find myself latched onto a zone. It is the ontological priority of the zone that accounts fully

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for the feeling of strangeness and belatedness in my decisions about the object that emits it. It is simply impossible to come up with the right reason for why I put the cigarette out in the sequoia forest. Indeed, if I try to generate a reason, I find myself watching the cigarette burn the undergrowth—I have already made a decision not to put out the ciga- rette. The zone has already grasped me in its beams. This does not mean that I know exactly how to dispose myself relative to the zone. Far from it: it means that I have no idea, or that I can feel the irreducible disso- nance between my idea and the zone.

On what scale am I engaging the zone? Why do I put out the ciga- rette? Is it because I am concerned about the environment in general? Or this tree in particular? This forest? Is it because I understand global warming, and I see the cigarette as an indexical a sign of human igno- rance, a small piece of a gigantic puzzle? Again, the zone is not a region of direct experience, but a shifting, illusory field of irony and weirdness. This is not Nature. This is Heidegger’s thrownness, inverted.23 I do not find myself in any old place, a projection of my Dasein’s unique uncan- niness. Everything is doing that. The uncertainty and hesitation are not just in my Dasein, but in the tree, the rock, the cigarette butt glowing in the ferns. My sincerity, my sensitivity to my phenomenological enmesh- ment in zones, is the very thing that prevents me from grasping the zone as solid and predictable.

This doesn’t mean that I am irrevocably caught in a world of preju- dices, and that this is a good thing—a common view in ecophenomenol- ogy. It means that I am caught in confusion and error and suffering, and that this is a good thing. Embeddedness in a world, as I have argued earlier, is no basis for ecological praxis and thinking. What the zones mean is just the opposite. It means that no matter what my prejudices are, no matter what “world” I feel embedded in, the zones burn through them. Some kind of nonconceptuality burns through my prejudice, which is exactly what hyperobjects, with their obvious futurality, surely do. Hyperobjects are genuinely apocalyptic (from the Greek term apo- caluptō) in the sense that they lift the veil of prejudice—but in so doing they do not catapult us into a beyond. Rather they fix us more firmly to the spot, which is no longer an embeddedness in a world.

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The existence of zones emitted by objects is the physical reason for Kantian beauty. Kantian beauty is a nonconceptual object-like entity that seems to float “between” me and the object. Kant reads it as a reflection of my a priori synthetic judgment. But in order for this aesthetic expe- rience to arise, there must be a zone. The zone vibrates from an object and burns through my conceptual overlay, haunting me with its strange strangeness. The zone turns my beliefs and reifications to ash. In the case of hyperobjects, this happens even if I am thickheadedly not well attuned to zones. Hyperobjects are simply too vast to be ignored.

Thus, we are no longer left with a choice between a transcendental aesthetics that guarantees the freedom of positing in an act of synthetic judgment a priori (as Kant suggests), and a substantialist aesthetics that crushes me with the weight of its awesome authority (as proposed by Edmund Burke). The political implications of each aesthetic philosophy are quite evident—we should without doubt choose the Kantian option. Burke’s theory represents the aesthetics of the Bush administration and their “Shock and Awe” tactics against Baghdad in the Second Iraq War. But now we have a good, realist reason to accept a Kantian aesthetic the- ory, not grounded in some transcendental beyond, but right here, before I think about it—in the zone. The zone is nonconceptual but not a blank nothing, not a Hegelian A = A of immediacy. The zone is unspeakable precisely because it is “in my face.” I don’t reach out to touch it—rather the object sends it to me.

Zones are real but they are not objectively “there,” since that would mean that they were metaphysically present, and the hyperobject poses a serious and physical challenge to the metaphysics of presence. There are problems with thinking this nonobjectification. How is it possible to imagine entities that flicker and shimmer rather than remain obdu- rately “there”—a flickering and shimmering that post-Humean, post- Kantian thought and science necessitates? Yet hyperobjects seem to help us visualize this shimmering quite efficiently. Ontotheology wants to convince me that I must construe things as real by thinking of them as objectively present and “there” (vorhanden, using Heidegger’s term).24 But the hyper object prevents me from objectifying it as “real” in this way—although it is of course real, without doubt; it seems to assail me

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like a nightmare or a threatening circus clown. It is never vorhanden, as it’s always disappearing behind the rain cloud, the sunburn, the pile of garbage. The feeling of being inside a hyperobject contains a necessary element of unreality—yet this is a symptom of its reality!

“Anything you can do, I can do meta.” Isn’t this the maxim of moder- nity? For two hundred years, performing intelligence has been about saying something like “I am smarter than you to the extent that I can see around mere objects, or through your ‘naïve’ attitude.” Being right in phi- losophy has most often been a case of going meta. Monty Python’s “Argu- ment” sketch almost perfectly embodies it.25 A man walks into a faceless bureaucratic office building that seems designed to dispense govern- ment aid of various kinds. At first he enters a room in which someone hurls insults at him. When he tells the insulter that “I came here for an argument,” that man apologizes: “Oh, I’m sorry, this is abuse. Arguments are next door.” Next door, the man encounters another bureaucrat, who refuses to engage with him. When the man announces that he is here for an argument, the bureaucrat argues the toss with him about whether or not he is here for an argument: immediately he goes meta.

If you’ve ever been in this type of argument, you’ll know how intense it can get. Going meta is a great way to sneer at someone. You remove the rug from underneath the other’s feet. Their mere immediacy is always false. It’s the deep structure, the numinous background, the possibility of the possibility of the horizon of the event, that is more real, better, or just more rhetorically effective, than anything else. In this mode, the egg of potentiality comes before the chicken of the actual. This mode is exactly what Monty Python exploits, in particular in the “Argument” sketch. Much of their humor is based on this meta syndrome, which tells us something about how dominant it was in the age of British imperial- ism, both in its fully erect and collapsing phases.

The syndrome of going meta is repeated in countless different philo- sophical modes. I’m not sure which part came first, the thinking or the acting out, but this meta syndrome seems strangely parallel with the basic ontology of modern life. Such is the syndrome deeply responsible for the beautiful soul condition from which we mock anyone who dares to actually do something—the condition Lacan noted when he claimed

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“Les non-dupes errent” (“Those who [assume they] are not duped are making a mistake”; it is also a pun on “The name of the father,” “Le nom du père,” and “The No of the father,” “Le non du père”).26 Those who sit up high on the mountain looking down at us poor saps beneath, because they think they can see through everything, are the most deluded of all. Since, as I’ve argued, the beautiful soul is the mode of consumerism— the default subjective framework since 1800—we can expect the meta syndrome to be pervasive in culture.27

Hyperobjects end the world, and they end the transcendental a priori that jumps out of the world to decide its reality. They do so not by dint of clever arguments, nor by remaining mute and impenetrable. There is a rhetorical mode of hyperobjects, since all objects are a form of delivery, as we shall see. Hyperobjects don’t smack us upside the head or hit us like Doctor Johnson’s boot, refuting Berkeley with the nonargument of an aggressive kick. They are not prereflective, if by that we mean they supply some immediate hotline to truth. Indeed, if the rhetorical deliv- ery has a name, it would need to include something like an inducement to reflection. Aristotle’s Rhetoric is a profoundly original meditation on human affect—rhetoric is as much the art of listening as it is the art of speaking. But to what are we listening when we attune to the hyper- object? Is this uncertainty not precisely what we are hearing? Doesn’t the affect delivered to us in the rain, or through the weird cyclone or the oil slick, reveal something uncanny? If it has a name, it is weirdness. Per- haps the most telling term is the word doom.

What is doom? Conventionally, doom is a decree or an ordinance: a directive.28 Doom can also refer to judgment, law, the faculty of judg- ing, or the final judgment that happens after the end of the world.29 Yet doom is also what we deem— opinion or discernment.30 Doom can mean fate, destiny, and in a stronger sense, death.31 Finally, doom means justice, or even judge, one who dispenses justice.32 Justice is a figure that Derrida calls synonymous with deconstruction, in that it is irre- ducibly futural: perfect justice can never be achieved now—there is always a remainder to come.33 A good judge doesn’t just mechanically dole out judgments, but paradoxically enforces and suspends the law at the same time.

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Doesn’t this rich range of meanings suggest something about the hyperobject? The hyperobject is indeed the bringer of fate, destiny, death. This destiny comes from beyond the (human) world, and pronounces or decrees the end of the world. This decree marks a decisive pivot in Earth history in which humans discern the nonhuman and thus reckon the fate of Earth with a greater justice. Or, just to go hog-wild Heidegger- style for a moment, doom comes from doom and dooms doom; this doom marks a decisive moment in which humans doom the nonhuman and thus doom the doom of Earth with greater doom.

Each political and ethical decision is made on the inside of a hyperob- ject, caught in the resonance of the zones that spell doom. Even cynicism becomes a species of hypocrisy in the grinding roar of the hyperobject. Cynicism is the worst hypocrisy: hypocrisy squared, since cynicism is hypocritical about its hypocrisy. The hypocrite understands that she is caught in her own failure. The cynic still hopes that if he vomits dis- gustingly enough, things will change. The cynic hopes: he is not beyond hope—he is a hypocrite. He is trying to escape doom.

Humans have entered an era of hypocrisy. Now I begin to argue that the time of hyperobjects is a time of hypocrisy, weakness, and lameness. I mean these terms very precisely. First we should try to understand hypocrisy. In Greek, hypo means under, hidden, or secret, while krisis means judgment, determination, or discernment, so we are still exploring the contours of doom when we think about hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is a “secret doom”: convention tells us that this means that someone is hid- ing something, pretending. Hypocrisy is a pretense, an act. But it is also simply hidden doom, a message sent from somewhere obscure. Or a message that is secret in some sense: encrypted.

Hypocrisy comes from the Greek term for delivery (hypokrisis). An actor is a hypocrite. Remember that one sense of doom is a decree or ordinance: that which is delivered, a statute or statement, a phrase that stands. Delivery is the fifth aspect of traditional rhetoric (Aristotle, Quin- tilian): there is discovery (invention), arrangement (logic), style, mem- ory, and delivery. Delivery is how a speech is embodied, how it is spoken, how it comes to exist for others. Demosthenes was once quizzed about what he thought was the most important part of rhetoric: he replied,

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“Delivery.” Upon being asked what the second most important part was, he replied, “Delivery”—and so on.34 Demosthenes practiced his delivery by putting pebbles in his mouth and climbing steep hills while reciting his speeches. Delivery is physical.

What if we flipped this around, so that we could understand that the physical is a form of delivery? Think about it. A CD is a delivery. An MP3 is a delivery. A vinyl record is a delivery. A cassette tape is deliv- ery. Each one has its own physicality. Each one is an object: not some merely neutral medium, but an entity in its own right. Now what if this green banker’s lamp were a form of delivery? The lamp tells my eyes about the light that its green glass diffuses. The brass base of the lamp delivers the stem to the cherry wood desktop. The fluorescent light in - side the lamp delivers the dusty photograph to me in such a way that I can see a reflection of my typing hands in the glass in the photo frame. We never hear the wind as such, only the wind in the chimney, the wind in the doorway.35 The zone of one object crisscrosses with another’s in the interobjective configuration space. Things are Aeolian, acousmatic: their timbre (timber, substance, matter) speaks of secret strangers.36 A thing delivers another thing. Rain, sunburn, plastic bags, and car engines all deliver the doom of the hyperobject. They are its hypocrites. They lie about the hyperobject; they tell secrets.

The Aeolian properties of objects are well accounted for in OOO. OOO holds that there are real things, and that these real things are objects, every single one. We humans are objects. The thing called a “subject” is an object. Sentient beings are objects. Notice that “object” here doesn’t mean something that is automatically apprehended by a subject. There are all kinds of objects that so-called subjects don’t appre- hend. Global warming existed long before human instruments started to detect it. For millions of years oil oozed around deep under the ocean. All kinds of objects apprehended it, of course. When we are conscious of something, we are on a continuum with rock strata and plankton that apprehend oil in their own way.

According to OOO, objects are Aristotelian, in some sense. One pleas- ant thing about OOO is that it refashions overlooked philosophy, such as Aristotle, Al-Ghazali, Husserl, and Zubiri. What is an Aristotelian

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object? Not a materialist one, for starters. If the first phase of my work on ecology was ecology without Nature, this one is ecology without mat- ter. And for the same reasons. I’ve seen wood, I’ve seen photographs of atoms, I’ve seen clouds in diffusion chambers, I’ve seen drawings of wave packets. Sure. But have I ever seen matter? I’m starting to think that this thing called “matter” is like the thing called Nature or the thing called Santa Claus—you have to say you believe in it so as not to upset the kids. So when Mr. Spock claims to have found “matter without form,” he is sadly mistaken.37

Don’t get me wrong here by assuming that this position in any way advocates hostility to science. Far from it—this position is trying to incorporate contemporary science back into philosophy to “imagine that which we know,” as Percy Shelley succinctly puts it.38 OOO is able to cope with the three most progressive scientific views of our age, rela- tivity, ecology, and quantum theory. It is simply that we really shouldn’t leave ontology to scientism. Otherwise we end up with some New Age head-shop, lava-lamp ontology that defaults to a reductionist atomism.

In this sense, OOO begins to see beyond capitalism, if by that eco- nomic process we mean the positing of value in some mystical, ethe- real beyond: the shadow world of capital. It’s not the essence that’s the trouble, so much as the positing of it in some beyond, some distant dimension over yonder: the metaphysical dimension of capital. With its mistrust of appearances, Marxist ideology theory also does this. All we poor saps can do is lament our lot, sitting around in the trashed world, the world that isn’t even as real as the unseen one that truly determines us. This mode of thinking is not a fine-grained sieve, but a blunt instru- ment that reduces everything to an unspeakable powder.

