Plastic Hyperobjects of non-Migrant Futures
Hyperobjects
Initially coined by Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects are “things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” (1). They are ‘viscous’, ‘nonlocal’, ‘temporally undulated’, ‘interobjective’ Objects. Hyperobjects are viscous, in that they “‘stick’ to beings that are involved with them”. They are nonlocal, in that they “involve profoundly different temporalities than the human-scale ones we are used to”. They are temporally undulated in that they “occupy a high-dimensional phase space that results in their being invisible to humans for stretches of time”. And, finally, they are interobjective in that they “occupy a high-dimensional phase space that results in their being invisible to humans for stretches of time” (1).Hyperobjects are spread extensively over time and space by virtue of their nonlocality and temporal undulation. Due to the presence of these Hyperobjects, the migrant subject is alienated from the cause of their migration. For instance, it becomes quite impossible for a Bangladeshi environmental refugee from the Sundarbans to understand how the greenhouse gas emissions of factories in the Global West leads to an accelerated increase in cyclonic activity in the Bay of Bengal surrounding the deltaic region. The migrant is extensively removed from the cause of migration: a sort of marxist alienation, going backwards, where the bourgeoisie becomes the producer in a far off land, the global warming becomes the commodity, and the environmental migrants become the consumer.
The result is thus two-fold: first, it engenders Hyphenation1, whereby the ontic self of the migrant is in constant flux—their identity is no more essentialised. Secondly, Unwittification2 occurs, whereby all Sense-making is ruptured—the migrant subject is no longer able to understand the causes that facilitate the conditions for its migration. For the Hyperobject that is Global Warming, for example, the ramifications of Global Warming are only present in a somewhat far-off unlived future. Yet, we have ghastly knowledge of the future by virtue of the tendrils of the future that sneak up to the present—the graphs that show the rising water levels, precipitation variables, global atmospheric alterations, ice-cap meltings, etcetera. This interobjectivity of Hyperobjects makes them invisible to human consciousness for most of their existence, yet we are already living in the era of these Hyperobjects; they are merely the irrefutable future we are hurtling towards. As Morton himself proclaims, “the end of the world” has already taken place, and we are merely living under the shadow of its future-facing ghosts (3). As a result of the Hyphenation and Unwittffication induced by the presence and affect of Hyperobjects, migrant subjects develop what Paul Faulstich, and later Mostafa and Fridman, call Geophobia—the phobias related to earth materials and geologic events.3
Organism-Oriented Ontology
Now, Morton has borrowed the concept of ‘object’ from Graham Harman’s OOO—Object-Oriented Ontology. Object-Oriented Ontology maintains that Objects exist independently of human perception and are not ontologically exhausted by their relations with humans or other Objects: “[a]n object or substance is a real thing considered apart from any of its relations with other such things” (Harman, Guerrilla 19). As such, Objects, in essence, are static entities, unchanging and elastic. Drawing from Bruno Latour, Harman proclaims, “[n]o object is inherently reducible to any other”. For him, one can try to explain anything qua anything else, but they must perform the work that translates and transforms relations through “chains of equivalences” (Prince 15).Herein lies the primary drawback of Harmanian Object-Oriented Ontology: the lack of plasticity and the overabundance of elasticity does not translate well towards the exploration of organic life. It does not, for instance, allow for a resistive network against biopolitical power, because the indivisibility and undifferentiability of Objects do not lend well to the construction of such networks. As Catherine Malabou claims, “a resistance to what is known today as biopower—the control, regulation, exploitation, and instrumentalization of the living being—might emerge from possibilities written into the structure of the living being itself” (Malabou, “One Life” 429). What we thus need is a Deleuzean twist, wherein Objects are substituted with organo-machinic assemblages. An assemblage is a decentered rhizomatic entity that is inherently plastic. It is neither a sum of its pre-present parts, nor is a randomly procured collection of completely disparate entities—assemblages are a mode of Becoming, an “increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections” (Deleuze and Guattari 8).
