Planetary Catastrophism:
Rethinking Hyperobjects, Extinction and Politics in the
Necrocene Epoch
MA Thesis
Author: Oriol Jiménez Batalla Supervisor: Dhr. Dr. Joost de Bloois
Second Reader: Dr. Jeff Diamanti Department of Literary and Cultural Analysis
Master of Arts in Comparative Literature June 2019
Abstract………... x
Acknowledgements……… xi
Introduction………. 0
Death of Time: Hyperobjects and TimeSpaces in Extreme Coral Extinction……… 14
Microentities and Macroplasticity: Plastic Pollution Invisibility……….. 32
Global Capitalocracy / Local Colonialism: Extinction of Towns in the Necrocene………. 46
Politics of the Necrocene………... 60
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As critical research has highlighted in the last years, we are no longer living in the Holocene but in an eerie and unpredictable epoch governed by the current environmental and political crisis in which humankind has already been acknowledged as a geological entity: the Anthropocene. Yet, which are the implications of such nomenclature? This paper will try to portray how the nomenclature of such epoch is intrinsically wrong, adopting the concept of the Necrocene (McBrien, 2016), a narrative that acknowledges the power capital has in modifying the Earth through the process of triggering extinction, not only of non-human species, but also of human cultures, peoples and languages. Within this framework, in Planetary Catastrophism, I will develop my thoughts on hyperobjects (Morton, 2013), time and space, visibility, globalization and the contemporary environmental and political crisis with the help of three documentaries: Chasing
Coral (2017), Albatross (2017) and The Forgotten Space (2012). Through a critical, ethical and
philosophical interpretation of the issues at hand, this work aims to portray how a narrative outside the current unsustainable Capitalist Realism is feasible by shedding light upon its inconsistency, and provide material for hypothetical real alternatives.
Key Words: Critical Theory, Cultural Analysis, Necrocene, Environmental Humanities, Contemporary Politics, Degrowth, Extinction Studies, Applied Philosophy, Hyperobjects, Interdisciplinary Studies.
About the author: Oriol J. Batalla is a UvA MA student interested in the fields of Environmental Humanities and Ethics, Critical Theory, Extinction Studies, Anthropocene Studies, Animal Studies, Contemporary Politics, Ocean Studies and Degrowth Studies.
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Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I would like to thank Dhr. Dr. Joost de Bloois for the time, help and dedication all throughout the project. I truly appreciate all the feedback and inspiration you have shared with me in the last months which has made me love even more writing from an Interdisciplinary perspective within the Humanities and Critical Theory. I would also like to thank Dr. Jeff Diamanti for his motivation and selfless love for what we do, expressed in the shapes of help, advise and a much-needed contemporary perspective in the Humanities and Interdisciplinary studies.
Secondly, I would like to thank all the academics, musicians, writers, artists, activists and friends that have taken stands on the issues concerning the unprecedented social, political, geological and environmental crisis the planet is facing and have tried to bring such discussions to both an academic and a popular level.
Finally, many thanks are due to my family, close friends. Your inspiration and love have made me keep on going and pursue my goals, and helped me in go through everything I proposed in life. I want to give a special mention to my partner Lucía, who has believed in me and supported me every day since I arrived to Amsterdam, being by my side in the toughest moments of this academic year. I love you. Os quiero. Us estimo.
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“How can we imagine life if we don’t understand it”. Antillectual, Change the Standard, 2016.
Extinction, Global Warming, Globalization. The Contemporary world has become “one marked by the globalization of markets, the privatization of the world under the aegis of neoliberalism, and the increasing imbrication of the financial markets, the postimperial military complex and electronic and digital technologies” (Mbembe, 2017: 3), where “organic” and “healthy” products come wrapped up in undegradable single-use plastic, control over masses is easier than ever due to 24/7 connectivity and where global governance and cohesion has become nothing more than a fallacy and a dystopia. Within this turmoil, in an age where human and non-human environments and ecosystems are endangered by human beings in a way never acquainted before, the Earth has been modified by an entity, a hyperobject1 that we call humanity.
The planet is dying before our eyes and we, human beings, have been blamed to trigger some hyperobjects that have boosted this fatality, such as climate change or plastic, referring to the so-called “Anthropocene” to define the geological epoch we are living in, in which human beings are considered a geological force that is changing the Earth for the first time in history. As Malm and Hornborg pointed out, “according to the standard Anthropocene narrative, the Industrial Revolution marks the onset of large-scale human modification of the Earth System, primarily in the form of climate change, the most salient and perilous transgression of Holocene parameters” (Malm and Hornborg, 2014: 63). The tipping point due to the unearthing and usage of fossil fuels to power machinery “had significant economic and environmental consequences” (Mokyr in Albittron, 2012: 683), causing an industrial growth without any precedent in the history of
1 According to Morton (2013), Hyperobjects are “things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to
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humankind, which “was accompanied by the large-scale development of the transport infrastructure (roads, canals and railroads) that contributed to expanding the markets and speeding up the commercial flows” (Van Neuss, 2016: 3).
Nonetheless, can we consider this true? Here, I would like to refer to Jason W. Moore (2016), and his objection to the traditional Anthropocene narrative. As he highlights,
“The Anthropocene makes for an easy story. Easy, because it does not challenge the naturalized inequalities, alienation, and violence inscribed in modernity’s strategic relations of power and production. […] It removes inequality, commodification, imperialism, patriarchy, and much more from the problem of humanity-in-nature. If sometimes acknowledged, these relations exist in the Anthropocene discourse as after-the-fact supplements” (Moore, 2016: 82).
Therefore, as Moore proposes, this epoch should be defined as the Capitalocene, an “era dominated by capital (…) shaped by the scope and speed of an environmental change emanating from an Atlantic-centered capitalism that was unrivaled in human history” (Moore, 2016), which was triggered in 1450 and that altered the shape of several regions of the planet2. A pivotal point for
Moore (2016) is that, throughout this process, nature became a set of objects outside from humanity with a monetary value and, within this “nature” not only ecosystems were found, but also members of humanity per se, “such as peoples of color, most women, and most people with white skin living in semicolonial regions” (Moore, 2016: 91). However, and even though the Capitalocene Theory provides ground-breaking concepts that are and will help portray, trace and, consequently, find alternative political, environmental , cultural and social ways to fight back the planetary crisis that Humanity and the Capitalist System have created, the Capitalocene narrative
2 The Capitalocene theory does not recognize the Industrial Revolution as the turning point of the Anthropocene epoch.
Instead, the Capitalocene narrative considers that the Anthropocene theory leaves aside the fact that “the greatest landscape revolution in human history” (Moore, 2016: 91) happened between 1450 and 1750. During these three centuries, the separation between Humanity and Nature occurred and the law of “Cheap Nature” started applying to support the accumulation system.
