Living Inside the Weather: Meaning of Hyperobjects Explained

Some things are too large, too sticky, and too long-lived to sit politely in our categories. Climate change, microplastics, nuclear waste, the internet’s data exhaust—these aren’t just “issues.” They are hyperobjects, a term the philosopher Timothy Morton coined for phenomena so massively distributed in time and space that we live within them rather than alongside them.

We’re used to objects as graspable units: a chair, a phone, a storm. Hyperobjects disobey. They outscale us (lasting millennia), outspread us (diffused across oceans, servers, atmospheres), and outwit our senses (visible only through instruments, models, or cascading effects). You don’t encounter “global warming” in a single event—you notice oddities: peaches flowering early, insurance premiums spiking, heat shimmering at midnight. The point isn’t that hyperobjects are abstract; it’s that they’re too real to fit inside a single frame.

What are Hyperobjects?

Hyperobjects exhibit five unnerving traits:

1. Viscosity. They stick to everything. Plastics are in rain, placentas, and polar snow. Try to step away; they cling.

2. Nonlocality. Causes and effects are smeared. The carbon from a commute reappears as a flood a continent away. No tidy line connects deed and consequence.

3. Temporal undulation. They warp time. Nuclear waste demands political care over tens of thousands of years; climate feedbacks simmer across centuries but erupt in a weekend.

4. Phasing. We glimpse them in facets. A heat dome here, a coral bleaching there—local cross-sections of a phenomenon too wide for any single vantage.

5. Interobjectivity. They are legible only in relations: satellite images, sensor arrays, epidemiological curves. Knowledge is a networked choreography.

Morton’s wager is ethical as much as metaphysical: if we stop pretending the world is neatly partitioned into manageable parts, we can practice responsibility adequate to entanglement.

Example of Hyperobjects

Consider microplastics. They originate in packaging and textiles, slip through wastewater plants, ride winds, seed clouds, alter albedo, get eaten by plankton, climb food chains, modulate hormones, and possibly tweak weather patterns. Where’s the “object”? Everywhere and nowhere. Or take capital flows in platform economies: ad auctions, recommendation engines, gig logistics, server farms drawing river water for cooling. The “internet” isn’t a place; it’s a planetary machine coupling attention, electricity, minerals, and mood. You don’t log on to it—you breathe it.

Why It’s Hard (and Necessary)

Hyperobjects defeat our ordinary moral tools. Blame looks for a culprit; hyperobjects are cumulative. Choice expects discrete options; hyperobjects make every option complicit. Prediction wants stable baselines; hyperobjects move the baseline while you’re measuring it. The risk is nihilism: if everything is entangled, why bother?

Because entanglement doesn’t abolish leverage; it redistributes it. The task is to find “handles” proportionate to scale:

• Institutional handles: standards, treaties, liability regimes that act across decades (e.g., extended producer responsibility for plastics; carbon border adjustments).

• Infrastructural handles: grid upgrades, urban shade canopies, water-sensitive design—material changes that reshape default behavior.

• Representational handles: art, dashboards, and rituals that thicken perception beyond a single news cycle—turning graphs into shared memory.

Ethics Without Clean Hands

Hyperobjects make purity politics impossible. No one has a plastic-free bloodstream. The viable ethic is accountable involvement: reduce harm where you stand, fund the systems that scale repair, and refuse the stories that privatize blame while socializing risk. Crucially, hyperobject thinking keeps justice central: heat islands map onto redlining; e-waste maps onto colonial afterlives; data centers map onto Indigenous water. The “everywhere” of hyperobjects is patterned by power.

To live with hyperobjects is to replace the fantasy of mastery with maintenance and metamorphosis. We won’t solve climate change like a puzzle; we will endure and transform through grids that cool, laws that remember, and cultures that learn to read the weather as politics. The hyperobject is not a monster at the door. It’s the room we’re already in. The question is how to rearrange the furniture—together—so we can breathe.

Matter With a Pulse: New Materialism Explained

We often treat objects as ballast: mute stuff that props up the human story. New materialism flips the stage lights. What if matter—plastics, power grids, weather systems, lithium—has its own momentum? What if culture is co-authored by things that push back, drift, leak, and vibrate?

