From Biopolitics to Ecology
I feel I need to justify renaming my blog. For the last few years I have been exploring the rhizome of Deleuzian thought. The lines of flight have led on adventures. But while I’ve been enjoying this blog “another line of flight: a biopolitical ethnomusicology” I have become increasingly restless. Partly because I’ve been reading more Guattari over these last two years and also because of Hardt and Negri’s explorations of biopolitics in Empire, Multitude and Commonwealth (thanks Paul).
My restlessness has led to the starting and then abandoning of a music ecology blog while I’ve been writing this one. For some reason biopolitics and ecology have not fit together for me. I’m sure you’re reading this and thinking - ‘how could you miss this?’. Well, I did. I couldn’t see how my ecology interests and my biopolitics interests could join and inform each other. Where was their point of connection? Where in the rhizome do they intersect? Never mind that the rhizome itself is ecology! (for readers of guattari – the ‘!’ is for you – for those of you that don’t read Guattari, he uses the ! a great deal!)
My decision to finally ‘fold’ “another line of flight” into ecomusicology has come out of two disconnected experiences. The first was a conversation with a farmer in the south of france two years ago. My wife and I were walking the southern french section of the camino de compostella and in the middle of the day we came across a farmer sitting outside his house watching the pilgrims as they pass. We waved and my wife (who is french) introduced us and began a conversation. He began to tell us about the pressure the local farms were under by what he called “american farming business”. I had already read empire and was in the middle of multitude and was ready for this conversation. We talked about the farmer’s unions and the way each of them were systematically swallowed up by bureaucracy. Our conversation swayed between rage and grief. I’ve since learned more about this process. Wendell Berry calls it agribusiness and identifies it as central to the “unsettling of america”. We took a photo of him as a remembrance of the chat and continued to reflect on American style farming in france and in western Canada where we now live.
The second influence has come from my continuing research in critical pedagogy. My recent publications have all explored the development critical listening, a critical media aurality (the listening version of media literacy). It seems to me that the development of an aural based critical method will be of value in a digital world dominated by technocapitalist-spectacle celebrating what bell hooks calls white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. The development of critical listening takes its philosophical foundations from Adorno, its pedagogical orientation from Friere, Giroux, hooks, and McLaren, but its biopolitical value from its role in human history.
This is the point were critical listening takes me back to my conversation with the farmer. Hearing his story made the hegemony of agribusiness – or neoliberalism – very, very real. I was carrying around 3 large books which told me the same thing the farmer did (which i realized was Michael Hardt’s point in the introduction to empire). But it was the farmer that really drove it home. He spoke from his life experience and I was transformed.
Speaking and listening draws us into ecology. The social ecology that we speak and that we hear is transformed by the hegemonic forces of neoliberalism. We speak of investing time, marketing our brand and other such business speak. In dissensus Jacques Ranciere quoted Schiller: “man is only completely human when he plays.” It seems that play produces a great many things but none of those things correspond to the efficiencies and rationalisms (weber) of neoliberalism. Cultural Ecology is produce by play. Music plays a role in the production of cultural and social ecology. Perhaps music’s first role in human life is the production of ecology. What is certain is that the 20th century has transformed human relationships with the land, with each other, and with ourself. The financialization of human life is the industrialization of cultural ecology. So I have come to realize that the struggle, implicit in biopolitics, and the formation of community, implicit in ecology, are two sides of the same event. The restoration of human play is the restoration of cultural ecology and the repoliticization of the human commons. The struggle is not to overthrow something but instead to become more human.
Welcome to ECOmusicology.
