Ecological Authentication
3.2 Ecology and Self
Acknowledging the mutualism of organism and environment, means also recognising the importance of ecological experience to self-identity. After all, an individual’s movements, convictions, activities, and identities are always situated in wider ecologies. So too is their use, understanding, and expression of aesthetic experience. It is the agent’s orientation in physical and interpersonal surroundings that psychologist Ulric Neisser famously captured in his notion of the ‘ecological self’.1 From a description of ecological perception – of a direct, first-person, intentional,
Gibsonian kind – Neisser establishes an exploratory, active, imaginative conception of the individual as embedded in human, and other, networks, concluding: ‘We know ourselves not only as objects of thought and experience but also as objects of perception, genuinely engaged with our fellow human beings and our shared environment’.2 I hope that the discussion staged thus far hints
at how our engagements with popular music evidence the first part of Neisser’s claim and, to a lesser degree, the second half too. Fleshing out an argument for how musical engagement can disclose authenticating ‘shared environments’ and specify human contexts is the analytical task of Part Three, and a philosophical aim of Part Four.
Understanding how the ‘ecological self’ emerges from and is formed within musical experience is enriched by looking to philosophical thinking from outside musicology. And psychology, too; while psychology gives us a view of the reality of perception and the self, philosophies of environment probe the issue of the meaning(s) of ecological experience. ‘Philosophical’ thinking is taken broadly here, and ranges from (ethical) philosophy established in the academy to disciplines practiced out(side) in the world, including soundscape ecology and psychogeography. The discourse of latter ‘practices’ is frequently framed by ‘academic’ (or
1 Here I primarily refer to Neisser’s compressed account of self-knowledge. Ulric Neisser, ‘Five Kinds of Self-
Knowledge’, Philosophical Psychology, 1/1(1988): pp. 35–39.
‘professional’) philosophy, though practitioners also understand that being out in, interacting with, and experiencing the world can lead to and reflect forms of philosophical thought. Musical experience, especially the ecological, world-disclosive aspects of listening, can be – and has been, Andrew Bowie’s study3 is exemplary – understood as both an object of philosophy and as giving
rise to and conveying philosophies. After observing the flowering of philosophically-interested musicology, Bowie writes ‘in my view such work using philosophy to look at music puts rather too much faith in philosophy, and too little in music itself’.4 Bowie points to Daniel Barenboim’s
tribute to Edward Said as representative: ‘He wrote about important universal issues such as exile, politics, and integration. However, the most surprising thing for me, as his friend and great admirer, was the realisation that, on many occasions, he formulated ideas and reached conclusions through music; and he saw music as a reflection of the ideas that he had regarding other issues’.5
Cornel West’s broadcast soundbite ‘I’m a blues man in the life of the mind, and a jazz man in a world of ideas’ also hints at a view of music and philosophy (and history) as co-essential. I ‘put faith’ in sonic specifications and affordances, the ethics of which are discussed in Part Four.
Philosophical works on environment typically centre around human relations to ‘natural’ environments. Of course, music can be part of, and can specify natural environments, though, as we shall see, it can also be more abstract and artificial. Nonetheless, key philosophical writings on natural ecology and environmental ethic offer some key concepts that intersect with notions of the authentic self and can resonate with affirming listening experience. In the writings of Heidegger and Næss we are presented with the powerful concepts of ‘home’, ‘dwelling’ and ‘belonging’ all of which point to a positive, centred, and fundamentally relational view of the self as connected to spaces and places. ‘Home’ and ‘dwelling’, on first glance, smack of conservatism and stasis – their deployment by conservative writers, namely Roger Scruton, only adds to this sense – and yet, as