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fails to acknowledge previous societies and empires that could be framed into the law of Cheap Nature due to its (dis)value and exploitation practices, especially when it comes to human beings. I consider that the law of Cheap Nature and, therefore, the Capitalocene, can be traced further than 1450 and, although it is true that some tipping points can be established -European colonization of America, Industrial Revolution- where the impacts on Earth and the planetary system have been critical in a larger scale, Imperial systems and Ancient societies have also modified the land and exploited their resources at hand. Therefore, I want to propose that if the beginning of the Anthropocene can be historically located with the expansion of sedentarism, the beginning of agriculture and cattle raising and trading when geography, ecosystems and trophic chains were altered to a certain extent due to the extinction and domestication of species (Certini et al, 2015)3. In this light, the Capitalocene or Age of Capital already showed traces of what was to happen in a global scale with the creation and divulgation of the use of money starting in China around 1000BC, arriving to the Mediterranean by 500BC (Gascoigne, 2019). I believe that from that moment onwards, yet not in a planetary way, some certain societies started to give a specific monetary value to their surroundings and, therefore, dis-valuating some specific elements, species or beings, hence, giving start to the law of Cheap Nature. Examples of this fact are prostitution in Ancient Greece (Kapparis, 2018) or slavery in Ancient Egypt (Redford, 2004). Nonetheless, a tipping point in this proto-worldwide-Capitalocene is the Roman Empire.
With the expansion of the use of money and trading, the banking system of the Roman Empire stopped being placed only in temples -as in other ancient civilizations- and took the banking scheme to the streets, locating these activities in the Forum of the towns, developing the figures of
3Other moments of commence have been established by scholars and the start of the Anthropocene is still a wide-open
debate amongst historians, anthropologists, economists and other scholars from different disciplines. I am using the theory of the start of it through agriculture just as a heuristic to develop my further assumptions on the Capitalocene Theory.
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the Argentarii and the Mesarii (Labate, 2016). The expansion of the Roman Empire brought these practices to different parts of the world. Furthermore, sticking to the Roman Empire, a hierarchal system of classes was established to distinguish different privileges, slaves being one of them, used in labor or sexual practices which could be remunerated or not (Knapp, 2014). Yet, even though the law of Cheap Nature could be perceived to have started during that time, or at least show traces of what was to come in the following 2000 years, how can we consider this proto-worldwide-infected Capitalocene age to start then if no substantial modification of the Earth has happened? Here I would like to say that expansion of trading, domestication and agriculture are important issues to consider when we perceive the modification of the Earth by humanity and Capital. Moreover, colonization and expansion of the Roman Empire led to wars that modified the landscape and nature of a place. An example of this is the Third Punic War, where after the siege operation by the Romans known as the Battle of Carthage between 149BC and 146BC, the city was destroyed and most of the people were killed or made slaves for the Roman Empire (Goldsworthy, 2001), becoming what Kiernan (2004) considers the “First Genocide”. Cultures, languages and peoples were exterminated just for the sake of “possessing” land and making profit out of it. During this event, another remarkable fact needs to be considered: some scholars such as Ridley (1986) have pointed out that Romans spread salt over Carthage so as to avoid any species of plant to grow there, which has remained like this since today. Therefore, although as Moore acknowledges, we can pinpoint a start in a planetary scale of the Capitalocene between 1450 and 1750, proto-Capitalocene traits can be perceived when analyzing past-historical events. Events that lead to the extinction and modification of landscapes, nature, ecosystems, societies and cultures.
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In this light, McBrien (2016) proposed a twist of the Capitalocene narrative, renaming this epoch as the Necrocene. For him, the Necrocene “reframes the history of capitalism’s expansion through the process of becoming extinction” (McBrien in Moore, 2016:116). When it comes to extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert (2014) portrays in her book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History how we might be living the period of the “Sixth Extinction” due to the high rate of extinction on some non-human species, specially amphibians4. However, if we consider some facts and figures, although
the amphibians massacre due to a human-induced climate change might be one of the scariest phenomena of this age, a massive extinction caused by Capitalism is happening in a multi-layered scale, and it is rooted to culture5. As McBrien (2016) highlights,
“It [the Necrocene] is also the extinguishing of cultures and languages, either through force or assimilation; it is the extermination of peoples, either through labor or deliberate murder; it is the extinction of the Earth in the depletion fossil fuels, rare earth minerals, even the chemical element helium; it is ocean acidification and eutrophication, deforestation and desertification, melting ice sheets and rising sea levels; the great Pacific garbage patch and nuclear waste entombment; McDonalds and Monsanto”. (McBrien in Moore, 2016: 116). Both McBrien and Kolbert propose two interesting approaches to the contemporary epoch the planet and all living species, cultures, languages and societies are facing and, although Kolbert does not acknowledge all the sublayers that are present and are affected by this epoch, the suggestions made by these two scholars are relevant to the discourse and will act as my main interlocutors to portray the geological and environmental crisis that the Earth is dealing with. Therefore, I will use the terms of Necrocene and Sixth Extinction -extinction that is implied in the
4 As Jablonski highlights, Mass extinctions can be taken as substantial biodiversity losses that are global in extent,
taxonomically broad, and rapid considering the average duration of the taxa involved (Jablonski 1986, in Jablonski, 1994:11). Five mass extinctions have happened in the history of life on the Earth, known for a “profound loss of biodiversity” (Wake and Vredenburg, 2008 in Kolbert, 2014: 6).
5 For Heise, “biodiversity, endangered species and extinction are primarily cultural issues, questions of what we value
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Necrocene narrative-, instead of using the term “Anthropocene” so as to refer to the current period in historical/social/ecological time. The Necrocene will help us dive into the current eerie epoch we are facing and the challenges it presents not only in the arts and humanities, but also in the social, political and environmental implications is and will have in the following years. It is also crucial to deviate the focus from an inexistent yet holistic subject to blame for the catastrophic implications of such age and switch to a narrative that acknowledges who is or not to blame for the sodomization of Nature under the will of Humanity’s mass-accumulation schemes and unsustainable idea of Nature as an endless product, and points out the historical consequences Capital has had in modifying the land, discriminating and wiping out societies, ecosystems and cultures driven by the mental and social virus of accumulation.
Within this narrative, the way the TimeSpaces of Climate Change and Extinction have been portrayed through different objects in activist art and journalism is worth discussing. Deep inside this new millennium marked by posthumanism, technology-over-humanity and a political climate-change denialism together with the dialectical opposition between right-wing localized national policies versus a global -even outer-spacial- reality and the current and forthcoming political, ecological and social crisis, portraying the abstractions of climate change and extinction through images is, as Grebowicz (2014) highlights, entangled with the globality of the Internet as an exercise of “settling the debate once and for all, by making visible and easily accessible a reality that, due to its time scale, is otherwise invisible to the human eye and, due to its remoteness, physically inaccessible for viewing by most people” (Grebowicz, 2014: 2). That is, these abstractions become real and tangible for human animals once are portrayed through images, with an ecological thought that, hungry for unlimited knowledge of the contemporary epoch the planet is facing, “requires the complete technological mediation of reality” (Grebowicz, 2014: 4).
