Ecotone: borders, flows, density and diversity

The Ecotone: Diversity and Prosperity in Difference

The question that I have been exploring is now  more clear. Inspired by the Deleuzian metaphor of the rhizome I have been unconsciously asking a biological question. The question is this: May I apply a biological concept to culture? I have, until this point, refused to ask such a question. Cultural studies in general has shied away from biology for some time. Borrowing the concept of evolution for biology has had devastating consequences that are all well-known. So as a social scientist the rule is to generally avoid taking a concept from a biology discipline. This however, in this case, may  be a weakness in the social sciences. The biological world, which we all share, may have interesting examples of diversity in work.

Diversity also has a long history. Once upon a time diversity mean that a concept wasn’t old enough to have established a central way of being. Diversity was a weakness. We now know this is wrong.  Old systems are more diverse than young systems. We also know that diverse systems are more resilient than less diverse systems. Further, we all know that a rhizome unlike a plant does not die just because part of it suffers from disease or dies. The rhizome, if cut, becomes two plants. The rhizomes power is its ability to embody diversity and non-centrality.

The City and The Country: Is 1960s folk music a cultural ecotone?

Human culture, and the act of cultural flowering is a rhizome. We now know scientifically that all of humanity is part of the same genetic plant that is wrapped around the globe. We are a rhizome. Parts were separated from other parts and have developed differently. This includes ethnicity or how the human creature looks in different places in the world. We are all the same and different. We now have scientific evidence for humanism!  But why has the banner of humanism not been raised, and the celebration begun?

Because it seems, from my narrow point of view perhaps, that we are more conceptually divided than we have ever been. Race has become a dominant metaphor used to prove unreconciled differences. This approach to race, which is really culture as ethnicity, is a method of thinking of human groups as separate groups of different creatures. But what if we were to turnover “diversity as weakness’ and make it “diversity as strength”.

Ecology has a concept for this: Ecotone (perfect for musical scholarship!). The ecotone is the space where two ecosystems connect. Ecosystems, like cultural systems, and mineral systems, have fuzzy and permeable borders. These borders are not fences nor are they walls they are the ecotone. It is a space of negotiation and high diversity. The ecotone is the ecological space of increased diversity. It is at the borders of systems that diversity and production really peaks. (The audio work that Steve Feld has done at the border between the jungle and the Kaluli village is a recording of the ecotone)

The ecotone is a suggestive concept. What happens at the borders of cultural systems? Is there evidence to suggest that there are spaces, at the borders of cultural or ethnic systems, where diversity increases? Do humans also have ecotones and if so what do they look like? Are they spaces with more life, more health, more creativity? In this case it seems that this is an environmental concept that could be explored in cultural studies.

The ecotone may also be an important concept for cultural sustainability. Instead of putting our focus on the preservation of cultural practices and using organization, similarity, and centrality as a measure of cultural health maybe we can take a lesson from the biological sciences and explore the borders of cultural systems to see what is at work there. Maybe innovation, new scenes, new practices and diversity is also an example of cultural health taking place in the ecotone.

Ethnosphere:Cultural Rhizome

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The political thought of D+G was, as is well-known, influenced by the complete political breakdown that occurred in France in 1968. It is also influenced in part by post-col

Why not map the ethnosphere?

onial discourse which emerged hand in hand with the defeat of French colonial power in both Algeria and Vietnam. Often this is where the description ends.  But there is another important moment in 1968 to consider. The Apallo 8 space mission captured the first picture of the earth from space. For the first time in human history we saw the full body of the earth. The molar of the earth dramatically captured within the molecular structure of the galaxy and of the universe. Assemblage theory and the rhizome influenced one another .  Political awareness was growing of the need to recognize difference and autonomy of once colonial subjects. But difference itself was being undermined. “We”, this photos said, we’re in it together. But it also said that “We” could no longer  imagine so great a role for the human species. The great wonders of the world were not visible in that historical photo. “We” were created in a new and psychologicallycompelling way. Ethnic, racial, and political lines could not be seen in the photo. The Earth appeared as a great and undivided body. We were not included. But this is not a strategy to deny diversity and diffeence a sort of, other sneakier approach to re-colonization, but we should always be conscious that this tactic is not used to regain colonial interests. To be sure this is so we must develop an approach to being differently equal and to respect difference but understand that each person and system ultimately touches and impacts an other.

