Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Andrew Mark 2016
Andrew Mark 2016
Andrew Mark
Ethics & the Environment, Volume 21, Number 2, Fall 2016, pp. 51-77
(Article)
Andrew Mark
Abstract
Joe Hill, a labour activist and singer-songwriter of the early 20th century, is best
remembered today for the slogan, “Don’t mourn, organize!” This paper confronts
Hill’s sentiment. When acknowledging the irreparable damages the human species
is inflicting upon itself and the planet, immediate action feels desperately required.
These motivations are laudable, but they also represent an impulse to repress con-
sidered confrontation with the past. How will ecomusicology contribute a new
perspective to understanding environmental loss and failure? How does making
music transform our losses and our production of environmental loss? The (Freud-
ian) psychic structure of commodity fetishism allows consumers to replace lost
objects with new attachments without coming to terms with the full consequences
of consumption. However, the creative arts give language, signification, ritual, and
community to otherwise unspeakable, un-acknowledgeable, and un-grievable loss
and repercussions. This article represents an acknowledgment of the shift in the
environmental movement towards more concerted focus on mourning and mel-
ancholy and entertains opportunities that may exist for ecomusicologists in this
burgeoning theoretical space.
MY LAST WILL
INTRODUCTION
The environmentalist’s condition can be one of loss, the perception
of a depleted and polluted environment as a product of modern con-
sumption. Compounding this grief, some environmental losses loom as
unrecognizable or beyond our immediate perception. Capitalism responds
to this obscure loss by offering consumption and development, perhaps of
a green variety, as a panacea for pain. This paper concerns the capacities
of making music, as an activity and process, to help recognize and respond
to present environmentally destructive patterns of grief and resource-
product consumption.
I see this paper as an opportunity to begin a conversation about how
ecomusicology might approach discussions of environmental loss and
failure. Rather than a tight and prescriptive disciplinary piece, with a sin-
gular focus and well-defined objectives, my goal is to offer a broad over-
view of a wealth of opportunities that I can see for interdisciplinarity.
Ecomusicology is a rapidly growing field that considers the relationship
between music and our environment (Allen and Dawe 2015). It also hap-
pens that environmental studies and humanities are rapidly offering up
streams of interdisciplinary thought with respect to environmental loss
(Cunsolo-Willox and Landman forthcoming). Where musicology is the
study of Western art music, and ethnomusicology is the study of music
in culture generally, my hope is that my (ethno)musicological readers will
take this paper, placed in Ethics and The Environment, as a location to
begin or complement more in-depth research into music and environ-
mental loss. I also aim to improve the reputation of musical culture for
environmental thought. The paper should resonate with and help con-
textualize past ethnographies and research. My ultimate aim is to pres-
ent both environmental and (ethno)musicological academic communities
with an occasion for fertile cross-pollination. It can be a delicate balance
to satisfy each audience. However, there is much to share: the creative
THE PROBLEM
Environmental loss as a source of legitimate grief has been dubiously
greeted (Windle 1992). Environmentalists are asked to look on the bright
side. They are asked, “why so negative?” Before immediately turning to
the statistical carbon-dioxide J-curves that project terrifying outcomes—
very good reasons to be negative—environmentalists might better contem-
plate the wounds the earth has already endured and how they happened:
through, for example, overconsumption, a pattern that is difficult to slow
or end when our economic system lauds growth. One significant concern
of environmental loss includes the psychic structure of commodity fetish-
ism (Sandilands 2012). In addition to proposing endless consumption,
capitalist commodity fetishism obscures the human and environmental
relations involved in what we consume, the externalities: the full social
and environmental costs involved in the production of commodities, our
objects.
Essentially, capitalist-growth asks us to replace our lost environmental
attachments, lost species, lost skills, lost forests, lost futures, and lost ways
of life with new consumable and disposable objects and efficiencies. The
scope of loss and consumption, which are bound tightly together in such a
system, is scalable from the individual to society. For example, everything
from new sneakers and microwaves, to dams, to upgraded military weap-
ons, to hosting the FIFA World Cup, these can all be imagined as a kind
of “retail therapy” (Plastow 2013; Garg and Lerner 2013)—spending to
improve our experience of reality by individuals and institutions—in an
environmentally diminished and/or threatened world.
These kinds of purchases and creations represent a particular kind of
melancholic failure. Each of them offers romantic and utopian promises
and then fails to deliver them: leaving one wanting. The sneakers promise
to push one outdoors to be fast, stylish, comfortable, fit, and to work
MUSICKING
Christopher Small (1998), with the styling of a sociologist and sym-
bolic interactionist, determined that while the study of “music” in abstrac-
tion of social conditions is a laudable project, without human interaction,
or at least someone to listen, music has no meaning. To keep people in
music, Small used the phrase musicking—as dance is to dancing, music is
to musicking. This framing shifts the emphasis of the value and meaning
of music away from musical objects and towards musical processes. This
pivot, from music as reified and consumable to musicking as emergent
and social, is how I see can see music making as an activity that helps
reveal and handle the environmental consequences of objects and their
failures. While songs, in abstraction, can stand as powerful elegiac mon-
uments and memorials to loss, they only become powerful in their emer-
gent, processual, and discrepant recitation.
