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Hyperobject

Philosophy
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A hyperobject is an object that is massively distributed in time and space, such as climate change or nuclear radiation. It eludes immediate human perception.

Detailed Definition
Timothy Morton's concept describes phenomena that exceed human scale. In poetry, hyperobjects challenge the lyric 'I' by creating a sense of scale and interconnectedness. Poets struggle to represent these invisible but all-encompassing entities, using imagery of the vast or the systemic. This makes poetry a medium for ecological and existential reflection, grappling with threats that defy traditional narrative representation.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poem that attempts to capture the scope of climate change, such as a work by a contemporary eco-poet, is trying to represent a hyperobject; The concept of the Internet or "the cloud" can be treated as a hyperobject in poetry, representing an entity that is everywhere but nowhere; A poem about a pandemic, like the AIDS epidemic in the works of Thom Gunn, grapples with a hyperobject that is pervasive and temporal, exceeding individual experience; The idea of a nuclear winter is a hyperobject that appears in many speculative poems, as it is a massive, distributed threat.
Additional Notes
Hyperobject is a term coined by Timothy Morton to describe objects that are massively distributed in time and space, so much so that they defy our normal human-scale perception. Examples include climate change, nuclear radiation, the Internet, or evolution itself. They are "hyper" because they are non-local, viscous (sticky and hard to get rid of), and phase-shifting (they appear differently at different scales). In poetry, hyperobjects challenge the traditional lyric subject by creating a sense of scale and interconnectedness that dwarfs the individual. Poets struggle to represent these all-encompassing phenomena, often using fragmented or disorienting imagery. This concept has given rise to a new "ecopoetics" that attempts to write about a world where the boundaries between human and environment are blurred, making poetry a crucial medium for ecological and existential reflection.
Also Known As
Hyper-object Ecological object Distributed object
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