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Therefore, reality becomes somehow tangible through digital means, even though some scholars such as Timothy Morton (2010) have perceived this event as reality lost in technology since, “the more information we acquire in the greedy pursuit of seeing everything, the more our sense of a deep, rich, coherent world will appear unavailable” (Morton, 2007: 56), where the world has become, amongst other facts, an internet application through, for instance, Google Earth, becoming available to everybody, everywhere and at any time, but alienating itself from “real” life as well. However, this urge of framing time and space is a consequence of the neoliberal Capitalist accumulation system we are living in which “non-time of late capitalism” (Crary, 2012: 63) -where almost everyone and everything is or can be tracked down, the action of consumption can happen 24/7, and where analytics can access our data to create advertisements that pop up at any time in people’s phones according to their preferences in order to not lose a second-, has overstepped the conception of time itself. The Necrocene is made out of binaries: material and immaterial, natural and cultural, local and global, spatial and temporal, visible and invisible. I will try to disclose these binaries throughout this work.
In turn, the concept of time is crucial when dealing with Climate Change. “How much time we have left?”, “How is the inevitable going to be stopped?” or “When are we going to reach the tipping point of Climate Change” are common questions that are addressed regarding such event. We are currently living in an unprecedented epoch and knowledge of past events might not be enough in order to face the reality not only human animals, but also every entity of the planet is and will be facing in the near future. A relevant example in this light are the Antarctic and Greenland ice cores6. As Antonello and Carey (2017) remark, “ice cores transform our “temporal
6 Ice cores are ice cylinders extracted from an ice sheet or a glacier. They can be more than 3km long and contain ice
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consciousness” as “we locate ourselves within natural cycles that endure for thousands of years, and witness the random events that punctuate these patterns” (Makewski and White, 2002 in Antonello and Carey, 2017: 183). That is, ice cores reveal different temporalities of past, present, the human, society and climate change. However, factual sciences and data, although crucial, fail to make visible the issues at hand per se and the future possibilities they offer, as mentioned before, due to the eerie agency of the Necrocene epoch and the current environmental crisis. This and the discourse produced on ice cores relies on technology and framing of time. In addition, data and research platforms such as the Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) depend on such framing of time to make the abstraction of climate change visible, same as the Jeff Orlowski’s award-winning documentary Chasing Ice (2012), which used time-lapse technology to make visible the rather-invisible reality of the melting of ice sheets, now accessible to everybody but difficult to perceive without the space left within frames. Here, I would like to highlight a core and recurrent statement that will keep on appearing throughout this work: when direct language and factual data fail communication, visual, speculative, indirect language and technological mediation of it are likely to take the upper hand when it comes to the portrayal of such events, with all the consequences it might have.
Considering everything said so far, in this project I aim to disclose the way three case studies, which are relevant examples of the theories that will drive my research, treat different binaries that arise from an interpretation of the of the Necrocene, the Sixth Extinction and Hyperobjects (Morton, 2013), tackling these concepts from different positions and how they provide tools to challenge the Capitalist Realism (Fisher, 2009) zoo in which humankind is stuck. This thesis will devote each chapter to one of the ecological/political events previously mentioned that will treat, help us think about and unfold the concepts of the Necrocene and Extinction and the issues at hand
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in every chapter, hence, will allow us to bring together and develop further ideas or conceptualizations in this light that, hopefully, will contribute in the development of such theories in the fields of Environmental Humanities and Interdisciplinary Studies. The three objects chosen to reformulate the assumptions that will drive this thesis are three documentaries tackling three different political and/or ecological events. It is interesting to bear in mind the agency this media has on a viewer. It appeals to the audience by means of an ethos-based narrative through a logos authority in combination with aesthetic images to affect the pathos of the audience so as to trigger a change on the logos, pathos and ethos of the viewer. Yet, we will see that even such documentaries cannot escape the darkness of the Necrocene.
The first chapter Death of Time: Hyperobjects and TimeSpaces in Extreme Coral Extinction will approach the catastrophic massacre that has happened in the last ten years in the Great Barrier Coral Reef in Australia, home of a vast number of trophic chains and key element for the health of the Earth’s Oceanic system. It has been disappearing in a quiet way, underwater, before our eyes, where more than 90% of the reefs have been affected by ocean acidification and more than the 30% of the GBR has died in a span of less than 10 years. This massive extinction boosted by mass bleaching events due to human-induced Climate Change is a symptom and, despite its invisibility, one of the most frightening examples of the existence of the Necrocene epoch. In order to make these concepts visible, I will first explore further the concepts of hyperobject (Morton, 2013), TimeSpace (May & Threft, 2001) and the eerie (Fisher, 2016) in order to approach the time-lapse images extracted from the project carried out in the Netflix documentary Chasing Coral (2017) to deal with the multiple TimeSpace scales that play part in our Environmental surroundings, in the Necrocene and in the Sixth Extinction. These images also work as an example of how the interval between frames is necessary to create a coherent visual narrative of time for
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humans to see extinction and how, just as the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets and glaciers, Coral Reefs are an example, help to portray and develop the narratives of future extinction and climate change in the Necrocene through the paradox of using time-lapse, which can be considered a tool to control time and information as a consequence of the 24/7 temporality and the deviation from the “real” world.
The second chapter, Microentities and Macroplasticity: Plastic Pollution Invisibility, will consider the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as a representative case of the (in)visibility of the Necrocene and how societies are causing it at all levels. Being invisible at first sight, this plastic and microplastic soup between California and Hawaii is, according to Lebreton et al (2018), 1.8 million square meters -three times the size of France-. Being one of the major examples of the Necrocene and how humanity is affecting the geology of the Earth by creating -directly or indirectly- new spaces with, in this case, one of the most anthropocentric materials that exist, the Great Garbage Patch represents the fast lane of Climate Change and the Necrocene epoch. I will make this concept culturally visible by close reading Chris Jordan’s Albatross (2017), which portrays, not only how non-human species are being affected by this geological epoch, but also how the hyperobjects of Humanity, microplastics and, above all, the Necrocene as a sort of Chthulu7 with several tentacles touching and infecting everything at its reach, are reshaping the planet. Bearing this in mind, I will develop further thoughts on how the tangibility of the Necrocene is in fact invisible for human beings unless there is a representation and mediation of such abstractions when direct language and factual data fail to understand the different realities and TimeSpace scales at hand. The chapter
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will close with some thoughts on the current role of the Arts, Humanities and Activism within the Necrocene.