How does musicking help to respond to the cycle of consumption and
loss? Making music can sometimes represent a low-resource-consumption
activity (Pedelty 2012, 129–98) that works against consumptive impulses
by acting as a (carbon) sink between choices of relative pleasure-
seeking activities. A pick-up game of soccer can operate in the same way.
However, I am not driving at such an analysis. I am working to address
how musicking interacts with environmental melancholy and mourning
A BRIDGE TO UNDERSTANDING
This paper is an expansion of ongoing research, creative, and perfor-
mance collaborations I have with others. We began this research process
by launching a podcast series, CoHearence, on environmental research
coming out of the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in
Toronto, Canada (Di Battista and Mark 2012). While investigating envi-
ronmental approaches to melancholy and mourning Amanda Di Battista
and I collected interviews with environmental academics, theologians, and
artists, to eventually develop a typology of environmental loss (Mark and
Di Battista 2016) that gives language or narrative (Kristeva 1989, 33–68)
to many different kinds of environmental mourning and melancholy. Our
work included incorporating the feedback of our informants to develop
this typology and share it. Arising from our findings, we describe various
methods and theorists that help environmentalists resist, respond to, and
contemplate environmental loss. In the following, I summarize our typo-
logical findings and then expand upon them to suggest how musicking
in particular might work with the ideas and themes we uncovered and
developed.
Wushke articulates not only a facile connection between song, loss, and
environment, and a way to connect more deeply with his community, but
more significantly, he underscores the importance of the ritual of musick-
ing for contextualizing loss, a theme I will return to. As Wushke suggests,
there is considerable room to consider how the AIDS crisis shares threads
with the environmental crisis.
A TYPOLOGY OF LOSS
As promised, what follows is the list of categories of environmental
loss Amanda Di Battista and I collated in our research (2012; forthcom-
ing). This list is not closed, or fully developed, but rather offers a means
for locating kinds of environmental loss. This section of the paper is not
an argument so much as a collection of modes of environmental loss to
which I will argue musicking responds in the next section. Further, the
PRECLUSION OF HOPE
I wonder if within these fragments of possibility for environment
and music, my reader has found something to pursue. After presenting a
version of this paper at an ecomusicological gathering, the first burning
question the musicological audience members had for me was, “Is there
any hope?” I put to my reader here and now the following: that—counter
intuitively—asking such questions are a means for turning away from
dealing with environmental problems. Those with the power and privilege
to affect environmental change are indoctrinated in narratives of triumph
over trouble, problem-shooting obstacles, and hope for change (Cronon
1992). Narratives of hardship and overcoming are lauded and ubiquitous
in popular and alternative media. Such narratives inform how we interpret
evolution, the arc of human “progress,” and how we conceive of a balance
between good and bad; activists and academics, particularly environmen-
talists, are no exception in utilizing such strategies to promote their stories
(Rutherford and Thorpe 2010) and to raise awareness. Other research on
psychoanalysis, music, and mourning confirms this approach (Stein 2004,
792). Various narratives of overcoming challenges in the field inform eth-
nomusicology’s understanding of itself. Institutional funding is geared
towards new insight into and action towards an expanding and evolving
field of environmental problems. Activists search for new means to grab
the attention of their target audiences. The pressures to produce solutions,
further the discourse, take progressive action, and remain positive under-
pin both academic and activist approaches to environmental thought.
Perhaps the most common critique of the environmental movement is that
it is simply not positive enough in its actual messages (McKinnon 2014).
Activists become depressed not only because of the kinds of outcomes
their research predicts for the future, but because their gloomy messages
are deemed inadmissible by both society and those in the movement who
would see a happier brand of environmentalism prevail.
REFERENCES
Albrecht, Glenn. 2005. “‘Solastalgia’: A New Concept in Health and Identity.”
PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature 3: 41–44.
Allen, Aaron. 2013. Grove Dictionary of American Music. Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press.
Allen, Aaron, and Kevin Dawe, eds. 2015. Current Directions in Ecomusicology.
New York, NY: Routledge.
Arendt, Hannah. 1970. On Violence. New York, NY: Harcourt Publishing.
Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York, NY: Ballantine
Books.
Braun, Bruce. 2002. The Intemperate Rainforest: Nature, Culture and Power on
Canada’s West Coast. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Brinner, Benjamin. 2009. Playing Across a Divide: Israeli-Palestinian Musical
Encounters. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New
York: Verso.
Clewell, Tammy. 2004. “Mourning Beyond Melancholia: Freud’s Psychoanalysis
of Loss.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 52(1): 43–67.
Cronon, William. 1992. “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative.”
Journal of American History 78(4): 1347–76.
Cunsolo-Willox, Ashlee. 2012. “Climate Change as the Work of Mourning.” Eth-
ics & the Environment 17(2): 137–64.
Di Battista, Amanda, and Andrew Mark. “Making Loss the Centre: Melancholy,
Mourning, and Environment, Parts 1 and 2.” CoHearence Podcast Series.
Network in Canadian History and Environment. February 6 and March 6, 2012,
http://niche-canada.org/category/media/cohearence (accessed February 20, 2014).
Driver, Thomas. 1998. Liberating Rites: Understanding the Transformative Power
of Ritual. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Dylan, Bob. 1963. The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. CD. New York, NY: Columbia
Records.
Eng, David, and David Kazanjian, eds. 2002. Loss: The Politics of Mourning.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Evernden, Neil. 1985. The Natural Alien: Humankind and Environment. Toronto,
ON: University of Toronto Press.