Either the conspiracy infiltrates everything, or it doesn’t exist.īut that’s not right, or not right enough: the conspiracy is real partly because we make it real-like a god. Morton’s notion of the hyperobject also illuminates a paradoxical feature of the conspiracy: in its limitlessness, tenuousness, invisibility, and threat, it begs to be denied absolutely. Masons, secret lizards, CIA LSD, Scientology, Tupperware, all pale in comparison. In this regard, or in all these senses put together, you could say we live in the era of the first truly global conspiracy that actually matters, one with sway over every human prospect.
Third, and most poignant, it has demanded in response a manifestly useless “conspiracy of good sense” right-thinking people everywhere attempting to conspire in saving the world and … getting nowhere in particular. It’s as if, instead of machines rising up against humans (as in The Terminator, or that old Twilight Zone episode in which the electric shaver comes slithering down the stairs like a cobra), it is the laws of nature that will ultimately act, like a Marvel supervillain, to topple humanity. Second, its onset-so gradual, and now so sudden-proposes the existence of a nonhuman conspiracy against capitalism. First, of course, the outstandingly real and simple disaster somehow stands under accusation of being the concoction of special interests (ecological, Chinese, or what have you). In a triple sense, global warming, or “climate change,” is a notion pervaded with an atmosphere of conspiracy.
That word, coined by Timothy Morton to describe those features of our existence too vast to apprehend entirely, to get our heads around, is frequently applied to global warming-which, taken as an example, in turn helps to clarify Morton’s odd term. It goes on without you and within you, and it’s big-a perfect example of a hyperobject. Peter Saul, ‘Government of California,’ 1969, acrylic on canvas, 68″ x 96″.
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