The third chapter, Global Capitalocracy/Local Colonialism: Extinction of Towns in the
Necrocene. will deal with the more-than-likely disappearance of the town of Doel, in Belgium
due to the expansion of the port of Antwerp. This event in the so-called “ghost town” of Belgium exemplifies the Necrocene and the narrative of Cheap Nature insofar as it highlights how the Capitalist Accumulation System is now affecting not only the minorities that were considered part of Cheap Nature, but also members that were not considered to be part of this paradigm. Being Doel a town in an economically-rich country, we can see how the Cheap Nature law is now dragging into itself societies and areas that were considered to be part of Humanity and how the Necrocene narrative validates itself acknowledging the extinction of non-human species as well as societies, languages and cultures, since this extinction is purely based on the economic accumulative interests of the Flemish Government (Doel 2020), which is using the “order” organisms in order to repress and force such exile from the locals -part of Cheap Nature- so as to benefit the oligarchy -Humanity- and the system. Here, I will develop ideas on the globality/locality of the Necrocene epoch, using the political conflict in Doel as an example of such dialectic. So as to illustrate such thoughts, I will use the images of the conflict in the documentary The Forgotten Space (2012), which, will help to illustrate how globality and locality are thought in the Necrocene through the images of global trading and the social victims of globalization locally, focusing on the testimonies from Doel.
In the last chapter, Politics of the Necrocene: Is There Any Way Out?, I will wrap up the content of my previous assumptions and I will develop some thoughts on the Dark Hyperobjectiveness of
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the Necrocene. Furthermore, I will analyze the political/social/environmental crisis and explore some of the different options within the Necrocene Realism paradigm that canopies our reality. This thesis by no means tries to solve the problems of the current environmental crisis and the Sixth Extinction. What this work will try to do is to show that the Necrocene is a reality in which every entity is entangled in a dark way. Furthermore, the four essays presented here will try to provide material to prove that the entities of Capital, Sixth Extinction and the ecological and environmental catastrophe must not be thought as separate entities but as a conjuncture of objects that intertwine with, unfold from and merge within each other, and how the current perception of them from societies, cultures and politics in an epoch in which growth is no longer a synonym of convenient development is failing to approach the taboo reality that maybe the cause of the current and post-1492 social, political and ecological calamities have been boosted by the viral -in the infective virus sense- mass accumulation towards mass accumulation system: Capitalism.
Death of Time
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Coral mass-bleaching has been defined by Ainsworth (2016) as “a stress response that results in the loss of intracellular symbiotic dinoflagellates (Symbiodinium) and/or their photosynthetic pigments; on a broad spatial scale, bleaching results from extended warm periods (Ainsworth, 2016: 338)”8. The most relevant human-induced risk agents in this matter include, as Death et al (2012) point out, “mortality and reduced growth of the reef-building corals due to their high sensitivity to rising seawater temperatures, ocean acidification, water pollution from terrestrial runoff and dredging, destructive fishing, overfishing, and coastal development” (Death et al, 2012: 17995), factors which can doom the area in a monthly timespan (McLeod et al, 2012). Although it has been classified as one of the least threatened reefs worldwide due to its distance from anthropogenic areas, the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) has decreased its mean coral cover in a 50.7% between 1985 and 2012, not only as a cause of mass-bleaching and temperature rises, but also as a consequence of COTS’s9 ecosystem invasions, tropical cyclones and coral diseases that have been boosted by human-induced climate change, human pollution and runoffs of chemical products from coming from agricultural and coastal industries (Death et al, 2012). Moreover, coral reefs depend on young fish for the refilling of functionally taxa, process which might be in extreme danger since fish semiotically rely on acoustic cues to guide their “orientation, habitat selection and settlement” (Gordon et al, 2018: 1). An experiment carried out by Gordon et al. (2018) also provided evidence that there is a link between reef degradation, fish larval preferences and juvenile settlement behavior, where “predegradation soundscapes were more attractive that
8 Bleaching must not be mistaken by Ocean Acidification, which is a continuous “deterioration of the chemical
conditions needed for physiological and biogeochemical performance of the reef ecosystem” (McLeod et al, 2012: 21). Coral Bleaching can be triggered by Ocean Acidification, even though it is usually caused by short-term increases of the SST (McLeod et al, 2012).
9 The crown-of-thorns starfish (Acanthaster planci), also known as COTS, is a large starfish that prays upon coral
polyps. In population outbreaks, these fish feed on alive polyps faster than the reproduction and growth cycle of corals. Nowadays, due to the critical situation of coral reefs, these fish are also feeding on slower-growing corals, such as some species of reef-building corals (Barrat, 2019).
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postdegradation soundscapes” (Gordon et al, 2018: 4). Therefore, coral reefs are at stake in an unpreceded situation in which any positive change -positive in terms of quantity- regarding the factors at hand can lead to bleaching events affecting every single coral reef at least once per decade (Ainsworth, 2016), thus leading to an alteration and destruction of many ecosystems due to human-induced climate change.
In this light, the hyperobject of the Necrocene and the unfolding of the hyperobject of Climate Change are the ones which are touching upon the ecological reality of coral reefs. Their extinction due to human-induced climate change, which seems inexistent at first sight due to its underwater nature, is a symptom and a vivid example of the existence, causes and consequences of these two hyperobjects. If we account on Latour’s ideas, there is no difference between natural and cultural in terms of agency and every single entity must be regarded as an actor as long as it has the ability to act (Harman, 2016). Therefore, hyperobjects have -direct or indirect- agency on other objects whether these are fully perceived or not. Still, to what extent we human beings perceive the fact that coral reefs are becoming extinct? Or the fact that we are living in an epoch marked by a human-induced climate change? Here I would like to highlight that, although it might seem linear, different temporalities -TimeSpaces (May and Thrift, 2001)- are at stake when it comes to Environmental and Ecological Philosophy and Theory. This is what makes this epoch eerie, since different TimeSpaces are playing part and a linear understanding of time is no longer useful to grasp the surrounding reality and politics of our age. Here, I am using the idea of TimeSpace proposed by May and Thrift (2001) since I find compelling to rethink the concepts of time and space in the 24/7 society and everyday life not as a dichotomy or dialectic per se but as two agents that are intertwined to one another that play part in multi-dimensional multiplicity.
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Nonetheless, before approaching TimeScales, it is crucial to acknowledge why Climate Change is a hyperobject. This human-induced environmental event, cause of the Necrocene, and booster of the Sixth Extinction and all its consequences, glides above daily conversations, human and non-human politics, losses and, to put it in a nutshell, every single environmental, ecological, trophic or ecosystemic event that is perceived to happen in the current epoch. Hyperobjects are, from an OOO approach, “things that are distributed in time and space relative to humans” (Morton, 2013: 1), which can be human and non-human entities, and share some common traits: All of them are Viscous, Molten, Nonlocal, Phased and Interobjective. Just as the Internet, the Biosphere or the idea of Planet Earth, Climate Change is a Hyperobject. It is viscous, because it portrays an “ecological interconnectedness” (Morton, 2013: 32) which is intertwined and cannot be untied. They are viscously omnipresent, as Morton (2013) exemplifies, just as radioactive materials: “The more you try to get rid of them, the more you realize you can’t get rid of them. They seriously undermine the notion of ‘away’.” (Morton, 2013: 36). Climate Change is also Molten in terms of Time and Space. As other Hyperobjects, Climate Change is molten in the sense that it stretches, bends and reshapes on time to such a vast extent that, even though it surrounds us, we as humans are not capable of mentally grasp its limitations, what makes it -and all hyperobjects- eerie as an opposite for Morton’s uncanny. I am using the word eerie Mark Fisher’s (2016) conceptualization of such nomenclature as an opposition to the ideas of the “weird” and the “uncanny”. Although these three concepts tend to be referred as the same thing and the three of them are heuristic modes of film, media, being (Fisher, 2016), Fisher (2016) himself differentiates the uncanny
-unheimlich- from the weird and the eerie by saying that
“Freud’s unheimlich is about the strange within the familiar, the strangely familiar, the familiar as strange — about the way in which the domestic world does not coincide with itself (…) which operates by always processing the outside through the gaps and impasses
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of the inside. The weird and the eerie make the opposite move: they allow us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside” (Fisher, 2016: 10).