Žukauskaitė proclaims, drawing upon the aforementioned words by Malabou on the resistive potentialities of Organisms:
If organic plasticity is not pre-programmed and does not have to adapt to the environment but rather helps to create it, then it offers a new conceptual tool to rethink resilience and creativity. In this respect, an organism-oriented ontology can be described as an ontology of resistance: if biopolitics operates by creating hierarchies, by making divisions and exclusions, an organism-oriented ontology is all-inclusive and non-hierarchical. To rethink organic plasticity in terms of processuality, multiplicity and potentiality, capable of qualitative change, we need to define organism-oriented ontology. (18)
That is what Žukauskaitė does by reinventing Objects as Organisms—OOO becomes Organism-Oriented Ontology. Žukauskaitė maintains that there is “no difference between an organism and a machine because machines are able to simulate the functioning of organisms” (5). Yet, she maintains that “cybernetic machines are very different from machines described by Descartes. The necessary element of cybernetic machines is feedback—a circular arrangement of causally connected elements so that each element has an effect on the next until the last ‘feeds back’. Wiener acknowledged that feedback is an important concept to define not only cybernetic machines but also living organisms, which use feedback loops to maintain their homeostasis and balance. In this respect, the notion of feedback leads to another idea—that of self-organisation” (5). This idea of self-organisation harks back to the Kantian notion of ‘natural purpose’, whereby in section 65 of Critique of the Power of Judgement he states, “[n]ow for a thing as a natural end it is requisite, first, that its parts … are possible only through their relation to the whole. … Then, it is required, second, that its parts be combined into a whole by being reciprocally the cause and effect of their form. … An organized being is thus not a mere machine, for that has only a motive power, while the organized being possesses in itself a formative power (sic)” (244–246; emphasis in original). As such, Organisms are not merely organising, but also more importantly self-organising, which is a quality that Objects lack. As Žukauskaitė clarifies, “a watch cannot replace its parts or repair itself on its own” (3).
Organisms are thus plastic beings (a Malabouean plasticity), for they contain within themselves the ability to deform (due the agent of change), preserve (the change itself), and inform (the agent of change) (Malabou, “Plasticity” 6). Unlike Objects that obliviate the modality of change itself (since they are unchangeable), Organisms follow creationary differentiation: “a star is a differentiated cloud of hydrogen, just as organic life is differentiated matter and music is differentiated sound” (Carrière 32). Differentiation is a negation of negation—whereby the negation of negation is not a Nothingness qua Absolute emptiness, but is instead—following Maoist Tongbian—a necessary something. As Aizenberg et al. quote following Marx and Engel’s ideas (who themselves were influenced by Hegel), “[i]n the development of a plant, the seed, a manifestation of its growth, appears as the negation of it, i.e., the negation of the negation. But seeds are generated by the development of the plant, they constitute a moment of the plant, a moment which signifies the goal of the development of the plant. The plant rots, the seed remains. The cycle of development is finished” (193). This something is not empty of its constituencies, but is merely a product of the rotting constituents, and as such is emblematic of it. As Carrière further qualifies, “[w]hat takes place is not this or that creation, but the one life expressed differently in each creation—and in outshining beauty, to kalon ekphanestaton, what took place bears the trace of its placeless origin… [W]hat has taken place is dead, except that it may birth more life ... The perfected apple that falls from the branch—what is produced—is dead. Save for the seeds it bears, the apple is only a remnant of the one life that runs through the apple tree” (31).
It is in this light that I wish to reinstate Morton’s Hyperobjects through Žukauskaitė’s Organism-Oriented Ontological approach, and thus understand Hyperobjects as Hyperorganisms, which, beyond having the properties that have already been stated by Morton himself, are themself dynamic, organic entities who are not merely immovable, unchangeable artefacts, but are instead changed by the tampered affectivities and temporal orders. As such, while Hyperobjects form an all-encompassing doomtheory that proclaims the end of history has already occurred, Hyperorganisms instead form a more optimistic reinterpretation whereby the very Hyperorganisms are prone to being affected by us in our present temporal orders, and as much as the ghosts of the future are hurtling towards the past-pregnant presentness that we currently reside in, the future-potentiality of this particular presentness is itself hurtling forwards to meet the future-distant Hyperorganism in its own temporality. As much as the tendrils of the Hyperorganisms reach out and tickle our ankles, we too send shockwaves towards these Hyperorganisms through these very tendrils themselves.
