Timothy Morton

I am opposed in principle to the idea that we live in an age

of limits. This idea too often serves to provide the fantasy
support for relentless cuts to education, services, pay and
other vital goods for what is now called ‘the 99%’. I refer
to the Occupy movements that have sprung up around the
world.

Every-
There is, however, a deeper sense in which the notion of
limit (Greek, peras) is true. For a philosopher such as myself,
one who subscribes to the feisty emerging view known as
Objects are ontologically prior
object-oriented ontology (OOO), there is no such thing as to everything else. Objects emit
a vague, limitless blur (Greek, apeiron), a vast expanse of
something-or-other in which everything floats and out of
space and time, just like in
which everything manifests. This is far from an image of Einsteinian relativity theory.
scarcity. The Universe according to OOO is a potentially
infinite regress (and progress) of objects; that is, of entities
They also emit causality.

thing Scale,
that are physically real of all sizes and shapes, occupying The causal dimension is the
all scales and levels, from football teams to crocuses, from
aesthetic dimension. It floats

Scarcity,
the rings of Saturn to feather boas. Objects can be humans,
dolphins and doughnuts. Objects can be conscious, by our ontologically ‘in front’ of things.
definition of consciousness, or as dumb as a post. OOO does
not discriminate much between objects.
The priority of objects (Theodor
Objects are ontologically prior to everything else. Objects Adorno prophetically called
emit space and time, just like in Einsteinian relativity theory.
it ‘ der Vorrang des Objekts’)

We objects
They also emit causality. The causal dimension is the
aesthetic dimension. It floats ontologically ‘in front’ of things. means that they are profoundly

Hyper-
The priority of objects (Theodor Adorno prophetically called
it ‘der Vorrang des Objekts’) means that they are profoundly
withdrawn from access.1
withdrawn from access.1 This withdrawnness will be what I
now call ‘essence’. We usually think of essence as something
present that exists when I strip the object of its properties.
This view has been unchanged since the early Greek form. Form is memory. OOO is a weird return to Aristotle,
philosophers. It is time to change it. Here, essence now who specified that the form of a thing is its essence and

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means the ungraspable withdrawnness of a thing.
Think of a large building, think of a city. A city contains
all kinds of paths and streets that one might have no idea of
on a day-to-day basis. Yet even more so, one could live in a
city such as London for 50 years and never fully grasp it in
its scintillating, oppressive, joyful London-ness. The streets
and parks of London, the people who live there, the trucks
that drive through its streets, constitute London but are not
reducible to it. London is not a whole that is greater than
the sum of its parts. Nor is London reducible to those parts.
London cannot be ‘undermined’ downwards or upwards.
Likewise, London is not just an effect of my mind, a
human construct – think of the pigeons in Trafalgar Square.
Nor is London something that only exists when I walk
through the Victoria Line tunnel to the Tate Gallery at Pimlico
underground station, or when I think about London, or write
this sentence about London. London cannot be ‘overmined’
into an after-effect of some (human) process such as thinking
or driving or essay writing. To this extent writing about music
really is like dancing about architecture – and a good thing
too. Everything is like that.
The streets beneath the streets, the Roman Wall, the
boarded-up houses, the unexploded bombs, are records of
everything that happened to London. London’s history is its
that matter (‘material cause’) is a perspective trick, a
backwards glance at the object – quarry, sand, crushed
dinosaur bones – that were appropriated to form the object
in question. London is a photograph of its past. When you
walk through the streets – it seems corny to put it this way,
but not really – you are walking through history. Just as
a hard drive is a surface on which data are inscribed, so
London is a series of surfaces on which causality has been
inscribed. There is no difference between causality and
aesthetic appearance (Greek, aisthēsis).
The appearance of an object is the past. But since an
object cannot be grasped by anything – including itself –
the essence of an object is the future. Stop to consider how
strange this is: appearance is past, essence is future. The
present does not truly exist. We experience a criss-crossing
set of force fields, the aesthetic–causal fields emanated by
a host of objects. Anyone familiar with relativity theory will
find this idea reasonably intuitive. What is called ‘present’
is simply a reification, an arbitrary boundary drawn around
things by a certain entity – state, philosophical view,
government, family, electron, black hole. Time is not a
series of now-points, then – Aristotle himself refuted this
idea – but rather a sickening surge, like cross-town traffic,
or an ocean with many currents; or ‘a river without banks’,