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But We know we are here. If wasn’t until later  night-time photographs. These next photos acknowledged our luminary impact on the earth and also our striations and densities that we’ve established upon the smooth space of the earth. But in those first photos we were, in all of our great difference and even greater self-importance (human-centric thinking) dislodged. To suggest that these photographs revolutionized the human condition in the way Copernicus did might be an exaggeration. But they certainly further  decentered human-centric thinking and opening the door to a more profound ecological thinking. This new ecological approach includes humans as one network or system embedded, influenced, and influencing all others. Humans are within the rhizome which covers the full body of the earth. The rhizome D+G theorize is both concept and reality. It is not merely a clever way of approaching social theory it isthe invitation to draw a new type of map.

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What that new map may look like is difficult to say. The model I find most compelling is drawn from geology. The geological map is not just a point and line map. Mineral deposits exist in spaces and are necessarily related to neighboring layers of material. Layer upon layer, strata related to strata. D+G in A Thousand Plateaus also turn to geology. Plateaus are formations that are linked to other plateaus. This approach was also used, in some way, by the Canadian composer and theorist R. Murray Shaffer. Shafer coined soundscape which he linked to acoustic ecology (see Shafer, R. Murray 1977/1994, The Soundscape, pg. 271).

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The ecological concept was absorbed by sound studies and aesthetics. In recent years a movement towards environmental aesthetics has been championed by Arnold Berleant and Steven Feld’s anthropology of sound shown lines of similarity. More recently noted anthropolgist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis has moved the concept a little further with his suggestions of an ethnoshphere. The ethnospere Davis wrote, “the sum total of all thoughts, beliefs, myths, and intuitions made manifest today by the myriad cultures of the world”(Light at the Edge of the World, Davis 2001, Douglas and McIntyre, pg . The ethnosphere embraces Schafer’ssoundscape and makes it more anthropological. The ethnosphere is the interconnected culturescapes of the world which like mineral deposits exists one upon the next, one over the next, one through the next. The rhizome of, wild culture (see my earlier posts on wild culture) the natural intermingling of human expressive culture that territorializes human culture and experience, and this is the important subtext of Davis’ suggestions, within the living biosphere of the full body of the earth. The ethnosphere is the human assemblage, that human plane of consistency that covers the full body of the earth. The ethnosphere, biosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere are planes of consistency which establish the living rhizome of the earth. Humans therefore play an active role in this intermingling. What’s more, an enlivened aesthetic discourse on human culture already has environmental implications and applications. Cultural research is also environmental research and, cultural sustainability and cultural diversity are differently equal to environmental sustainability. This is the full impact of those photos in 1968.

Smooth Space:Striated Space and the Musical Note and Flow

ADSR

In the last installment I began to discuss the relationship between flow, copyright, and culture. D+G in A Thousand Plateaus develop a coupling of smooth space and striated space that has a relationship with flow.  Flow takes place through space and time. It is the blending of the two. Here is the connections between Einstein and minimalism, time is space and space is time. Consider a musical note. Imagine the note it its full capacity as it is manipulated by your favorite electronic musician. This manipulation has four aspects (ADSR). The attack of the note you hear as the first moment of the note as it emerges into being. The attack is not just a note emerging from nowhere however. It is already a vector, a straight line that, if graphed, moves out of the baseline of “silence”. The attack has a velocity and a sound pressure. If you’ve ever played a piano, struck a guitar string, taped a table, whistled, closed a door, talked, or even breathed you created an attack. If you make the same sound over an over again and continue to pay attention to the note you make you will notice that the attack is not a point but a period of time.

After the attack there is a Decay. The velocity of the note reaches its climax and begins a decline to a particular point where the note doesn’t change as much. The note, once stabilized, is in a period called the Sustain. The note is “held” in place. Here the note is often manipulated. Pulses are introduced into the note (tremolo for instance). Finally, the note is comes to an end. But the end is also not a moment but a process called Release. The release is the trailing off of the sound. If one hits the key of an organ, or synth and then releases the key the note gradually (although this may be very quick) diminishes.

The ADSR happens through and is an expression of the movement of time. It is the flow of time that captures and captivates. It is the experience of joining the flow and of enunciating. Music is territory; all sound is territory. On the above graph Duration is the bottom line. It is also already the flow. Duration is made physical/material in the sounding or sounds. Sound then is not only the creation of territory but territory through space and time. A territory that moves. It is at once sedentary and nomadic, a point and a line. Is this our experience of tradition? Is this what is so mystical about the taking part in the ritual of tradition, the spell of heritage?

This is an interesting example of D+G discussion of Smooth and Striated space within an assemblage. If one considers an “unpulsed” musical example, like an alap or the opening of an electronic piece before the pulse begins (striation) this may be considered an example of a smooth space of flow. But even within this there are pulses and flows, striations and smooth space. Each of the four moments (ADSR) of the sounding of any sound are striations in smooth space. Flow is created by a relationship between smooth and striated space. To say that Striations create smooth space is not a paradox.