According to OOO, objects have a very interesting property. We only see their sensual qualities, in interactions that spontaneously spawn new objects. Me smelling an oil spill is a whole new object in the universe. You can examine this object, as well as the oil and my nose. This object also has special properties. What are they? Just like all objects, hyper- objects withdraw. All objects are hidden from access in some sense. No other object, no finger, photon, or supercomputer, can possibly experi- ence every single aspect of the object. Consider a coin. You can never see

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the other side of the coin as the other side. When you flip it over, the other side becomes this side. All objects are like that.

But hyperobjects make this withdrawn quality obvious. So how do we experience them at all? People love to churn out that hackneyed phrase, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” I always thought dancing about architecture sounded like a good idea. And in OOO terms, this is what all objects are doing with each other. After all, no object truly contacts another one. They really only share what Har- man calls their “notes.” So architecture “columns” (or whatever it does) about human relationships. And dogs sniff about trees (nicely, about can also mean around). And pencils pencil about pencil sharpeners.

Imagine a world where we could only play music if we wanted to “talk about” music. It would be like John Malkovich’s nightmare world in Being John Malkovich, with music as Malkovich.39 Music musics about music. Or as Joyce writes somewhere, “love loves to love love.”40 No. We clap about music, we dance about music, we play music about music, we write about music—all these things are not the music about which we are performing. Alvin Lucier’s long thin wire vibrates about the people walking through the installation.41 The storm storms concerning the chimney it blows through (Heidegger’s nice example). The calculator calculates concerning the bank balance I’m anxious about. Think of how compatible OOO is with relativity. Einstein’s train trains about the flash of lightning. The camera on the side of the track cameras about it. Now consider quantum theory. The photon photons about the electron. The birds bird about the BP oil slick, telling us about it in bird meta - phors. And weather weathers about global warming. And writing writes about music. Just like dancing about architecture.

Why does the rain lie about the hyperobject, while telling secrets about it? Things get stranger still when we consider a single object—which is why reckoning hyperobjects as objectively present (vorhanden) is simply out of the question. Let us imagine, for the sake of argument, one sin- gle thing, alone—I know how difficult this is for us in an age in which even Chevron tells us every day that “everything is interconnected.” One single banker’s lamp. The banker’s lamp delivers itself. The delivery is different from the deliverer. It is like the difference between the I that

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is writing this, and the I about which I am writing. So that I can say the following: “I am lying.” “This sentence is false.” Such sentences are Liars, the most famous of which is the liar paradox: “All Cretans are liars,” says a Cretan. The Cretan is telling the truth and lying at the same time, and for the same reasons. The sentence is a hypocrite. It says one thing and does another. Objects are hypocrites, actors portraying themselves. They can’t be justly represented. They emit blue notes that differ from them- selves without difference. They lie—again: “What constitutes pretense is that, in the end, you don’t know whether it’s pretense or not.”42 Hyperob- jects simply allow us to see this intrinsic, ontological level of hypocrisy, because they are just so much larger in scale than we are, both tempo- rally and spatially. We see signs everywhere, but not the hyperobject as such. We see signs of doom, but the doom is nowhere objectively pres- ent. How easy it is for denialism to work its magic on Americans who are both very insecure and very nihilistic.

Gerard Manley Hopkins writes about delivery:

Each single thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being each one indoors dwells; Selves, goes itself, crying What I do is me, for that I came.43

The richly knotted vocabulary hides and tells the truth at the same time. “Deals out”: delivers. “That being indoors each one dwells”: dwells here seems almost transitive—the thing “dwells” a secret “being indoors,” dealing it out—pronouncing its doom, delivering it, telling the secret (hypocrisis). “Selves, goes itself,” like “going green,” “going berserk.” This scholastic haecceitas (“thisness”) appears to be simply a vivid version of the standard ontology (with “actuality” and bland substances), unless we recall that objects are hypocrites. How can you go yourself ? You are already yourself. You can only “go yourself ” if you are not yourself. You must be not-yourself at the same time as being yourself. When a thing cries, “What I do is me,” the thing is saying “This sentence is false”; “I am lying.” The piercing blue note that the object sends out is both major and minor, a perfect photograph and an opaque mask, a femme

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fatale behind whose eyes is a depth of mystery or a blank void, or not even nothing. Doom.

The hyperobject is a liar. We never see the hyperobject directly. We infer it from graphs, instruments, tracks in a diffusion cloud chamber, sunburn, radiation sickness, mutagenic effects, childbirth (Plate 3). We see the shadows of the hyperobject, gigantic patches of darkness that fleetingly slide across the landscape. We see shadows of humans engraved on a Japanese wall. We see rain clouds, mushroom clouds, we see the Oort Cloud at the edge of the Solar System. “The awful shadow of some unseen power.”44 We see figments and fragments of doom.

Waking up in the shadow of the unseen power of hyperobjects is like finding yourself in a David Lynch movie in which it becomes increas- ingly uncertain whether you are dreaming or awake. Humans are forced to confront phenomenological sincerity, the truth that “there is no meta- language.”45 Far from being a cool T-shirt slogan, such a truth makes us extremely vulnerable. We have not traversed the curtain of illusion into a world of certainty, even if that world is a shiny process-relational upgrade, a happening of fluids and flows and rhizomes. The Liar sits in the corner wearing an enigmatic half-smile, smoking a cigarette with a look of vacancy, or is it profound depression, or just boredom—is he even alive? Does he have a mind? What does he know about us? What doesn’t he know? As Laurie Anderson put it in her song “Born Never Asked,” “What is behind that curtain?”46 The play of illusion and conceal - ment is a symptom of reality. Thus, some environmentalist rhetoric—the scorn for mediation, the anti-intellectualism—is part of the problem, not the solution. The further into the Great Acceleration we go, the more we shall need to confront feelings of unreality.

Here we encounter the deep reason why inside the hyperobject we are always in the wrong. Since we never encounter the hyperobject directly, since we are lower dimensional than it and exist with it in an interobjec- tive aesthetic–causal space that includes 1 + n (withdrawn) entities, we are unable to get a purchase on it. Hyperobjects stick to us, like melting mirrors. They leak everywhere. They undulate back and forth, oozing spacetime all around them. They come in and out of phase with

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our quotidian existence. They interface with us in a slightly evil-seeming aesthetic dimension.

As I stated above, Kierkegaard argues that “against God, we are always in the wrong.”47 It is not possible for us to attain the perfect stance toward God. Indeed, attempting to do so might result in horrific violence or evil. The thought that against God, we are always in the wrong, is curiously relaxing and confidence-inspiring: we have nothing to lose. Kierkegaard calls this feeling “edifying,” a term that is flavored with a dash of char- acteristically Protestant virtue. Kierkegaard’s insight is also true for the human relationship with hyperobjects: as I wrote, inside the hyperobject, we are always in the wrong. We are in a state of hypocrisy with regard to hyperobjects—the hypocrisy fish eats the cynicism fish, just as the Darwin fish eats the Jesus fish on the back of some people’s cars.

Beautiful soul syndrome, which Kierkegaard assaults remorselessly, is the default ideological mode of modernity. The beautiful soul sees real- ity “over yonder,” separated from her by a thin pane of aestheticizing glass. Beautiful me over here, corrupt world over there. The beautiful soul is a Hegelian category, a stance toward the world that typifies the Romantic artist—she has no inkling that she herself is formally respon- sible for the corruption in the world that she sees. The gaze that sees evil “over yonder” is evil. So to get over beautiful soul syndrome is to realize that you are a hypocrite.

Marxists will argue that huge corporations are responsible for ecolog- ical damage and that it is self-destructive to claim that we are all respon- sible. Marxism sees the “ethical” response to the ecological emergency as hypocrisy. Yet according to many environmentalists and some anar- chists, in denying that individuals have anything to do with why Exxon pumps billions of barrels of oil, Marxists are displacing the blame away from humans. This view sees the Marxist “political” response to the eco- logical emergency as hypocrisy. The ethics–politics binary is a true dif- ferend: an opposition so radical that it is in some sense insuperable. Consider this. If I think ethics, I seem to want to reduce the field of action to one-on-one encounters between beings. If I think politics, I hold that one-on-one encounters are never as significant as the world (of economic, class, moral, and so on), relations in which they take place.

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These two ways of talking form what Adorno would have called two halves of a torn whole, which nonetheless don’t add up together. Some nice compromise “between” the two is impossible. Aren’t we then hob- bled when it comes to issues that affect society as a whole—nay the bio- sphere as a whole—yet affect us all individually (I have mercury in my blood, and ultraviolet rays affect me unusually strongly)?

Yet the deeper problem is that our (admittedly cartoonish) Marxist and anarchist see the problem as hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is denounced from the standpoint of cynicism. Both the Marxist and the anti-Marxist are still wedded to the game of modernity, in which she who grabs the most cynical “meta” position is the winner: Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Meta. Going meta has been the intellectual gesture par excellence for two centuries. I am smarter than you because I can see through you. You are smarter than they are because you ground their statements in con- ditions of possibility. From a height, I look down on the poor fools who believe what they think. But it is I who believes, more than they. I believe in my distance, I believe in the poor fools, I believe they are deluded. I have a belief about belief: I believe that belief means gripping something as tightly as possible with my mind. Cynicism becomes the default mode of philosophy and of ideology. Unlike the poor fool, I am undeluded— either I truly believe that I have exited from delusion, or I know that no one can, including myself, and I take pride in this disillusionment.

This attitude is directly responsible for the ecological emergency, not the corporation or the individual per se, but the attitude that inheres both in the corporation and in the individual, and in the critique of the corporation and of the individual. Philosophy is directly embodied in the size and shape of a paving stone, the way a Coca Cola bottle feels to the back of my neck, the design of an aircraft, or a system of voting. The overall guiding view, the “top philosophy,” has involved a cynical distance. It is logical to suppose that many things in my world have been affected by it—the way a shopping bag looks, the range of options on the sports channel, the way I think Nature is “over yonder.” By thinking rightness and truth as the highest possible elevation, as cynical transcen- dence, I think Earth and its biosphere as the stage set on which I prance for the amusement of my audience. Indeed, cynicism has already been

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named in some forms of ideology critique as the default mode of con- temporary ideology.48 But as we have seen, cynicism is only hypocritical hypocrisy.

Cynicism is all over the map: left, right, green, indifferent. Isn’t Gaian holism a form of cynicism? One common Gaian assertion is that there is something wrong with humans. Nonhumans are more Natural. Humans have deviated from the path and will be wiped out (poor fools!). No one says the same about dolphins, but it’s just as true. If dolphins go extinct, why worry? Dolphins will be replaced. The parts are greater than the whole. A mouse is not a mouse if it is not in the network of Gaia.49 The parts are replaceable. Gaia will replace humans with a less defective component. We are living in a gigantic machine—a very leafy one with a lot of fractals and emergent properties to give it a suitably cool yet non- threatening modern aesthetic feel.

It is fairly easy to discern how refusing to see the big picture is a form of what Harman calls undermining.50 Undermining is when things are reduced to smaller things that are held to be more real. The classic form of undermining in contemporary capitalism is individualism: “There are only individuals and collective decisions are ipso facto false.” But this is a problem that the left, and environmentalism more generally, recog- nize well.

The blind spot lies in precisely the opposite direction: in how com- mon ideology tends to think that bigger is better or more real. Environ- mentalism, the right, and the left seem to have one thing in common: they all hold that incremental change is a bad thing. Yet doesn’t the case against incrementalism, when it comes to things like global warming, amount to a version of what Harman calls overmining, in the domain of ethics and politics? Overmining is when one reduces a thing “upward” into an effect of some supervenient system (such as Gaia or conscious- ness).51 Since bigger things are more real than smaller things, incremen- tal steps will never accomplish anything. The critique of incrementalism laughs at the poor fools who are trying to recycle as much as possible or drive a Prius. By postponing ethical and political decisions into an idealized future, the critique of incrementalism leaves the world just as it is, while maintaining a smug distance toward it. In the name of the

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medium-sized objects that coexist on Earth (aspen trees, polar bears, nematode worms, slime molds, coral, mitochondria, Starhawk, and Glenn Beck), we should forge a genuinely new ethical view that doesn’t reduce them or dissolve them.

Cynicism is enabled by the left: “Since no one person’s action will solve global warming, better to do nothing, or at most await the revolu- tion to come.” As I argued above, vegetarians, Prius owners, and solar power enthusiasts often encounter this logic. The trouble is, left cyni- cism maps perfectly both onto U.S. Republican do-nothing-ism and Gaian defeatism (“Gaia will replace us, like a defective component”). Nothing happens. Result? Global warming continues.

A Nietzschean tendency is at work within modernity. This Nietz - scheanism strives for being “meta than thou.” Cynicism is nothing other than the attitude inherent in what Heidegger calls the “ontotheological” stance of this Nietzscheanism: pure becoming floating in the void (nihilism).52 Holding reality at a distance, it reifies reality into an objec- tively present block, then it explodes the block itself. No longer serving the purpose for which it was intended, Marxian critique is a specific mode of this Nietzschean tendency. To assert this is by no means to sug- gest that there is no social reality beyond capitalism. Yet this critique mode is not attuned to the time of hyperobjects, which brings cynicism to an end.