Emerging across philosophy, feminist science studies, and STS, new materialism challenges the old split between passive matter and active mind. Think Karen Barad’s agential realism (phenomena are produced through “intra-action,” not preexisting entities colliding), Jane Bennett’s vibrant matter (things have lively capacities), and Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman ethics (subjects are assembled from human and nonhuman forces). The aim isn’t to mystify objects; it’s to notice how material processes shape what counts as thought, choice, and agency.

What is New Materialism

1. From objects to agencies. Matter is not raw clay awaiting human inscription; it has propensities. A virus mutates; concrete cures and cracks; a battery overheats. These capacities don’t erase human responsibility—they complicate it.

2. Entanglement over interaction. Barad’s term intra-action reminds us that boundaries are outcomes, not givens. A lab apparatus and a particle co-produce a result; a content moderation system and its training data co-produce what “harm” looks like. Agency lives in the relation.

3. Assemblages and scale. Following Deleuze/Guattari (and DeLanda), new materialists see social life as assemblages: ad hoc gatherings of bodies, tools, codes, climates. Power flows across scales—hand, warehouse, ocean current—without a single sovereign center.

Case in Point

Consider the smartphone. It isn’t a neutral portal to culture; it is culture, condensed. Cobalt from the Congo meets Chinese assembly lines, Californian UX, Chilean lithium brines, and your fingertip oil. Haptics choreograph attention; push notifications modulate cortisol; aging batteries slow apps, nudging upgrades. A new-materialist lens reframes debates about “screen time” into questions about material-temporal capture: how devices reorganize our bodies and ecologies long before we “decide” anything.

Or take microplastics. They are not simply pollution we produced but actors that now infiltrate blood, plankton, clouds. They refract sunlight, alter weather microdynamics, ferry endocrine disruptors across species. Policy that treats plastics as post-consumer waste misses their ongoing life—their capacity to author futures we then must inhabit.

New materialism is practical. It pushes researchers and designers to follow forces across domains: map a content platform through server heat and water usage; track a logistics algorithm through diesel particulates and warehouse injuries; read architecture via mold blooms and ventilation routes. Crucially, it guards against “human exceptionalism” and against a lazy flattening. Differences matter: a hurricane’s agency isn’t the same as a contract’s; both still shape a neighborhood.

Why New Materialism Matters

Designers, policymakers, and activists already negotiate with nonhuman forces—though often implicitly. A new-materialist stance makes the negotiation explicit: write building codes for fungi and humans; price cloud computing with rivers in mind; regulate antibiotics across hospitals and aquaculture; plan transit as a choreography of bodies, batteries, and temperatures. In classrooms and studios, it trains attention: Which materials are speaking? Through what failures, frictions, or leaks?

Critics worry that new materialism romanticizes things while sidelining labor, race, and capital. That risk is real when “vibrancy” becomes a vibe. The stronger versions braid material agency with political economy: petroleum’s viscosity meets redlined neighborhoods; data centers’ thirst hits Indigenous water rights; heat waves amplify carceral geographies. In this register, new materialism sharpens—rather than blurs—justice: it tracks how inequality travels through pipes, polymers, and power surges.

New materialism asks for a humbler hero story. We’re not puppet masters of inert stuff, nor puppets of inscrutable matter. We’re partners in unstable assemblies, answerable to forces we set in motion and that now set us in motion. The ethic that follows is unspectacular and rigorous: notice the nonhumans, measure their push, and build with—rather than against—the agencies already at work.

Minor Transnationalism Explained

When we talk about the global, we usually picture big arrows: empire to colony, center to periphery, Hollywood to everywhere else. Minor transnationalism asks us to tilt the map and watch the smaller lines - the sideways exchanges among communities that don’t sit at the center of power and don’t necessarily route through it.

Coined by Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, “minor transnationalism” describes cultural traffic that flows between minority formations rather than through the sanctioned hubs of nations, empires, or dominant diasporas. It highlights the ways subaltern groups connect, translate, and collaborate without first seeking validation from the “major.” Think of it as a theory of passages rather than pipelines: short bridges built from below, driven by need, affinity, and improvisation.