Dance music shows that pulse creates smooth space. The dancer/listener experiences the flow of a smooth space of sound that is established by a regularized striated space. Is this what D+G meant when they said that Smooth and Striated space always exists within one another? Smooth and Striated space are necessarily aspects of one another. D+G assert that smooth space coincides with the nomad with striated space coincides with the sedentary. This is the articulation of an assemblage. The rhizome of assemblages of enunciation created out of the point and flow, the striated and smooth space that is the foundation of sound.

Flow and Antiflow: the myth of resource managment and copyright

This is Utah in my flow of memory

In the summer of 2007 I drove U. Utah Phillips from the Vancouver International Airport to UBC. He was in town for the 2007 Vancouver Folk Music Festival. I had been asked by the then-Artist Director Dugg Simpson to interview Utah on stage. I had been working on folk music and folk music festivals for a few years already. I was through part of my PhD and felt semi-prepared to do an interview on stage at a festival. The interview however was terrible. I was intimidated and  still too much in awe of Utah to really pull it off in public. Too bad. It wasn’t the interview that made an impact on me  but the conversations that lead up to the interview.  Utah explained why a river is a useful metaphor for human culture.

We all sit beside a great river, Utah began. We all reach into the river and take stuff out. We take out practices, habits, songs, ways of living, ways of preparing food, etc. All kinds of stuff. After we take out these things, he went on, we do things with them. It’s like finding a song in a bottle. I take the song out and do things with it. I rewrite some parts I add new parts and then, he said, I put it back in the bottle and back in the river because I know somebody downstream will do the same. I am already connected to all those who lived upstream and all those who will live downstream.

But then Utah finished with a warning. Corporations, he said, have been busy over the last few centuries building a great dam across the river. They no longer want material flowing downstream. They would prefer that no one goes to the river to get anything. It is better for them, he argued, if we go to the store instead of to the river. If we get used to going to the store to get everything then we no longer need the river. But this is the danger.

The dam that these corporations are building Utah called copyright and trademark. Copyright does not allow anything to float downstream. I know some who read this will say “That’s not true copyright was designed to help creativity”.  It is true. Copyright, when it was first designed was in order to help create a market for creative works. But copyright originally was for 15 years. After which it would go back into the river. Fifteen years is sustainable. It could be argued that 25 years is sustainable. But 70 years after the death of the creator, which is what we currently have, is not sustainable. But what you may ask does sustainability and copyright have in common?

Maybe I have an appreciation for life cycle-industry relationships because I grew up on Cape Breton Island leading up to the great collapse of the Atlantic fish stocks. Maybe it is because we heard fishermen/women complain about overfishing for years leading up to the collapse that “science” under the code name “fisheries management” claimed to control. The collapse of the East Coast fish stocks is part of the same regime of property management that still has no/little critical voice. The issue with the east coast fisheries, global forest, environment (et. al – but not to be too simplistic) must be part of a similar aspect of the ontology of modernity. Instead of looking a generations of collapse as individual anomalies why not suggest, as Utah has, that our scientific models and predictive capabilities which are the basis of the myth of “resource management” are only part of a larger model.

Deleuze in Flow

Musical culture is part of this conversation. Musical culture however, has never truly been understood as a resource. Utah suggested, in his river analogy, that musical culture, like a great many other things, are not and have never been private property. Copyright is an early tool of “resource management”. Copyright converts expressions of the imagination into property. This originally, as Attali pointed out in Noise, was supposed to give musicians power to market themselves. But copyright has, however, converted cultural practice into a commodity. Because of the way copyright is activated, when a cultural expression is recorded (onto any medium), those who control the medium control the conversion. This has created a century of “cultural clear-cutting”. The entire history of the popular music industry is based on cultural resource extraction of the worst kind. Generations of communities have lost access to their cultural resources.

So while copyright claims to promote creativity and help the creators it does the opposite. Copyright allows corporations (individuals or groups legally established as enterprises on a free market) to take musical resources out of the local community where they have been developed in flow for, in some cases generations, in others hundreds of years, and others still since a time before knowing (old growth creativity?). The myth of copyright and private property has encouraged individuals to take the cultural resources of a community and sell them on a market and in some cases to become personally very wealthy. But that person did not develop that musical resource alone. Musical sounds develop in musical communities through flow. We often call this musical tradition. But this is a bad word. It is flow. It is the flow of experience that we find ourselves in. It is the flow of the river in which we develop. Flow needs to be protected. And we need to begin to become more acutely aware of the antiflow that serves no shared purpose. Anitflow is the myth of resource management hidden within the term copyright.