In this light, the weird is considered as an entity that does not belong, bringing to the familiar “something which ordinarily lies beyond it, and which cannot be reconciled with the ‘homely’” (Fisher, 2016: 10), thus making it a crucial tool for surrealism and aesthetic modernism. An example of the weird could be the relation between microplastics (see in Chapter 2) and their surroundings, since microplastics conjoin with the ocean and the ecosystems that they relate with -amongst others-, being affective upon them. On the other hand, the eerie is present in places outside the reach of humankind, providing us with epistemological, ontological and phenomenological questions such as “what kind of entity or agent was involved, if there was at all?” or “why is there something here when there should be nothing? / “why is there nothing here when there should be something?” (Fisher, 2016: 13). The eerie confines two modes: a failure of absence, allowing us to ask, due to its not-so-clear presence, questions with a rather speculative tone such as “what is strange about X?”, and most important, all the questions referring to an agent, such as “Is there a deliberative agent?” (Fisher, 2016: 63) or “what entities seem to be involved in X and which agents are affecting Y?”; and a failure of presence, which Fisher (2016) coins as the sensation that the eerie belongs to “abandoned structures” (Fisher, 2016: 62). This paradigm allows us to approach questions about “the nature of the agent at work” (Fisher, 2016: 63) such as “what was the nature of what happened and why?” or “what will be the nature of what will happen and why?” in a certain context in a distant past or distant speculative future, as when approaching
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distant past or speculative ungraspable futures10. Bearing in mind what has been said so far, I think
it is important to consider the following account:
“the eerie turns crucially on the problem of agency, it is about the forces that govern our lives and the world. It should be especially clear to those of us in a globally tele-connected capitalist world that those forces are not fully available to our sensory apprehension. A force like capital does not exist in any substantial sense, yet it is capable of producing practically any kind of effect” (Fisher, 2016: 64)
Materials such as plastic as an element can be considered phenomenologically weird, since plastic does not belong to certain environment, it modifies them and there are specific examples that can help us understand that. On the other hand, when we regard the hyperobjectical nature of microplastics or other hyperobjects such as Climate Change, the Capital or the Necrocene epoch, we lose grip of what they really are, where they really act or in which TimeSpaces they play. Maybe these might not be even existing, as Fisher says, in any fully tangible sense, they are affective in the way the human and non-human realities, TimeSpace scales and relations exist and interact with each other. Here is where the connection between Fisher’s eerie and Morton’s hyperobjects can be seen. Hyperobjects are eerie and the way we perceive them is eerie as well through Environmental, Ecological and Political Thought.
Going back to the idea of hyperobjects, Morton highlights that “the recognition of being caught in hyperobjects is precisely a feeling of strange familiarity and familiar strangeness” (Morton, 2013: 55). Just as in a scuba-diving immersion, hyperobjects surround you, pressure you and alter your perception of time and space like the ocean. Yet, humans are independent of the water surrounding them. Although humankind can be perceived as a hyperobject, it is caught in others too. Therefore,
10 Consider the examples provided by Fisher (2016) about the monumental creations Stonehedge and the Easter
Islands, which are semiotically incomprehensible for our current culture, and how our current culture will most likely be as culturally incomprehensible as these creations are for a speculative human or non-human future.
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Climate Change is also Nonlocal and Phased, since it is part of a “high-dimensional phase space” (Morton, 2013: 70) that sidelines humans to identify it holistically from an “ordinary” 3D human perception. Finally, and related to what has been exposed so far, Climate Change is Interobjective, just as the rest of hyperobjects, in the sense that the experience and perception we might get from them is never felt straightforwardly but “only as mediated through other entities in some shared sensual space” (Morton, 2013: 86). If we consider such traits, they can be equally applied to the concept of the Necrocene, which unfolds two other hyperobjects: The Sixth Extinction and Capitalism. All of them are viscous, molten, nonlocal, phased and interobjective.
Having said that, TimeSpace is portrayed by May and Thrift (2001) not as linear11 temporality that stretches uniformly over space, but rather a group of diverse and different “networks of time” (May and Thrift, 2001: 5) that stretch in multiple and uneven directions throughout an uneven social field, which may be able to give shape to incompatible and contradictory senses of time which do not stand in isolation since every sense of time is the aftermath of the dynamic and uneven inter-relationships between these. TimeSpace is systematically replicated through material practices, still, its portrayal and constitution are not limited to physical texts. Moreover and also according to May and Thrift (2001), the perception of TimeSpace on humans has radically changed from the so-called “Great Acceleration”12 onwards, which made, for instance, travelling in the UK by the third quarter of the 19th Century considerably faster than a hundred years before and accessible to a third-class commuter, made trading and communication-by-post much more faster and efficient,
11 Here I would like to adopt the Deleuzian assumption that past can only exist through memory, therefore there is a
historical lineality of time but different temporalities that play part. Memory is the “ground of temporality that causes the present to pass into the past” (Couzens Hoy, 2009: 161).
12 The “Great Acceleration” was one of the tipping points that boosted the Necrocene epoch. The omnipresence of
Capitalism not only lead to the Necrocene and the consolidation of the Law of Cheap nature, but also to a modification of the perception of TimeSpace.
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allowed some places to have access to telephone and made possible what I call the manipulation of imaginative TimeSpace through the invention of photography and film. Nonetheless, these advances were not arriving at the same time to every area. All these developments reframed the affected people’s consideration and reality of TimeSpace, not only geographical, but also everyday pre-assumed knowledge of location and position. In short, “space is seen to both expand and to contract, time horizons to both foreshorten but also to extend, time itself to both speed up but also slow down and even to move in different directions” (May & Thrift, 2001: 20)13. Consequently, I
would say that TimeSpace is subjective since its existence is relative to the sensuous perception of our environment. This brings our ideas to Bergsonian and Deleuzian conceptions of time and space. According to Bergson, there are two distinctions within time: Pure Time14 and Mathematical Time15. Although Bergsonian assumptions fail to acknowledge -at first sight- the uneven and different TimeSpaces embodied in our reality, the concepts on the mobility and duration of time are noteworthy and compelling to this study. To wrap it up, and bearing in mind that any attempt of finding a universal ontological truth about TimeSpaces is bound to fail, I would suggest, trying to collaborate with the genealogical motion of such conceptualizations, that TimeSpaces are not
13 Worth is considering related to the multiple TimeSpace scales and speed the political and social implications of
such, for instance the entanglement of reactionary politics and a fear of speed and, on the other hand, the liberating possibilities that burst from speed, acceleration and new technologies. Acknowledging the different and uneven TimeSpace scales in speed and acceleration shed light upon how some new technologies and media intertwined themselves with different cultural, political, economic and mental organisms, thus producing “the possibility of different social outcomes from similar technological infrastructures (not to mention the way in which such assemblages influence the development of such infrastructures)” (Glezos, 2012: 6). For instance, Virilio (1977) considers speed as an autonomization and automation of war and weapons which also protects the state as an institution of power, surveillance and control. However, speed, acceleration and the mediation of them trough different technology and media have also led to the possibility to organize masses in certain ways in order to protest and fight such institutionalized state -see for instance the 1-O referendum in Catalonia, the global Climate marches and demonstrations or the 8-M feminist demonstrations in Madrid in 2018 and 2019-.