Theory Snapshot

Minor transnationalism turns three dials:

1. From vertical to lateral. Instead of center-to-margin diffusion, it traces horizontal links: Haitian-Creole poets in Montreal trading forms with Maghrebi slam collectives in Paris; Tamil and Malay filmmakers in Singapore editing each other’s shorts.

2. From representation to relation. The goal isn’t to “represent” a nation to the world but to sustain minor lifeworlds through mutual recognition, small infrastructures, and shared tactics—zines, pop-up festivals, subtitling circles, remittance-backed studios.

3. From identity to practice. It’s less about fixed labels than about what gets done: ad hoc translation, co-mentorship, resource pooling, vernacular archiving. Identity becomes a workshop, not a flag.

This “minor” is not a demographic headcount but a position - defined by constrained visibility, uneven mobility, and the necessity of collaboration. It sits close to Deleuze and Guattari’s “minor literature,” where language is stretched under pressure, and to Glissant’s poetics of relation, where opacity is a right, not a defect. But the emphasis here is practical: How do marginal communities actually move things across borders?

Case in Point

Consider independent fashion networks linking Indigenous designers in Aotearoa with Afro-Brazilian textile co-ops. They exchange patterns through encrypted chats, crowdsource dyes, and stage runway “raids” at mainstream fashion weeks without waiting for a luxury brand’s blessing. Or the way queer Rohingya and Somali activists swap harm-reduction scripts on Telegram—translating safety strategies through religious vernaculars that Western NGOs routinely miss. These are minor circuits: modest budgets, high trust, and a talent for converting scarcity into style.

Even pop culture has minor lanes. Filipino and Mexican nurses share TikTok parodies of clinical hierarchies; Kurdish and Palestinian beatmakers trade stems that sampled wedding ululations long before EDM discovered them. The point isn’t purity but combinatory survival—hybrids formed outside the glamour routes of “global culture.”

Minor transnationalism doesn’t romanticize the small. Lateral ties can be fraught: uneven access to visas and platforms, translation fatigue, colorism, patriarchy. Yet friction becomes method. Mistranslation slows the conversation just enough to reveal assumptions; the need to caption, footnote, or gesture breeds new forms. Think of the bootleg as pedagogy: the imperfect copy that teaches you how circulation works.

Why Minor Transnationalism Matters

Major narratives still monopolize legitimacy—states, conglomerates, celebrity diasporas. But our most durable cultural innovations often spring from the minor’s experimental logistics: group chats that double as grant systems, kitchens as studios, churches as theaters, barbershops as publishing houses. Policy makers and institutions seeking “inclusion” could learn from these infrastructures: fund the connectors, not just the showcases; pay translators like producers; support archives that preserve the small-scale and the off-platform.

For readers and creators, the takeaway is simple: look sideways. Ask not which capital city crowned a work, but which minor corridor carried it—who subtitled it, who smuggled the equipment, whose cousin’s living room became the rehearsal space. That’s where you’ll find the future rehearsing itself.

Minor transnationalism is the study of culture in the key of workaround. It honors the cunning of those who move without permission and build without blueprints. In a world obsessed with scale, it reminds us that smallness is not a defect but a strategy—one that keeps possibility alive in the cracks of the global.

See also: Carry-On Selves: How Transnational Identities Repack the Idea of Home

Paul Ricoeur on Ethics and Justice

For Paul Ricoeur, ethics and justice are not abstract concepts detached from human life but emerge from the ways people interpret themselves, their actions, and their relationships with others. Across his writings, especially Oneself as Another (1990), The Just (1995), and Reflections on the Just (2007), Ricoeur articulates an ethical vision grounded in hermeneutics—the interpretation of human existence, narratives, and institutions.

The Ethical Aim: The Good Life with and for Others

Ricoeur defines ethics as “the aim of the good life, with and for others, in just institutions.” This well-known formula contains three key dimensions:

1. The Good Life – An Aristotelian element: human flourishing (eudaimonia), the pursuit of a meaningful life.

2. With and For Others – An emphasis on relationality: ethical life is not solitary but built on recognition, reciprocity, and responsibility.