How do we overcome Nietzsche? We can’t, because Nietzsche is the high priest of overcoming. As I’ve argued elsewhere, we have to creep lamely underneath Nietzsche and get away like that. Malcolm Bull has written a very powerful escape manual for lame creatures who want to exit Nietzschean modernity, entitled Anti-Nietzsche. Thinking needs to begin to set the bar incredibly low for solidarity between humans, and between humans and nonhumans—including non-“sentient” humans. Otherwise we become gatekeepers of solidarity, and remain within Nietz - schean ontotheology—nihilism.53

The Romantic period was the beginning of the phase in which cyni- cism became the highest mode of thinking. Romantic-period art writes the manual on how to produce avant-garde products, starting an in- flationary war in which successive waves of the avant-garde strive to

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overmaster their predecessors. This movement is deeply akin to the way in which philosophy gradually retreated into the possibility of the possi- bility of the possibility of . . . gradually eroding its ability to talk about reality, a self-inflicted wound of doubt and paranoia.54

Hegel says that the Owl of Minerva—the forward movement of his- tory, which just is the progress of thinking—flies only at dusk.55 The Owl of Minerva has become the Oil of Minerva. Yet the Romantic period was also the moment at which nonhuman beings emerged deci- sively on the human stage. Animal rights became thinkable, not simply as a mystical practice, but as a political one. Carbon began to spread around Earth, eventually ending up in the ice floes of the Arctic. The counternarrative to the Romantic period and beyond is the story of how the Oil of Minerva emerges from its invisible place in the human fram- ing of things. The Oil of Minerva gradually convinces cynicism that it is only a disguised form of hypocrisy. It is to this story that we now turn, the story of how nonhumans finally convinced the most recalcitrant humans to let them into their thinking. We have arrived at the next moment of history, not by dint of our own efforts, but because the very inner logic of science ran up against a limit, revealing the uncanny futu- rality of objects for all to see.

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Modern life presents us with a choice between two options:

(1) The essence of things is elsewhere (in the deep structure of capital, the unconscious, atoms, evolution, the cosmic order, and so on);

(2) There is no essence.

Philosophies, like elections, have consequences. The restriction of this choice between these two options is one reason why Earth is in big trou- ble. The choice resembles having to pick between grayish brown and brownish gray.

Yet there is a third option:

(3) There is an essence, and it’s right here, in the object resplendent with its sensual qualities yet withdrawn.

We are entering a new era of scholarship, where the point will not be to one-up each other by appealing to the trace of the givenness of the open- ness of the clearing of the lighting of the being of the pencil. Thinking past “meta mode” will bring us up to speed with the weirdness of things, a weirdness that evolution, ecology, relativity and quantum theory all speak about. This weirdness resides on the side of objects themselves, not our interpretation of them.

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Even Pat Robertson and Richard Dawkins must use sunscreen to counteract the effects of ozone depletion. Hyperobjects have dragged humans kicking and screaming (when they feel anything at all, rather than being merely blank with denial) into an Age of Asymmetry in which our cognitive powers become self-defeating. The more we know about radiation, global warming, and the other massive objects that show up on our radar, the more enmeshed in them we realize we are. Knowledge is no longer able to achieve escape velocity from Earth, or more pre- cisely, what Heidegger calls “earth,” the surging, “towering” reality of things.1 The dance-on-a-volcano idealism of Romantic philosophy and art has collapsed because we have discovered that the walls of the vol- cano are ever so much higher than we took them to be. We are no longer poised on the edge of the abyss, contemplating its vastness while lean- ing on a walking stick, like the character in the Friedrich painting who exemplifies the transcendental turn and the managerial power of the bourgeoisie (Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818). Instead, like Wile E. Coyote in midair, we have discovered that we are already falling inside the abyss, which is not pure empty space, but instead the fiery interior of a hyperobject. Or we discover that the space we inhabit is not open and neutral, but is the interior of a gigantic iceberg whose seeming transparency was simply a matter of our less than adequate eyes. Flying through the universe in the space shuttle of modernity, we find out that we were driving with the breaks on, revving the engines while the fuse- lage lies rusting in a junkyard. We have woken up inside an object, like a movie about being buried alive. It is now the uncanny time of zom- bies after the end of the world, a time of hypocrisy where every decision is “wrong.”

Should we feel terrified or liberated? Both. As the black metal band Wolves in the Throne Room say, “We are all hypocrites.”2 This is an astonishing thing for members of Earth First! to say. If even these people can admit that no ethical or political decision can be pure and free of compromise in the time of hyperobjects, then we are really making some progress. The asymmetry between action and reflection gives us a strong feeling of the uncanny. We know more than ever before what things are, how they work, how to manipulate them. Yet for this very reason,

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things become more, rather than less, strange. Increasing science is not increasing demystification. The ethical asymmetry is a function of an ontological asymmetry between humans and nonhumans.

Let’s think about a philosopher who wrote at the beginning of the Anthropocene, when those carbon deposits were first laid down. Let’s think about Hegel. Hegel’s history of art is pretty telling when it comes to understanding what got us into the Anthropocene in the first place. Hegel sees art as a conversation between what we think we know and what materials we have at our disposal. Since what we think we know keeps upgrading, art moves (Hegel would argue that it must move “for- ward,” but I’m not so sure about that), and without a reverse gear, since we can’t unknow what we know. Hegel outlines a thoroughly teleological history of art, in which increasing human understanding gives rise to a transcending of art materials, and eventually to a transcending of art itself. By “materials” he means the “subject matter” of art, the aesthetic conventions, the paint, stone, and ink. The phases are the Symbolic, Clas- sical, and Romantic. In the Symbolic phase, for example, a weak under- standing (Hegel calls it Spirit) is dwarfed by materials. A thousand (for Hegel, inadequate) images of Spirit proliferate as Hindu gods, fetishes, and Buddhas: Hegel is thinking mainly of “Oriental” art.3 But in this view a Gothic cathedral would also encapsulate the Symbolic phase: a huge mass of stone and glass, missing the sense that the God of the “beyond” died on the cross and is transmogrified into human being-together (the Holy Spirit). Nonhumans seem to possess godlike powers. Stones speak, the heavens shape human destiny.

I am not endorsing Hegel’s views, least of all his teleology, the hide- and-seek game in which Spirit already knows where it is hiding, some- where in Romantic-period Prussia. It is of great interest, this teleological vision: it is itself a symptom of modernity. In addition to allowing us to see something, it excludes something. What it excludes is a fourth possibility, perfectly predictable according to the inner logic of Hegel’s history of art (again, I do not endorse this logic), but radically unspeak- able within it. There is the possibility of a postromantic, or we might say (truly) post-modern phase, which I here call the Age of Asymmetry. How do we get there from here?

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The Symbolic phase of art is unstable because all attitudes are unstable for Hegel: there is a gap between the idea and the attitude that it codes for. The attitude is the unconscious of the idea. When you figure out the attitude, it is now included on “that” side of what you are thinking. Then a new idea has been born, a fusion of the original idea and its accompa- nying attitude: the dialectical synthesis. Increasing knowledge (both prac- tical and theoretical) increases Spirit’s understanding of its materials, which reflects back on Spirit itself, developing its idea of itself. Thus, the Symbolic phase collapses into the Classical phase. In the Classical phase, there is a Goldilocks sweet spot in which there is a pleasant symmetry between Spirit and art materials.4 A harmony emerges that a later age can only regard as an illusion. Humans and nonhumans meet each other halfway, generating all kinds of beautiful machinery. Mozart and Haydn sound sweetly neoclassical, their music embodying how the nonhuman no longer towers over the human, but the human doesn’t fully compre- hend the depths of its own inner space. Art focuses on what William Blake called “the human form divine.”5 But this “equilibrium” is actually unsta- ble, since temporality is internal to thinking. It is not simply that cus- toms and ideas change “in time.” It is that there is a necessary movement within Spirit because of the gap between itself and its manifestations.

So the Classical phase collapses into the Romantic phase. Spirit’s self- understanding far outstrips the materials of art at this point. Philosophy takes over the driver’s seat. In this period, humans recognize the infinite depths of their inner space for the first time. It becomes radically impos- sible to embody this inner space in any nonhuman entity.6 So Romantic art must talk about the failure to embody the inner space in outer things. Yet by failing this way, art ironically succeeds to talk about the inner space. Isn’t the inner space precisely what can’t be embodied? So the job of art is to fail better, or rather, more sublimely. A truly Christian art is now possible, because art can now express the ironic gap between the divine idea and fallen human flesh, embodied in the incarnation of Christ.7 So, oddly, medieval cathedrals are less Christian than a Beethoven string quartet. From here on, art can only be about the failure of its mate- rials to embody Spirit fully, precisely because Spirit is not reducible to those materials. The inner infinity discovered in the Kantian sublime

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and in the poetry of Wordsworth ranges over the world of things like a ghost in search of a destination. Art becomes deeply story-shaped, as artists realize that since they can’t directly express Spirit, they must tell the story of the failure to express it. Music develops into the extreme chromaticism of Mahler, who explores every possible relationship be - tween the notes of a tune. “Chromaticism” means the use of semitones, the smallest possible traditional Western interval between notes.

The story of art’s failure to embody Spirit is recorded in the history of the avant-garde, which is also bound up with the history of the failure to change the objective social conditions of capitalism. The long march of the “isms” is the march of one form of Romanticism after another: Romanticism, realism, Impressionism, Expressionism . . . At the same time, art realizes that philosophy is now its big brother. At the very least, art needs manifestos and statements of purpose, philosophical explora - tions and justifications—because of its failure. We know more than we can embody and we can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

In order to express the nonexpression of the inner life of the human, technologies were invented such as the piano, whose massive resonant interior can be heard when the sustain pedal is depressed. Equal tem- perament came to dominate modes of tuning, because it enabled music to wander around in a consistent world, no matter how much chromati- cism was employed. Now in order to attain equal temperament, you have to detune the piano strings a little bit. The relationships between them are not based on whole number ratios. If they were—a tuning called just intonation—then wild dissonances and interference patterns between sound waves would result: the wolf tones. Equal temperament fudges the ratios a little bit. The endless journey of musical matter in search of Spirit happens in a coherent world of equal temperament fudge, like a sepia painting or photograph.

So, ironically, Beethovenian expressions of the rich inner life of Spirit are bought at the price of the enslavement of nonhuman beings—piano strings—to a system that turns them into fudge. Likewise, conductors arose to command the orchestra like a boss commanding workers in a factory. Gone were the genteel classical days when an orchestra conducted itself through the agency of the lead violinist, an arrangement that rather

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elegantly expresses the Goldilocks harmony between Spirit and materi- als that exemplifies that earlier era.

What happens next is something like the Master–Slave dialectic that Hegel explores in the Phenomenology of Spirit.8 The Master commands the Slave, but by working on the Master’s things, the Slave gains power and is eventually able to break free. But what happens next was unthink- able for Hegel. Hegel thought that art was going to be irony and inner life from his time on out because of the gap between Spirit and materials. Art came bundled with manifestos such as Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads or Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto: a quasi-philosophical statement of intent, which decenters the art by providing a way to think about it, dislocated from experiencing it directly.

The Romantic period is the very advent of the Anthropocene, when a layer of carbon is deposited by human industry throughout Earth’s top layers of crust. It doesn’t seem like a random coincidence, the epochal event of carbon deposits in Earth; the invention of pianos, gigantic slabs of hollow wood wound with strings tightened with industrially made nuts and bolts; the invention of the factory-like orchestra with its managerial conductor; and the dominance of equal temperament, spearheaded by the age of the piano. Equal temperament allowed the piano to dominate, to become a general musical instrument, much like the steam engine— recall that James Watt’s 1784 patent specified that it was a general pur- pose machine—as is its descendant, the universal Turing machine known as the computer. While a steam engine can be harnessed to a wide variety of machines (a train or loom, for example), a computer can pretend to be any machine at all.

Yet what has happened so far during the epoch of the Anthropocene has been the gradual realization by humans that they are not running the show, at the very moment of their most powerful technical mastery on a planetary scale. Humans are not the conductors of meaning, not the pianists of the real: a truth that is common both to poststructuralist and to speculative realist thought, despite their stated differences.

Let us explore the history of that nonhuman Romantic hero, the piano. It was as if composers began not so much to impose their will on pianos as become their operators, servants, or technicians, in a playful parody

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of the fate of the industrial worker, “an appendage of the machine.”9 Composers stopped listening to their inner space and started tuning to the inner space of the piano, its physicality, its timbre. We could describe the extreme Romanticism, shading into Expressionism, of Scriabin and then Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, as the way in which human inner space was evacuated through the logic of storytelling as such. Atonal music was a kind of Weimar Republic of sound, in which a protosocialist democracy made all notes equal. Serialism then proceeded to reduce the narrative sequence to an algorithmic process, a computation of pat- terns strictly based on the twelve-tone row.10 Žižek makes a very percep- tive statement about how atonal music begins to show the shadow side of the human self—it is paramusic, contacting the vortex of drives beneath the dialectic of desire, releasing them as an undead sound, a spectral materiality that no longer tells stories.11 But this was also a moment of liberation for another physicality, a nonhuman kind. Piano strings were beginning to be set free.

