[spectre] hyposubjects by Timothy Morton and Dominic Boyer - new open access book from Open Humanities Press

[Gary Hall]

Announcing the publication of hyposubjects: on becoming human, by 
Timothy Morton and Dominic Boyer.

Like all Open Humanities Press books, hyposubjects is available for free:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/hyposubjects/ 
<http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/hyposubjects/>


The time of hypersubjects is ending. Their 
desert-apocalypse-fire-and-death cults aren’t going to save them this 
time. Meanwhile the time of hyposubjects is just beginning. This text is 
an exercise in chaotic and flimsy thinking that will possibly waste your 
time. But it is the sincere effort of two reform-minded hypersubjects to 
decenter themselves and to help nurture hyposubjective humanity. Here 
are some of the things we say in this book: 1) Hyposubjects are the 
native species of the Anthropocene and are only just now beginning to 
discover what they might be and become. 2) Like their hyperobjective 
environment, hyposubjects are also multiphasic and plural: not-yet, 
neither here nor there, less than the sum of their parts. They are, in 
other words, subscendent (moving toward relations) rather than 
transcendent (rising above relations). They do not pursue or pretend to 
absolute knowledge or language, let alone power. Instead they play; they 
care; they adapt; they hurt; they laugh. 3) Hyposubjects are necessarily 
feminist, colorful, queer, ecological, transhuman, and intrahuman. They 
do not recognize the rule of androleukoheteropetromodernity and the apex 
species behavior it epitomizes and reinforces. But they also hold the 
bliss-horror of extinction fantasies at bay, because hyposubjects’ 
befores, nows, and afters are many. 4) Hyposubjects are squatters and 
bricoleuses. They inhabit the cracks and hollows. They turn things 
inside out and work miracles with scraps and remains. They unplug from 
carbon gridlife; they hack and redistribute its stored energies for 
their own purposes. 5) Hyposubjects make revolutions where technomodern 
radars can’t glimpse them. They patiently ignore expert advice that they 
do not or cannot exist. They are skeptical of efforts to summarize them, 
including everything we have just said.

hyposubjects is published in our Critical Climate Chaos: Irreversibility 
series, which is edited by Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/ccc2-irreversibility/


Author Bios

Dominic Boyer is a writer, media maker and anthropologist. He currently 
teaches at Rice University where he also served as Founding Director of 
the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences 
(2013-2019). His most recent book is Energopolitics (Duke UP, 2019), 
which is part of a collaborative duograph, “Wind and Power in the 
Anthropocene,” with Cymene Howe, which studies the politics of wind 
power development in Southern Mexico. With Howe, he also helped make a 
documentary film about Iceland’s first major glacier (Okjökull) lost to 
climate change, Not Ok: a little movie about a small glacier at the end 
of the world (2018). In August 2019, together with Icelandic 
collaborators, Boyer installed a memorial to Okjökull’s passing, an 
event that attracted media attention from around the world. He is 
pursuing anthropological research with floodies in Houston, Texas, and 
on electric futures across the world. And he is developing a TV series, 
Petropolis, about relations and reckonings in Houston TX.

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. 
They have collaborated with Björk, Laurie Anderson, Jennifer Walshe, 
Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin 
Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and 
appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming 
with Jeff Bridges. They are the author of the libretto for the opera 
Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe. They are the author of Being 
Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People 
(Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence 
(Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), 
Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World 
(Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open 
Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology 
without Nature (Harvard, 2007), eight other books and 250 essays on 
philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and 
food. Morton’s work has been translated into 10 languages. In 2014, 
Morton gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory. They blog regularly at 
Ecology Without Nature.

Other recent titles from Open Humanities Press include:

Psychopolitical Anaphylaxis: Steps Towards a Metacosmics by Daniel Ross: 
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/psychopolitical-anaphylaxis/

A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain by Gary Hall: 
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/a-stubborn-fury 
<http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/a-stubborn-fury>

Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies by Winnie Soon and 
Geoff Cox: 
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/aesthetic-programming/

-- 
Gary Hall
Professor of Media
Director of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Faculty of Arts & Humanities, Coventry University:
http://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/areas-of-research/postdigital-cultures

http://www.garyhall.info

Latest:
Chapter (open access): ‘Postdigital Politics’, in Cornelia Sollfrank, Shuhsa Niederberger and Felix Stalder, eds, Aesthetics of the Commons:
https://www.diaphanes.com/titel/aesthetics-of-the-commons-6419