14For Bergson, Pure Time -real duration or lived consciousness-, is a spaciotemporal continuum which, thus, is
indivisible. Pure Time can only be understood through intuition, which acknowledges that reality is always changing and makes us “think in duration”. Real Time cannot be analyzed mathematically (Bunnag, 2017).
15 Mathematical Time is divisible into smaller units -frames-, just as a movie, which do not reflect the duration of real
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linear and uneven, which construct networks of time with a multiplicity of TimeSpace scales. They are not only geological but also reshape our understanding of mundane location and position. Therefore, TimeSpace is relative to our consciousness and its duration and distance is not static and, consequently, irreversible. TimeSpace is eerie since we are not able to see neither its beginning nor its end16, yet we are able to pinpoint likely future events that give us a sense of past or “speculative future time”17. TimeSpace, as Morton (2013) points out, “can no longer be
construed as an absolute container, but rather should be thought of as a spacetime manifold that is radically in the universe, of it rather than ontologically outside it” (Morton, 2013: 56). Nevertheless, even though Morton understands that “time and space emerge from things” (Morton, 2013: 63), I would argue that TimeSpaces can be perceived through things, and help us have a better understanding of the different temporalities surrounding us -for instance, understanding that gasoline is millions of years old and that our surroundings and ourselves might be fossil fuels one day, watching a time-lapse video or just by the fact of taking a look at a clock and understanding Mathematical Time as an opposition to the different TimeSpace scales that play part in a certain reality-. TimeSpaces exist whether we understand them and perceive them or not and as a matter of fact it can seem that the different scales that play part in our reality might be arising from the objects and entities that surround us. However, to my way of thinking, this could be just an illusion since, as mentioned before, TimeSpace scales exist by themselves and it is our perception of them what we grasp through the entities surrounding and in our reality. Thus, I consider that Morton’s assumption of TimeSpaces emerging from things is at stake and, in fact, I consider it, since
16Although Deleuze considers that “the end of time” is the concept of future as “the order of temporality” (Couzens
Hoy, 2009: 161) and I agree on the fact that the idea of future fixes an ending point of the linear nature of chronological time, I would argue that from a relativist perspective, we are not able to grasp the beginning or the end of time.
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TimeSpaces are relative to our consciousness. Furthermore, crucial is to acknowledge the unstoppable nature of the present at hand which is what I scrutinize -even though its perception would radically vary from one subject to another18- Real TimeSpace.
This eeriness of Environmental/Ecological TimeSpaces due to their variable magnitudes and different Temporalities and Spatial realities intertwined, and the fact that they can be grasped through things is what is at stake in our matter. Yet, how these TimeSpaces embedded in the hyperobjects of Climate Change and the Necrocene -maybe being hyperobjects themselves- can be fathomed for the human eye and cognition? Here is where I consider the Ecological, Trophic and Ecosystemic crisis concerning Coral Reefs to be a crucial representation of the abstractions at hand. Considering the scientific data stated above, Coral Reefs have been brutally damaged by the Necrocene hyperobject and the subsequent hyperobjects that unfold from it such as the human-induced climate change and the period of the Sixth Extinction. These reefs are losing the agency they once had to act as an ecosystem, causing in a major loss for global biodiversity, since they are one of the richest ecosystems in the planet and an essential source of oxygen for all life on Earth. Some of these reefs, such as the GBR have been alive for more than 20,000 years and yet they have been put in a critical situation in the last 30 years due to the effects of the Necrocene and Climate Change. However, and in a similar way as microplastics (see further chapter), this extinction and the effects it is having to life on Earth in general terms are invisible to the human eye. The diverse dimensions of TimeScales at hand which science fails to represent through factual data and analysis19, the fact that an increase of 1 degree Celsius above normal season maximum
18 From a Hegelian perspective, “even if the temporal sequence seems to exist in itself, without a fixed standpoint to
contrast to the flux of experience there could” (Couzens Hoy, 2009: 42) not be any before or after, earlier or later, faster or slower.
19 With this statement I am not suggesting a failure of natural sciences and a consequent disruption with them but the
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(Knowlton, 2018) may cause a catastrophic bleaching event and the reality that life underwater seems to be in a faraway foreign reality for humankind, therefore, to have at first sight no substantial consequences from an anthropocentric perspective, make coral reefs a vivid representation of the (in)visibility and multiplicity of TimeScales embedded in the Necrocene and our Ecological/Environmental surroundings. Although this chapter will not engage with the idea of invisibility, it is important to consider an assumption that can apply to both (in)visibility and TimeSpaces: when direct language fails communication, speculative and figurative means of communication need to take the upper hand so as to portray the abstractions direct language cannot make clear.
Insomuch as what is at stake, Chasing Coral (2017), an acclaimed Netflix documentary directed by Jeff Orlowski -director of the award-winning documentary Chasing Ice (2012)- helps us reconsider and make tangible the issues at hand. This documentary portrays how a group of journalists and researchers face the setbacks of recording a Time-Lapse video of a coral bleaching event that they want to use to show the world -as they do so through a worldwide mainstream broadcasting company such as Netflix- what is happening with the lives of coral reefs underwater, their process of becoming extinct in the TimeSpace of the hyperobject of Climate Change -and what I consider to be the Necrocene epoch- and how this will affect the stability of the Earth if these events do not stop happening. The documentary acknowledges the invisibility of the issue at hand when a massive bleaching event is happening right under a restaurant boat. The team of researchers made their home in a tiny room in the restaurant while taking the daily pictures of the bleaching events in New Caledonia’s reefs. This scene portrays the existence of the invisibility of
provide a holistic and realistic perspective including the different TimeSpace scales and both human and non-human agents.
