Julian Manley, Social Dreaming, Associative Thinking and Intensities of Affect
March 2019
Timothy Morton described climate change - he prefers the term global warming - as a hyperobject, an example of a phenomenon that is too big and complex for our cognitive and emotional minds to grasp - we are, so to speak, contained in it rather than it in us. 1 If that is the case, I wonder whether we could somehow aspire within ourselves to be more than the human subject we assume ourselves to be - a hypersubject, as it were. We might then begin to understand something of this ‘hyperobjective’ universe of which we are an integral part. Perhaps the experience of social dreaming is a good place to start, somewhere we could begin to realise that liberated sense of self we need to understand and combat the ecological crisis that so alarmingly besets us.