Gradually the inside of the piano freed itself from embodying the inner life of the human being, and started to resonate with its own wooden hollowness. There is a long yet traceable history between the first uses of the piano sustain pedal in the Romantic period, and the long, frightening boom from the inside of the piano at the end of The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.”12 John Cage liberated piano strings from sounding like a piano, by placing other objects on them, domestic items that might surround pianos in normal circumstances, items such as rubber bands and screws. These objects, which created the “prepared piano,” were not meant to express Cage’s inner self; they had their own anarchic auton- omy. It is as if they were allowed to occupy the inner space of the piano. In Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes, all kinds of fresh timbres emerge from the strings: muffled gongs, twangs, beeps. In the same way, AMM guitar - ist Keith Rowe constructs musical hyperobjects by allowing electric gui- tar strings to resonate with all kinds of sounds that are not intended by the human operating them. Indeed, Rowe’s term for silence, which is just a human refraining from making a sound, is un-intention, since “silence” is only when humans stop making sounds.13 The improvisations of Rowe allow nonhumans to jut through the art into human space.

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Then La Monte Young, a student of John Cage, took the next step. He liberated the strings of the piano from equal temperament, reverting to the just intonation that had been abandoned to create the Romantic world of sepia fudge. To return the strings to just intonation was indeed an act of justice, a “doom.” In justly tuned piano wires, we hear the doom of wire and wood. It was Young, first of the New York Minimalists, who used sound to end Romantic storytelling. Serialism had deconstructed the Romantic narrative by feeding what Webern calls the Strukturklang, the ghostly, spectral–material sound of structure as such, back into the music. Cage had gone further and fed household objects into pianos. Instead of coming up with a new tune, Young decided to work directly with tuning. Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano explodes the tradition begun by Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, organizing music not around a journey but around the vibrations of strings tuned to whole number ratios, ratios that allow ears to hear a dizzying height of crystal clear harmonics within any one note. This is the music of attunement, not of stories. Young’s drone music, accompanied by Marian Zazeela’s light pieces, happen for days at a time, sometimes longer, as human voices try to tune to a sine wave that is as pure as possible. The world of sepia, the consistency that enables the world as such to be, is brought to an end by vibrant colors that clash and interfere with one another, like lines in a painting by Napangati or Riley.

A string vibrates in a piano. Since it’s tuned to whole number ratios, the sound is clear and transparent, as if it were infinite, even though the string itself is finite. Yet the sound is specific, colorful, vivid: far more vivid than the topped and tailed, sepia sound of an equally tempered string. It cannot tell a story so easily, because piano strings that are not curtailed by equal temperament are unable to allow music to wander in the possibility space of effortless modulation between keys, an unre- stricted movement that is in direct proportion to the hobbling of the strings themselves, like the bound feet of Chinese women. If you try to change key, you create wolf tones, extra vibrations that oscillate wildly, spoiling the smoothness of the possibility space. Wolf tones are named precisely to evoke the nonhuman, the wild animal that must be domes- ticated to be of use.

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What are we hearing when we hear a justly tuned piano, playing the slow single notes and clusters that Young favors? We are hearing the piano as object, as open to its nonhumanness as is possible for humans to facilitate. The pianist becomes the medium—in the spiritualist sense— for the piano. Thus The Well-Tuned Piano is a cycle that is over five hours long, defying the human mind to make a story out of it. It is a loving work of restorative justice, allowing the piano to sound without refer- ence to the human. Young’s previous music, in particular the sets of in - structions to release a butterfly into the hall, or to push the piano until it goes through the wall, or to push and pull tables and chairs to emit shrieking harmonics, are algorithmic recipes for involving nonhumans in musical space. They are more or less versions of what Cage had already laid out in 4’ 33”, a piece designed for an open-air amphitheater. But The Well-Tuned Piano is a deliberate attunement to a nonhuman, the most significant musical nonhuman of the Anthropocene.

This brings us to the subject of Young’s music of attunement and drones. Young uses sine-wave generators so accurate that they only have an error once per calendar year. Young tries to live inside these sonic fields for as long as possible. What are we hearing when we enter Young’s Dream House in New York City (at 275 Church St.), where these gener- ators create crisscrossing interference patterns that shift as we move? We are hearing the equipment itself, we are hearing “music” that is a tuning to the equipment, and not the other way around. Rather than the equipment delivering the music, the music delivers the equipment. Likewise, Young’s drone pieces are tunings, like Indian classical music, which winds around a central motif, with the voice or the sitar trying to attune itself to the divine. Strings and generators have been liberated from telling a human story. They tell their own story, pronounce their own doom.

Tuning to tuning as such: doesn’t this remind us of the loop-like quality of meditation or contemplation, mocked in the Hegelian lineages of West- ern modernity as narcissistic navel gazing? For it is Hegel who above all wants to paper over the Kantian phenomenon–thing gap. Since I can think this gap, there is no gap—this is a too-short parody of Hegel’s idealism. Simply allowing the gap to exist would plunge me into the night in which

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all cows are black, the dreaded pure negation of A = A. Hegel pathologizes this loop as a primitive form of consciousness that he calls Buddhism, an orientalist inscrutability that approaches the status of “object”—some- thing that must be mastered, overcome, manipulated, changed. Raw materials. Yet what is an object other than the truth of A = A, which is strangely, spectrally in-difference, a loop that resembles “This sen- tence is false”? This sort of loop is not totally static, just as a night with black cows is not totally blank or opaque: after all, there are cows in the dark . . . An object, according to our understanding of hyperobjects, con- sists precisely of a rift between its appearance and its essence. Yet the appearance of a piano string is not the appearance of a plastic bag. A piano string is . . . a piano string: A = A. Yet this A can unleash not-A, insofar as all kinds of high-frequency sounds that are normally sup- pressed in equal temperament can be coaxed from the string, if only it is tuned according to a whole number ratio. The “equals A” is, as Derrida remarks in a discussion of the copula, a minimal difference within A as such, a difference that turns a self-swallowing snake into a Möbius strip.

So when modern music starts to go into a loop, beginning with late Romanticism, what emerges is a spectral physicality denied by Hegel and celebrated by his contemporary opponent, Schelling. The release of the vampiric remainder of sound at first seems uncanny and horrific, but the pure colors of Young’s just intonation are its direct descendant. The meditative, contemplative lineage into which Young deliberately plugs, the bhakti of devotion, in which one attunes to God in physical form (as the guru), and via physical forms (such as drones and chanting), is the Western descendant of Theosophy and the Victorian fascination for the spectral as spiritual, as a parareligious realm not wedded to the Christian narrative and the Christian love of narrativity.

Hegel’s disavowal of the richness of A = A has a long history in the Christian suppression of its more meditative forms (demonized as “Gnoti - cism”). The attempt to eliminate contemplative practices in the West is readily discernible in the history of religious interference with music. It is significant that Pope Gregory, who developed rules for sacred music, banned the augmented fourth, the infamous diabolus in musica. The augmented fourth chord is considered sacred in Hindu music, precisely

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because it allows the ear to access a vast range of harmonics, a range that evokes a hugely expanded sense of what in musical language is called timbre: the material that generates a sound, such as the wood and strings and open body of a sitar. What resonates in just intonation, for example—music based on whole number harmonic intervals, such as Indian music—is a profound range of materiality. It is like the “diaboli- cal,” ghoulish materiality of atonal music, but colored brilliant violet, magenta, and viridian. The singing of Sanskrit syllables, such as “OM” (a sound that Hinduism and Buddhism associate with the material uni- verse as such), evokes the materiality of the singing body and of the breath that circulates within and outside that body while it remains alive. These syllables are made to vibrate with as subtle and as profound a range of harmonics as possible, evoking the vastness of the universe. Devo- tional singing, then, is a form of hyperobject, one that meets the inti- macy with the other and with the distant future that hyperobjects such as plutonium force on us.

The aesthetic realm, the realm of causality, is demonized in Western thought: it is precisely seen as a demonic force from a beyond that is immanent rather than outside the universe. No wonder then that there is a connection between the vampiric sound of atonal music and the spiritual sound of La Monte Young. Recognition of the uncanny non- human must by definition first consist of a terrifying glimpse of ghosts, a glimpse that makes one’s physicality resonate (suggesting the Latin horreo, I bristle): as Adorno says, the primordial aesthetic experience is goose bumps.14 Yet this is precisely the aesthetic experience of the hyper- object, which can only be detected as a ghostly spectrality that comes in and out of phase with normalized human spacetime.

We discover in the contemplative singing practices of India an ex - panded materialism that tunes the singer and the listener to the precise timbre of the voice and the body, and to the resonant frequencies of the ambience in which the music is played. In so doing, expanded material- ism shows the way to bring the hyperobject into human social and philo- sophical space. This materialism is designed precisely to “bring the gods to mind,” to achieve the intimacy of devotion (bhakti) that is also prac- ticed in esoteric Buddhism.15 La Monte Young hit upon the notion of

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attending to matter in a contemplative way when he sought a radical break with Western music in the early 1960s. Young decided that the only way to evoke a truly new music was to stop the narrative flow that is normative in Western music, to pull the emergency break and bring to a shuddering halt the predictable journeys around the world of dia- tonic harmony and equal temperament. His Trio for Strings of 1958 is probably the first minimalist musical composition. Hanging like mono- liths in huge, gorgeous swathes of silence, the trio’s lapidary chords evoke something more threatening, more intimate and vast, than the repetitive riffing of the later minimalists Steve Reich and Philip Glass. It is sig- nificant that Reich and Glass have been far more successful in the bour- geois world of luxury products than Young, whose work demands a level of passion and commitment—and free time—that would probably embarrass and irritate, not to mention disturb, the average middle-class concertgoer.

Young’s interest in tones as such began with a fascination with the sound of the transformer in his turtle’s aquarium, the hum of the elec - trics that kept the environment habitable: the sound of the nonhuman. And so he produced 15 VIII 65: Day of the Antler from The Obsidian Ocelot, The Sawmill and The Blue Sawtooth High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer Refracting The Legend of The Dream of The Tortoise Travers- ing The 189/98 Lost Ancestral Lake Region Illuminating Quotients from The Black Tiger Tapestries of The Drone of The Holy Numbers. This aston- ishing title is evidently a hypertitle, full of objects. Adjunct to the sonic space traced in the piece, Young’s partner Marian Zazeela’s calligraphy begins to reveal the tracery of unmeaning that language supposedly transcends. Zazeela places writing in structures that employ a fourfold bilateral symmetry, turning script into the illegible arabesque it already is. These fractal squiggles, reminiscent of sound waves seen on oscillo- scopes, mark the performance space, illuminated with magenta and blue lights that clash in a way analogous to the way in which notes in an aug- mented fourth clash, producing a supersaturated abundance of radiation. What is this music other than art in the Age of Asymmetry? In other words, the music is a two-pronged attempt both to bring hyperobjects into human aesthetic–causal (social, psychic, philosophical) space, and

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to open that space to the wider world, or rather to the charnel ground after the end of the world; that is, to create a musical–social space for a while (hours and days) in which the project of attunement to the non- human is performed.

Attunement is precisely how the mind becomes congruent with an object.16 Young and Zazeela bring tuning to the forefront of art by having the music “tune” itself, insofar as singers and instruments play a fluid sequence of adjustments to a drone. Attunement opens the supposed here and now of light and sound into an infinite “lightyears tracery” (Young’s phrase), a nowness of harmonic frequencies, vibration within vibration, the infinite in matter, on this side of things; an immanent beyond. A sonic ecology without presence, without the present.

Singing the syllable “AH” (as Young and Zazeela do on 31 VII 69 10:26–10:49pm: Map of 49’s Dream The Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery, side 1 of the so-called Black Album) involves breath, vocal chords, the air around the body, and so on. This is not a realm of abstract presence, not a “world,” no Gesamtkunstwerk phantasmagoria of Wagnerian “total art.” Working directly on sound and light, on tones as such, reveals the emptiness and vastness of timbre, its groundless difference. Young’s and Zazeela’s New York Dream House is not natural, but super-natural, extra-natural, more natural than natural. It is bound to its materiality.

Young’s art allows us to encounter the timbre and determinacy of things; and at the very same time, and for the very same reasons, the depth of things. The art object strives to attune itself to hyperobjectivity. One of La Monte Young’s algorithmic compositions from 1960 involves playing a chord “for as long as possible.” The future that this art opens up is highly relevant to enabling us to cope with hyperobjects. Art in this mode approaches an aesthetic transcendence of normative human lim- its, yet not as Schopenhauer predicted in his ascetic and sclerotic version of Buddhism, an escape from samsara into a realm of soothing contem- plation.17 This contemplation is hot, intense, passionate and compassion - ate, intimate with death and poison, staking its place in the charnel ground, coexisting with specters and structures, with the mathēsis that tunes human cognition to the withdrawn thing. Is this not exactly what

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we need in order to live alongside hyperobjects? We shall be playing the game of coexistence for a very long time.

The nonhuman, already right here in social space, is finally acknowl- edged in the Age of Asymmetry. The nonhuman is no longer simply an object of knowledge (calculable and predictable), but is known by humans as a being in its own right, through a tricky ruse of reason itself, which now knows too much about nonhumans. We only hear a limited amount of the piano string. We only see a constrained amount of the electromagnetic spectrum. We know that the sounds and the lights tower into our perceptual realm through depths and heights immeasurable to our everyday experience. Thus, we get a somewhat metaphorical, yet vivid, taste of how all entities are profoundly withdrawn.

