Lecture, Dipesh Chakrabarty: "Climate Change and the Human Condition"
Guest Writer: Brandon Jones
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
posted under
anthropocene
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anthropocentrism
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Climate Change
,
Dipesh Chakrabarty
,
human condition
,
Hyperobjects
by Unit for Criticism
"Rifts of Scale: Humans and Hyperobjects in the Era of the Anthropocene"
Written by: Brandon Jones (English)
In The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton coined the term “hyperobject” to refer to “materials from humble Styrofoam to terrifying plutonium” that “will far outlast current social and biological forms… hyperobjects outlast us all.” (He furthers this concept in his most recent book that carries his influential term as its title: Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World.) Climate change is perhaps the most quintessential and pressing example of a hyperobject, as its global environmental effects push the limits of what is temporally and spatially imaginable. For Morton, to act ethically and politically in a world where climate change cannot be ignored requires us to think bigger than we ever have before: “To tackle pollution, climate disruption, and radiation, we must think and act big, which means thinking and acting collectively. This will take conscious input. We will have to choose to act and think together.”
Dipesh Chakrabarty both borrowed fruitfully from Morton’s analysis of hyperobjects and complicated it in ways that are extremely important for questions of social injustice, economic inequality, political agency, and human history in the age of the Anthropocene. If Morton and his colleagues in object-oriented philosophy show us how to think ethically about objects and hyberobjects in a way that acknowledges and appreciates their inaccessibility to human experience, Chakrabarty reminded us that in the case of climate change, this insight cannot but be a problem for activity on the human scale.
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