3. In Just Institutions – A political and social dimension: ethics must be embedded in fair and legitimate structures, from laws to communities.

This definition reveals Ricoeur’s distinctive synthesis of Aristotle’s teleological ethics and Kant’s deontological ethics, held together by a hermeneutics of selfhood and responsibility.

Justice as the Extension of Ethics

While ethics concerns the “good life,” justice arises when human beings confront the need to regulate competing claims fairly. Ricoeur views justice as the public expression of ethics, particularly where conflicts of interest and values cannot be resolved by personal generosity or private morality alone.

Justice therefore requires institutions—courts, laws, and procedures—that embody fairness. But Ricoeur insists these institutions must remain open to interpretation and critique, avoiding the rigidity of pure legalism. Justice is not just about rules; it is about ensuring that institutions remain aligned with the ethical aim of human flourishing.

The Role of Recognition

A central thread in Ricoeur’s ethical thought is the concept of recognition. Justice requires not only fair distribution of goods but also the recognition of persons as subjects of dignity. In this way, Ricoeur extends ethics beyond material fairness toward the affirmation of identity, respect, and human worth.

Recognition bridges the personal and political: it is how individuals are seen within communities and how institutions affirm the equality of citizens.

Practical Wisdom and Moral Conflict: From Ethics to Politics

Ricoeur acknowledges that ethical life often involves tragic conflicts where duties and goods clash. Here, he appeals to practical wisdom (phronesis), drawing again on Aristotle. Justice is not about applying universal rules mechanically but about discerning the right course of action in concrete situations. This allows his ethics to remain sensitive to pluralism, ambiguity, and the complexities of human life.

For Ricoeur, justice links individual responsibility to collective structures. He insists that just institutions—laws, courts, and political systems—are the conditions for living ethically with others. Yet he also warns that institutions can become oppressive if detached from their ethical aim. This tension calls for a continual hermeneutics of justice: interpreting, critiquing, and reforming institutions so they remain truly just.

The Hermeneutics of the Good Life

Ricoeur’s conception of ethics and justice is both personal and political, both philosophical and practical. His definition—“the good life, with and for others, in just institutions”—captures a vision of ethical life that integrates flourishing, responsibility, and fairness.

In a world of plural values and social conflicts, Ricoeur offers a framework where ethics becomes not only a personal aspiration but a shared project of building just institutions. His thought remains a vital resource for contemporary debates on democracy, law, and human dignity.

Articles by and on Ricoeur

Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion 

Paul Ricoeur's concept "Symbol Gives Rise to Thought"

Conceptual Framework of Action

Surplus of Meaning

Explanation and Understanding

Ricoeur's Concept of Distanciation

Appropriation

Narrative Identity

Living Metaphor

Emplotment

Second Naïveté

Biblical Hermeneutics

Noteable Books and Articles by Ricoeur

Conflict of Interpretations

The Symbolism of Evil 

The Rule of Metaphor

Time and Narrative

Glossary of Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics

Jameson and Baudrillard: Two Diagnoses of the Postmodern Condition

Few thinkers have mapped the late twentieth century’s cultural terrain as powerfully as Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard. Both saw the rise of global capitalism, mass media, and digital culture as transforming not only art and politics but the very structure of human experience. Yet their diagnoses, while parallel in observation, diverge radically in tone and philosophical orientation. Where Jameson remains a Marxist humanist committed to historical understanding and political possibility, Baudrillard proclaims the disappearance of both history and reality itself.

The Collapse of Depth: From Reality to Simulation

Both thinkers begin from the perception that the postmodern era has flattened experience. For Jameson, this flattening manifests as the waning of affect and the loss of historical depth. Cultural production, he argues, has become a play of surfaces, a recycling of past styles devoid of emotional or moral center. This is the aesthetic of pastiche—imitation without irony—typical of a culture that has turned history into image.

Baudrillard radicalizes this insight into his famous concept of simulation. In works like Simulacra and Simulation (1981), he argues that we no longer live in a world of representations but of simulacra—copies without originals. Television, advertising, and digital media have not merely distorted reality; they have replaced it. In his striking phrase, we now inhabit “the desert of the real.” The Gulf War, Disneyland, celebrity politics—all, for Baudrillard, are simulations of meaning that conceal their own emptiness.

