Ecological Imaginaries 2

 

Crabapple tree of many colors, Oct. 22, 2022. Photo by J. T. Titon

 

“Ecological imaginaries” is but one kind of imaginary, but in the past ten years this idea has become increasingly useful as ecology in all senses of the word gains traction. A bit of background is in order before introducing two more ecological imaginaries. Imaginaries are ideas, not things; they are social products of a collective human imagination. Like myths, they are believed in; they are thought to be true, or they deserve to be made so. An example is the idea of “the rule of law.” The best known imaginary is the “social imaginary,” i.e., the network of ideas that individuals in a particular social group have about their society, what it is, how it operates, and how one should behave as a member of that society—the rules, principles, laws, values and the assumptions that people believe (imagine) govern their social interactions, and their meanings. For Jürgen Habermas, it was “the massive background of an intersubjectively shared lifeworld.”

Benedict Anderson’s concept of the “imagined community” has been influential among folklorists, ethnomusicologists and anthropologists. Anderson was thinking primarily of an imagined socio-political community, often based in ethnic, regional, and racial ties. So, for instance, a nation such as "England" or "the United States" when regarded as a whole, integrated society embodies an imagined community. The idea of the folk community, as a comparatively undifferentiated, pre-industrial, peasant or Indigenous social group, with its ancient customs and oral traditions, and their performance as expressive culture, is another example of a social imaginary. A more recent example of a social imaginary is the community invoked by the phrase "Christian nationalism." 

In the previous post I’ve identified four ecological imaginaries all related to beliefs about nature: pastoral, the “land of Cockaigne,” untrammeled wilderness, and self-regulation (organicism and the balance of nature). Here I will identify two more among many others. The first is Lorraine Code’s identification of an ecological imaginary (as she calls it) which attempts “to enact principles of ideal cohabitation,” or living together. Code views this “ecological imaginary” as based in the ecological principle/assumption of interdependence (or what others have called relationality and reciprocity) among living beings, a principle that, for example, I have called an ecological rationality (Titon 2013) and invoked more specifically in my sound ecology project, in which this interdependence is both signaled and secured by co-presence through sonic connections (Titon 2015, 2021). Code’s project is ongoing and difficult to summarize on account of numerous digressions—one might say the same thing about sound ecology—whereas she is incisive in her description of the social imaginary of “mastery” (Val Plumwood’s term) and the “autonomous individual”: “The instituted social imaginary of the affluent white western-northern world is one of taken-for-granted availability and access: a way of life where individual self-reliance is a virtue [positioned so as] to achieve their ‘goals’ and fulfill their ‘needs.’ Such needs are said to be natural, the sine qua non of a viable human life; scarcity is temporary and contingent: it can and should be ‘fixed’” (Code 2010, 30). Mastery involves control over the self and control over others: political mastery, and mastery over the external world; and thus they require management.

The second ecological imaginary I would add here is that of scientific realism, a set of assumptions based in the idea that the external world has an existence apart from our human perceptions of it, and that it is knowable by means of a series of epistemic operations, perhaps the most familiar being the so-called “scientific method” of inductive reasoning: observation, hypothesis, experiment, measurement, and conclusion. Scientific realism acknowledges organic wholes but proceeds towards functional analysis by means of reducing wholes to constituent parts, and parts to their constituent parts, and so on, studying the structures of those components and their interactions. The science of ecology appears to have always contained both the ecological imaginary of ecological rationality biased toward intersubjective understanding, organic holism, interrelation, balance, and interdependence; and the ecological imaginary of an objective and reductive scientific method, currently in favor among ecological scientists, that portrays nature as in continual flux, subjected to frequent disturbance and without an overall tendency, absent human interference, toward climax equilibrium and natural balance.

All six of these ecological imaginaries reflect Western intellectual history. There are additional perspectives. Folk, Indigenous, and non-Western social groups have their own ecological imaginaries, their own particular ideas concerning nature and the socio-political world. Earlier this year in this blog I wrote about “settler ecology,” prompted by an intervention from Kyle Powys Whyte from an Indigenous perspective. The diversity of environmentalisms is based in diverse ecological imaginaries.

References

Code, Lorraine. 2010. “Particularity, Epistemic Responsibility, and the Ecological Imaginary.” Philosophy of Education 2010: 23-34.

Titon, Jeff Todd. 2013. “The Nature of Ecomusicology.” Música e Cultura: revista da ABET 8, 8-18.

Titon, Jeff Todd. 2015. “Exhibiting Music in a Sound Community.” Ethnologies 37 (1): 23-41.

