Scan barcode
casparb's review
ok whirlwind this is quite the piece and absolutely one of my favourite books I've read this year. Tim has been on the radar for a little while and seems to be growing. Glad I got here now!
To get this out of the way, Tim works with and in OOO (Object-Oriented Ontology) which is a bit of a battlefield in contemporary philosophy as I understand it there are strong feelings from everybody I'm not here to wade in on whatever side. But this was my official intro to OOO! I really enjoyed what was happening with Heidegger here, partly because Tim keeps distancing and then returning to it, it feels very love-hate! It's entertaining!
Also a note that Tim's love for Percy Shelley is just v cute I like the punctuating appearance of PS
My highlights are truly on every page & that is because it felt necessary! TM's style is accessible with the nods to pop culture we find in a lot of pop-philosophy (contradiction in terms? ;) ) but then that's batted out of the air with a Derrida/Heidegger reading of interobjectivity and indeed Hegel makes his appearance toward the end (weirdly I didn't hate this reading of Derrida I felt it was v sophisticated). Not a fan of Nietzsche & I think for the N quote pulled that's valid - imo the most exciting Nietzschean (non)ecology is found in The Will to Power but that's not established as a 'canonical' text yet! grr. Ridiculous breadth! We're spinning in Roman Jakobson (my love) as a means of understanding weather Events with a good splash of quantum theory & relativity in the beginning. V funny stabs at Deleuze maybe it's philosophical schadenfreude by this point
Discussion of the future-art critical too. Too relevant. Hegel makes his grand entry here.
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.
...
Art in these conditions is grief-work. We are losing a fantasy—the fantasy 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.
I want to reread very soon I like TM
To get this out of the way, Tim works with and in OOO (Object-Oriented Ontology) which is a bit of a battlefield in contemporary philosophy as I understand it there are strong feelings from everybody I'm not here to wade in on whatever side. But this was my official intro to OOO! I really enjoyed what was happening with Heidegger here, partly because Tim keeps distancing and then returning to it, it feels very love-hate! It's entertaining!
Also a note that Tim's love for Percy Shelley is just v cute I like the punctuating appearance of PS
My highlights are truly on every page & that is because it felt necessary! TM's style is accessible with the nods to pop culture we find in a lot of pop-philosophy (contradiction in terms? ;) ) but then that's batted out of the air with a Derrida/Heidegger reading of interobjectivity and indeed Hegel makes his appearance toward the end (weirdly I didn't hate this reading of Derrida I felt it was v sophisticated). Not a fan of Nietzsche & I think for the N quote pulled that's valid - imo the most exciting Nietzschean (non)ecology is found in The Will to Power but that's not established as a 'canonical' text yet! grr. Ridiculous breadth! We're spinning in Roman Jakobson (my love) as a means of understanding weather Events with a good splash of quantum theory & relativity in the beginning. V funny stabs at Deleuze maybe it's philosophical schadenfreude by this point
Discussion of the future-art critical too. Too relevant. Hegel makes his grand entry here.
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.
...
Art in these conditions is grief-work. We are losing a fantasy—the fantasy 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.
I want to reread very soon I like TM
lraoutrha's review
5.0
Woe...this shifted so much of my thinking, and I don't even know where to find the words for how. All I can say right now is that I feel challenged as an artist in exciting and terrifying ways. More on this to come.
ssdamon's review
2.0
*Hyperobjects* reflects many of the worst characteristics of continental philosophy, mushy concepts, an erudition that bullies and distracts rather than elucidates, analogy and bluster in place of argumentation. This is a work of philosophy that contains no sustained engagement with philosophy, a work of ecology that contains at best casual reference to ecological details, a work of politics that manages at most a couple of vague proposals. As a work of literature, of description, it has its moments; though perhaps its best use is as a compendium of other books and artworks one might better occupy oneself with.
mattbgold's review
2.0
Hyperobjects are a useful concept. Perhaps the rise of hyperobjects actually does mark a transition into a new historical era (I doubt it). But the consequences of hyperobjects? In my opinion the reality is not nearly as dramatic as this book makes it out to be. Just because we exist within a complex and more fundamental mesh of "hyperobjects" does not render our existing concepts such as "world", "nature", or "consciousness" either meaningless, unreal, or absurd. I also think this book fails to account for the fact that science is not married to a "greedy" reductionist ontology, and seems to suggest more than once that a reductionist worldview is an unavoidable consequence of the acknowledgement of hyperobjects such as "quantum mechanics".
eithe's review
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
0.5
Oh boy, where to start. This is not a book so much as it is a rambling, self-indulgent poem; it will be difficult to distil something useful from it.
Having doggedly refused to leave this book unfinished, I'm not sure I've come out the other side knowing anything new, entirely due to the failure of the author to actually communicate effectively.
Morton's biggest failure to communicate this particular work is in assuming too much esoteric background in various fields, primarily philosophy, but also art, history, and music - this is not a self-contained work. To understand all their references you'd have to be them. So the book as a whole and by itself is not of much use to anyone else.
But that's not the only failure. Even if you were to have a grasp of the right concepts, Morton's thoughts are unfocussed, meandering between disparate modes. They apparently expect us to trust that their wild meanderings are going somewhere useful. They rarely set a clear direction or a route, and rarely reflect systematically on the journey thus far, which makes it incredibly difficult to assemble the ideas into something consistent or useful.
This is a pretentious work. There is unnecessary use of French, Latin, and Greek. Morton uses strange syntactic constructions without explanation and overuses quotation marks as if we're supposed to keep track of all the non-standard ways they're using words, or which non-idiomatic subtle component of the definition they're relying upon. In fact, they do this so much that they frequently delve into etymology to justify non-standard word choice.
When Morton finds the fleeting realisation that they're trying to communicate complex ideas to an audience, they awkwardly use pop references and stretch metaphors past usefulness.
Perhaps there's something interesting in here but I would have a hard time explaining exactly what. They say that someone hasn't really understood something unless they can explain it in simple terms. Well, that litmus test speaks loudly when it comes to Morton's attempt to explain hyperobjects.
Having doggedly refused to leave this book unfinished, I'm not sure I've come out the other side knowing anything new, entirely due to the failure of the author to actually communicate effectively.
Morton's biggest failure to communicate this particular work is in assuming too much esoteric background in various fields, primarily philosophy, but also art, history, and music - this is not a self-contained work. To understand all their references you'd have to be them. So the book as a whole and by itself is not of much use to anyone else.
But that's not the only failure. Even if you were to have a grasp of the right concepts, Morton's thoughts are unfocussed, meandering between disparate modes. They apparently expect us to trust that their wild meanderings are going somewhere useful. They rarely set a clear direction or a route, and rarely reflect systematically on the journey thus far, which makes it incredibly difficult to assemble the ideas into something consistent or useful.
This is a pretentious work. There is unnecessary use of French, Latin, and Greek. Morton uses strange syntactic constructions without explanation and overuses quotation marks as if we're supposed to keep track of all the non-standard ways they're using words, or which non-idiomatic subtle component of the definition they're relying upon. In fact, they do this so much that they frequently delve into etymology to justify non-standard word choice.
When Morton finds the fleeting realisation that they're trying to communicate complex ideas to an audience, they awkwardly use pop references and stretch metaphors past usefulness.
Perhaps there's something interesting in here but I would have a hard time explaining exactly what. They say that someone hasn't really understood something unless they can explain it in simple terms. Well, that litmus test speaks loudly when it comes to Morton's attempt to explain hyperobjects.