Pandemic Media and the Hyperobject

by Rachel Pincus

 

Hyperobjects

 

In 2013, Timothy Morton coined the term “hyperobject” to describe entities that are “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans.” The original hyperobject that Morton wanted to bring to the forefront was climate change. Activism around climate change has been distinctively stymied by the way the issue is present in our lives: ambient, sometimes evident, sometimes not. The effects of climate change are so widespread and interconnected that it has been difficult to get certain actors, such as governments, to take it seriously, but we must act proactively before it is too late. 

 

Every element of this description can also be applied to our current “overriding crisis,” COVID-19. Many commentators during the pandemic have pointed out its parallels with society’s approach toward (or retreat from dealing with) climate change. Individuals and governments are always perched on the edge of denial, overly eager to lift restrictions on behavior and act as if everything is normal. The time lag between this letting go and the ill effects that follow leave many people unable (or unwilling) to see causal connections.

 

“It is a ‘massive thing’ constituted by the sum total of all the coronaviruses hidden in the body of each individual person, bat, pangolin, or wild animal. It dwells in the globe’s forests and hospitals, Asian wet markets and scientific labs, saliva droplets and particulate matter that act as viral carriers. Its temporality is also multiple: it’s the slow time of evolution and the fast time of multiplying cells, the time of quiescence and the time of contagion, the time of illness and that of immunity.”

 

— Serenella Iovino

 

"All these devices are indulged in not only to lure the attention of the audience, and to create the easy impression that there is a kind of participation open to them in the program itself,  but also to highlight the chief values stressed in such 'personality' shows.

 

These are sociability, easy affability, friendship, and close contact—briefly, all the values associated with free access to, and easy participation in, pleasant social interactions in primary groups.”

 

Rachel Pincus is a Media Studies MA student interested in how physical and online spaces facilitate community.

To view the full presentation please go to: Pandemic Media and the Hyperobject

 

 

Response to Presentation

by Professor Josh Scannell 

 

Hello. I want to start by thanking Sumita for inviting me to participate in this exciting event and to thank Rachel for that excellent and fascinating presentation. I think that the work that you’re doing to connect para-social relationships with an object-oriented pandemic aesthetics is fascinating and points to a set of really interesting moves in digital media theory and post-cinematic theory. There’s a lot that I would like to respond to, but in the interest of time I’m going to just draw out a few key points that your presentation brought out for me.

 

I want to start with your framing of the pandemic as a hyperobject, because I think that it’s an excellent way to characterize it, but also because it speaks to questions of temporality that I understand to be at the heart of your project. As you note, for Tim Morton, the hyperobject par excellence is climate change, which he uses to anchor his claim that hyperobjects are massively distributed in time and space, such that they operate at time scales that humans don’t have real access to. So, in the case of climate change (which he insists we refer to as global warming to emphasize its urgency), we can only experience its effects directly, and can only “know” it in the abstract. The sense of its scale eludes us, which in turn produces a dynamic that hamstrings our ability to collectively take it seriously enough.

 

You point out that the virus, and humanity’s collective response to it, has been likened to climate change in that it has been halting (at best), and characterized by denial and indifference with tremendous social costs. Also, like climate change, the virus has had predictable necropolitical impacts, with death and disaster unevenly distributed so that poor black and brown countries and peoples suffer disproportionately. In our daily lives, we experience the virus only in its effects, as an intensification of slow death, the terror of the anonymity of contagion, and the effects of lockdown (or not). On the other hand, the pandemic as hyperobject is, in fact, the opposite of Morton’s definition because, where Morton understands hyperobjects as extensive the virus is intensive. The temporality at which it operates is outside of the capacity of human minds to comprehend, but that is so because of its intense speed and smallness. You can’t see the virus, of course, but that’s because it operates inside us—it hijacks our bodies as laboratories to produce increasingly efficient mutations that we can only discover in retrospect as they become emergent at populational levels. It’s massively distributed but infinitesimally small. That’s a difference that I think bears on the pandemic aesthetics that you’re alluding to because that aesthetic is fundamentally intensive.

 

One of the consequences of this intensivity, and its combination with lockdown—or at least the prevailing feeling of isolation that seems to be true for those who have been locked down and those who haven’t—is what you point to the rise of the parasocial relationship. But that parasocial relationship is also defined by the centrality of apophenia. So, in the context of the Facebook group people will pack bond with anything. I think what’s really happening there is that the decorrelation from human sensoria has had the effect of surfacing objects with which we have always been in a type of community, but in a new context in which we come to imagine them meaning something to us.

 

So, the two people kissing in the crack in the wall or the soap bubble work to address us in a sort of parasocial relationship—just as the pandemic addresses us in a sort of parasocial relationship as well—I know, at least, that it’s common among people I talk to anthropomorphize the virus and to imagine that it is “speaking” to us in some inscrutable way. And so, isolated as we are, and beholden to the inscrutable decision making of a massively distributed virus, there is a rise in aesthetic intensity and a concern with the intensive. As you know—sticking with object-oriented ontology—reciprocity with things is a major concern of people like Harman, and I think that what you’re pointing to is a reciprocity of the object in a quarantine aesthetic where it sometimes feels like all relationships are parasocial.

 

It seems to me that the macro-photographer that you refer to is also working in this aesthetic mode, where the “truth” of the object or at least the weird set of intensive relationships that constitute the object, whether that object is the coffee or the hand is surfaced by the intensivity of the macro-photograph. And like the apophenia that characterizes the pack bonding, there’s the inevitable observation that the chaotic/fractal geometries of materials speak to a kind of weird syllogism of things.

 

The last piece that I wanted to touch on briefly is how the quarantine comedy that you point to both draws on the already-extant decorrelated mode of humor that proliferates on platforms like Tik tok and works to heighten the discognition of the moment. I’m especially taken by the video that you also highlight of the girl responding to Duterte’s injunction to look into the corners of our homes because the use of jump cuts paired with her completely flat affect and surrealist touches like the bird on her head work together to completely eliminate any sensibility of continuity in the video. And that, of course, is the joke—discontinuity is sort of the affective regime of the pandemic. That makes me think of the quarantine aesthetic as a set of nested dynamics in which the central principle is the falling away of legible relations so that what we’re left with is a kind of hunt for establishing possible correlative experiences in a moment where they often feel absent. That is to say, that we can’t really get a handle on any of this, from the level of the hyperobject that is maybe, as you say, really the hyperobject to the hand that only comes to “mean” something when it ceases being a hand, to the allure of the crack in the wall, to the girls disappearing into the corners of her home, and the aesthetics of the moment speak to and heighten this sense of the lack of a ground.

 

There’s a lot more that I’d like to talk about because this project is so rich and so fascinating, but I’m out of time. So thank you again for this fascinating presentation and I hope that my comments were helpful.