The Age of Asymmetry resembles the Symbolic phase, in that mate- rials now gain a new “life.” But humans can’t unknow what they know. We know about quarks and sine waves and Beethoven and the Anthro- pocene. So the Age of Asymmetry is not a return to animism as such, but rather animism sous rature (under erasure).18 It’s called the Age of Asym- metry because within human understanding humans and nonhumans face one another equally matched. But this equality is not like the Clas- sical phase. There is no Goldilocks feeling in the Great Acceleration era of the Anthropocene. The feeling is rather of the nonhuman out of con- trol, withdrawn from total human access. We have even stopped call- ing nonhumans “materials.” We know very well that they are not just materials-for (human production). We have stopped calling humans Spirit. Sure, humans have infinite inner space. But so do nonhumans. So does that piano note at the end of “A Day in the Life.” So the Age of Asymmetry is also like the Romantic phase, because we have not lost the sense of inner space. This feeling of inner space has only expanded, since we now glimpse it in nonhumans. Some even find it in other “higher” primates, some in all sentient beings, and some (the real weirdos such as myself ) in all beings whatsoever: eraser, black hole singularity, ceramic knife, molasses, slug.

From within the Romantic phase, we can already begin to detect the footprints of nonhumans in the very fact of irony, the one ingredient that appears to suck us into the vacuum of our inner space. The default

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position of Romanticism—which has been going on from about 1776 to now—is irony. Irony is the aesthetic exploitation of gaps, or as I have sometimes called it in undergraduate classes, gapsploitation. To be more precise, irony is the exploitation of a gap between 1 + n levels of signifi- cation. Irony means that more than one thing is in the vicinity. Irony is the echo of a mysterious presence. For there to be irony, something must already be there.

We can see in this phenomenon of irony stemming from an awareness of 1 + n levels the seeds of Romanticism’s dissolution. But this knowledge is only available to us now in the time of hyperobjects. Recall the dis- cussion of interobjectivity. Remember how hyperobjects point out how things share a weird sensual space in which everything is entangled. When you encounter a phenomenon in this sensual space, 1 + n entities are withdrawn in order for this encounter to take place. Irony is the foot- print of at least one other entity, an inner ripple, a vacuum fluctuation that indicates the distorting presence of other beings.

So, strangely, irony has not gone anywhere, but has increased in potency and poignancy. Irony has lost its “postmodern” (I would prefer to say “late modern”) edge, its T-shirt sloganeering. Irony has become the feeling of waking up inside a hyperobject, against which we are always in the wrong. The full truth of Romantic irony, in which the narrator real- izes that she is part of the story and that “there is no metalanguage,” is fully born not in the Romantic period, surprisingly, but in the Age of Asymmetry.19 Asymmetric irony is when we “save the Earth” but have no idea exactly why. “They were going to make me a major for this, and I wasn’t even in their Army anymore” (Apocalypse Now);20 or, “The vicis- situdes of this life are like drowning in a glass pond.”21 Irony multiplies everywhere, since no being’s appearance fully exhausts its essence. Irony becomes the experience of total sincerity, of being Jonah in the whale realizing that he is part of the whale’s digestive system, or Han Solo and Leia inside the gigantic worm they think is the surface of an asteroid.

Consider the absurd politics of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruc- tion) that held the world in the weird oppressive peace of the Cold War. Behind the face-off between the United States and the Soviet Union, do we not also glimpse an aspect of the Age of Asymmetry, in which

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humans coexist with a hyperobject, nuclear materials? Have humans not been forced since 1945 to contemplate a world without them, not simply in the abstract, but next week, ten years from now, in my children’s life- time? It is hyperobjects whose presence guarantees that we are in the next moment of history, the Age of Asymmetry. With their towering temporality, their phasing in and out of human time and space, their massive distribution, their viscosity, the way they include thousands of other beings, hyperobjects vividly demonstrate how things do not coin- cide with their appearance. They bring to an end the idea that Nature is something “over yonder” behind the glass window of an aesthetic screen. Indeed, this very concept of Nature is itself a product of the Romantic phase. Hyperobjects likewise end the idea that things are lumps of blah decorated with accidents, or not fully real until they interact with humans.

Art in the Age of Asymmetry must thus be a tuning to the object. Uncannily, the Platonic idea returns: art as attunement to the realm of demons. In the Ion Socrates and the rhapsode Ion imagine art to be the transmission of some demonic energy, as if Muse, poet, poem, rhapsode and audience were connected like magnets.22 This really isn’t too far from the idea of an electromagnetic field as such. Faraday and Maxwell imag- ined electromagnetic fields permeating the universe. The same can be said for gravitational fields. They are never completely nullified. In addition, one can see the Cosmic Microwave Background from the “beginning” of the universe in TV snow. Art becomes tuning to the depth of these fields.

The existence of this field, itself a hyperobject, seriously upsets the applecart of art as modernity defines it. Westerners have spent two cen- turies supposing that one could be a genius. Now the older idea of hav- ing genius (as with the Greek daimon, intermediary spirit) is returning. Genius is no longer a production of my inner space, but a collabora- tion between my inner space and at least one other entity. There is indeed something like a genius loci, we have found, not because we can stultify ourselves and unlearn science and throw away electric engines in favor of carts—but because we can’t. Art becomes a collaboration between humans and nonhumans, or as Negarestani puts it, “complicity with anonymous materials.”23 When you write a poem you are making a deal with some paper, some ink, word processing software, trees, editors,

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and air. You have to wonder whether your poem about global warming is really a hyperobject’s way of distributing itself into human ears and libraries. Art becomes an attunement to the demonic: Felix Hess allows us to hear the sound of air pressure fluctuations over the Atlantic by recording sounds from microphones placed on a window, then speeding up the recording to a more-than-human speed (see the section “Tempo- ral Undulation”). Rather than “being” a genius, you “have” it, because art is an attunement to a demonic force coming from the nonhuman and permeating us: as we all know we have all been strafed by radiation, for example. In Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia, the “anonymous materials” of oil and deep geological strata spring to demonic life, as if philosophy were a way not so much to understand but to summon actually existing Cthulhu-like forces, chthonic beings such as Earth’s core, which Nega - restani imagines as locked in conflict with a tyrannical sun, like Greek Titans.24 In China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, a city becomes a sen- tient being, while in The Scar, a floating city is made out of a gigantic assemblage of captured ships.25

There is another reason why art becomes an attunement to the demonic. The more we know about an object, the stranger it becomes. Conversely, the more we know about an object, the more we realize that what call subject is not a special thing different from what we call object. According to evolution, I look and quack enough like a human to pass on my DNA. This “satisficing” is enough to make me a human. A com- puter program looks and quacks enough like a person in a Turing Test, which is enough to make it a person. So in turn I look and quack like a person. Life 2.0 is possible; so “original life” is Life 1.0, artificial already. Life is made of non-life, so that replicant molecules such as DNA, RNA, and some silicates are neither alive nor non-alive, but rather they are more like the undead, persisting ironically by reproducing themselves in the very attempt to erase their disequilibrium. Eliminative materialists, who say that this means that smaller or simpler things such as nucleotides and quarks are more real than medium-sized things such as amoebae, horses, and minds, are in denial about the necessarily spectral properties of things in the Age of Asymmetry. Something about being is inherently spooky, disturbingly uncertain. “What constitutes pretense is that, in the

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end, you don’t know whether it’s pretense or not”26 Object does not mean objectified. Rather it means totally incapable of objectification. It’s clear that we only ever see footprints of hyperobjects. But in some sense we only see footprints of pencils, penguins, and plastic explosive.

Art, then, must attune itself to the demonic, interobjective space in which causal–aesthetic events float like genies, nymphs, faeries, and djinn. Something like a return to sensationalism or sentimentality seems to work, with added layers of irony and weirdness, as in the movies of David Lynch where, as Žižek observes, fire really burns and light itself hurts your eyes, where songs are the most beautiful songs you have ever heard and emotions passed over in daily life take on a horrifying, uncanny hue.27

In the previous section, we saw that the time of hyperobjects is an age of a precisely defined hypocrisy. Now we shall add to the (truly) post- modern human portfolio another specific category: weakness. Weakness determines the capacity for tuning. Just as hypocrisy flies in the face of a Nietzschean tendency within modernity, so weakness ends the search for ultimate men and supermen. Modernity is like the dinosaur, rendered extinct by some planet-scale cataclysm. Small, weak mammals crawled out from the wreckage.

The time of hyperobjects is a time of weakness, in which humans are tuned to entities that can destroy them: “‘Well, what’s your name?’ you ask him. ‘Odradek,’ he says. ‘And where do you live?’ ‘No fixed abode,’ he says and laughs; but it is only the kind of laughter that has no lungs behind it. It sounds rather like the rustling of fallen leaves.”28 Kafka uncannily blends Nature writing (“the rustling of fallen leaves”) with a claustrophobic indoor confrontation between a human and a nonhuman. The figure is the same that Coleridge uses in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which talks about “brown skeletons of leaves” in a way that pro- vokes thoughts of undead beings.29 The sound of trees resonates, but not in the expected way, to soothe or inspire a soul. Odradek, the contem- porary object par excellence, is just there. We are powerless to explain him. Yet somehow he was invited into our home. Odradek is a physical anomaly, like a drought or an unexpected tornado, or a mutant leaf bug with legs coming out of its eyes, born near Chernobyl. His very name has

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obscure origins: “Some say the word Odradek is of Slavonic origin, and try to account for it on that basis. Others again believe it to be of German origin, only influenced by Slavonic. The uncertainty of both interpreta- tions allows one to assume with justice that neither is accurate, especially as neither of them provides an intelligent meaning of the word.”30 When does global warming stop and start? When did the Anthropocene begin? The decisive dates (1784, 1945) and the vivid news stories (relating earth- quakes and fires) belie the undisclosed vagueness, yet realness, of the hyperobject. The very feeling of wondering whether the catastrophe will begin soon is a symptom of its already having begun. Besides, hyper- objects are too viscous, too nonlocal and molten, too interobejctive to be specified in the way we commonly think objects should be pinned down. The properties of hyperobjects provide an open window for denial- ist “skeptics” who use the tricks the tobacco industry has used for years: asserting that probability is not a guarantee of causality (even though science is nothing more than a collection of statistically significant data). Large, complex systems require causality theories that are not determin- istic. The oppressive drive to repeat the epistemological thrills and spills of the correlationist era by returning to Humean skepticism is itself a symptom that the nonhumans are already here.

Consider Sheryl St. Germain’s poem “Midnight Oil,” written in re - sponse to the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010:

how to speak of it this thing that doesn’t rhyme

or pulse in iambs or move in predictable ways like lines

or sentences

how to find the syntax of this thing

that rides the tides and moves with the tides and under the tides

and through the tides and has an underbelly so deep and wide

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even our most powerful lights cannot illuminate its full body

this is our soul shadow, that darkness we cannot own

the form we cannot name

and I can only write about it at night when my own shadow wakes me, when I can feel

night covering every pore and hair follicle, entering eyes and ears, entering me like Zeus, a night I don’t want

on me or in me, and I dream of giving birth to a rusty blob of a child who slithers out of me,

out and out and won’t stop slithering, growing and darkening, spreading and pulsing between my legs

darkening into the world

what it might feel like to be a turtle, say, swimming in the only waters you have ever known

swimming because it is the only way you move through the world to come upon this black bile

a kind of cloying lover a thing that looks to you

like a jellyfish, so you dive into it and try to eat it but it covers your fins so they can’t move as before

and there is a heaviness on your carapace and head that wasn’t there before, and you are blind

in the waters of your birth31

Notice how the poem is indented, justified to the right, not the left of the page, as if a gigantic force had reversed the normal right–left polarity. The poem seems to stick to a viscous object just off the edge of the right- hand side of the page. Far from foregrounding the human subject’s sup- posed priority to things, this inversion of normal lineation truly makes the poem a response, in the deep sense of tuning.

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Hyperobjects only make clear what is already the case: humans are weak, since they sincerely tune to the entities that crowd around them, unable to bootstrap themselves into the geostationary orbit of metalan- guage. The inner logic of the Great Acceleration ensures that in “touching the real” with the scanning tunneling microscope of objective presence, humans lose track of it immediately.32 Some contemporary ecological art tries to create cognitive maps of relationships between coexist ing things. Yet if things are somehow irreducibly withdrawn, if they have an inevit - able shadow side, such cognitive maps can only skate over the surface of things. The Age of Asymmetry ends the beautiful-soul syndrome of modernity. It is now no longer possible to maintain the aesthetic distance necessary for the “going meta” moves of the beautiful soul.

Romantic art exemplified by Wordsworth is the manual for the map- ping approach, whose avant-garde edge is what I shall call constructiv - ism. Constructivism views the artwork as a machine for upgrading the mind of the viewer. The machine is complex enough and distracting enough to unhinge one’s habitual patterns and encourage new cognitive maps to be drawn. The map, or the compendium, of Benjamin’s con- volutes (the Arcades Project), the volume with two or three columns of prose (Derrida’s Glas), and the online text peppered with hypertext links all derive from this Wordsworthian approach. Constructivism is fundamentally Romantic: it gives us too much to know, and Spirit floats free of things like a ghost. The wish of constructivism is an if-only: if only I could displace you enough, dear reader, the world would change.

Some art objects talk directly about hyperobjects. Consider the poi - gnant graffiti and guerilla installations of British artist Banksy. When a child rides the mechanical dolphin in Banksy’s piece Pier Pressure, a song plays, the familiar English “Oh I do like to be beside the seaside . . . ”; only the dolphin is swimming in an ocean of oil. Banksy’s dolphin ride is designed to provoke disgust and gallows humor.33 The repurposed fairground ride is a good example of constructivism. It forces us to think. It’s the late grandchild of Wordsworthian aesthetic strategies Likewise, Shelley, the first Wordsworthian of the next generation, styled himself as a hyper-Wordsworth who would do the same thing only better, and was more committed to radical politics.