The Notion of Temporality
Hyperorganismic time is neither teleological nor completely quantic. Various quanta of time, in their Baradian and Bergsonian senses, do exist as relative time—relatively observable past and future. However, these are not absolutes, and exist in an un-striated smooth space of continuous movement that defies the establishment of normative colonial temporal orders. For Bergson, and later for Karen Barad, time may be seen as a spatiality that facilitates the movement-translation of the experientiality of memory. As Bergson conceives of it, the process of recalling a memory occurs in various stages. When we wish to recall a memory, we are immediately transported—through a ‘Quantum leap’ as Deleuze qualifies it; a Kierkegaardian leap; a leap into being (Deleuze 57)—to the ‘general’ past of the event’s contemporaneity. This general past houses the moment of Recollection (the Recollection-Event) (58). Once we draw upon this Recollection, in order to actualise into a graspable memory, it must first become a Recollection-Image (66). This occurs through two layers of change: first effectuated by ‘movement’, whereby the Recollection-Event passes through time, and thereby the lens of experience; second effectuated by ‘rotation’, whereby as the Recollection-Event passes through this lens, it gets rotated and reoriented in accordance to both experience and the affectivities of the present temporal order (the contemporaneous present). The past, thus, is actualised in accordance to the ideological orientation of the present moment, and thereafter translated in accordance to experience (70–71). What this present moment contains within itself is a germ of the future, as seen from the past—the point of actualisation (the point of the Recollection-Event). As this past Recollection-Event is on the verge of translation, it faces the future (which is the contemporaneous present). This future is full of potentiality—a potentiality for both movement and rotation. The contemporaneous present is thus pregnant with ghosts of the past and of the future. Karen Barad, drawing upon both Bergson and Kyoko Hayashi, proclaims:…[I]t is precisely the question of re-membering and just mourning that defines being human, which is not to define its nature as some particular singularity, thereby rooting the story in the soil of human exceptionalism, but rather to bring it back around to questions of the nature of the ‘human’ (in its differential constitution). What makes us human is not our alleged distinctiveness from—the nonhuman, the inhuman, the subhuman, the more-than-human, those who do not matter—but rather our relationship with and responsibility to the dead, to the ghosts of the past and the future. (86)
Hyperorganisms co-inhabit this particular conjugate space with the hauntings of the past and the ghosts of the future.
Archiving the Future
Timothy Morton, as previously noted, has proclaimed that “the end of the world” has already taken place, and it is Hyperobjects that have brought about this end (76). Through the lens of Hyperorganisms, however, the end of the world does not appear as a teleological straight line, as a means towards an inevitable end that we are hurtling towards. Hyperorganisms, instead, are a symptom for a probable condition, a condition that is subject to change given the plastic nature of these Hyperorganisms.Hyperorganisms are archives of the future—they evidence the future, particularly the future facing the past. The future that the Hyperorganism resides in is oriented not just towards the present moment, but beyond it; it is oriented towards the vastness of our collective past. Hyperorganisms are a future-product of the already-past, and this product is only now being measurably noticed through ghastly abnormalities in otherwise normal observations. What is noticed is an archive of the future: Hyperobjects produce an Hyperabjection (a term coined by the Danish poet Theis Ørntoft, and properly theorised by Mikkel Krause Frantzen).4 This Global Weirding5 (Hyperabjection) that is produced by virtue of Global Warming (Hyperorganism) as a complementary product, is the primary cause of Unwittification among ecological migrants as had been mentioned before. There is a general restlessness, a sense of not knowing how to recuperate with their confrontation with the naked products of these Hyperorganisms.
Furthermore, Hyperorganisms can be posited as another sort of archive—a de-/postcolonial archive. Ghosh, in The Great Derangement, comments that “[t]he refugee crisis we’re experiencing today in Europe and in North America is a consequence of colonialism, and it stands to get worse as more vulnerable countries begin feeling the effects of climate change” (92). It is the future that evidences the past, it is the possibilities of annihilation that lay bare the foundations for the annihilation to have taken place in the first place—Hyperorganisms evidence the violent, atrocious colonial past.
