Morton, Timothy

Timothy Blockham Morton was born on June 19, 1968. He is a professor and also a professor named Rita Shi Gaffi at Rice University . Member of the movement of object-oriented philosophy. Morton's work focuses on the intersection of object-oriented thought and environmental research.

To use the term 'hyperobjects' Morton was inspired by the 1996 song of the singer Björk - ' Hyperballad ' '. Although the term “hyperobjects” (designated the nth number of persons) has been used in the field of computer science since 1967. Morton uses the term to explain objects that are so massively distributed in time and space and that go beyond localization, such as climate change and polystyrene. His recent book, Humanity: Solidarity with Non-Human People, explores the separation between humans and non-human people from an object-oriented ontological point of view, argues that people need to radically rethink how we understand and relate to non-human animals and nature in general, continuing examine the political implications of such changes. Morton also wrote a lot about the literature of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley , romanticism , diet studies and ecotheory.

Since 2009, Morton has been involved in a project of environmental criticism. In honor of this, 2 works were created: “Ecology without nature” (2007) and “Ecological thought” (2010). Through these works, he problematizes environmental theory in terms of environmental involvement. In The Ecology Without Nature, Morton proposes to abandon environmental criticism of the bifurcation of nature and civilization or the idea that nature exists as something that supports civilization, but exists outside the walls of society.

According to Morton:

Environmental publications continue to insist that we are “embedded” in nature. Nature is an environment that supports our existence. Due to the nature of the rhetoric that leads to thoughts about the environment, publications in the field of ecology will never be able to correctly establish what nature is and thus provide a convincing and consistent aesthetic foundation for a new worldview that aims to change society. This is a small operation, similar to overturning dominoes ... Ascending something called Nature on the pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for a woman’s figure. This is a paradoxical act of sadistic admiration. Considering "nature" as an arbitrary text symbol, Morton theorizes the artistic ideas about the environment as the basis for the discovery of nature's ideas to new possibilities. Seeking to find an aesthetic way, given the differential, paradoxical, and unidentified nature of the environment, he offers a materialistic method of textual analysis called “environmental poetics,” in which literary texts of all kinds are examined in terms of how they control the space in which they appear, thereby tuning the audience’s sensitivity to forms of natural representation that contradict the ideological coding of nature as transcendental principle. The history of this form of poetics allows politicizing environmental art and its “eco-memesis” and sharing experience with the audience.

Art is also an important topic in Ecological Thought, which was a prequel to Ecology Without Nature, in which Morton offers the concept of “dark ecology” as a means of expressing the “irony, ugliness, and horror” of ecology. From the point of view of dark ecology, there is no neutral theoretical basis for the formulation of environmental requirements. Instead, all creatures are already involved in the environmental, which requires recognition of the coexisting difference to overcome the environmental catastrophe, which, according to Morton, "has already occurred." Morton’s “grid” concept is closely related to dark ecology. Defining environmental thought as “thinking of interconnectedness,” Morton thus uses the “grid” to denote the interconnectedness of all living and nonliving, consisting of endless connections and infinitesimal differences.

He explains: Environmental thought, indeed, consists of a truly remarkable fact - the grid. All life forms are a grid, as well as all the dead, as well as their habitats, which also consist of living and non-living creatures. Now we know even more about how life forms shaped the Earth (think about oil, oxygen — the first cataclysm of climate change). We drive through shredded pieces of dinosaurs. Iron is mainly a by-product of bacterial metabolism. Like oxygen. Mountains can be made from shells and fossilized bacteria. Death and the net also go together in a sense, because natural selection implies extinction. There is no central position in the grid that gives the privilege of any form to be above others and thereby erases the final internal and external borders of creatures. Emphasizing the interdependence of beings, environmental thought “does not allow distance”, so that all beings are said to be related to each other in a summing open system, making ambiguous the entities with which we assume familiarity. Morton calls these ambiguous inscribed creatures "strange strangers" or creatures that cannot be fully understood and labeled. In the grid, even the strangeness of “strange strangers” that are related to each other means that the more we know about the object, the more alien it becomes. Then the proximity becomes threatening, because it covers the grid under the illusion of a friend.

Morton began to engage in object-oriented ontology after his environmental work was correlated with the ideas of change. One of the differences between his work and other works of object-oriented thought is its orientation to the causal dimension of object relations. Unlike traditional philosophy, Morton argues that a causal relationship is an aesthetic dimension of the relationship between objects, in which sensory experience does not indicate direct access to reality, but rather a supernatural violation of the false ontic balance of the interobjective system. The reason, according to this point of view, is considered to be an illusory or “magical” one, which forms the core of what Morton considers to be “realistic magic”. A causal relationship, from this point of view, is considered illusory or “magical”, forming the basis of what Morton calls “realistic magic”.

(term coined by Timothy Morton, author of the book)

In environmental considerations, Morton used the term “hyperobjects” to describe objects that are so massively distributed in time and space that go beyond the spatio-temporal nature, such as global warming, polystyrene pollution, and radioactive plutonium.

He subsequently listed five characteristics of Hyperobjects:

1. Viscosity. Hyperobjects adhere to any other object that they touch, no matter how strongly the object tries to resist. Thus, hyperobjects gain the upper hand; the more an object tries to resist a hyperobject, the more it adheres to the hyperobject.

2. Meltdown : Hyperobjects are so huge that they refute the idea that space and time are unchanging, concrete and consistent.

3. Nonlocality : Hypeobjects are distributed throughout space in time and space so widely that their totality cannot be realized in any particular local manifestation. For example, global warming is a hyper-object that affects weather conditions, such as, for example, the formation of a tornado. However, according to Morton, objects do not feel global warming, but only experience a tornado, since it causes damage. Thus, non-locality describes a way in which a hyperobject becomes more significant than the local manifestations that it produces.

4. Stage-by-stage : hyperobjects occupy a higher place than other ordinary objects. Thus, hyperobjects appear and disappear in three-dimensional space, but if the observer could have a higher multidimensional representation, they would look different

5. Interobject : Hyperobjects are formed by the connection between several objects. Therefore, objects can only perceive the trace of a hyperobject on other objects that are revealed as a source of information. For example, global warming is formed as a result of the interaction between the Sun, minerals and carbon dioxide among other objects. However, global warming is becoming apparent due to emission levels, changes in temperature and ocean levels.

According to Morton, hyperobjects become noticeable not only in the era of the ecological crisis, but also warn people about environmental interrogations that determine their future life. In addition, the ability of hyperobjects to survive changes to less tangible cultural values, combined with the threat that many such objects pose to organic matter (what Morton calls the “demonic inversion of the sacred substances of religion”)