Titon, Jeff Todd. 2021. “Sustainability and a Sound Ecology.” In Toward a Sound Ecology: New and Selected Essays, 254-276. Bloomington: Indiana U. Press.

Ecological Imaginaries 1

The Land of Cockaigne, painting by Pieter Bruegel the elder, 1567

     Our Diverse Environmentalist Research Team faculty seminar will be discussing aspects of the topic “ecological imaginaries” starting in November. Each of us is to prepare some thoughts on this concept which has many possibilities. Here are four that occur to me immediately. There are some others I want to investigate, but this will be a start.

    1. Pastoral as ecological imaginary. This is the Arcadian tradition, in which humans live in harmony with and in nature. Literally of course it evokes shepherds and their flocks in the countryside, but symbolically pastoral does a great deal of work in the Romantic traditions of literature and philosophy, whether in German naturphilosophie or the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads. Thoreau’s Walden is usually regarded as pastoral, and the ecocritic Leo Marx worked American pastoral into an explanation of American intellectual history and its ambivalence toward industrialism. This Romantic ambivalence is also responsible, of course, for the concept of “folk,” das volk, as an uneasiness with modernism—not just industrialism, but also economic rationality ("economic man") and reductionist Western science.
    2. Related to pastoral and a projection of “folk” is the ecological imaginary of the “Land of Cockaigne,” a medieval alternative universe of pleasure and plenty, a utopian paradise of license. The 13th century French poem portrayed a land where people did not have to work, goods were freely available, game gave itself up to hunters, fish leapt out of the water and into the cooking kettle, and people never aged or died. There are some parallels with visions of the Christian heaven here. A 20th-century song, “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” expresses the ecological imaginary of Cockaigne as a hobo’s paradise where hens lay soft-boiled eggs, trees leaf out in cigarettes, and lakewater is whiskey. That song was composed by “Haywire Mac” Harry McClintock around the turn of the 20th century and first recorded by him in 1928. Since that recording it has become widely sung and known in variant forms, even appearing in a 2005 Burger King commercial.
    3. A third ecological imaginary is the idea of untrammeled wilderness, wild nature untouched by human intervention. The Romans had a word for this, res nullius, which they distinguished from res commones (commons, things that by their nature could not be owned, such as the air mantle and the oceans), res publicae (public things, owned by the state, such as roads and bridges), and res privatae (private things). Res nullius (no one's things) was a kind of terra incognita; it was conceived of as that part of the world that had not (yet) been “captured” by human beings. Wild nature is not peaceful nor is it pastoral; as Colonial Governor William Bradford wrote in 1640 of Massachussetts when the first European settlers came, that the land was filled with “wild beasts and wild men.” But this is of course a frontier imaginary; the “wild men” had been transforming the land for millennia by hunting, farming, fishing, burning to clear the land, and so on. Thoreau thought he had experienced “untrammeled nature” when, as he relates in The Maine Woods, he became frightened while descending Maine’s Mt. Katahdin and was surrounded by the rocky landscape that looked to him untouched by humans—it might as well have been the far side of the moon as far as he was concerned.
    4. A fourth ecological imaginary, related to the first two, is the notion of a self-regulating or balanced nature, or the ecosystems of the world as organic wholes, most recently expressed on a planetary scale by Lovelock and Margulis’ concept of Gaia. Although the idea of a balance of nature can be found in Greek thought, Gilbert White’s The History of Selborne, and of course in the Romantic philosophical and literary traditions, as well as pastoral, it has also captivated a number of ecological scientists and is usually expressed in concepts such as “climax” or “equilibrium.” Related to holism and organicism, it is not currently in fashion, but for much of the last century it vied with its opposite, the idea that the normal state of nature was not equilibrium but rather disturbance, flux and change until in the century’s last few decades it was largely abandoned. But this is not to say that balances do not exist in nature; they do: but the idea that nature overall and absent the hand of human intervention (itself as much a fantasy as Hobbes’ idea of a “state of nature”) tends toward balance is not widely believed by ecological scientists today. 