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 Duskin Drum, Beyond 99%, silkscreen print, 2011
like the title of a painting by Marc Chagall. Time is a flurry of
spells and counter-spells cast by objects themselves.
On this view, the notion of scarcity is based on a
description of reality that is not sufficiently deep. Scarcity is
for someone or something, within a particular reification of
time. Look beyond those artificial boundaries, and you will
find abundance. What constitutes the present is a political
act, insofar as politics is not just a human affair. There is a
politics of quartz crystals whose piezoelectric oscillations
‘time’ my world in a particular way. There is a politics of
American sitcoms such as Frasier that orchestrate every
movement of the cast and extras like a kind of swing, a
crystalline tempo attuned to the oscillations of quartz. There
is a politics of mental illness, in which humans subjected to
crystalline time find themselves hurled from one appointment
to the next, unable to catch a breath. There is a politics of
the Tibetan Kalachakra Tantra, in which practitioners try to
project themselves into different times in order to have an
influence on events ‘there’. London past and London future
criss-cross like streams of intersecting traffic: a single solid
present London is nowhere to be found.
A building opens to the future. In part this future is
predictable. But in part – the essential part – the future
is radically, irreducibly unpredictable. There is a ‘future
future’. This future opens up when we consider the beings
that hove into view in the age of ecological emergency: a
plutonium pellet, global warming, a polystyrene cup. These
are ‘hyperobjects’: objects that are massively distributed in
time and space relative to humans. They are not infinite, but
they are so large that they humiliate and defeat not only our
ability to count, but also our ability to build.
Hyperobjects are the true anarchists, the shock troops
of ecological coexistence. Even relatively short-lived
hyperobjects ruthlessly demolish 200 years of comforting
(for some) anthropocentric domination of time and space.
Forty years ago the humorously named Energy-Related
Health Research Lab in Davis, California, injected dogs with
Strontium-90 in utero and put small amounts of Strontium
90 in puppy food. The dogs died at varying speeds
depending on how much Strontium-90 they had been fed.
Strontium-90 is a very dangerous emitter of beta waves –
electromagnetic waves that can penetrate cells, paper and
skin – and heats up whatever it penetrates. The dogs were
placed in gigantic slabs of concrete. In 2006 they were dug
up and transported – where? Of course one does not know.
One has the vague impression that they are now ‘away’ (I
live in Davis). But for the same reason that the present does
not really exist, neither does ‘here’.
I think of the slogan that hung above John Lennon and
Yoko Ono’s doorway: ‘This Is Not Here’. Away is a convenient
fiction that is losing its phantasmal grip in the ecological
age. Peer over the edges of here and away and you will find
planet Earth just around the corner from you. Now we know,
on a visceral level, that when we flush the toilet the waste
does not go into some magical extra dimension, but simply
into the Pacific or into a wastewater treatment facility.
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Now consider the timescales of global warming: the terrifying
(500 years, 75%); the horrifying (30,000 years, 25%); the
petrifying (100,000 years, 7%). In 30,000 years, let alone
100,000 years, two things will be true:
1) No one will be meaningfully related to me.
2) Everything that happens will bear the traces of
my actions.
These two facts provide the ethical and political coordinates
for thinking ecological coexistence. Our presence is hollowed
from the inside at the very same time as our significance
becomes exquisitely heightened. And for the very same
reasons: we are enthralled in the vast, interwoven spells of
hyperobjects, huge undertows in the river of time without
banks.
Let us return to the notion of the 99% with which
Occupy is preoccupying the global imaginary right now.
Ninety-nine is a tantalising number. It is not 100. It keeps
you waiting on the edge. It seems packed, more packed than
100: packed yet finite. It is more suggestive than 0.99 or 9,
evoking fullness and yet a ‘not quite’, a ‘not yet’. Ninety-nine
evokes what I have elsewhere called ‘very large finitude’,
which confronts us from all sides in an age of ecological
emergency. Hyperobjects destroy infinity, they destroy here
and present, with very large finitude.
Humans share Earth with a plenitude of life forms, a
plenitude that constitutes what one artist calls the Beyond
99%.2 Again, it is best to think of this plenitude as a very
rich 99%, rather than as 100%. There is no whole of which
these life forms are the sum. And why stop there? Why
not include the oil, the iron ore, the very hills themselves,
all memory traces of life forms? Why not include oxygen,
the first ecological cataclysm? Why not include water? If
we include all these beings, we will find that utilitarian
calculations based on self-interest fail somewhere along
the line. It is time to let them go. This letting go has a
larger resonance to do with the theme of scarcity. If we let
go of limits, we also let go of the vague apeiron of infinity
and embrace finitude: not as scarcity or as limit, but as
coexistence in the disquieting flux of time. 2
Notes
1. Theodor W Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans EB Ashton, Continuum (New York),
1973, pp 183–194.
2. Duskin Drum, Beyond 99%, silkscreen print, 2011.
Text © 2012 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Image: p 80 © Duskin Drum (Creative
Commons Share-Alike)
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