Sigur Ros: Sonic Immanence and Cultural Sustainability

Is there a connection between aesthetics and cultural sustainability? This is far more than a question I think. It is probably the outline for  a field of inquiry. But where would one begin to draw a link. The question may be reposed. Can a musicologist really say something about cultural sustainability in a way that is within the traditional confines of the discipline of musicology 0r even ethnomusicology? Ethnomusicologists have Steven Feld and his work with Keith Basso (senses of place). It seems that making the connection between anthropology and ecology/human ecology is easier. But musicology and ecology. I would make the argument that musicology is already involved in ecological and environmental discourse even if it is under-theorized and under-conceptualized. Cultural sustainability and ecology are an issue of aesthetics. But not of a passive sort. Ecology as immanence is a central, if unacknowledged, category of aesthetics.

Transcendence is part of art discourse. The experience is related, in important ways,  to the sublime, of being outside or beyond the limits of physicality and human-ness. Transcendence in my reading is an experience beyond the physical that moves towards the divine. Or an experience of the divine which is beyond human or other-than-human. Interestingly, and maybe alternatively, place is constructed by sound. The place-ness of sound, the territory that sound creates, is a space like this. Transcendence is beyond materiality. But Deleuze championed an alternative,  Immanence.

The Immanent space is a real conceptual challenge. But one, I think, makes the connection between the experience of the sublime and the creation of place-ness. So much art has been complicit in the creation of place. Sound has suffered from the incorrect notion that is has a lack of materiality. We know that sound is material. So sound is now a material place that you experience. Sound and music however can be, as Feld pointed out, about place-making. The place-making effect of music that is beyond human avoids what Nietzsche’s warning about being “human all-too-human”. So immanence is related to transcendence.

Michel Maffesoli in The Time of the Tribes suggested immanent-transcendent for the liminal experience that is often associated with ritual (see Victor Turner: ‘Liminal to liminoid in play, flow, and ritual: An essay in comparative symbology’. Rice University Studies 1974. 60(3):53-92). The dissolution of the individual that is associated with the liminal brings up an interesting question. Does the identity dissolve or become associated with a larger identity. Does the individual fuse in a spiritual sort of way with another beyond human identity.

This is why I have included this Sigur Ros trailer for their film Heima. My first reaction to the music of Sigur Ros was “sublime”. This music is often beyond human. But I never felt drawn to a transcendental sublime but an immanent sublime. Something that I have also experienced in my research on Pagan music (see Singing Me Into The Land). There is a dissolution of the identity that is not grafted onto a Judeo-christian divine but a conception of a spiritual physicality.  One could suggest a pagan spirituality that is without gods and goddesses and is populated by the experience of “within-place-ness”. The non-human connection to a place that is beyond “nostalgia” and cheap imitations.  Music may be a tool for the creation of this sort of physical-liminality, this immanence.

There may be an important point of connection between musicology, cultural sustainability, and aesthetics which goes beyond the comfort zone of each of the participating disciplines.  In the experience of making place and self in the dissolution of both. Sigur Ros Heima means home and homeland. I think it also could  mean the construction of self and other. The immanent connection to the physicality of placeness that is beyond human-ness may be an important point of connection between local cultural production, sustainability, and musicology.

Thinking Musically: Thinking the Rhizome

Thinking Musically: Thinking the Rhizome B

Wild Culture

Local and wild culture is a rhizome. Local culture is not just “like the wild” it IS the wild. It functions as a rhizome.  Individuals form neo-tribes and connect to each other, crossing over each other, and creating a fully overlayed and conceptually multidimensional carpet of communities. Members and ideas slip between the layers. There are no spectators only participants. All of this participation and sharing produces a wild (synonymous with) sustainable ecosystem, “Wilderness is a place where the wild potential is fully expressed” (Snyder 12).   Participation is not just a nice idea but an essential aspect. Eliminating or limiting participation creates cultural erosion. Like trees that are harvested no longer hold down the topsoil of hills. A limitation on local participation damages the health of local culture. Full participation leads to cultural health,  “When an ecosystem is fully functioning, all the members are present at the assembly. To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness” (ibid.).

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It seems therefore that ecology is not merely a useful metaphor for cultural sustainability. The health of the commons is connected to its wildness. It may be of use  to consider organic metaphors and ecological thinking. It may have a great deal to offer. Kerouac transformed American literature by introducing wildness. Maybe nomadology may do the same for musicology and the rhizome for the map. Vernacular culture is the expression of the assemblage. Participation is key to the carnival and it is the central feature of the ecosystem. Total participation is wildness and Michael Taussig has remarked there are redemptive as well as destructive properties to wildness, “Wildness challenges the unity of the symbol…Wilderness pries open this unity and in its place creates slippage and a grinding articulation between signifier and signified”(Taussig 219). Wildness tears apart structures because of the constant creative negotiation contained in becoming. Is it no wonder, Taussig remarked, that wildness has been demonized for thousands of years. Bernheimer reminded that the central authority of the Roman Catholic church in the Middle Ages constructed wildness in opposition to, “Christian norms and the established framework of Christian society” 220.

