Timothy Morton

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Ecological writing keeps insisting that we are "embedded" in nature. Nature is a surrounding medium that sustains our being. Due to the properties of the rhetoric that evokes the idea of a surrounding medium, ecological writing can never properly establish that this is nature and thus provide a compelling and consistent aesthetic basis for the new worldview that is meant to change society. It is a small operation, like tipping over a domino... Putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is a paradoxical act of sadistic admiration. [20]

Viewing "nature," in the putative sense, as an arbitrary textual signifier, Morton theorizes artistic representations of the environment as sites for opening ideas of nature to new possibilities. Seeking an aesthetic mode that can account for the differential, paradoxical, and nonidentificational character of the environment, they propose a materialist method of textual analysis called 'ambient poetics', in which artistic texts of all kinds are considered in terms of how they manage the space in which they appear, thereby attuning the sensibilities of their audience to forms of natural representation that contravene the ideological coding of nature as a transcendent principle. [21] Historicizing this form of poetics permits the politicization of environmental art and its 'ecomimesis', or authenticating evocation of the author's environment, such that the experience of its phenomena becomes present for and shared with the audience. [22]

Art is also an important theme in The Ecological Thought, a "prequel" to Ecology Without Nature, in which Morton proposes the concept of 'dark ecology' as a means of expressing the "irony, ugliness, and horror" of ecology. [23] From the vantage point of dark ecology, there exists no neutral theoretical ground on which to articulate ecological claims. Instead, all beings always are already implicated within the ecological, necessitating an acknowledgement of coexistential difference for coping with ecological catastrophe that, according to Morton, "has already occurred." [24]

Closely related to dark ecology is Morton's concept of the 'mesh'. Defining the ecological thought as "the thinking of interconnectedness," Morton thus uses 'mesh' to refer to the interconnectedness of all living and non-living things, consisting of "infinite connections and infinitesimal differences." [25] They explain:

The ecological thought does, indeed, consist in the ramifications of the "truly wonderful fact" of the mesh. All life forms are the mesh, and so are all the dead ones, as are their habitats, which are also made up of living and nonliving beings. We know even more now about how life forms have shaped Earth (think of oil, of oxygenthe first climate change cataclysm). We drive around using crushed dinosaur parts. Iron is mostly a by-product of bacterial metabolism. So is oxygen. Mountains can be made of shells and fossilized bacteria. Death and the mesh go together in another sense, too, because natural selection implies extinction. [26]

The mesh has no central position that privileges any one form of being over others, and thereby erases definitive interior and exterior boundaries of beings. [27] Emphasizing the interdependence of beings, the ecological thought "permits no distance," such that all beings are said to relate to each other in a totalizing open system, negatively and differentially, rendering ambiguous those entities with which we presume familiarity. [28] Morton calls these ambiguously inscribed beings 'strange strangers', or beings unable to be completely comprehended and labeled. [29] Within the mesh, even the strangeness of strange strangers relating coexistentially is strange, meaning that the more we know about an entity, the stranger it becomes. Intimacy, then, becomes threatening because it veils the mesh beneath the illusion of familiarity. [29]

Object-oriented ontology

Morton became involved with object-oriented ontology after their ecological writings were favorably compared with the movement's ideas. One way that their work can be distinguished from other variants of object-oriented thought is by its focus on the causal dimension of object relations. Against traditional causal philosophies, Morton argues that causality is an aesthetic dimension of relations between objects, wherein sensory experience does not indicate direct access to reality, but rather an uncanny interruption of the false ontic equilibrium of an interobjective system. [30] Causation, in this view, is held to be illusion-like or "magical," forming the core of what Morton terms "realist magic."

Hyperobjects

In The Ecological Thought, Morton employed the term hyperobjects to describe objects that are so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend spatiotemporal specificity, such as global warming, styrofoam, and radioactive plutonium. [5] They have subsequently enumerated five characteristics of hyperobjects:

  1. Viscous: Hyperobjects adhere to any other object they touch, no matter how hard an object tries to resist. In this way, hyperobjects overrule ironic distance, meaning that the more an object tries to resist a hyperobject, the more glued to the hyperobject it becomes. [31]
  2. Molten: Hyperobjects are so massive that they refute the idea that spacetime is fixed, concrete, and consistent. [32]
  3. Nonlocal: Hyperobjects are massively distributed in time and space to the extent that their totality cannot be realized in any particular local manifestation. For example, global warming is a hyperobject which impacts meteorological conditions, such as tornado formation. According to Morton, though, entities don't feel global warming, but instead experience tornadoes as they cause damage in specific places. Thus, nonlocality describes the manner in which a hyperobject becomes more substantial than the local manifestations it produces. [33]
  4. Phased: Hyperobjects occupy a higher-dimensional space than other entities can normally perceive. Thus, hyperobjects appear to come and go in three-dimensional space, but would appear differently if an observer could have a higher multidimensional view.
  5. Interobjective: Hyperobjects are formed by relations between more than one object. Consequently, entities are only able to perceive the imprint, or "footprint," of a hyperobject upon other objects, revealed as information. For example, global warming is formed by interactions between the sun, fossil fuels, and carbon dioxide, among other objects. Yet global warming is made apparent through emissions levels, temperature changes, and ocean levels, making it seem as if global warming is a product of scientific models, rather than an object that predates its own measurement. [32]