Leo Marx, an Appreciation of a Pioneering Eco-Critic

 

Leo Marx, at Amherst College

      In college I studied American literature with Leo Marx (1919-2022), who died last week, aged 102. He also became my senior year honors thesis advisor. More than any of my other professors, he influenced my choice to go to graduate school. Leo had, in my junior year, published a book, The Machine in the Garden, which gained him a reputation among his peers as one of the foremost literary critics of his generation. The book’s thesis was original: that canonical American authors and painters, particularly in the last half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, responded both positively and negatively to the growing dominance of industrial technology and the desire for material wealth by creating, through their arts, fictional alternatives, literary or visual portraits of American culture that drew on the pastoral literary tradition in a metaphorical way. Or, in the case of Henry David Thoreau, here was someone who didn't just write pastoral but for two years lived it, at Walden Pond, before returning to civilized life in Concord to write his masterpiece, Walden. American environmentalism may also be viewed through this lens of nature as American pastoral, and as a result Leo is now considered an early eco-critic. I might not have thought about Thoreau and sound had I not read, in Leo’s literature class, about the shrieking, belching train that became a symbol of the industrial transformation of pastoral America, in the “Sounds” chapter of Walden. Leo's mind and his way with literary, social, and political ideas is well illustrated in a video made in the early 2000s (amazingly, when he was near to 90 years old) of a lecture he gave at MIT on Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, the American Myth, and the invasion of Iraq.
       I graduated from Amherst College in 1965. Leo and I stayed in touch for about twenty years thereafter. In 1972, when I'd just begun teaching at Tufts University, Leo was briefly in the public eye (and on the front page of the New York Times) when he was joined by many others from the College, including its president, John William Ward, to block the entrance at Westover (Massachusetts) Air Force Base, protesting the Vietnam War. Leo, Bill Ward, and hundreds of faculty and students were arrested for doing so. In 1977 Leo left Amherst for MIT, to become a professor in their newly-formed interdisciplinary program in science, technology, and culture. One of my classmates who also knew him at Amherst said that Leo told him he was feeling that the town and College were too far away from the cultural and political mainstream. The move to MIT would bring him closer to where he decided that he wanted to be. He had spent 20 years living in a pastoral New England town, teaching in an idyllic liberal arts college where we, the students, having left our familiar homes, lived in a pastoral retreat ourselves, in a privileged educational and social, rural college community, before we entered the real world (as it then was called). Leo finally left Amherst's pastoral for the city of Boston. In so doing he showed, literally, what he had claimed in his book, that the pastoral worked better as a symbolic field than as a permanent habitation; yet his interest in the idea of American pastoral never departed. He retired in 1990 but continued teaching in the MIT program as a senior lecturer, until stopping at last in 2015 at the age of 94. Whether he felt that he had a better perch there than at Amherst I never knew.   
       Leo had, also, been a pioneering scholar in the field of American Studies. Although he was not among the field's very founders, he was one of the founders' first students; and he soon became their friend and colleague. Their project, undertaken chiefly in the period from the latter part of the New Deal to the Vietnam War, was to examine the supposedly unique character and history of the United States as a democratic society and nation. They often did so by analyzing the cultural and historical meanings of themes like “the American dream,” or the Westward expansion of the frontier, or slavery and emancipation, women’s suffrage, the meaning of free speech, or immigration and the “melting pot.” They examined historical and contemporary responses to facts of importance to the development of American culture—New England Puritanism, for example, or cotton plantations and textile mills—and found in them symbols expressing both affirmation and despair over the past, present and future of the United States. However, the post-Vietnam War generation of American Studies scholars—my generation—did not think that Leo’s generation had gone far enough in exposing the violence and suppression in American history and culture: genocide of the Indigenous inhabitants of the United States; colonialist exploitation and transformation of the continent; continuing, institutionalized racial, ethnic, class, and gender discrimination; an increasingly imperialist foreign policy; and so on. Indeed, Leo’s generation was (wrongly, I think) attacked as believers in and therefore defenders of the American experiment as a whole. They did believe in the possibility of America, but they were critics of American society and well aware that its promise had yet to come close to being realized.  

American pastoral: The Lackawanna Valley (George Innes, c 1855).

 

      Leo spent some time fighting a rear-guard action on behalf of his generation’s “myth-symbol school” of American Studies, as it had come to be called (after Henry Nash Smith’s 1950 book, Virgin Land, on the American West as myth and symbol). Although he summed up his defense in a 2003 article in the Boston Review, he had also been busy as an eco-critic, following the path he charted in The Machine in the Garden into further studies in literature, technology, and the environment. He found like-minded scholar-activist colleagues in the environmental movement. Today ecomusicologists and environmental humanists recognize him more for his eco-criticism and pioneering work in studying the impact of technology on American culture, than for his participation in the development of the American Studies movement.
       Recently I watched an oral history interview that an Amherst professor and former colleague did with Leo, as part of the Friends of the Amherst College Library series. Leo was then in his early 90s and seemed a little bored on that occasion, but now and again he revealed some things that I hadn’t realized about him. I had known that he taught at the University of Minnesota during the heyday of its American Studies program; in fact, he steered me there for my graduate studies. But I hadn’t known that Minnesota denied him tenure. He did not say why, nor did it seem to trouble him. Fortunately for him, and for Amherst College, he found a home there directly after leaving Minnesota. Leo also spoke about his role as a catalyst in the College’s anti-Vietnam War protests. He said some of the more conservative faculty members thought of him as a troublemaker.

