Peter Saul, ‘Government of California,’ 1969, acrylic on canvas, 68″ x 96″. Collection of Brian Donnelly, New York. © Peter Saul. Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery, New York.

The conspiracy lives. It goes on without you and within you, and it’s big—a perfect example of a hyperobject. That word, coined by Timothy Morton to describe those features of our existence too vast to apprehend entirely, to get our heads around, is frequently applied to global warming—which, taken as an example, in turn helps to clarify Morton’s odd term.

In a triple sense, global warming, or “climate change,” is a notion pervaded with an atmosphere of conspiracy. First, of course, the outstandingly real and simple disaster somehow stands under accusation of being the concoction of special interests (ecological, Chinese, or what have you). Second, its onset—so gradual, and now so sudden—proposes the existence of a nonhuman conspiracy against capitalism. It’s as if, instead of machines rising up against humans (as in The Terminator, or that old Twilight Zone episode in which the electric shaver comes slithering down the stairs like a cobra), it is the laws of nature that will ultimately act, like a Marvel supervillain, to topple humanity. Third, and most poignant, it has demanded in response a manifestly useless “conspiracy of good sense”; right-thinking people everywhere attempting to conspire in saving the world and … getting nowhere in particular. In this regard, or in all these senses put together, you could say we live in the era of the first truly global conspiracy that actually matters, one with sway over every human prospect. Masons, secret lizards, CIA LSD, Scientology, Tupperware, all pale in comparison.

Morton’s notion of the hyperobject also illuminates a paradoxical feature of the conspiracy: in its limitlessness, tenuousness, invisibility, and threat, it begs to be denied absolutely. Either the conspiracy infiltrates everything, or it doesn’t exist.

But that’s not right, or not right enough: the conspiracy is real partly because we make it real—like a god. One central source of the conspiracy’s power is the fact that we can’t agree, not only on what it looks like or what its purposes might be but on whether or not it’s there at all. It feeds on belief and disbelief, a billion-footed Lovecraftian creature running amok because each of us is knitting one of its socks—and those of us who deny its existence are knitting some of its most useful socks. Though the image is absurd, the word knitting suggests the knit brow of the worried person, and Shakespeare’s “sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care.” We dwell on malign conspiracies while we’re suffering insomniac episodes.  Read More