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What about art that takes the hyperobject as its form? Are there any hyper-art-objects that perform the terrifying ooze of oil? As I argued previously, our position vis-à-vis these objects is like trying to get closer to the moon by running toward it, all the while forgetting that you are on the surface of Earth. The viscosity is a direct product of increas- ing information. The more data we have about hyperobjects the less we know about them—the more we realize we can never truly know them. As we’ve seen, hyperobjects are viscous: we can’t shake them off; they are stickier than oil and as heavy as grief. The closer we get, the less we know. Yet we can’t break free of them no matter how far away we retreat. We are stuck to hyperobjects, as if they enacted Sartre’s nightmare, “the sugary death of the For-itself,” evoked when I plunge my hand into a jar of honey.34 But it’s really much worse than that. We can’t assert a tran- scendental metaphysics in the face of hyperobjects. They won’t let us. They keep getting stuck to us. It was precisely our fantasies of transcen- dental smoothness and presence that summoned them into being. It was our drive to see and know everything that made us discover their oily presence, everywhere. Modernity’s nihilism is confronted by its specter, the nothingness of the thing.

This curious phenomenon confirms that we have entered an eco- logical era. A few moments ago we were delighting in our ironic free play. Now it seems we’re stuck to the mirror. This sticking occurs as a function of our attempt to realize the dream of progress, to see ourselves in the mirror of the end of history. Our very attempt to achieve escape velocity from our physical and biological being has resulted in being stuck to Earth. Rather than the total disintegration of the subject à la Fredric Jameson, or the vertiginous freedom of deconstruction, what we have is the creepy awareness that we are stuck to objects forever: we can’t un-know what we know.

Like Anansi and the Tar Baby, there is no way to break free from hyperobjects. It becomes impossible to achieve pure detached irony. Vis- cosity reinforces itself in the very attempt to break free from it: we are enmeshed in A = A, which turns out not to be the night in which all cows are black, but a strange sticky Möbius strip. So we find ourselves incapable of the quizzical, man-in-space postmodernism of the 1980s.

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Knowing more about hyperobjects is knowing more about how we are hopelessly fastened to them. Hyperobjects have done what two and a half decades of postmodernism failed to do, remove humans from the center of their conceptual world (there’s that term again).

What we end up with is a situation in which it becomes impossible to maintain aesthetic distance. This distance is the main factor in pro- ducing the concept Nature. So the curious phenomenon arises in which Nature dissolves just as hyperobjects start to ooze uncannily around us. “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” Viscosity is what compels us, what puts us in the zone of the imperative (Lingis’s term). In this zone, choice is not the protocol of moral action. The viscosity of hyperobjects haunts us. It looms into our social, psychic, and ecological space. Or rather, we discover that it was already looming. Ontologically (and temporally) prior to our conceptual probing, hyperobjects are here, like the ghosts in The Sixth Sense.

This leads us to consider an approach that is precisely the converse of constructivism. The approach is the weird little sister of the rather mas- culine constructivist strategy. Let us call it the object-oriented approach. If objects subtend their relations, not as substantial blah decorated with accidental candy, but as sparkling realities withdrawn from access, the constructivist approach can only go so far. The inventor of the object- oriented approach was John Keats, who exemplifies a minor tradition within modernity, a tradition that has flirted with objects and is thus vil- ified as naïve, kitsch, or commodity-fetishist. When Wordsworth heard some of Keats’s poem Endymion, he took offense, muttering sarcasti- cally, “A very pretty piece of Paganism.” His infantilizing, feminizing remark was right on the money. Wordsworth saw the threat. Keats had discovered a totally new move within modern consumerist possibility space. He was not playing in Wordsworth-space at all, the space of open form, of complex machines that upgrade the subject. Instead, he went straight to the object, trying not to upgrade the reader’s mind but to melt it.

We need to get out of the persuasion business and start getting into the magic business, or the catalysis business, or the magnetizing busi- ness, or whatever you want to call it. Using reason isn’t wrong. But with

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objects this huge, this massively distributed, this counterintuitive, this transdimensional, it’s not enough simply to use art as candy coating on top of facts. We can’t just be in the PR business. Percy Shelley put it beautifully when he wrote, “We [lack] the creative faculty to imagine that which we know.”35 That was back in 1820, and it’s only gotten worse. Consider the heavy hydrocarbons that subtend the soil of the Lago Agrio oil field in Ecuador, a black fudge hyperobject that oozes into drinking water, with unknown and under-studied mutagenic and carcinogenic effects. We do not need to keep on parsing the data like Chevron, the defendants in the lawsuit on behalf of the people affected by the con- taminated soil. Such parsing of data would be using the very same tac- tic as the gigantic corporation, the strategy of producing endless maps and graphs.

What we need is more like what Judge Nicolás Zambrano finally did in the case, which was to suspend the endless construction of (necessar- ily incomplete statistical) data, and specify that precisely because there is a gap in our knowledge—what do these heavy hydrocarbons do exactly?— to determine that the best action is to act as if the threat were real. To specify them not as assemblages of relations but as a unit, as an entity with unknown powers, a unique entity consisting of all kinds of other entities, all kinds of complex hyrocarbons, but an entity nonetheless, just like any other in its Tardis-like inconsistency. To respect the Kantian gap between phenomenon and thing on which modernity and modern science is based. And yet to respect it still more than the deniers, who endlessly look for more data, more proof. This is a philosophical war, a war that Blake calls a “mental fight.”36 The tactic of Judge Zambrano was in effect to specify the oil as an entity in its own right rather than as an assemblage or set of relations: an object-oriented tactic. Precisely because the hyperobject is withdrawn—it is mathematizable to humans as reams and reams of data—its appearance is in doubt: its appearance as cancer, its appearance as sores covering the body of a newborn baby.37 And for precisely this reason, precaution must be the guiding principle. No fur- ther proof is required, since the search for proof is already contaminated by an unwillingness to acknowledge the hyperobject, an unwillingness we may readily call denial.

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The burden of proof is shifted to the defendant: Chevron must now prove that oil does not have a harmful effect.38 This is a judo move within a post-Humean age in which scientific causality just is statistical. Toxic- ity is a category that emerges from the Humean science of statistical causality. You can’t directly specify it since there is no single criterion for it—its object withdraws, yet every day we see people dying of cancer from the mutagenic effects of radiation and hydrocarbons. Moreover, only about twenty-five of the thousands of hydrocarbons in existence on Earth have been studied as to their toxic effects. So Chevron can parsimoni - ously claim that there is no proof. Figuring out exactly what the causal links are, even if possible, would result in further delay and further dam- age to nonhuman and human life. It is like Lingis and the cigarette in the sequoia forest. Reasoning as the search for proof only delays, and its net effect is denial. This doesn’t mean that a cigarette is an umbrella, or that the effects of heavy aromatic hydrocarbons are to cause cotton candy to sprout on banana trees. It means that things are liars who tell the truth, like “This sentence is false”; the larger the things are, the more obvious this feature becomes. Ethics and politics in a post-modern age after Hume and Kant must be based in attunement to directives coming from enti- ties, which boils down to accepting and listening to true lies. Any ethical or political decision thus feels like an uncanny leap into a void, where we are unsure of ourselves, precisely because there is so much data.

The trouble with the PR approach, or the reason-only approach (its twin in some ways), is that human beings are currently in the denial phase of grief regarding their role in the Anthropocene. It’s too much to take in at once. Not only are we waking up inside of a gigantic object, like finding ourselves in the womb again, but a toxic womb—but we are responsible for it. And we know that really we are responsible simply because we can understand what global warming is. We don’t really need reasons—reasons inhibit our responsible action, or seriously delay it. No neonatal or prenatal infant is responsible for her mother’s toxic body. Yet that is the situation we find ourselves in—on the one hand terrify- ingly regressing, on the other hand, enragingly implicating. It’s like the joke about the man who ended up in an asylum as he was paranoid that he was being stalked by a gigantic chicken. Upon being released, he

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returns a few weeks later, sweating and terrified. The chief psychiatrist tries to reassure him: “But you know that there is no chicken.” “I know that,” says the man—“But try telling that to the chicken.” The urgent question of our age is, how do we convince the chicken—in particu- lar, the American chicken—that she doesn’t exist? In other words, how do we talk to the unconscious? Reasoning on and on is a symptom of how people are still not ready to go through an affective experience that would existentially and politically bind them to hyperobjects, to care for them. We need art that does not make people think (we have quite enough environmental art that does that), but rather that walks them through an inner space that is hard to traverse.

What is required, then, is to renew the object-oriented approach pioneered by Keats. Drop or supplement the Nature strategy—why is constructivism a Nature strategy in the lineage of Rodchenko and Naum Gabo? Because Nature art creates machines that change attitudes, para- doxical devices that upgrade human consciousness, changing people’s relations with one another and with nonhumans. Their raw material is the viewer’s or reader’s conceptual mind. Why? Because Wordsworth, “poet of Nature,” as Shelley calls him, wrote the manual on this strat- egy. This affects all kinds of art practice including concept art and per- formance art, and even agriculture as performance art (as in the work of Wendell Berry). The art object as geographical text. You think you know what Nature is—all it requires is some good PR. You get into the con- vincing business. You are working in the configuration space of adver- tising. To many, dropping the Nature–constructivist approach in favor of an object-oriented approach will look like an abandonment of Nature. It is—but it is by no means an abandonment of Earth or of things in their weird vibrancy. Far from it. Let’s consider some examples.

The sound art of Francisco Lopez evokes the hyperobject in an object- oriented way. La Selva is an immensely powerful example.39 Lopez achieved it by using simple equipment: place just two good mikes in the Amazon jungle, hit record, stop. The result is far from an ambient rendering or simulation of the real. By using loops and careful equali- zation, recordings of Nature tend to evoke a comforting sense of being surrounded. What we hear in La Selva is a threatening, solid wedge of

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sound. Lopez summons the jungle as a discrete unit, a quantum inca- pable of being divided further. Since there are real objects, I contend, some metaphors for them are better than others—and Lopez’s transla- tion of the jungle into MP3 form is an excellent translation, based at any rate on my personal experience of the Amazon rainforest. In the jungle, lifeforms abolish all sense of aesthetic distance. They are in your face— you need to keep them away, frequently, to avoid fatal disease. The tem- perature is roughly human body temperature, constantly, so it becomes hard at the level of deep sensation to maintain a boundary between where one’s skin stops and where the rainforest starts. And the jungle as a unit is present—this is not to argue that it’s a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts (a Gaian whimsy). You do not experience the jungle as a gigantic benevolent machine made of tiny replaceable components. Rather, the jungle is an entity that comes right up to your skin and pene - trates it, beaming through you like x-rays. Lopez forces us to confront the rainforest in this manner.

Consider Robert Ashley’s She Was a Visitor.40 Ashley intones the phrase “She was a visitor” into a microphone. The audience begins to pronounce whatever phoneme of the phrase an individual chooses. The piece becomes a massively distributed pronunciation of “She was a vis- itor,” split into sonic chunks. It spine chillingly captures the alien pres- ence of the strange stranger, the notion of entities as irreducibly uncanny. There is an echo of the Greek tragic chorus and the protagonist, as Ash- ley’s voice speaks over the hissing, clicking ocean of syllables. “She was a visitor” becomes strange. Perhaps she was a visitor to my house. Per- haps she was a visitor to the concert hall. Perhaps she was a visitor from another planet. She gives us a glimpse of the futural essence of a thing. Likewise, the phrase itself becomes a “visitor,” an alien being that rus- tles like a rainforest around Ashley. In the mouths of the audience, the phrase becomes a hyperobject—distributed, yet there—like the image in a Magic Eye picture that can only be glimpsed anamorphically, yet is distributed throughout the picture plane, like a hologram. The past of she was melts into the future, the future future, the unknown unknown.

John F. Simon’s Every Icon is an algorithmic piece, easily found online.41 Every Icon is software code that causes the microprocessor to produce

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every possible icon capable of being made out of a small grid, which con- sists of a series of cells that can be black or white. When left to run, given sufficient energy, and given a universe whose duration is very different from our own, Every Icon executes what it says in the title over the course of ten trillion years. Or, as the accompanying text puts it succinctly:

Given: An icon described by a 32 × 32 grid. Allowed: Any element of the grid to be colored black or white. Shown: Every icon.

Like Ashley’s She Was a Visitor, this is a disturbingly futural work. The fact that the algorithm will stop, but only after 1012 years, conveys the futurality of the hyperobject: very large finitude makes infinity humiliat- ingly easy, as I’ve argued earlier. Smith’s piece shows how hyperobjects make clear the reality of execution—what algorithms do when they run.42 Each momentary state of Every Icon is not Every Icon, because that is the execution of an algorithm. Without an object-oriented theory of objects at hand, the fact that each moment of Every Icon is not Every Icon might cause us to imagine there was a Sorites paradox at work: the ancient paradox of the heap, in which if I place a grain of sand next to another, it is not a heap—and if I repeat this process, even tens of thou- sands of times, each time I check, there will be no heap, since adding one grain does not make a heap. If no moment of Every Icon is the work itself, then suddenly there is no work! The work withdraws, precisely because it executes, a fact that is more significant than its duration. Every Icon is ignoring us humans in its moment-to-moment procedural unfolding.43 The fact that we only see flickering pieces of a hyperobject is an indica- tion of a hyperobject’s reality, not of its nonexistence.

