A note on the Hyperobject

This reflection does not intend to supplement or contradict the reviews of Unidentified Flying Hyperobject, for example, those of Michael Zimmerman or Travis Dumsday. Rather, it is occasioned by my reading through Madden’s Unidentified Flying Hyperobject in preparation for a session of the SUAPS monthly reading circle. In the course of my preparation, one aspect of Madden’s book that caught my attention is the way he puts to work Timothy Morton’s notion of the hyperobject.

My approach is critical—not fault-finding but probing the conditions for and implications of a notion, position, or practice. For example, conversations around “Artificial Intelligence” (“AI”) tend to be either practical or theoretical. Developers and engineers concern themselves with building, training, and “improving” “AI,” while others reflect on its implications for society or our conceptions of intelligence or consciousness. A critical perspective, however, focusses on the historical, social, and material conditions that determine the phenomenon. In the case of “AI,” one can point to Matteo Pasquinelli’s book The Eye of the Master:  A Social History of Artificial Intelligence or Muldoon’s and Wu’s study “Artificial Intelligence in the Colonial Matrix of Power,” which “theorises how a system of coloniality underpins the structuring logic of artificial intelligence (AI) systems,” bringing into view the “regimes of global labour exploitation and knowledge extraction that are rendered invisible through discourses of the purported universality and objectivity of AI.” Note how practical and theoretical considerations are included in critique, however much their apparent spontaneous objectivity is stripped away in the process.

Madden’s argument strikes me as a bricolage. He borrows freely from Plato, Aristotle, Heidegger, Wilfred Sellars, Jakob von Uexküll, Nietzsche, and others what he needs to jerry-rig a working, speculative framework of his own. This method of construction tends to overlook the implications of its component parts, risking an incoherence (into which it seems to me Madden’s speculations fall, at least in so far as they are presented). But apart from this problem, the notion of the hyperobject possesses some intriguing implications, especially in the way Madden develops it.

With regard to the hyperobject, Madden, following object oriented ontologist Graham Harman, first argues that “If a thing has effects novel with respect to its components (including control of those components) and an identity that survives their replacement, and it controls its parts, then that thing is real—without qualifications” (70). Madden employs Harman’s example of a particular Pizza Hut franchise:  “The entire staff, management, and equipment can be changed over while we still have the same Pizza Hut restaurant” (71). Madden infers that, therefore, “we can make a case that a particular Pizza Hut has a life of its own…things we originally do or set in motion, e.g., a Pizza Hut franchise can actually go their own way independently of us, and even while controlling us.”

The substantial agency of such an object is then transferred to a plane of transcendently large complexity. Madden cites Morton’s description of the hyperobject, its being

…things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans. A hyperobject could be a black hole. A hyperobject could be the Lago Agrio oil field in Ecuador, or the Florida Everglades. A hyperobject could be the biosphere, or the Solar System. A hyperobject could be the sum total of all the nuclear materials on Earth… A hyperobject could be the very long lasting product of human manufacture such as Styrofoam or plastic bags, or the sum of all the whirring machines of capitalism. Hyperobjects, then, are “hyper” in relation to some other entity, whether they are directly manufactured by humans or not. (72).

A close, rhetorically-vigilant reading of Madden’s development of Morton’s notion reveals a telling tropology. Madden begins with Harman’s example of the Pizza Hut franchise as, as it were, a synecdochic “part” of the Pizza Hut Corporation hyperobject. Moving on from the passage from Morton, above, Madden then writes of the environment, the economy, and the war in Ukraine as hyperobjects (73). Later, this list becomes “economies, wars, nations, [and] corporations” (74), a passage preceding Madden’s writing of the UFO hyperobject that “maybe…now it’s on the loose under its own steam.”

If we read Madden here both taking him at his word and against the grain we might perceive that the very idea of the hyperobject is a precipitate of the social moment of its articulation, for thinking of the hyperobject socially (as the economy or a corporation) seems indexical of that moment in late capitalism when the sacrosanct, independent agency of the economy resembles some zombie version of Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand and, at least in the United States, corporations are legally persons. That is, it should come as little surprise that this idea of the hyperobject should come to consciousness within a context of social conditions characterized by socially contingent entities’ (the economy and corporations) possessing a fetishized, reified independence and agency, a time marked, further, by the climate crisis (the hyperobject par excellence), a development whose cause can be traced to the metabolic rift that characterizes capitalism’s relation to the natural world from which it extracts wealth and, most immediately and tellingly, to the Industrial Revolution and its steam-powered “Dark Satanic Mills.”

Does this realization imply the notion of the hyperobject is false? Not at all. However, what is revealed is how its articulation is an instance of how social conditions determine consciousness and how the products of that thinking consciousness can work in an unintentional collusion with those conditions under and within which it labours. At the very least, the hyperobject cannot, as if it were a hyperobject itself, pretend to transcend and illuminate (determine) the (social) world that determines its genesis and orients a now vigilant reception of its being put to use.