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hyperobjects and, in this case the Necrocene, being a boat party above a coral reef a symbol of economically-rich people -Humanity- applying the Law of Cheap Nature (Moore, 2016) or, in other words, the cultural (dis)value of Nature. While a mass bleaching event is happening right where the boat is in front of the eyes of the people, making the corals glow and change pigmentation in order to protect themselves from ultraviolet exposure and the SST rises of such bleaching events20, only the researchers of the project seem to be aware of what is going on while
Humanity does not only seem to be ignorant of what is going on but also adopting an attitude that we as viewers can intertwine with the fact that boat parties might be using elements that directly affect and pollute the corals underneath.
In this matter, what is the bullseye of this chapter is the time-lapse images that the documentary reveals, which portray how a coral reef degrades in a temporary frame of two months from a healthy state to an underwater graveyard. Considering the previous assumptions on TimeSpaces, and precisely the uncanniness of the TimeSpace scales regarding hyperobjects and the environment, crucial is to understand that our ideas on our environment are subjugated to the 24/7 21st Century immediacy and accumulation of knowledge that “requires the complete technological mediation of reality” (Grebowicz. 2014: 4), leaving this ontological paradigm to the state of a non-existence of the environment per se (Morton, 2010). With the use of non-direct, speculative or technological means of language, a tangible approach to the radically uneven TimeSpaces of the Necrocene seems possible (as in the Albatross movie) and I would suggest that it is in fact the only way to do so. Yet, through the reaching of such a high-awareness state of the surroundings through indirect mediation, we might be losing grip on a pre-posthumanist perception, due to the high
20 According to Robitzski (2017), zoozanthellae uses such bright coloration generated by chromoproteins in order to
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visibility and different scales of perception regarding TimeSpaces that the human eye can get through technology21. As Morton (2010) points out, “the more information we acquire in the greedy pursuit of seeing everything, the more our sense of a deep, rich, coherent world will appear unavailable” (Morton, 2010: 56). Consequently, the concept of world as a holistic entity has disappeared or, maybe, as Morton (2010, 2013) develops, “we are realizing that we never had it in the first place” (Morton, 2013: 101), therefore losing touch with our environment by gaining awareness of the rather-invisible TimeSpaces through indirect mediation. Time-Lapse uses frames and pictures taken between exact intervals of -let me be a bit Bergsonian- Mathematical TimeSpace. Then, these pictures are sped up in order to portray a sped-up reality. These images have been one of the key features in most of the documentaries dealing with nature, climate and the environment22 in order to mediate long frames of Mathematical Time, since they allow the viewer to comprehend long-term TimeSpaces in a way that the human eye can somehow grasp. In other words, it is in unfathomable, multiple TimeSpace scales for humans such as in coral bleaching events when time-lapse images can illustrate a tangible reality that the human psyche can comprehend. Time-lapse images can do so through the invisibility of TimeSpaces or, in other words, the missing fragments of TimeSpace between exposed frames in a sequence. Grebowicz (2014) calls it “negative time” (Grebowicz, 2014: 4), however, I argue that this nomenclature can be problematic considering the assumptions made about TimeSpaces and the objections that this concept can have, since negative time, for instance, implies that there is a positive time and, consequently, a chronological sequence of it. Hence, I would suggest naming this grey area as the
21 Remember that hyperobjects, in this case Climate Change and the current environmental/ecological crisis are never
felt straightforward but through their interobjective nature.
22 See for instance the BBC documentary series Our Planet (BBC, 2019) lab images to show the blooming of fungi,
the spatial images to portray the bursting of water and life of the Lake Eyre in Australia; or Blue Planet II (BBC, 2017) images of starfish and corals.
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“equivalent interval” between frames, since it is always exact in terms of Mathematical TimeSpace. In this situation, a bigger picture is seen and the viewer is able to really understand the issue at hand with the extinction of corals due to mass-bleaching events at the GBR since it is portrayed in a TimeSpace scale that the human eye and psyche can grasp since, due to the change to a rather-technological era, the perception of TimeSpace scales has radically changed and Mathematical Time is more present than ever before, controlling almost -if not- every part of human life and their mediation, interpretation and understanding of the surrounding realities, TimeSpace scales and the environment.
Chasing Coral provides material to develop further ideas on the current crisis and dive deep into
the hyperobjects of the Necrocene and Climate Change. Two moments of the movie are crucial for these illustrations. The first one is the boat restaurant scene, where the viewer can perceive both the dialectic between Nature and Humanity proposed by the Law of Cheap Nature that applies in the Necrocene age -which includes the Sixth Extinction-, and how the hyperobject of climate change takes place in different temporalities -the people in the boat having a random party and a mass bleaching event leading to the eventual extinction of an ecosystem that has been alive in that place for more than 20,000 years in the time that the party is happening which will have dramatic consequences for the whole planet-, and can only be perceived through its interobjective nature. In turn, considering the time-lapse images of the movie, the concepts of TimeSpace and Environment beg for reconsideration. The main assumptions, based on May & Thrift (2001) and the work of Timothy Morton (2010, 2013, 2016) are that there is an existence of multiple and uneven TimeSpace scales that are not only geological but also social and mundane. TimeSpaces are relative to our consciousness and they are not static in terms of location and position, making
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them irreversible and impossible to frame between boundaries. Furthermore, TimeSpaces are understood through things and acknowledge the subjectivity of the perception of them. Accordingly, it is important to highlight that it is the variability of TimeSpace scales what factual science tends to misrepresent through facts and figures due to the rather invisible nature of hyperobjects and how it is only through indirect, figurative or visual language and semiotics how these hyperobjects and the TimeSpaces that unfold from them can be perceived, at the cost of, as Morton (2010, 2016) states, losing grip of the world as an entity in its entirety. Still, time-lapse images help the viewer understand to a more tangible extent bearing in mind the uncanniness of the hyperobjects at hand what is at stake and what is happening in the GBR ecosystem through an aesthetic time-lapse showing the devastating reality of the Sixth Extinction and the existent hyperobjects of Climate Change and the Necrocene. It is important to consider the aesthetic agency of such images. Although they are the images of death, bleached corals are aesthetically appealing to the human eye when they are in their pure-white state even though the viewer of the documentary, due to the dramatic narration of the documentary, is aware of what this means and what is caused for. Moreover, coral reefs themselves hold a spectacular aesthetic cultural value for humans due to its colorful polyps, fish and other non-human species that surround such reefs, and the paradisiac connotation they might have for the non-local viewer. Thus, questions regarding the aesthetic agency of time-lapse images and coral reefs arise: Do the images and the documentary accomplish their aim? To what extent will the documentary make sure that reefs face a more sustainable future? Could not it be the case that by portraying such event in a catastrophic and aesthetic perspective certain activities would be tackled in order to stop this global crisis, but other problems would arise, such as massive eco-tourism? Still, I believe such questions will need further research and discussion.