Leo Marx in 1985; photo by Jerome Liebling

       We also had a few other things in common besides Minnesota, I realized, when he spoke in the interview about the transition he had to make when he went from Amherst, a liberal arts college where he taught undergraduates exclusively, to MIT, where he was suddenly responsible for the professional training and future careers of graduate students. I made a similar transition about ten years later, moving from teaching (mainly) undergraduates at Tufts, to directing the PhD program in ethnomusicology at Brown. I don’t know if Leo made the transition easily. I know I didn’t. Leo did speak about the difficulties he had teaching undergraduates at MIT who were already well into their scientific specialties. I didn’t have that problem at Brown; I had a different one. I didn’t like the ways in which the professional concerns of the PhD students in our ethnomusicology program often made it inadvisable for them to follow the paths where their intellectual curiosities were taking them, to explore avenues of learning that were exciting but probably would not have a career payoff. It took me some time to reconcile to that, and to realize more completely my own responsibilities to the students’ careers.
       Although it has continued as an interdisciplinary field, American Studies fragmented in the 1980s and 1990s into a series of subjects: studies in social history, labor history, American minorities, race and gender studies, and so forth, effectively abandoning the idea that there was anything unique or unifying about American culture. In today’s even more polarized America, the belief that there is, or was, such a thing as a process of Americanization that resulted in, or was moving towards, a common culture, appears quaint—or, possibly, the kind of nostalgia that a segment of the population feels for a once-great America, but as Leo and his generation of scholars showed, its myths and symbols revealed it to be much more of a complex mixture of hope and despair, than a land of liberty and justice for all.  

Thoreau's Pastoral Symphony

Next week I will be speaking at the University of Tennessee's School of Music, and later in Boston, on "Thoreau's Pastoral Symphony." Of course, Thoreau never wrote a symphony; but he had a singular understanding of music and its place in the natural world, one which has a good deal of affinity with contemporary composers of ambient music and environmental sound art. Here I want to say a few things about Thoreau's musical background and conclude with a word about how his understanding of music can shift our understanding from people sustaining music to music sustaining life.

Indeed, a very prominent mid-20th century American intellectual historian, Perry Miller, disparaged Thoreau's understanding of music. “Thoreau had an insatiable hunger for music,” he wrote. “His untutored flute-playing has become a legend. He could invoke Beethoven, but he knew little about music, had virtually no chance to learn. . . . The second chapter of 'The Service,' that on heroic music, is pathetic in its revelation of musical illiteracy. What he could learn of music, aside from his little 'music box' and Emerson's Aeolian harp, was only what he might hear through the windows of some burgher's house wherein a daughter of respectability was practicing her piano lessons" (Miller, Consciousness in Concord, p. 146). 

But Thoreau’s pastoral symphony was not, like Beethoven’s, a representation of pastoral; it was pastoral. After all, Thoreau didn’t just write about pastoral; he actually experienced it in his cabin at Walden Pond. And so in these public lectures I will claim that Thoreau’s pastoral symphony was the music of the whole world of Nature, humans included, with which he vibrated sympathetically. 

Thoreau understood Beethoven’s music, the music that Professor Miller said he was ignorant of, as a kind of human echoing of the music of Nature; that is, of natural sounds. Miller’s characterization was at best ungenerous; but was it also correct? What, exactly, was Thoreau’s musical background? Was he really musically illiterate? Was he limited to music boxes, Aeolian harps, and listening through a window to some respectable young lady practicing the piano? David Henry Thoreau (he later reversed his given names) was born in 1818 and spent most of his youth in rural Concord, Massachusetts. What musical education would have been available to a young man of his time and place?