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Being wild was to be outside of Christianity and therefore outside of all that is Good. This is still the case in Christian countries where the bible is still allowed to influence social discourse. Taussig commented that, “European ideas and sentiments separating pagans from the great chain of human being so that the pagan entered, with the utmost ambiguity, into a nether zone between the animal and the human” 215. Wildness is the rhizome that is human and more-than-human and therefore contradicts the Christian ontology. This observation has been made in other part of the “colonized” world but is rarely discussed within North American society even though since the 1970s America has inherited Britain’s place as the world center of modern paganism (Adler 2006, 233-6;Hutton 1999, 17 and 341) and especially the particular experience of feminist wicca that has become so influential (see my article American Goddess publication forthcoming). Taussig tells of the wild that is stolen out of the pagan world and reterritorialized in the church. But its connections to the rhizome cannot be completely cut off , “Her name was changed from the Wild Woman of the Forest to Our Lady of Remedies. Conquered and tamed, wildness yields its healing power. Today figures of seminaked Indians surround her image” 189.

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It is possible to trace the connections and establish the rhizome and to see how wildness has a long history of being written out of history. The writing of history is, as Foucault reminded, is the establishment of structure over experience. What would happen to History if the wild were permitted its rightful place? One implication would be the legitimation of the rhizome as a model for history and as an extension a transsubjective approach to subjectivity and community. Delezue, Snyder, and Taussig speak together when Snyder wrote, “The world is our consciousness, and it surrounds us…The depths of mind, the unconscious, are our inner wilderness areas, and that is where a bobcat is right now”[16].
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The rhizome is not new. It is only a new way to think about social life. If we now accept that the rhizome is useful we can come back to earlier terms to find new value in them. LIke a mythical journey Snyder supports these sorts of returns, “The heart of a place is the home, and the heart of the home is the firepit, the hearth. All tentative explorations go outward from there, and it is back to the fireside that elders return”[26]. We have now returned back to the hearth with a new appreciation of the wild, subjectivity and community. As we have agreed the individual and the community are locked in a process of becoming. It is time to develop a new approach to the idea of the folk. Instead of thinking about the folk as those who cut into the wilderness to build fort walls and bordered communities, on the side of the colonizers, maybe it is time to re-imagine the folk as those who live in sustainable independent communities before or just after colonialism. It is not too hard to believe that a society coming to terms with colonialism will return to pre-colonial articulations for a  post-colonial sociality. A post-colonial sociality might articulate itself in the terms that Michel Maffessoli describes in The Time of the Tribes.

Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild (1990)

Taussig, Michael Shamanism. Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A study in Terror and Healing (1987)

The Commons and the Wild

Jack Kerouac, since my undergraduate introduction to him, has  been burning through the back roads of my mind in a 1958 Chev Impala.  I have never seen him and he has never spoken to me. He is a ghost rider content to kick up dust across wild frontiers and open fields. He is content to travel under the radar of my consciousness and has never really totally informed any phase of my thinking or my life. But he has continued to stay close. He is in the rhythm of my speech and the timbre of my conceptual life. Recently I was introduced to an old friend of his who I had read as Japhy Ryder in Dharma Bums. Ryder inspired me so much that I considered, for a summer, giving up a musical career to become a trail guide. It was a tough decision.

Kerouac based Ryder on Gary Snyder. Snyder is an important American poet, introduced Kerouac to Buddhism, and has been a leading advocate of ecological thinking. Snyder has made significant artistic and philosophical contributions to the ecology movement. I was introduced to Snyder at an AFS (American Folklore Society) meeting. While at the book fair I was speaking to somebody (sorry don’t remember who to give credit for this) and was just figuring out my conceptualization of wildness as a productive concept. I was having a conversation with the right person. He suggested that I purchase “The Practice of the Wild” by Snyder. Out of the corner of my eye I saw some dust getting kicked up and I heard the unmistakable sound of spinning tires on dry gravel roads.

I met Ryder/Snyder again. This time however my interest in ecology is not separated from my interest in musical culture. It is like I followed Kerouac’s dust trail across conceptual space-time to meet up again with a possibility of myself. My work in ethnomusicology and my developing interest in the health and sustainability of  local music community has brought me back to my earlier interests in ecology. Snyder is the connection between Lessig’s Commons and ecology.