Jameson sees this loss of depth as the cultural logic of late capitalism—a system whose economic structures now penetrate every sphere of life. Baudrillard, however, sees it as something beyond economics: a metaphysical transformation in which the distinction between reality and illusion has collapsed altogether. Jameson historicizes the condition; Baudrillard ontologizes it.

Ideology vs. Hyperreality

For Jameson, ideology remains a central category. Even when culture is saturated with market logic, there is still an underlying “political unconscious” to be interpreted—traces of conflict, repression, and utopian desire. The critic’s task is to decode these traces and reconnect cultural forms to their historical roots. Baudrillard rejects this project entirely. In the age of simulation, he argues, ideology has disappeared, because there is no longer any “real” beneath appearances to distort. Power no longer lies in false consciousness but in the endless circulation of images that produce consent through fascination.

Utopia vs. the End of Meaning

Here the two thinkers part ways most decisively. Jameson’s thought, for all its pessimism, is ultimately animated by a utopian impulse. Even in postmodernism’s emptiest forms, he searches for the glimmer of a collective desire for transformation. For Baudrillard, by contrast, utopia itself has been absorbed into simulation. The dream of liberation has become a theme in advertising and film—a sign among other signs. His tone is ironic, fatalistic, almost apocalyptic: resistance has given way to seduction, critique to spectacle.

Two Responses to the Same World

Jameson and Baudrillard thus represent two poles of postmodern theory. Jameson remains the dialectical thinker of mediation and history, seeking to map the totality of global capitalism and reclaim agency within it. Baudrillard is the prophet of disappearance, insisting that mapping itself has become impossible in a world of hyperreality. Between them lies a tension that still defines our cultural moment: the struggle between critique and collapse, between the will to interpret and the vertigo of endless simulation.

If Jameson offers us a cartographer’s compass, Baudrillard hands us a mirror—one that reflects not the world as it is, but the image that has already replaced it.

Worlds, Not Just Worldviews: The Ontological Turn Explained

For a long time, anthropology treated cultural difference as a matter of beliefs about one world. The “ontological turn” asks a sharper question: what if there isn’t just one world awaiting multiple interpretations? What if there are many worlds, partially overlapping, occasionally commensurable, often not?

The ontological turn coalesced in the 2000s across anthropology and STS (science and technology studies), drawing on work by Philippe Descola, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Annemarie Mol, Bruno Latour, and later Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen. The pivot is from epistemology (how people know the world) to ontology (what the world is). Instead of translating others’ concepts into our categories—“they believe spirits cause illness”—researchers attempt to let those concepts compose the analytical terms: spirits as persons, jaguars as subjects, objects as social actors. The aim isn’t whimsy; it’s method.

Theory Snapshot

Three moves define the turn:

1. Take concepts as world-making, not mere opinions. Viveiros de Castro’s “Amerindian perspectivism” argues that beings (humans, animals, spirits) share a culture but inhabit different natures—a form of multinaturalism. A jaguar sees blood as manioc beer; a human sees beer as beer. The difference isn’t a mistaken belief but a different bodily position in a pluriverse.

2. Map ontological regimes. Descola proposes four modes—naturalism, animism, totemism, analogism—to describe how societies sort interiorities and physicalities. These are not museum labels; they’re living arrangements that organize ethics, property, and politics.

3. Enactment over representation. Mol’s The Body Multiple shows how “atherosclerosis” is done differently in clinic, lab, and ward—multiple realities enacted through practices. Ontologies are not just thought; they are performed in institutions, instruments, and routines.

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Method in Practice

In this approach, analysis slows down. Rather than correcting “local beliefs” with scientific truth, ethnographers ask: what realities have to hold for these practices to make sense? If a fisherman in Oceania treats a reef as kin, the question becomes practical: how do kinship obligations allocate harvest, repair damage, or sanction extraction? Likewise, if data engineers say “the model learned,” the ontological turn doesn’t scoff at anthropomorphism; it tracks how workflows, dashboards, and legal fictions materialize a learning entity with rights, liabilities, and budgets.