The work of Jarrod Fowler exemplifies the object-oriented approach. Fowler is a percussionist working in what he conceptualizes as the crea - tion or discovery of non-music, a category that evokes François Laruelle’s notion of non-philosophy, an attempt to see philosophy within a wider

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configuration space. In this sense, Fowler’s music includes the absolute absence of music as well as the presence of noise. Yet these theories become almost insignificant when one is confronted by the actual sound of his pieces Percussion Ensemble and P.S., which consist of vast sam- plings of layer upon layer of percussion pieces. This layering gives rise to what feels like a forest of glittering shards of broken glass stretching as far as the ear can see.44 I wrote the sleeve note for P.S:

To generate, or rather to discover from within music itself, substances that resist not only classification as music, but music as such. To locate music as a small island of pseudo-consistency in a gigantic ocean of non- music, after François Laruelle. To locate noise as the infinitesimal subsi- dence of this island into the ocean, much bigger than noise, quiet, sound and silence.

To force music to think about itself, as music. To see thinking about music as distorted by what is exterior to thought, and even to human being. To discover, with a slightly uncanny horror, that the wall between human being and nonhuman is the appearance of the nonhuman itself. To realize that this wall of resistance is a symptom of what the philosopher Quentin Meillassoux calls hyperchaos.

To delineate through this method a working model of causality itself, which operates by what Jarrod Fowler calls rhythmicity. To investigate beats, which break up sonic continua: one beat as the miniscule flicker of causality. To realize that this causality floats on top of and emerges from the ocean of rhythmicity. To see, to hear that there is only this ocean, continually sampling itself, breaking itself up into itself. To announce this inherently contradictory reality in a sonic form as dialetheia, double- truth: p ^ ¬p.45

In the ears, however, the music becomes a hyperobject, literally consist- ing of layers of beats and no-beats that offer dizzying perspectives of phasing, high-dimensional sound (and non-sound). What we don’t have here is a postmodern pastiche. What we have is a musical hyperobject, a truly new entity. Imagine summing all the waves of all the rhythms in the universe and constructing a musical hyperobject of the highest possible

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complexity—this would be the Platonic ideal (yet substantial and imma- nent) of this “non-music.”

Now, though enormous, this sum is necessarily incomplete! Why? Because of the determinacy of the objects in the universe, including the transmission media. For a beat to exist, at least one frequency is always “left out” of the perceived beat—no music can ever be complete precisely because there is an interaction between waves plus at least one wave that is canceled out. To hear a beat at all, something must be erased. So there really can be no “beyond” in which the absolute sum could be “heard”: a fact that is very similar to Cantor’s diagonal proof of transfinite sets. What Fowler’s music demonstrates, then, is a weird realism in which objects are uncanny, futural, and slightly threatening. They exist in an interobjective space that emerges from the coexistence of 1 + n objects, as we saw in the section on phasing.

Most environmentalist art is constructivist, not object oriented, for the simple reason that constructivism has been the dominant mode of art in modernity. Another strange fact: the art that emerges at the in- ception of the Anthropocene is not fully capable of addressing it. The 350.org movement places the number 350 on gigantic surfaces, such as beaches, that are photographed from above. Like the Nazca Lines in in Peru, they cannot be seen fully from ground level. Three hundred and fifty is the number of parts per million CO2 that is deemed acceptable to avoid disastrous global warming. This graffiti is designed to change your mind. Or consider the geographical map-like piece Wellness over Time, by Marije de Haas (Plate 4). A detailed map of artists’ responses to the Arctic is drawn to supplement maps of physical space, including a cross section of isotherms influenced by the pioneering work of Hum- boldt. Comically, there is a variable (and appropriate symbol) for bowel problems along with affective states, diet, and so on. The constructivist work is a map, trying to give us more, ever more, even too much, so that we can’t take it all in.

In 2011 some artists and architects and other scholars in Sydney were trying to come up with ways to do an exhibition about hyperobjects.46 I suggested purchasing some space aboard a satellite that passed over the exhibition space in its orbit. The idea is put about that something

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has been placed in a locked container aboard the satellite, something known only to a few people, but with some unspecified significance to do with hyperobjects. Then when the satellite passes over the exhibition, it photographs people entering. When people enter the museum, they give their e-mail addresses. At some randomly generated point after people leave, the satellite sends them a photograph of themselves enter- ing the museum. I wanted the artwork to be as threatening as possible. But such a piece remains within a constructivist framework.

By contrast, consider Chris Wainwright’s, Red Ice 3, a photograph of an iceberg in red light (Plate 5). To achieve this, Wainwright simply photographed the iceberg with a red flash. As Wordsworth sneered, the feminine is in play. The iceberg looks like the femme fatale Judy in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, when she is flooded with red light and we realize with creepy horror that she is indeed the woman from the earlier part of the film. The ocean no longer looks deep and fishy, but more like a rippling layer of latex. By heightening the artificiality, Keats-style, some- thing of the object as such intrudes into human social and psychic space. By tinting the mirror pinkish red, objects within it are realized to be “closer than they appear.” The sudden disappearance of the background pushes the iceberg forward like an actor in a drama or a figure in an Expressionist painting.

Without a background, without Nature, without a world, the iceberg haunts us. There is a weird effect of withdrawal and disturbing intimacy all at once, like the pull focus, another favorite Hitchcock technique. David Lynch movies and Chris Wainwright’s iceberg, or the dreampop of Slowdive or Lush, are differently resonant than a constructivist map. This resonance contains a vital ecological truth, because the object- oriented art of the Age of Asymmetry forces us to coexist with nonhu- mans—coexist without an agenda. Now we may see how astonishing it is that Napangati was able to combine a map (constructivism) with a device (object-oriented art) in Untitled 2011 (Plate 1), which I discussed in “Phasing” in part 1.

Object-oriented art confronts us with the possibility of accommo- dating ourselves to things that are viscous and sticky and slow. Art that sticks to us and flows over us. To this extent, Pink Floyd were not the first

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space rockers. They were the first exponents of viscous pop. Their very name conjured up the huge bowl full of pink jello into which their fans dived when they played live in 1967. Their early light show, the first to use the oil wheel, covered the band in oozing light. We could read this not as metaphorical for trippy space but as literal oil and radiation, cov- ering their bodies, impossible to slough off. The oil slides developed by Peter Wynne-Wilson speak to a phenomenological truth called sincerity. There is no way to jump outside sensual objectivity, because when you try, you find yourself slap in the middle of another one. As has been said many times, there is no metalanguage.47 Irony becomes just another way of sticking to hyperobjects. Or, in the words of Buckaroo Banzai, “Wher- ever you go, there you are.”48 Sincerity eats irony.

Consider Brenda Hillman’s poem “Styrofoam Cup,” a poem whose title’s play with Greek announces in advance that this will be some kind of remix of Keats’s On a Grecian Urn:

thou still unravished thou

thou, thou bride

thou unstill, thou unravished unbride

unthou unbride49

On the one hand, the poem is a commentary on disposable culture with its less-than-visible waste, in which mountains of Styrofoam form a hyperobject of their own. On the other hand, by including the “waste” within the poem, by returning to the commodity’s afterlife outside human use, Hillman shows us, similarly to Keats and his urn, how objects are not exhausted by our use, but rather persist beyond it, beyond the grave. The cup haunts the poetic space, just as the Grecian urn seems to haunt Keats with its “leaf-fring’d legend” that “haunts about [its] shape” (5). The

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poem takes the first line of Keats’s ode, “Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,” and repeats it (as in industrial production), while distorting and as it were “crushing” it (like casual hands crumpling a Styrofoam cup).50 The space around the lines becomes part of the poem, puffed up like Styrofoam itself. It is as if wherever we look, we find pieces of Styro- foam, pieces of poetry lines—waste made visible. The cup, the poem, and the first line are eminently repeatable and disposable. But this does not get rid of the cup: it keeps returning weirdly, as if reincarnated or zombified, as if no amount of crushing and reuse would “ravish” it. It maintains an uncanny opacity, an opacity that extends beyond presence, to an uncanny realm in which it is shot through with nothingness, an “unbride”—undead, “unthou.” This is the Keatsian, object-oriented strat - egy par excellence. In this strategy, a strange pull focus effect occurs whereby irony’s attempt to achieve escape velocity from sincerity is con- stantly thwarted, resulting in bigger and bigger physicality, like the ex - panding puffiness of Styrofoam.

Comora Tolliver’s Pod installation is a disturbing, wonderful explo- ration of our current ecological crisis (Plate 6).51 Rather than rely on worn-out Nature-speak, Tolliver cuts to the heart of the matter and ren- ders the strange mixture of intimacy, grief, and overwhelmingness that is the current reaction to global warming and the Sixth Mass Extinc- tion Event—an extinction triggered by human activity, the sixth major one on Earth (the last was about 66 million years ago). Pod is entirely covered with Mylar. At first glance it says, “Covering the world with plastic brought this about, this destruction, this commodification, this need to preserve now threatened with extinction.” It also references the radiation-resistant foil covering the Lunar Module around the time Pink Floyd were oozing through their powerful PA system. Like any truly great work of art, however, Pod is a dialectical image that says a lot more than that. The threshold of Pod vibrates with form and color so much that nonhumans, such as dogs, take fright and run.

Pod is a seed bank turned into the visual equivalent of a huge wall of guitar feedback. Inside the Pod is a grave-like hollow in which dead flowers float in water. It’s as if the Pod contains a grave for the now dead concept of Nature, a plastic fetish disguised as the real thing. For Tolliver,

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by contrast, Mylar is a distorting mirror held up to our non-Nature, a mirror that refuses to reflect the human but instead reaches out to destroy us. In this sense the floating flowers at the grave-like core of Pod are the most artificial things in the entire installation. The threshold as well as the interior melts with vibrant Mylar dripping with paint. So reflective is the surface and so intense the light that the paint seems in places to stand out from the surface down which it drips in fronds and tentacles. It is as if background and foreground have been shockingly suspended, leaving us with a hallucinatory, psychotic experience that is at once intensely real yet at the same time uncannily withdrawn and unspeakable. Like the gigantic oceans of sound produced by musicians such as Spacemen 3, Sunn O))), or La Monte Young, Tolliver’s work is lit- erally staggering, inducing neurological shock in the same way Bridget Riley makes you see your own optic nerve. Tolliver replicates the viscos- ity of hyperobjects.

The jaw dropping loveliness of the colors that seem to melt in pure space evokes a world that is far too close to be called a world, an ecolog- ical real that is right under our skin—it is our skin. We find ourselves like prisoners waking up inside the ecological mesh of lifeforms. There was no outside. The interstitial space of the Pod entrance screams, “You are already inside this.” It’s a monument to the beginning of history. How arrogant that we thought it was the end when the Berlin Wall came down.

Marina Zurkow’s Mesocosms are two digital pieces that last over 140 hours. One is based in Northumbria, the other in Wink, Texas, the site of a petroleum sinkhole (Plate 7). One starts the animation and lets it run, and turns one’s attention to it coming and going as one does with the weather—this compels us to see how boredom and anxiety are intrin- sic to the scalar shift required to think about hyperobjects. There is a strange dislocation: the temporal scale of the animations disturbs, while the images resemble familiar pictures in a Nature coloring book. Yet amid the charming familiarity, strange things happen. In the Northum- berland animation, a portly naked man gets up and walks out of the screen into the blank or void space on either side. A strange planet rises off in the horizon. In the Wink, Texas, animation gorgeous butterflies

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float in slow motion while disconcertingly small people (children?) in hazmat suits crawl across the landscape. Yet these strange events occur alongside the ordinary. The stars come out. It rains.

A mesocosm is an ecologist’s term for a slice of an ecosystem that one has isolated in order to study. Zurkow’s Mesocosms evoke uncanny feel- ings of being-with other things, lifeforms, horizons, the void around the frame. To adapt a phrase of Derrida’s, there appears to be no outside- mesocosm: it is as if things considered to be Nature and Nature art are still there (the sky, a tree, a butterfly, and the charming, children’s style of illustrating them) while things considered not to be (voids, hazmat suits, weird overlapping speeds) coexist alongside, eating Nature away slowly, gently and thus with true remorselessness. In Zurkow’s Elixir series, we watch the human as a fragile essence in a crystal decanter, storm-tossed in waves or billowing clouds (Plate 8). There is a little world of liquids within the decanter, and a vast ocean without, so that each bottle is a mise en abyme of a larger nonhuman space. Inside each bottle, a cartoon human flaps artificial wings, or surfs. The fragile glass decanters, contain- ing their cartoon line drawing humans in their bottled worlds, are corre - lationist ships in bottles, storm tossed inside the hyperobject of climate. Each bottle is a swollen glass head full of dreams, adrift in a real world.

A ne plus ultra of the object-oriented approach is JLiat’s found sound piece, a series of straightforward recordings of the hydrogen bomb tests in the Pacific.52 Words fail to describe the horror with which I heard the first few seconds of the sound of the Bravo test, “the worst radiologi- cal disaster in US history,” as JLiat’s home page puts it. After those first few seconds, I had to tear the headphones off my head. There’s some- thing about hearing that sound, that actual sound. It has been sam- pled and translated of course into an MP3, yet it is a sample of the real sound of a real object, a massive bomb. Hearing it rather than seeing it, in a tiny movie image on YouTube behind the aestheticizing glass screen of your computer, restores to the aesthetic dimension a trauma and a pain that we edit out at our peril. Hearing it, in other words, restores not full presence but spectral intimacy to the thing. This is the promise of the object-oriented approach: not a back-to-Nature erasure of art’s mendacity—that would be a denial of the Kantian gap between

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phenomenon and thing—but a strange reinforcement of the gap that brings us into intimacy, into coexistence with strangers, which is ecolog- ical being-with.