Snyder wrote, “Recovery of the commons—and this in a modern world which doesn’t quite realize what it has lost. Take back, like the night, that which is shared by all of us…There will be no tragedy of the commons greater than this: if we do not recover the commons—regain personal, local, community, and peoples’ direct involvement in sharing (in being) the web of the wild world” (The Practice of the Wild pg. 36). Isn’t this Lessig’s concern as well. Cultural sustainability in both the legal dimensions and its ecological dimensions agree. This is, I suppose, not surprising. But it does suggest an unlikely alliance. The court room, class room, board room, and field, “Understanding the commons and its role within the larger regional culture is one more step towards integrating ecology with economy” 37.

Snyder’s commons is a sustainable community. The model for this sustainability is taken from the wild. In a very powerful couple of pages early in The Practice of the Wild Snyder goes through the OED definitions of the wild and point out that they all are opposed to civility and civilization. The wild is not a concept that can stand on its own, “ uncivilized, rude, resiting constituted government” of individuals, “unrstrained, insubordinate, licentious, disolute, loose” of behavior “ violent, destructive, cruel, unruly, artless, free spontaneous” Snyder develops a counter definition for the wild, “Of societies—societies whose order has grown from within and is maintained by the force of consensus and custom rather than explicit legislation. Primary cultures, which consider themselves the original and eternal inhabitants of their territory. Societies which resist economic and political domination by civilization. Societies whose economic system is in a close and sustainable relation to the local ecosystem” (10). And he continues, “Of individuals—following local custom, style, and etiquette without concern for the standards of the metropolis or nearest trading post. Unintimidated, self-reliant, independent. “Proud and free.” “Of behavior—fiercely resisting any oppression, confinement, or exploitation. Far-out, outrageous, “bad,” admirable, artless, free, spontaneous, unconditioned. Expressive, physical, openly sexual, ecstatic”.

Lessing’s commons become a much more colourful space when they are described in terms of the relationship to wildness. It also, I think, provides a framework for a much more critical discussion of the importance of the commons as a creative place. The wild is an openly creative space and worthy of protection. The commons, if it is a town park, is nice but hardly supports the same sort of life affirming activity. It hardly excites the same protectionist impulse. Is cultural sustainability about making sure we have access to the town/city park or to cultural Rockies, ancient boreal forests, pristine prairies.  Lessig doesn’t really describe, in any detail, what we should protect. Snyder however is very clear. Local culture is not small culture. Local culture is the magic of ancient woodlands. Local culture is the wild.

Local and wild culture is a rhizome. Local culture is not just “like the wild” it IS the wild. It functions as a rhizome.  Individuals form neo-tribes and connect to each other, crossing over each other, and creating a fully overlayed and conceptually multidimensional carpet of communities. Members and ideas slip between the layers. There are no spectators only participants. All of this participation and sharing produces a wild (synonymous with) sustainable ecosystem, “Wilderness is a place where the wild potential is fully expressed” (12).   Participation is not just a nice idea but an essential aspect. Eliminating or limiting participation creates cultural erosion. Like trees that are harvested no longer hold down the topsoil of hills. A limitation on local participation damages the health of local culture. Full participation leads to cultural health,  “When an ecosystem is fully functioning, all the members are present at the assembly. To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness” (ibid.).

It seems therefore that ecology is not merely a useful metaphor for cultural sustainability. The health of the commons is connected to its wildness. It may be of use  to consider organic metaphors and ecological thinking. It may have a great deal to offer. Kerouac transformed American literature by introducing wildness. Maybe nomadology may do the same for musicology.

Snyder, Gary. 1990. The Practice of the Wild. North Point Press, New York.

Deleuze and the Wild

Creativity is Also Destruction

The wild is an approach to relationships. Not just the relationships that one develops between each other but the biological floor upon which these relationships are maintained can be considered in terms of relationships. Individual and group subsistence is a basic requirement for group maintenance. A community relationship is partly organic. An as an organic entity the individual and group negotiate resources upon the strata of the earth. This strata is the absolute ground floor of existence. The body of the earth is the basic limit of the assemblage. The next step in the assemblage is the individual or the group. Political philosophy has a long history of arguing over this first level strata. Hobbes argued that without centralized rule life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”(xiii). The individual, interested in his own existence, will struggle and fight for his own satisfaction. The state in the form of a social contract will ensure safeguards and the possibility of social harmony. Rousseau argued alternatively that community is the most basic form of existence. The genetic experience is the family unit that one is born into. The child is raised by a community even if it is just the family. One can not raise oneself without being completely marked as outside of society. Rousseau argued that the social contract is based on the relationship between people and nature. A successful life depends on the relationship between the force of the natural world and that of the family. He suggested that families joined together to form larger groups out of self interest. The social contract therefore, the first strata upon the body of the Earth, is ultimately social. Rousseau claimed that the Social Contract  would preserve life in community and individual freedom as well {Rousseau, 2003 #167} (9).
The community is a free association of individuals who do not give up their individuality to become community but retain this self expression and become something else. Assemblage theory, like Rousseau, does not allow for a dialectical dissolution of the individual into the group. The individual becomes a member of the group through negotiation of value. The negotiated individual freedom makes the individual a member of the group. This negotiation takes on an outward appearance and characteristics. Rousseau called this the General Will. He wrote that, “As long as several men in assembly regard themselves as a single body, they have only a single will which is concerned with their common preservation and general well-being”. This basic agreement should not be confused with some sort of primitive order of things. As social anthropologists have well established there is no primitive order from which any social order has descended {Kuper, 1997 #13} (231-244). The establishment of the compact and the general will is not a matter of inheritance but of group-becoming.