3 Andrew Bowie, Music, Philosophy, and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 4Ibid., p. 2.
5 Daniel Barenboim, ‘Sound and Vision’, The Guardian, 25 October
Luca Valera argues, home and dwelling rely on active world- and meaning-making. Valera explains: ‘Through dwelling human beings open spaces and create new worlds. They rediscover the actual meaning of things and establish essential links with spaces through memory, artistic production, construction of places etc.; to put it briefly, through the act of changing the world’.6 A connection
of these terms and ‘world making’ (and ‘agency’, more broadly) is invited. More significantly, home, dwelling and belonging specify a form of ecological identification that I recognise in musical engagements. In the simplest terms, songs give us spaces and places to be (the ‘third’ listening position) and to identify with. This is not just retrospective; that is, our ecological connections to music are not limited to experiences, however meaningful and powerful, of being ‘taken back to’ somewhere by a song. Music not only provides access to subjective ecological archives, songs also demand that we make something of their worlds as we encounter them. One possible response is ‘identification’, a form of (authenticating) appropriation, where ‘the human being can create a home because it identifies itself with the place in which it has chosen to dwell’.7 The tracks that
authenticate us are those which invite us in, those which specify worlds we recognise and are recognised by, and those which specify places and spaces that afford meaningful experience and action. With this, we move closer to the processual view of authenticity surveyed early on in this thesis, though the specific argument made here is that experientially interacting with spaces and places, in music and elsewhere, is a vital aspect of self-assessment, development and affirmation. Before moving on, I want to briefly make one final point, to which I will need to later return. Heidegger’s notion of ‘home’, it has been noted, projects an exclusionary sense ‘inherent in his philosophy’.8 Valera approaches the broader problem of the development of the ecological
self with, and at the expense of, others via Sartre, who observed the conflict that inevitably results
6 Luca Valera, ‘Home, Ecological Self, and Self-realization: Understanding Asymmetrical Relationships Through
Arne Næss’s Ecosophy’, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-018-9715- x,2018): accessed, 25 May 2018: pp. 1–15.
7 Ibid., p.5.
8 Carl Lavery and Simon Whitehead, ‘Bringing it all Back Home: Towards an Ecology of Place’, Performance Research,
between situated, subjective forces in the world. Recorded music, by virtue of its accessibility, abstract (or ‘virtual’) nature, and invitation to imaginative engagement, negates the physical problem of ‘real world’ ecological antagonism. Put simply, immersive listening experience offers us a way of enacting, developing, and expressing ecologically situated subjectivities that is not detrimental to others. In this sense, the ‘other’ worlds opened up by music can be understood more positively as sites of ecological opportunity and being (though the issues of context and ‘competence’ are unavoidable here).
In a useful, if occasionally unanchored, synthesis of environmental and transpersonal psychology and (Næss’) philosophy, Einar Strumse offers a broadened understanding of both the ‘physical environment’ and the ‘ecological self’. Strumse’s conceptual expansion results from, and is concentrated by, a fundamentally relational, integrative view of ecological relations. In simplified terms, the self is not a contained ego, but is established by identifying with, and seeking to be identified by, its surroundings. ‘The realisation of this sense of self’, Strumse explains, ‘starts when we cease to understand ourselves as isolated, narrow and competing egos and begin to identify with other humans such as family and friends and continue to the whole human species. In order to include the global level the requirement is that this identification goes beyond humankind to include the non-human world’.9 It is argued that self-identification occurs through five primary
modes of ecological interaction, all of which can be related to kinds of ecologies, and forms of involvement, specified by recorded popular song. Indeed, the interpretive analyses that form the second half of part three are organised, albeit loosely, according to combinations of these kinds of interaction. The first, ‘external, physical location’ points to an individual’s perception of the properties of, and objects featured in, their ecological surroundings. Strumse conceives of this as a ‘scientific’ – observational, objective, detached even – form of environmental experience. Heft’s ‘topography’, discussed in 3.1, is called to mind here. In academic and vernacular discourse on
9 Einar Strumse, ‘The Ecological Self: a Psychological Perspective on Anthropogenic Environmental Change’,
Sigur Rós’ Takk idiolect, for instance, we see topographical specifications prioritised. While acknowledging the basis for these, in 2.4 I detail immersive, affective, and emergent affordances. Strumse next acknowledges environments as ‘social systems’. Human relations are the focus here and, as such, this form of ecological experience is of special interest to social scientists (Strumse uses these two forms of experience to set up a scientific/social opposition). After providing an overview of developments in symbolic interactionist and affect control theory, Lynn Smith-Lovin10
offers an alternative to this, discussing socially situated agents in terms of an ‘ecology of identities’ and, in the process of doing so, offers a dynamic view of self-social system relations. Simply put, ‘selves and social environments sustain and shape one another’.11 The use of plurals (‘identities’
and ‘selves’) is intentional and noteworthy, as Smith-Lovin asserts the potential of agents to assume multiple identities. Such agency, it is argued, rests on the interactional and, with this, affective affordances of social systems. Thirdly, Strumse describes the environment as an ‘emotional territory’ experienced ‘exclusively in terms of emotions and associations’.12 The authenticating
appeal of Ed Sheeran’s ‘Castle On The Hill’, for example,13 surely rests on its ability to inspire
imaginative engagement with affectively domesticated places (the ‘take me back to when’ line is also neatly supported by overt stylistic regression, notably in the appropriation The Edge’s use of delay on the guitar). The influence of this expressive stance is popular and of influence; elsewhere, we can observe Brighton-based singer-songwriter Maisie Peters attempting to channel a similarly reflective outlook on ‘The Place We Were Made’, which is not unremarkable bearing in mind she was fifteen at the time of the song’s release. Recorded song’s capacity to afford, with a special directness, autobiographical association can be understood within this concept. I argue that songs can also specify potential emotional territories; that is, affective settings experienced in song but
10Lynn Smith-Lovin, ‘Self, Identity, and Interaction in an Ecology of Identities’, in Peter J Burke, Timothy J.
