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LCC's Distinguished Speaker Series: Tim Morton, University of California-Davis
Title of Talk:
"Dawn of the Hyperobjects"
Abstract:
In this talk, Professor Morton explores hyperobjects: entities such as radioactive materials and global warming. Hyperobjects are massively distributed in time and space, subject to temporal distortion, nonlocal, phased and “interobjective.” Hyperobjects appear in the human world as a product of our thinking through the ecological crisis we have entered. The ecological crisis is best thought as the time of hyperobjects. Why? Because this is the moment at which massive nonhuman, nonsentient entities make decisive contact with humans, ending various human concepts such as “world,” “horizon,” Nature and even “environment.”
The existence of hyperobjects poses a number of problems for ecology and philosophy, from theories of self-interest to deep ontological questions. Hyperobjects also challenge artists and other kinds of creators to find ways of meeting them and working with them in their practice.
Bio:
Timothy Morton is Professor of English (Literature and the Environment) at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of The Ecological Thought (Harvard UP, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard UP, 2007), seven other books and over seventy essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, food and music. He blogs regularly at http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com
