Hyperobjects

By: Timothy Morton

Narrated by: Dave Wright

Length: 8 hrs and 52 mins

Publisher's Summary

Global warming is perhaps the most dramatic example of what Timothy Morton calls "hyperobjects" - entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place. In this book, Morton explains what hyperobjects are and their impact on how we think, how we coexist with one another and with nonhumans, and how we experience our politics, ethics, and art.

Moving fluidly between philosophy, science, literature, visual and conceptual art, and popular culture, the book argues that hyperobjects show that the end of the world has already occurred in the sense that concepts such as world, nature, and even environment are no longer a meaningful horizon against which human events take place. Instead of inhabiting a world, we find ourselves inside a number of hyperobjects, such as climate, nuclear weapons, evolution, or relativity. Such objects put unbearable strains on our normal ways of reasoning.

Insisting that we have to reinvent how we think to even begin to comprehend the world we now live in, Hyperobjects takes the first steps, outlining a genuinely postmodern ecological approach to thought and action.

©2013 Timothy Morton (P)2014 Redwood Audiobooks

Imperfect, sprawling, hypnotic, brilliant

This work has changed my thinking and everyday experience -- my highest praise. It's not that I swallow whole every assertion made there about a narrative flow of the "end of the world," though a credible if very non-rigorous model is sketched. This is not a formal work trying to bring a microscope to the exact problems we face as a species. What uniquely grabbed me was the radical approach to meaning and experience that peels off every comforting and supposedly "safe" surface or refuge and instills an amazing vertigo and bracing penetrating discomfort about -- pretty much whatever one clings to. I admire someone with the courage to rip into my stodgy mental structures and at least shake them up. And aside from its content, its form is arresting too. I think this a great performance in the audiobook genre specifically. The narrator's intonations coupled with the writing style make it a work and experience of -- philosophizing art -- an incisive commentary and a prose poem in the same moment. The least appealing parts to my mind were perfectly fine (and occasionally brilliant) descriptions of modern art works and their rhetorics -- I preferred when the author put his mental scalpel right into the stuff of everyday experience and thought, and turned the same in effect inside out. If one wants to open doors of perception, there's no need to make recourse to drugs. Just strap this sucker on and take a walk, anywhere. It is like walking inside a vast many-faceted work of art.
People more versed in such schools as poststructuralism may not have this beginners' delight in the arresting clashes with the comfortable I find here. That's my next stop.

worst narrator ever.

This audiobook has the most painfully dry, monotone, and off beat narrator I've ever heard. The rhythm and tone of his voice sounds as if he is reading an agonizingly long and complex inventory list of office supplies. Because of the narrators off beat, list-like, rhythem, it makes this already dense and long-winded book very difficult to understand. This is exceptionally disappointing because the book itself is very interesting, creative, and complex. I'm very dissapointed. The narrator makes this audiobook painful and almost unbearable to listen to. Please remake this audiobook with a better narrator!!!

Narration

I agree with the earlier comments about the narration, which is disastrous. Numerous foreign names and words are mispronounced to the point of being unintelligible. Overall the reading style itself is robotic and sounds almost computer-generated at times; it sounds like the narrator is reading a phone book and has no clue what he's talking about.

Viscous Verbage

One of the most important books I’ve ever encountered. A must read for any human or non-human being.

niceeee

sometimes the narrator pronounces names and concepts entirely wrong but he tried really hard! It was excellent overall

Compelling theory, bland presentation

For a theoretical narrative with such gravitas, it is presented in a disappointingly monotone expression.

so much to meditate upon

I loved it, there's alot of information and it's quite intriguing to think about. something interesting to obsess over

contains many interesting elements

This is not a book for the casual listener/reader. It contains a wealth of information, but I found it poorly organized and difficult to access. The author states in his forward that this organization is intentional, presumably to draw a word-salad-picture of hyperobjects, which he shows not to be describable in ordinary terms. I am academically and professionally interested in how climate and global environmental change is discussed in other disciplines, but I am not a philosopher. I expect this to be most valuable and interesting to students of philosophy, literature, and maybe critical theorists (comfortable with M. Foucault).

a very nice book

narrator was understandible for me. the author is very witty and uses many nice analogies although i wish i jad a concise list of all the artist references he made.

excellent book

Great book from Timothy Morton. I'm very grateful it is available as an audio book. The narration is fairly wooden, sounds like a computer reading. It's pretty awful at first but you get used to it.

Read by a computer

Or at least sounds like it...probably best to buy the actual book instead. Sad!

Intesting Topic

This an interesting subject but it is quite a demanding book, in terms of language and content.

Check the sample before purchasing!

I can't bare to listen to the narrator's voice, such a strange performance! Can't get through any amount of the book. It's a shame because I loved reading The Ecological Thought, might just have to buy the book instead. Definitely one to check the sample on before buying to see if you can listen to it.

Failed to communicate the concept

I feel as if there are some good concepts in this book but the author completely fails to communicate them. I came to this book after reading ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism ‘ by Shoshana Zuboff and ‘New Dark Age’ by James Bridle both of which mention this book. The hyper object itself may be on a different dimension but the explanations should not be. Most of the time if feels as if the author actually doesn’t want the reader to understand the concepts at all and that writing the book is just an opportunity to cite the philosophers he’s read, the artists you’ve never heard of and the cool bands he listens to. I gave this book one star for the image on the cover. The picture of the iceberg tells me more about hyper objects than anything the author has to say on the subject.