Tag: Hyperobjects

Hyperspace is the Place

Let’s stop calling it the Republic. Plato’s name for it needn’t be our name for it. The thing we wish to make is hyperspace.

Hyperobject in Timothy Morton’s sense, hyperspace is where we go when we generate joy. And it’s there, already, in miniature. You built it there in your “particle accelerator”-shaped apartment. Your bedroom, like the interior of the Tardis, is a realm unto itself. Like the space conjured up when one draws around oneself a circle. Such circles are strange loops, woven of the same stuff as Fate.

“We are moving,” writes Morton, “from a regime of penetration to one of circlusion” (Spacecraft, p. 71). Circlusion is the means by which vessels enter hyperspace.

Bini Adamczak introduced the term circlusion to describe this warping process, this weaving of strange loops, in a 2016 article published in German. An English translation by Sophie Lewis appeared in Mask Magazine later that year. Lewis says circlusion can be considered a companion term for Ursula K. Le Guin’s “carrier bag theory of fiction.” Instead of imposing onto spacetime a grid, one weaves a weird warp, a strange loop.

Sunday June 6, 2021

As I continue to read Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk, I learn of digital hyperobjects like “boids.” Apply three or four simple rules to these objects, he reports, and complex patterns emerge in their behavior, their movement together in groups. Yunkaporta claims that these patterns “cannot be programmed, but must emerge within the system organically — a process that is called ‘random’ in western worldviews but is in fact following the patterns of creation” (135). Patterns of right relation can arise in any complex, self-organizing system, he suggests. Kevin Kelly wrote of such patterns in his book Out of Control. For Yunkaporta, however, such patterns are excuses not for free markets but for heterarchies: complex, self-organizing learning communities where members “operate autonomously under three or four basic rules” (136). Heterarchies are systems “composed of equal parts interacting together” (137). There’s a moment in the book when Yunkaporta says, “If the world ever experiments with an actual free market rather than an oligopoly, this would be the perfect system to facilitate sustainable interactions” (144). In no way, though, should this be read as a defense of what capitalists themselves mean by “the free market.” I admit wanting to tug a bit on this part of Yunkaporta’s yarn. The Marxist in me wants him to turn up the base.