Ecological awareness is without the present. The “As I write . . . ” trope of ecomimesis is, without admitting it, an elegy to this totally lost pres- ence.53 “As I write these words, snow is gently falling outside my hut at the edge of the forest,” is an inverted acknowledgment of the towering realities of the Anthropocene. The calls for a restoration of a balance that never existed on Earth—Earth being the name for a text of geotrauma— are desperate attempts to put the genie back in the bottle; or rather the twin genies of Anthropocenic reason and Anthropocenic human force. The perverse triumphalism that rubbernecks the sadistic victory of Gaia over lifeforms deemed improper—the viral human—is a futile attempt to master the irreducible uncanny futurality of things: all things—a Styro - foam cup that lasts for five hundred years, a dog dosed with strontium-90 encased in a block of concrete for forty years, the shadow of a human impressed on a Hiroshima wall—an image eerily reproduced in Yves Klein blue in 1961 (Figure 15).54

A more genuine acknowledgment of what is happening—the opening for humans of the Rift between essence and appearance, the vanishing of the present and of presence—is the work of Butoh, the Japanese “dance of darkness” that was invented in the wake of Hiroshima.55 In Butoh, the human body no longer floats as if weightless in abstract space, but is pressed down from all sides by a horrible gravity, the spacetime emitted by a gigantic object, preventing the human from achieving escape veloc- ity. The waves of other beings distort the human face into sickening masks of itself—faces that are already heavily made up to appear mask- like. The body is powdered with ash as if from the fallout of an atomic bomb.56 Cinders, ash, the trace, the shadow of a holocaust.57

Reality in the Anthropocene is becoming more vivid and “unreal,” spec- tral. Without a world, without Nature, nonhumans crowd into human space, leering like faces in a James Ensor painting or the faces of Butoh dancers. The difference between a face and a mask (in the Greek, prosō - pon) collapses. Without presence, habitual, ontically given coordinates of meaningfulness dissolve. This irreducible unreality is a symptom

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of reality as such with which the weird realisms (speculative realism, object-oriented ontology) are beginning to cope as emergent features of the uncanny intersection of geotrauma and human history. Covered in ash, the human dances, caught in a horrible physicality: physicality with- out a beyond, without an outside, without presence.

Ecological coexistence is with ghosts, strangers, and specters, precisely because of reality, not in spite of it. The coexistence of beings, without an agenda, is predicated on what I call lameness. Lameness is the third human attunement to the time of hyperobjects, the first two being hypocrisy and weakness. Like hypocrisy and weakness, lameness has a

Figure 15. Human atomic shadow (with

ladder), Hiroshima, Japan. A human blocks the wall

from being totally bleached by the

propagation of heat from the blast. In light of this

image one might reverse Foucault’s quip (at the end

of The Order of Things) that the figure of man will

vanish like an image drawn in sand on the

seashore. Hyperobjects make clear the far more

disturbing fact that what is called human continues

after the end of the (human) world. Here the

human is literally a shadow on a much larger

physical structure, a shadow of the conversion

of matter to energy.

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very specific significance here. The fundamental reason for lameness has to do with a special property of any given entity that is particularly visible in the case of hyperobjects. An object fails to coincide with its appearance-for another object, no matter how accurate that appearance- for. There is thus a lameness within every object, a lameness that consti- tutes the very being of the object as such. In order to exist, an object must fail to coincide with itself totally. Existence, contra Alain Badiou, is not consistency but rather a fragile inconsistency.58 Every object exhibits this ontological inconsistency, but hyperobjects make it especially obvious. A tornado is not global warming. A mountain is not planet Earth. Tissue scars from x-rays are not radiation. A child is not the biosphere.

The lameness applies to humans, who now stand within the reso- nance of hyperobjects. There is a fissure between how we appear and what we are, a fissure this study has called the Rift. The “inner space” that Kant and others opened up in the Romantic period is only a distant and inverted caricature of the Rift, like a photographic negative. The Rift guarantees that inner space, no matter how deep or vivid or sensitively attuned, is hermetically sealed from other entities. The Kantian experi- ences of beauty and the sublime are inner echoes of other beings, just as the synthetic judgment that these experiences underwrite is a footprint of these other beings.59 Even correlationism maintains a tenuous umbil- ical link with nonhuman realities. When hyperobjects are fully exposed to human being, the power and freedom of the Romantic sublime inverts itself into contemporary lameness. It is not an unpleasant reversal, unless you really need to be on top all the time. Indeed, the “saving power” that Hölderlin speaks of is truly the saving lameness of the Rift: the way in which all things, humans no exception, are hobbled from within by an ontological gap. Spirit now no longer floats in the zero gravity of inner space. Instead, humans find nonhumans pressing in on all sides, in the charnel ground at the end of the world.

Art in these conditions is grief-work. We are losing a fantasy—the fan- tasy of being immersed in a neutral or benevolent Mother Nature—and a person who is losing a fantasy is a very dangerous person. In no sense then should art be PR for climate change. Have you ever considered the possibility of doing PR for a relentless army of zombies?

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Every aspect of hyperobjects reinforces our particular lameness with regard to them. The viscosity that glues us to the hyperobject forces us to acknowledge that we are oozing, suppurating with nonhuman beings: mercury, radioactive particles, hydrocarbons, mutagenic cells, future beings unrelated to us who also live in the shadow of hyperobjects. The nonlocality of hyperobjects scoops out the foreground–background manifolds that constitute human worlds. The undulating temporality that hyperobjects emit bathes us in a spatiotemporal vortex that is radi- cally different from human-scale time. The phasing of hyperobjects forc - ibly reminds us that we are not the measure of all things, as Protagoras and correlationism promise. And like a wafting theater curtain, inter- objectivity floats in front of objects, a demonic zone of threatening illu- sion, a symptom of the Rift between essence and appearance.

The object-oriented approach that frees hyperobjects for our being- with them is Keatsian, in that it is a type of rest. Keats writes that, resting in a room, he absorbs the qualities of those around him, like a chame - leon: when “not himself goes home to himself,” because the identity of everyone in the room has pressed upon him and annihilated his identity:

As to the poetical Character itself . . . it is not itself—it has no self—it is every thing and nothing—It has no character—it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosop[h]er, delights the camelion Poet. . . . A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is con- tinually in for—and filling some other Body—The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute—the poet has none; no identity—he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s Creatures. . . . It is a wretched thing to confess; but it is a very fact that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature—how can it, when I have no nature? When I am in a room with people if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins [ for so] to press upon me that, I am in a very little time an[ni]hilated.60

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Resting is an aesthetic event. Most of our comportment to hyperobjects looks like “rest” right now in various forms: stunned silence, denial, obsessive compulsive behaviors (endless 350s on beaches) that sum to rest across the surface of Earth (when you see them from a high-enough dimension). Meditation or contemplation is the quintessence of rest in this sense. It does not have to be obsessive or stunned, however. “Rest” simply means the way in which thinking handles what Husserl calls “intentional objects.” Rest could be an attunement to the nonhuman, coexisting with their necessary spectrality. Thinking is already, in itself, a relation to the nonhuman, insofar as the logical content of one’s thought is independent of the mind thinking it.61 In this sense think- ing is intrinsically contemplative. Thus, when in meditation the mind takes itself as its own object of rest, the withdrawn, secret quality of the mind itself becomes poignant. Consider again Hillman’s “Styrofoam Cup”: the distorted repetition is a form of contemplative attunement to the cup as such, just as Keats seems to turn the Grecian urn around for inspection. The uncanny thing is that the more one does such a task, the less immediately graspable an object becomes—precisely because we become more and more intimate with it. Such contemplation is far from simplistically apolitical, far from a retreat from things.

Philosophical reflection on the hyperobject is also a form of rest. There are various dimensions of this rest—mindfulness, awareness, sim- ple letting-be—that are equally fascinating. Rest in this “positive” sense suggests a deep acceptance of coexistence. Since Keats is not (ontically given) Keats but is a symbiotic community of all the impressions of others on his chameleon-like skin, what can he do but rest with that? Is this a receptiveness only to subjective impressions? Yes, but in a modi- fied sense. “Subjective impression” is far more than a merely whimsical or self-centered interpretation of a thing, but an attunement to a thing’s reality. This attunement might be distorted in some way, but in order to be distorted there has to be a reality, an always-already going on. Does this receptivity reduce objects to relations? No. My aesthetic– causal impression of something is not that something, by definition. This becomes obvious in the case of hyperobjects: the cold wet things I feel

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plopping on my head are not global warming, yet they are. Moreover, since all entities are chameleon poets in this sense—since Keats and a chameleon and a piece of chalcedony are all doing the same thing—all entities are “resting.”

What have we witnessed in this book? Radiation, hydrocarbons, global warming, and a number of other hyperobjects. Along with them, we have seen the emerging reactions to hyperobjects as genuine non- human entities that are not simply products of a human gaze. Hyper- objects are not just the stuff of charts and simulations, but rather are a huge objects consisting of other objects: global warming comprises the sun, the biosphere, fossil fuels, cars, and so on. Thus, hyperobjects spell the end of environmentalisms that employ Nature (a tool of modernity) against modernity, fighting fire with fire, matter with matter, the present with the present. To say the least, it is a surprising situation. One might have thought that seeing ecology as connected feedback loops would “undermine” (reduce downward) and “overmine” (reduce upward) all entities on this planet into systems or material processes or discursive effects.62 And one might have thought that it was environmentalism and ecocriticism that pushed us out of modernity. But in effect that was the last gasp of hot air inside the plane of modernity. What waited outside was a hyperobject, and it is responsible for pushing us out of the plane: we are now in the Age of Asymmetry. This age is marked by the birth of speculative realisms that oppose the correlationist circle that emerged at the time of the Anthropocene.

As we reach the end of this book, can we explore the Age of Asym- metry a little more carefully still? Human inner space is profound and vast. We can comprehend infinity: we can comprehend the transfinite, as Cantor showed with his astonishingly simple diagonal proof that we can discern infinities larger than the infinity of rational numbers. When I say “inner depth,” I don’t mean a dimensional “inside,” as if what I am talking about lives inside the human skull. There is no necessary impli- cation of psyche or soul or self. The closest is the thinking of Heidegger on Dasein, being-in-the-world. By “world” Heidegger certainly doesn’t mean something that environmental philosophers want him to mean:

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a set of comforting or inspiring or ennobling beings that surround us. Dasein is profoundly uncanny. Dasein is the being after the end of the world, if world is what this book means by that term.

The inner depth and strangeness of the human is real and is articulated by many philosophers and artists, in particular Sophocles, whose chorus from Antigone is the epigraph of this part of the book: “Many are the dis- turbing beings in existence, but none is more disturbing than man.”63 This passage fascinated Heidegger.64 The neuter plural term deina sug- gests fear and weirdness combined: it’s where the first part of the word dinosaur comes from; Deimos was the brother of Phobos (fear). The best word is “dreadful”: Deimos is the demon of dread, while Phobos is the demon of panic. Dread is existentially prior to panic: panic is starting to be a flight or fight situation, based on dread.

What makes humans the most dreadful is their ecological power. The uncanniness of human being is that it stirs up the oceans, divides the rocks, and ploughs up the soil. The chorus in Antigone sings of this in a powerfully disturbing way. Antigone is about a woman who goes beyond the law in the name of a transcendent law. Antigone is an uncanny human who is even prepared to go outside the physical and normative boundaries of the Greek city-state.

There is just one problem with the idea that humans are to deinotaton (the most dreadful thing): all beings have a dreadful depth. The very term to deinotaton, a neuter noun, brings to light that dreadfulness is thing-like. My depth is not the uncanniness of this paperweight, a Per- spex sphere in which floats a magnified dandelion in full puff, each tiny hair visible and startling. A small rainbow hangs at the top of the sphere and the fluorescent light of the banker’s lamp is reflected in it upside down. I do not interpret the paperweight as an emergent property of a fizzing buzz of dots or flecks of light and color: this actual paper- weight un leashes its power, seducing me with its compelling roundness and softness. Yet I am unable to grasp the essence of the paperweight, whether I use the paperweight, ignore it, or contemplate it for the rest of my life. Things are “standoffish,” as Stanley Cavell puts it, borrowing from a line of thinking in Emerson’s essay “Experience”: “I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our

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fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition.”65

This seems like an understanding of things that the time of hyper- objects has enabled. I mean this in the fullest possible sense, so just to be clear, let me restate it in stronger terms. Nonhuman beings are responsi- ble for the next moment of human history and thinking. It is not simply that humans became aware of nonhumans, or that they decided to enno- ble some of them by granting them a higher status—or cut themselves down by taking away the status of the human. These so-called post- human games are nowhere near posthuman enough to cope with the time of hyperobjects. They are more like one of the last gasps of the mod- ern era, its final pirouette at the edge of the abyss. The reality is that hyperobjects were already here, and slowly but surely we understood what they were already saying. They contacted us.

Hyperobjects profoundly change how we think about any object. In a strange way, every object is a hyperobject. But we can only think this thought in light of the ecological emergency inside of which we have now woken up. Heidegger said that only a god can save us now.66 As we find ourselves waking up within a series of gigantic objects, we realize that he forgot to add: We just don’t know what sort of god.

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