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The documentary properly represents the issues at stake and also makes the viewer rethink the politics of time-lapse images, in the sense that they are product of modernity and the 24/7 social TimeSpace imposed to the beings negatively affected by the law of cheap nature (Moore, 2015). Time-lapse can be perceived as a product of the Necrocene mass-accumulation motion, since it tries to accumulate a massive TimeSpace fraction in a compressed Mathematical Time-frame. Albeit this is the reason why the mass-bleaching event is understandable for the human psyche, worth considering is the postcolonial reading of time-lapse images that Grebowicz (2014) proposed, according to which, basing her discussion on Jonathan Crary’s concept of “non-time of 24/7 capitalism” (Crary, 2013), it is actually the uncolonizable time, in this case the equivalent intervals between frames, what makes us grasp the crisis of Coral Reefs in a TimeSpace that the human being can somehow comprehend to a certain extent (Grebowicz, 2014). Contrariwise, I must argue that, as it has been discussed before in this chapter, there cannot be an existence of non-time, even if, as Crary (2013) well points out, social TimeSpaces grasped by humans have been colonized by the way the Capitalist system works and makes members of the law of cheap nature subjugate to it. I would also point out that Grebowicz reading of Crary might be wrong since Crary acknowledges that even free time or sleep are in fact affected by the influence of late capitalism. Just think about how free time is spent in the late capitalist societies and how most, if not all the activities, involve some sort of connection with the 24/7 society, accumulation and transactions of money to provide the consumer with the possibility of using such free time in one way or another. Same happens with the uncolonizible time and how Grebowicz (2014) approaches it. For him, the missing frames of a time-lapse are like the uncolonizable sleep, what she considers the only time that cannot be colonized by capitalism. Yet, sleep is in fact colonized since most of
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the circadian rhythms of people subjugated to late capitalist societies and colonies are affected by labor, whether if it is a morning or a night shift -obviously the latter is the ultimate form of it-, consumerism and insomnia due to stress.
Microentities and Macroplasticity
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In the last years, concern about anthropocentric plastic consumption and its consequent pollution has been a core issue in Conservation Biology, Global Politics and Sustainability. Yet, the TimeSpace scales of this hyperobject are somehow non-tangible for the human eye: Daily use plastic devices used by human beings (bottles, bags, etc.) are thought to degrade in a temporal span of between 450 and +1000 years (LeBlanc, 2018). Nonetheless, although plastic degradation might seem achievable, it most likely never biodegrade (Harris, 2010). Microplastics containing Bisphenol A (BPA) and PS Oligomer are product of such “material degradation”, likely to end up floating in the ocean. According to Eriksen (2014), “plastics have been found worldwide in the marine environment, with estimates pointing to >5 trillion plastic debris (over 250,000 tons) afloat at sea” (Eriksen, 2014 in Barboza, 2018: 336), with a significant amount of them resulting from continental sources and other anthropocentric activities, such as fishing, offshore industrial activities or tourism (Barboza, 2018: 336). Still, due to the lack of technology available (Barboza, 2018: 336), these numbers do not represent the amount of microplastic23 debris that lie floating in
the ocean. As Barboza et al (2018) highlight, “ingestion is believed to be a main microplastics exposure route for several marine species […] After ingestion, microplastics absorption, distribution through the circulatory system, and entrance into different tissues and cells can occur, potentially resulting in several types of adverse effect” (Barboza, 2018: 341), which will be transferred from pray to predator, spreading in a trophic chain together with the chemical substances they consist of, being observed in a wide range of species that are consumed by humans,
23 According to the NOAA (2009), plastic particles smaller than 5mm. The sources of microplastics can be “primary,
plastic particles specifically manufactured for their abrasive qualities (e.g.; microbeads and industrial scrubbers), 2) secondary MPs originating from parent materials such as discarded plastic items and synthetic textiles and 3) tertiary MPs which includes any preproduction pellets used to mould plastic goods. Rivers, stormwater and sewage effluents are a major pathway of plastic debris to the ocean sea is a result of physical and UV action, increasing the availability of smaller particles to a wider range of organisms, including those at the base of marine food webs” (Carbery, 2018: 400).
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as well as in human drinking water (Barboza, 2018: 342). Recent studies have found that the effects caused to marine species by the exposure to microplastics can result in mortality, reduced allocation of energy for growth, decreased predatory performance or intestinal damage (Barboza, 2018: 343). Moreover, as a consequence of their trophic diffusion, microplastics have been found in human bodies and excrements (Parker, 2018), although its effects are still to be clarified. Having said that, when microplastics and other marine debris are not transported to the shorelines and beaches, they most likely end up swirling in offshore oceanic gyres (Lebreton et al, 2018: 1), accumulating in specific areas. One of the most notorious examples of this phenomenon is what is known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, located between Hawaii and California. This plastic island, “not immediately noticeable to the naked eye” (NOAA, 2019), in fact extends to an area of 1.6 km2 and weights around 79,000 tonnes (Lebreton et al, 2018: 7). According to the last NOAA
reports (2019), the consequences for the environment of these patches, and specifically the GPGP are entanglement and ghost fishing24 due to the high amount of lost fishing nets and plastic packages caught and dragged by the currents into the GPGP; ingestion of marine plastic debris; and the transportation of non-native species through the different currents, which can lead to a disruption in the ecosystem if they happen to be invasive species, some of them managing to adapt to this anthropogenic environment often referred as the Plastisphere (Amaral-Zettler et al, 2015). Microplastics are a hyperobject because, as Climate Change, they are viscous in the sense that they transcend the physical bodies of all the beings of the planet. Microplastics are a hyperobject because they infect every object they have contact with and form part of ourselves in one way or another. In other words, microplastics, as all hyperobjects, “are us” (Morton, 2013: 36), and
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challenge our perception of TimeSpace. Therefore, they are molten since, due to its incommensurable holistic magnitude and its ungraspable dimension as individuals, the idea that TimeSpace is something fixed is no longer valid. In relation to this assumption, microplastics are nonlocal and phased because, although local manifestations -for instance, the extinction of a species due to microplastic ingestion or a pollution peak on a specific area such as the GPGP- can give us information about such hyperobject, their TimeSpace totality cannot be perceived. To wrap this conceptualization up, microplastics are, consequently, interobjective since they can only be perceived with the mediation of other entities. The same way trichromatic color vision is perceived by humans through the interaction of light on top of other objects which gains tangibility through our cone cells and its perception depends on external modifications of the light and environment – consider for instance the invisibility of the ocean below 1000 meters-, modifying the objective, subjective and aesthetic understanding of our surroundings in different layers., hyperobjects need the interaction of and with other objects so as to be perceived. As an obvious, yet interesting assumption to summarize the hyperobjectiveness of microplastics is that microplastics are objects with Plasticity in the sense that they are not only one of the most malleable objects in our reality which their destruction is virtually impossible, but in a more ontological way, plastics are us, interact with us and belong to us, and modify our reality and existence.
That is, plastic is one of the most anthropogenic materials and hyperobjects of the current epoch the planet is facing. It modifies the environment, stays forever and causes extinction. Even though some countries have started applying plastic-free policies to reduce the consumption of single use plastic or are meant to do so in the near future (United Nations Environmental Programme, 2018), the use of plastic is too entangled to the way societies in the 21st century have developed. Therefore, the GPGP and the hyperobject of oceanic plastic debris represent the fast lane of the