It is not just a matter of exchange reciprocity. Deleuze suggests that the relationship runs much deeper than this. The relationship between the group and the individual is a mutual becoming. This becoming is not marked by over legislative coercion but of another type of negotiation. Deleuze asserts that,  “Customary rules (nomos) govern group behaviour without being deliberately founded as legislation or explicitly represented to it in the form of law (logos)” {Holland, 2004 #4} 21). Group behaviour establishes modes of conduct and approaches to life. The personal is not the base expression of individual desires but a more complex, more sophisticated negotiation between individual and group. The personal, “ is composed of—or, in Deleuze’s terms, passively synthesized from—experiences and therefore cannot be separated from them” {Buchanan, 1999 #15}  6). Passively sythesized though in no way takes away from the status of the individual. The creative existence of the individual is established within the dynamic of the group membership. Membership is not the denigration of individual creativity but the expression of it. The group is an assemblage and in Assemblage theory the negotiation of Rousseau’s General Will is not alien to the individual. This negotiation of group personality is the same as the individual negotiation at a different level. The individual is not on one side of the binary individual-group. Thisbinary is incorrect. The individual is always already in the group even if it is only a group of one.
The subject does not become less important but arguably more important. The establishment of individual affect is an expression of part of the will of the group, “The smallest scale comprises a population of individual persons, but the subjectivity of each of these persons must itself be conceived as an assemblage of sub-personal components”  {DeLanda, 2006 #7} 253. DeLanda suggests that, “A subject crystallizes as an assemblage through the habitual grouping of ides via relations of contiguity, their habitual comparison through relations of resemblance, and the habitual perception of constant conjunction in the case of linear causality which allows one idea (that of the cause) to always evoke anther (the effect)” 253-4 Deleuze argued that that contiguity, causality and resemblance constitute the principles of association which transform the mind into a subject {Deleuze, 1991 #19} 98-101 {DeLanda, 2006 #7} 254. Subjectivity for Deleuze is not a subject but an effect arising or growing out of the principles of subjectivity. The mind becomes aware of the subject in the association of ideas that are “connected in the mind not by the mind” {Deleuze, 1991 #19} 24.
This does not reassert a division between subject and object but firmly denies any possibility of such a distinction. The subject and object exist in relation to one another and mutually create meaning for each other. But this seems to suggest a deadlock. Where is the engine which moves these pieces into action? If the subject is established by a collection of objects how is the subject pushed into definitive action. Action is not part of a collection of objects nor is it an essence of the object. The mind is affected by the social and the passional. The social is an object that the subject must come to terms with. The relationship between the subject and the social is therefore a necessary negotiation. The subject is affected by this negotiation just as the negotiation itself defines the community. The social and the subject are therefore mutually dependent and mutually foundational.
But this does not suggest that the community is without hierarchy. The negotiation that occurs in community is the establishment of hierarchy and difference. Not necessarily the hierarchy of government, class, tradition. The creation of the subject is the awareness of difference. Thinking is the act of coming into awareness of difference and community. It is not therefore, I am, but “we are and I am” that is established in thought. But difference is not negation. Difference is positive difference, “In its essential relation with the “other” a will makes its difference an object of affirmation” {Deleuze, 1962/1983 #20} 9. The subject is established in difference but difference is established by thought. Deleuze suggested that, “ To think is to create this is Nietzsche’s greatest lesson”  {Deleuze, 1962/1983 #20} xx. Thinking is a creative negotiation of hierarchy. The creative difference that establishes group relationships. This is a retelling of Rousseau’s founding premise but for Deleuze, “Hierarchy is the originally fact, the identity of difference and origin” {Deleuze, 1962/1983 #20} 8. The social contract is not merely an establishment of a force to satisfy shared needs but is also the establishment of hierarchy and morality.
The subject is established not merely in relation to their environment but in reaction to it. The creation of the subject, its becoming, is always and already in reaction, “Consciousness is essentially reactive” {Deleuze, 1962/1983 #20} 41. And this reaction is the creation of difference, or hierachy, and of the subject itself, “We do not feel, experience or know any becoming but becoming reactive” {Deleuze, 1962/1983 #20} 64. But becoming reactive is not the negation of creativity. Creativity is expressed in the negotiation unleashed by becoming-reactive. The act of becoming therefore is always in relation to something else. Since the community and the environment are all outside of the subject, and since the subject is defined by their reaction to what is outside, then it is unnecessary and even misleading to suggest that there is a special set of negotiations between people and objects. Everything is an object to the mind and the minds negotiations and creative reactions with all of these objects affect the individual. Therefore the natural world, people, art, ideas are all particles that are synthesized in the establishment of the subject and subjects are synthesized into community.