If he had been a musical prodigy Thoreau might have studied performance with a master, but musical conservatories had not yet been introduced in the United States, and the formal study of music history, literature and criticism was even further in the future. We know Thoreau played the flute, loved to sing popular and folk songs, and enjoyed dancing (his mother had sent him to dancing school as a boy). In order to play the flute he would have had to had some kind of tuition which likely would have involved learning musical rudiments, if he had not already learned them in singing school as a boy, in grammar school or, more likely, in church. We can suppose that he was musically literate at least in the limited sense of someone who could read for an instrument and who knew musical intervals, melody, rhythm, and harmony. Also, he was renowned for his unusually keen ear; he could discriminate among different birds singing simultaneously and had a knowledge of each one's song (that is, he could sing it back) as well as a mnemonic device for remembering it (Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau, 195, 265, 354-355.)

As a young man, Thoreau went to dances and other entertainments (Ibid, 73). He did not study music at Concord Academy (where he was enrolled from age 11 until he went on to Harvard) but then it was not offered. He did not receive a musical education at Harvard either because, as far as I can tell, it was not offered. Lowell Mason established his Boston music academy when Thoreau was fourteen years old, with instruction in singing and theory, and therefore launched his music education in the schools program too late for Thoreau to have taken advantage of it. Where else might he have received his education in music? Most likely it was from his father, John Thoreau, who "took great pleasure in music and often played the flute in the parish choir as a young man" (Ibid, 8). His older sister Helen "gave music lessons" in Concord (Ibid, 10). His sister Sophia was "fond of music" and "sang and played the piano well" (Ibid, 12). So instead of being limited to what he could overhear from a respectable neighbor lady playing the piano, he in fact grew up in a musical family; his father sang and played the flute, he himself played the flute, and his two sisters played piano, one well enough to give music lessons. In point of fact, then, his musical education would have been more advanced than most of his peers for that time and place. 

Miller's conclusion about Thoreau's musical illiteracy is, therefore, likely incorrect; but as Thoreau had a much broader concept of music than Miller, the critique is also somewhat beside the point. Thoreau did not write in his journal about the soirees in the family home when he played flute and his sisters played the piano, or the social occasions when he was called on to sing popular songs and ballads. His writings did not chronicle his social life. He did write about times when he and his companions, boating on rivers and lakes, break into songs of camaraderie; and he gives some of the lyrics. We recognize these as occupational folksongs of the sort that folklorists later collected from sailors and loggers. And he also wrote about those times when adrift in a boat on a lake or pond he plays his flute in a meditative way, the scene usually compared to pastoral. Seldom did he comment about concert-going, although we know he attended them; once he wrote, in typical perverse fashion, that opera must be for deaf people. (In fact, his hearing was acutely sensitive and until the last years of his life he could recognize very soft sounds over long distances.) He mentioned Beethoven and other Western art music composers very occasionally, and usually in a complimentary way. But most of his writing about sound and music concerned the sounds he heard in the natural world: frogs, crickets, birds, the sounds of the wind and rain, and also the ambient sounds of children playing, church bells tolling, and people chopping wood and surveyors halloing through the woods to mark their location.

To digress for a moment, when I was a sophomore at Amherst College I met Perry Miller. He had come down from Harvard, where he taught, to lecture us on Roger Williams, in our American studies course. He had written a book on Williams, and in his lecture he argued that the Puritans who ruled the Massachusetts Bay Colony had been ethically wrong to convict him of sedition and heresy and to exile him from the Colony for proclaiming his views on religious freedom. Another professor had taken an opposite view, that the colonial magistrates had the right to banish someone from their community who was a threat to its very fabric. Like most of the students, I sided with Miller when I was asked to write about the conflict. Who, after all, could oppose freedom? Later in the course, as we explored First Amendment rights, I began to understand more about the context. Williams was, in effect, screaming "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, the classic case. Therefore, when I read Consciousness in Concord, I was surprised at Miller's condescension toward Thoreau, his lack of essential sympathy. 

Thinking with Thoreau here, we begin to see the importance of music as sound, and of sound in sustaining life on planet earth. As I've written earlier, one approach to music and sustainability is to ask how we can sustain music; and I've addressed that in various writings on this blog and elsewhere. Another approach to music and sustainability, however, comes from acoustic ecology and is to ask how music is involved in sustaining life on planet earth; and it is in reply to this question that Thoreau's larger scope pertains, for he understood sound to be the natural language of the universe. Thoreau never wrote a pastoral symphony. He never needed to: it sounded all around him. We may not share his Romantic views, but insofar as sound is the primary medium of communication among the creatures of the universe, interference with and threats to the natural soundscape make inter-species communication increasingly difficult, to the point that they endanger the sustainability of life.