Case in Point

Consider human–wildlife conflict. A conservation NGO frames elephants as endangered resources in a shared ecosystem. Farmers frame elephants as political agents rerouting through their fields when the state neglects irrigation. Meanwhile, local ritual specialists might treat elephants as emissaries from ancestral domains. Each enactment distributes responsibilities differently: insurance schemes, legal personhood for rivers, ritual compensations, electric fencing. The policy catastrophe begins when one ontology masquerades as neutral “reality” and the others are demoted to “belief.”

Friction and Critique

The ontological turn attracts heat. Critics warn it can slide into anything-goes relativism, evacuate power analysis, or romanticize “others” while ignoring capitalism, gender, and race. The best work counters by coupling ontology with politics: who gets to decide which world is operative in court, clinic, or climate model? Latour’s diplomacy of “composition” and decolonial scholars’ insistence on pluriversality push the turn toward institutions—treaties, standards, audits—where worlds negotiate under asymmetry.

Why It Matters

Climate change, pandemics, and AI governance are ontological battlegrounds. Are viruses agents or objects? Is a dataset property, commons, or kinship archive? Is a forest a carbon sink, a cathedral of beings, or an infrastructure? These are not semantic disputes. They script which futures are fundable, insurable, and livable. An ontological sensibility equips us to design with difference—to build policies and interfaces that don’t erase worlds in the name of efficiency.

The ontological turn’s wager is modest and radical: let analysis be remade by the realities it studies. Not to flatten conflict but to render it intelligible on its own terms. We don’t need consensus about one true world to act together; we need institutions capable of hosting worlds—with procedures for friction, translation, and repair.

Judith Butler on Desire, Recognition, and the Subjects of Desire

Judith Butler began not with gender but with Hegel—with the messy birth of selfhood inside dependence, desire, and conflict. Subjects of Desire, her first book, is the prequel to everything that follows: a reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit filtered through the post-structuralist turn of the 1980s. Before drag queens and bathroom bills, there was the question of how a subject—any subject—comes to be.

Butler’s answer: through the need to be recognized. The self doesn’t emerge from interior truth but from a dialectic of address. To say “I” is to have already been seen, named, summoned. The subject’s autonomy, then, is born inside dependency; it’s freedom haunted by its origins in subjection. Recognition is double-edged: it makes the self possible while binding it to the gaze and desire of the other.

This is the drama Butler inherits from Hegel’s famous “lord and bondsman” scene, where the self discovers itself only by risking life for acknowledgment—and immediately finds itself trapped in another’s recognition. The moment of victory (I exist!) is also the moment of captivity (I exist only because you see me). Butler reads this not as an antique allegory of spirit, but as a structural truth about personhood in modern life: we are condemned to seek freedom in the eyes that constrain us.

From here, the trajectory toward Gender Trouble starts to make sense. The “performative” theory of gender doesn’t appear from nowhere; it grows out of this Hegelian insight that the self is relational, citational, and never sovereign. Butler’s early attraction to French theory—Foucault, Lacan, Derrida—wasn’t a turn away from Hegel but a translation of his dialectic into the language of discourse and desire. If Hegel dramatizes recognition between consciousnesses, Butler asks: what happens when the “other” that recognizes (or refuses to) is an institution, a norm, a legal category?

In Subjects of Desire, the tone is not yet insurgent; it’s elegiac, even romantic. Butler tracks how desire—erotic, intellectual, ethical—propels philosophy itself. The subject wants to know, but also wants to be known. Every system of reason carries this erotic remainder. She calls Hegel’s dialectic a “comedy of desire” because it never ends—every recognition breeds new longing, every synthesis slips back into need.

That circularity becomes the conceptual seed for everything later called “performative.” Gender, power, and identity will all be reframed as scenes of recognition where norms act like invisible others, hailing us into coherence. We’re always mid-dialogue, always dependent, always half-misrecognized.

Read Subjects of Desire not as a historical curiosity but as Butler’s covert autobiography of thought: the record of a philosopher discovering that dependency and agency are not opposites but coordinates of the same condition. Long before she writes about vulnerability, she’s already staging its first scene.