Owens, Richard Serpe and Peggy A. Thoits (eds.), Advances in Identity Theory and Research (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2003): pp. 167–178.
11 Ibid., p. 167.
not, in the obvious sense, in everyday life. I also submit that authenticating engagements with songs result from the simultaneous – in knowledge of the gestalt nature of musical experience14 –
specification of topographic, social, and affective worlds.
Environment as a ‘setting for action’, Strumse’s fourth understanding, is easily integrated into this list. While we have already seen how physical musical spaces afford modes of expressive comportment, the challenge now, then, is to relate perceiver action to sonically disclosed ecologies. Finally, Strumse points to the ‘mystical’ experience of environment as self, where ‘the environment is no longer something that can be easily detached from the person, because the detachment itself turns the person into something else’15. This idea can be readily applied to experiences of musical
attunement – ‘the song is you’ – and especially to the forms of embodied entrainment discussed in part two, where the musical environment is understood not as separate from the listener, but as part of a two-way, perceptual relationship where listener (identity) and sonic environment are simultaneously constituted. It is worth noting that when applied to music, the first of Strumse’s types, ‘physical location’, seems to explicitly concern ‘specification’, whereas the others hint more obviously at experiential ‘affordances’.
My interest in ecological writingfrom outside of professional musicology, philosophy, and psychology rests on practitioners’ shared emphasis on the exploratory, imaginative, and affective
use of environment. One unlikely but noteworthy influence is ‘deep topography’, an emerging
discipline that has close ties with the established and once again intellectually popular psychogeography. Both psychogeography and deep topography prioritise walking as a means of exploring environments and both have an emphasis on contemporary urban and ‘liminal’ environments. It is not, then, mode of environmental interaction, or topographic emphasis that bear direct relation to musical experience, but more broadly the pursuit of interaction with
14 I consider this issue in section 2.3 with reference to Daniel Stern’s phenomenological study. Daniel N. Stern,
Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology, the Arts, Psychotherapy, and Development (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2010).
environment as a means of experiencing space, and place; in short, the intentional use of environment in order to experience meaning and self. In the writings of Nick Papadimitriou, deep topography’s somewhat eccentric originator, ecological interactions lead to deep connections with landscape and, with this, self – to ecological ownership and agency. Papadimitriou’s perambulations around North London also led to the formation of historical and social understandings of place and space that are imbued with subjectivity. But deep topography is not a purely solipsistic practice: while it is understood that the perceiver experiences the world from a first-person perspective, by opening oneself up to experience the perceiver not only enables the formation of personal connections with environment but also insight into the collective phenomenology of ecological settings. The act of writing up ecological experiences also points to deep topography’s hermeneutic – and, thus, intersubjective – as well as phenomenological ambitions. In Papadimitriou’s book
Scarp,16 we are presented with phenomenological concepts that, in their identification of the
transformative and interpretive potential of ecological experience, invite translation into a musical context. One such concept, ‘proximity flight’, is explained in the following, typically personal and lyrical, passage:
A particularly strident line of pylons follows the stream’s course and adds a peculiar intensity to the landscape this is definitely a place of history and power, one of those Celtic ‘thin places’, where a sense of something other lurks behind the visible. At one time, a few years back there were nettle-edged, but they seem to have dried out. I love to sit by the track crossing below the high-tension cables and imagine that I’m somewhere in the Ukraine, circa 1952, starting up at these triumphant monuments to the electrification of my region. I’m a veterinary surgeon working on a sovhoz located somewhere unpronounceable deep in the shimmering wheat plains. I see tractors and fat sows; I see