Dawn of the Hyperobject

Hyperobject at the end of time was always bullshit. Here's why:⌥ "That vast plains of sand may be altered into meadows where a hundred thousand cattle and sheep can graze." We are not at the end of time. Nor are we in front of something too big, too slow, beyond human comprehension, capacity to resist, impossible to perceive, too something to grasp.

Hydraulics do not suggest hoisting everything up to the level of the hyper. On the contrary, they make space for smallness, playing across scales and intensities, in the middle of things—the meso. With this, they inspire attention to human and nonhuman transformations of environments at the scale of bodies and societies: how they are arranged, striated, and sustained in movement. We are not facing the Anthropocene. We are facing a long history of responses to the thinning and thickening of earthly materials through calculation, capture, and care. Is the problem one of perception, as Morton proposes? Or is the problem figuring how to deal with the cumulative effects of responses to perceived problems? Something becomes a problem when it matters; when it must be answered to. Like when the military engineers of the Qing empire who surveyed the Ordos plateau in 1697 reported a crisis: overgrazed, overpopulated desert sooner than "vast plains of sand," its grasses only memories of the herds of cattle and sheep that once grazed there. Sandstorms blow so hard that flame cannot be raised to heat the evening meal. The remedy? Dig holes, one after another, fill them with water and wait. Grasses will sprout; sand will settle. Dig engineering corps from the ranks. Dig reserves from the provinces. Dig logistics from the land. Dig vigorously. Dig in.

In Yasunori Kawamatsu's 1998 Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris, a coalition of experts race against time to save Earth from the threat of the Hyper Gyaos, a species of bird-monster that feeds on pollution ("our trash and poisons of the twentieth century") and multiplication ("one asexually produces from its own body," an egg of future catastrophe). Left unchecked, Gyaos will reproduce to the limit of planetary resources: "they will keep multiplying until they occupy every niche of the globe." Against the finality of this future, the film stages an encounter between monsters: Gyaos vs. Gamera, giant turtle and ancient guardian of the cosmos here reborn "to carry the burden and punishment for humanity's evil deeds." Obscure and primordial—"a life from the most distant past," "that of a time before mankind"—Gamera performs a calculus of survival where the fate of the many outweighs that of the few. When Gyaos descends on Shibuya to feast on the exhaust fumes and landfill gases of the metropolis, Gamera delivers his verdict: an annihilating breath of fire ignites downtown's hydrocarbon surplus, turning life world into burning time, biosphere inferno.

Who will speak for Tokyo's 5.1 million exterminated souls? What did their cries sound like, drifting upward into the night sky with smoke and ash? Critic Shozo Takahashi reads the trauma of this scene as allegory for the political present: born-again Gamera is the state incarnate, embodying the "irresponsible, unreasoning force that lurks within democracy itself," revealing that "within the spaces of everyday life lurks the potential for sudden, violent destruction anytime, anywhere, without warning." But another interpretation is possible. Recall the lesson of hydraulics: things persist not despite but in relation to the forces that pollute and extinguish them. Just as Gamera's purification is perennially undone by Gyaos's return ( "wounds in the Earth itself"), so Gyaos's appetite is endlessly fueled by the carbon wastes whose combustion Gamera prescribes ("Gyaos will be the new dominant species"). The film's title names the truth of this relation: Revenge of Iris, revenge of rainbows and irradiated raindrops reflecting sunlight scattered by dying stars. Iris avenges not this or that life but the principle of life itself: its capacity to shift form and find passage in whatever medium remains. Gamera vs. Gyaos is thus not tragedy but dialectic: struggle to the death of determinate monsters yields synthesis of indeterminate monstrosity, metabolism of toxins into ever stranger fuel.

And what of humanity, caught in the crossfire? Perhaps our role is not to choose sides—Gamera or Gyaos, guru or demon?—but to learn to swerve with their combat, hiding inside the intervals of attack and counterattack as they carve new openings in the armor of the world. Not apocalypse but aperture: the moment when the firmament cracks and daylight floods in, revealing that we dwell not in a cosmos but a compost heap, pregnant with ghosts of futures already aborted and reborn. #DawnoftheHyperobject

[Hyperlinked image sources: Gyaos feeding on pollution broth; Gamera Fire Breath, Shibuya Inferno]