According to Morton, hyperobjects not only become visible during an age of ecological crisis, but alert humans to the ecological dilemmas defining the age in which they live. [34] Additionally, the existential capacity of hyperobjects to outlast a turn toward less materialistic cultural values, coupled with the threat many such objects pose toward organic matter (what Morton calls a "demonic inversion of the sacred substances of religion"), gives them a potential spiritual quality, in which their treatment by future societies may become indistinguishable from reverential care. [35]

Although the concept of hyperobjects has been widely adopted by artists, literary critics, and some philosophers, it is not without its critics. Ecocritic Ursula Heise, for example, notes that in Morton's definition, everything can be considered a hyperobject, which seems to make the concept somewhat meaningless, not to mention seemingly impossible to define clearly. As a result, Heise argues that Morton makes "so many self-cancelling claims about hyperobjects that coherent argument vanishes like the octopuses that disappear in several chapters in their clouds of ink, Morton's favorite metaphor for the withdrawal of objects from the grasp of human knowledge." [36]

Morton’s approach has sparked a contentious debate, with some arguing it’s overly harsh and disempowering. Consequently, it has faced significant backlash. Morton states “they wouldn’t write Hyperobjects again today, they say, or not the same way. They don’t want to scare people anymore—things are already scary enough.” [37]

Bibliography

Authored works

Interviews

References

Timothy Morton
Timothy Morton.png
Born
Timothy Bloxam Morton

(1968-06-19) 19 June 1968 (age 57)
London, England
Education
Alma mater Magdalen College, Oxford
  1. Roc Jiménez de Cisneros (13 December 2016). "Timothy Morton: Ecology Without Nature". CCCB LAB.
  2. "Morton, Timothy, 1968-". Library of Congress. Retrieved 2014-07-22. Timothy Bloxam Morton; b. 6/19/68
  3. "Rice Faculty Page" . Retrieved 2012-06-20.
  4. Noll, A. Michael (August 1967). "A Computer Technique for Displaying n-Dimensional Hyperobjects". Communications of the ACM. 10 (8): 469–473. doi: 10.1145/363534.363544 . S2CID   6677741.
  5. 1 2 Morton (2010) , p. 130.
  6. Smith, P. D. (20 January 2018). "Being Ecological by Timothy Morton review – a playfully serious look at the environment". the Guardian. Retrieved 2018-10-10.
  7. "UC-Davis Faculty Page". Archived from the original on 2011-11-23. Retrieved 2011-11-23.
  8. "SCI-Arc launches new program on emerging topics in landscape architecture". The Architect’s Newspaper. 5 December 2019. Retrieved 2021-01-14.
  9. 1 2 3 "UC-Davis Faculty Page". Archived from the original on 2011-11-23. Retrieved 2011-11-28.
  10. Morton (1994) , p. 2
  11. Morton (1994) , p. 4
  12. Morton (1994) , p. 11
  13. Morton (2000) , p. 2
  14. Morton (2000) , p. 3
  15. 1 2 Morton (2000) , p. 19
  16. Morton (2000) , p. 68
  17. Morton (2000) , p. 75
  18. Morton (2004) , p. 9
  19. Morton (2007) , p. 1
  20. Morton (2007), pp. 4–5
  21. Morton (2007) , p. 3
  22. Morton (2007) , p. 32
  23. Morton (2010) , p. 16
  24. Morton (2010) , p. 17
  25. Morton (2010) , p. 30
  26. Morton (2010), p. 29
  27. Morton (2010) , p. 38
  28. Morton (2010) , p. 39
  29. 1 2 Morton (2010) , p. 41
  30. Morton, Timothy (25 April 2011). "Shoplifting Advice". Ecology Without Nature. Retrieved 2011-12-01.
  31. Morton, Timothy (25 October 2010). "Hyperobjects are Viscous". Ecology Without Nature. Retrieved 2011-09-15.
  32. 1 2 Coffield, Kris. "Interview: Timothy Morton". Fractured Politics. Archived from the original on 2011-08-16. Retrieved 2011-09-15.
  33. Morton, Timothy (9 November 2010). "Hyperobjects are Nonlocal". Ecology Without Nature.
  34. Morton, Timothy (2011). "Sublime Objects". Speculations. II: 207–227. Retrieved 2011-09-15.
  35. Morton (2010) , pp. 131–132.
  36. Ursula K. Heise (4 June 2014). "Ursula K. Heise reviews Timothy Morton's Hyperobjects". Critical Inquiry. Chicago Journals. Retrieved 2018-12-24.
  37. Hudson, Laura (16 November 2011). "At the End of the World, It's Hyperobjects All the Way Down". Wired. Archived from the original on 2024-03-20.