Delezue used Nietzsche’s thought to replace the binary good:bad with an alternative. Deleuze said that everything is already reactive. But even in reaction there is, what Nietzsche called a will to power being expressed. The will is not  Hobbes’ General Will . It is not a trancendental expression of community or humanity that  motivates and activates the community through the individual. The will, according to Deleuze, is not merely the desire for power or the need for self aggrandizement. The will is not something so simple and selfish. The will to power is the, “genetic element of force” 53. And the force is a response in reaction. Reaction therefore is more than simple response. Reaction has two possibilities. Reaction, which defines the subject, defines the subject’s relationships as well. The will to power, says Nietszche is not without morality. But it is not the morality of the Church or the State. Nietzsche claims that he has invented a new conception of the will. A will that does not finds its essence outside of itself but in the relationship between self and the world. The relationship may take two forms. It must either be reaction as subservience or reaction as creation. In either case creativity remains the constant. The will is the expression of creativity. The will to power is creativity.
Nietzsche, through Deleuze, is a philosopher of  creativity. There is no God as a metaphysical engine. Nietzsche taught that “god is dead”. But it is not the death of something concrete. Not even of something divine. But it is the death of exteriority.  Replaced by an inner creativity that is no less theistic, monotheistic and polytheistic. God has been replaced by creativity and being creative. There is no longer a need for a metaphysical driver if creativity itself is the engine of all desire. The desire to create is the will to power. Creativity itself is not the act of the arts or the intuition. Creativity is the act of thought. Thought is creativity. Thought is the basic experience of life.Through Delezue Nietzsche states that, “ the will to power is essentially creative and giving…power is something inexpressible in the will (85). This is the role Nietzsche plays for Deleuze. Through him Deleuze is able to find a way to ground french deconstruction in the Spinoza-Nitzscheian critical heritage.
Deleuze claims that Nietzsche’s genealogy is a critical but ultimately creative discourse. Morality is dependent, not upon socially constituted rules and norms but in the evaluation of creativity. The will to power is expressed. Creativity is expressed by everyone. But everyone does not express creativity equally or, to use moral terminology, in an equally upstanding way. The good is the creative and the joyful and the bad is the creative that is bounded and without freedom. Creativity that is reactive-active or reactive-reactive. A reactive-active creativity occurs in critique, “Critique is destruction as joy, the aggression of the creator. A creator of values can not be distinguished from a destroyer, from a criminal or from a critic: a critic of established values, reactive values and baseness” (87).
But Deleuze opens himself to criticism here. He claimed to avoid the role of judge. But through Nietzsche he established a criterion to judge value. But to do so he tore down class, community, tradition, and even revolution and replaced it all with a morality of creativity. Ranciere suggested that this philosophy runs into a dead end. Zizek is troubled because Deleuze attempts to always dissolve the contradiction to never allow the ultimate moment of pure negativity. But Deleuze does this to avoid the dialectic. The judge is the dialectic. The will to power, creativity, does away with the need for the judge. There is no need to choose between becoming a or becoming b. In the reactive-active many options are created, a multiplicity. The multiplicity is the expression of creativity and the choice is the creativity in reaction. Choices are inventions and inventions are creations. Deleuze used Nietzsche to dissolve the subject:object binary, to establish a creative deconstruction called genealogy, and to deny the binary creating dialectic. The good is defined by free creativity.
Free creativity can be described in another way. Nietzsche’s good genealogy has a lot in common with composting. The breaking down of items to create from their debris a fertile ground from which new life can spring. Composting is life affirming and destructive. Intellectual composting, the act of destroying to affirm life, is a more active genealogy. Deleuze would prefer composting. It is a creative, life affirming act that demonstrates immanence. If Deleuze had been born in America instead of France his orientation may have been different. If genealogy is translated through deconstruction to composting then Deleuze may have more of a connection with contemporary ecology than one may think. Free creativity is the wild.