My learning direction has propelled out of sound as primary. I’ve been wondering how to approach environmental issues without the essentialism criticised by Seth Kim-Cohen. The essentialism as a smokescreen behind which social constructs are maintained for comfort. The research does not feel like a detour since my music is often about ecological issues and I use environmental recordings to create effect. The aesthetic of nature is hyperised, like the effect of looking through a small window onto another world. I am wondering about the critical messages we can send and how music can help us cope with feelings of ecological grief.
I am reading “Humankind” by Timothy Morton. Morton’s work explores the intersection of object-oriented thought and ecological studies. Object-oriented thought rejects the privileging of human existence over the existence of non-human objects. Objects exist independently of human perception. This philosophy relates to deep ecology and also the way indigenous cultures approach nature (as percieved by western culture). The point of these philosophies is to radically redefine nature to change our interaction with the planetary ‘resources’.
How can we approach environmentalism without the environment being “pure” or separate from the human? Without the human in the void of the centre, this is a planet at war with itself. Also! destruction is not far away but all around us. With focus on our proximity we can remain in dissatisfaction as a potency for action. Opening ourselves to the unhappiness is a delicate process, but essential for bright burning hearts!
Morton discusses a planetary situation of symbiotic entities: a biosphere: the symbiotic real. In symbiosis the relationship between beings is unclear. With the borders blurred between the human and nonhuman we can start to see our position as one of interdependence. For example let us remember the gut. Non-humans compose our bodies.
How to we imagine a world of interdependence without it having an essential essence, the one we call nature? What is in between beings as they rub against eachother? What is in common?
In “In The Blink Of An Ear” Cohen disproves the faith in a fundamental stratum of experience; some essential ontological state. But in the idea of universal beings there would be an essence of conciousness that is shared between all beings. It is not affected by the borders between things. If this were to exist it does not define my current subjective experience. I believe it is not a question of IF but moreso questioning our definitions of conciousness, sentience and matter. I believe in these other worlds, the other beings, that make up our shared world, and there is no essence to it. There is no inbetween spaces, just a tetris. This is the ecological perspective.
The ecological perspective does not have to be the natural harmony of life, but simply seeing a material surroundings that we do exist in, and we can no longer reject. These material surroundings are our source, our bodies, our microbiomes, the food we eat, the material structures that we walk in, etc. Contemporary culture pretends like these materials do not exist. There is discomfort, ugliness and shame around these topics. We walk around the city and dress up instead.
In the state of discomfort we make big theories about the world to prove our position, to prove anthropocentrism as natural.
Morton explains correlationism: there are things in themselves but they aren’t realized until they are correlated by a correlator. “The subject tends to be found hovering invisibly behind the heads of only one entity in the actually existing universe – the human being.” In contemporary art, recognition of the correlator is the major event. Kim-Cohen writes about the movement towards deobjectification, post-structuralism and non-cochlear ways of thinking. The mistakes in art to claim a purity without the human subjectivity prove wrong. However! What about the worlds without the human? How do we approach them with a human art? Let us expand the correlator to the nonhuman until it dissolves!
Can we expand the category of the correlator to also include the squirrel who perceives the tree branch in effort to move along? It does move. Then let’s include the tree as a correlator, as a being that recognises the light and moves toward it. A lesson in mental health. With this method the world becomes a net of unique worlds that all share a common space. Do all of these worlds have value? They must have value because they compose our world too.
I’m imagining this anti-essentialism trending in contemporary thought as a correlationism that is only defined to the human. A discomfort with our sources. Therefore why would we want to protect other species and other ecosystems? Valuing the nonhuman requires having something in common, which I believe is the world. “Having something in common is exactly what culturalism sees as reactionary primitivism.” Morton.
So why is contemporary culture so uncomfortable with the nonhuman, and so eager to write complex theories to disprove any attempt to protect the nonhuman? If we see culture as a progression of thought then we are totally right to disregard the source. But if we see it as a replacement for our relationship to the source, then we can understand this eagerness to prove the legitimacy of our direction and disprove a connection to wider planetary systems. Do we write theories to avoid pain?
Morton describes the “severing” as a “foundational traumatic fissure between reality (the human-correlated world) and the real (ecological symbiosis of human and nonhuman part of the biosphere.”
In my music I want to embrace the pain and create joy in the forward motion of the procession. It is a procession that we walk in. There is hope in our ability to make joy from even this!