Yet, the West is still uneager to acknowledge the Hyperorganisms of its own creations. Yet again, the burden is being borne by the unassuming Orient, who have only recently been switching over to Western consumerism. Ghosh says, “[t]t is Asia, then, that has torn the mask from the phantom that lured it onto the stage of the Great Derangement, but only to recoil in horror at its own handiwork; its shock is such that it dare not even name what it has beheld—for having entered this stage, it is trapped, like everyone else. All it can say to the chorus that is waiting to receive it is “But you promised…and we believed you!” (92).
The immigrant is disillusioned by promises of a better future in a world not immediately affected by the Hyperorganisms. The coloniser, the hyperconsumerist Westerner, retains all of its sensibility while the migrant loses all of theirs. However, this is only partially true; Unwittification has been occurring on a global scale, but the absolute immediacy of the migrant’s confrontation with the Hyperorganisms lends them bare to Unwittification at a much more expedited rate than their Western counterpart.
Plastic Salvation
So where does salvation lie from this demonic possession of Hyperorganisms? Unlike Morton’s Hyperobjects that leave no room for salvation whatsoever, Hyperorganisms are salvageable by virtue of their very Plasticity, since they themselves can be affected by whatever takes place in any of the temporalities that they have their tendrils intertwined into. The order of temporality must be dissolved, teleology dismembered, and it is then and only then that the salvation shall come within reach. Embracing the enjambment on the past and the future in the present moment, accepting the plasticity of this presentness, and coming to terms with the Unwittification that is being inevitably generated shall enable the disillusioned migrant to tap into the salvaging potentiality of the Plasticity of Hyperorganisms.The world has not already ended. In Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, the eponymous character of Ishmael suggests that “people need more than to be scolded, more than to be made to feel stupid and guilty. They need more than a vision of doom. They need a vision of the world and of themselves that inspires them” (148). Amitav Ghosh expounds upon this further in The Great Derangement, prophesying that “to imagine other forms of human existence is exactly the challenge that is posed by the climate crisis: for if there is any one thing that global warming has made perfectly clear it is that to think about the world only as it is amounts to a formula for collective suicide. We need, rather, to envision what it might be” (128–129).
Hyperorganisms signify an extremely probable end, but they are not the end itself. They are a symptom of an end that beckons to us from the darkest pits of a hopeless future. Yet, they also resemble hope—hope that the end, however plausible, is Plastic and thus subject to change. Hyperorganisms push us, propel us to action to work towards that other end, the end filled with a bountiful Becoming. There always remains resistance at the ends of the cruellest tortures, and this organic resistance shall sustain and retain its own organicity. As much as the ghosts of the Hyperobjects linger in our present moment, so do the ghosts of our actions reflect in the contemporaneous realities of these Hyperobjects. While the resistance may not be a guarantee for a complete reversal of phenomenological conditions, it enables enough room for the potentiality of survival to sustain itself: the migrant is allowed some room for optimistic Becoming.
Endnotes
1Hyphenated identities are “beings that dwell within the confines of liminal spaces. They do not belong fully to either of the identities, and more often than not, they are not partial or biased for or against just one of the identities they inhabit; they belong to both” (Adhikari, “Liminal Space” 118). As Karlyn Koh observes, “the hyphenated subject inhabits a split and double-edged space” (161).2Unwittification is “the creationary process through which the irrational Unwit comes into existence. It is the phenomenon that facilitates the reversal of Wit—it is the unmaking of Sensibility. Unwittification presupposes Sensibility: it is only when Sense is present that Unwit may manifest” (Adhikari, “Unwittification” 204).
3See Paul Faulstich’s “Geophilia”, and Mostafa and Fridman’s Geophobias: Linking Geological Events to Illogical Fears.
4See Frantzen’s “Ecology, Capitalism and Waste: From Hyperobject to Hyperabject.”
5The term was initially coined by Hunter Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute. See John Waldman’s Yale E360 article “With Temperatures Rising, Here Comes ‘Global Weirding’.”
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