ecology without nature

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ECOLOGY


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Ecology without Nature EKG EVEAL AESECS

TIMOTHY MORTON

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESSCambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 2007


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Copyright 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard Colege

ll rights reserved

Printed in the United States of merica

SBN13: 978-0-674-024342

SBN0 074-0243-6

The CataloginginPubication Data are available from the Library of Congress.

Epigaph to Chapter To the Reader," by Denise Levertov, from

Poems 96-967 copyrght 9 by Dense Levertov. Reprinted bypermission of New Direcions Publishing Corp., Pollinge Limited and the

proprietor.

Pink Foyd Gantchester Meadows" U11au1a EM 969). Words and

Music by Roge Wates Copyright 970 Renewed) and 980 Lupus Music

Co. Ltd., London, England. TROHampshire House Pubishng Corp., New

York contols a pubication rights for he U.S. and Canada Used by

Permission


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F K


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Acknowledgments

itng this book has often called to mind a pecaious pictue ofwalkng acoss a mneeld wth a bouquet of owes, dessed in the

costume of a clown. Fo those who encouaged me acoss, I havenothing but thanks: Davd Clak, Geg Dobbns, Maaet Feguson,Kate Flnt, Dense Gigante, Geofey Hatman, Kaen Jcobs, DouglasKahn, obet Kaufman, Alan Lu, Jame C. McKusck, Davd No-book, Jffey obnson, Ncholas oe, Davd Smpson, Ngel Smth,Jane Stable, obet nge, Kaen esman, and Michael Zise. Thetwo anonymous eades appointed by Havad nveity Pess wee

extaodnaly encouagng To Davd Smpson n paticula owe adebt of gattude beyond measue, fo yeas of suppot and fendshipI beneted fom a Dstngushed Vsitng Fellowshp at Queen May,Univest of London whle copyeditng, poofeadng, and indexing.Thanks in paticula to ichad Schoch and Pa ul Hamilton. Thanks goto my eeach assstants, Seth Foest and Chistophe Schabeg, whohelped me balance my lfe, witng, and teaching. I would lke to thank

all those students, both undegaduates and gaduates, who have ex-ploed and shaed these deas snce 1998 , n classes at the Univesty ofColoado and the Unvesty of Calfona. In patcula, I am gatefulto my entie Ecomimess gaduate class of Spng 004, fo helpingme to wok though to the heat and soul of ths poj ect Seth Foest,Tmothy Kene, Dalal Mansou, Eic ' Bien, Fancsco enking,Chstophe Schabeg, Daniel ThomasGlass, Sabna Tom, Kaenalke, and Claa Van Zanten. And I am equally gateful to my


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viii . Acknowledgments

Ecology without Nature" class of Spring 2006: Tekla Babyak, An-

drew Hageman, Lynn Langemade, Rachel Swinkin, Julie Tran, and

Nicholas Valvo At Harvard University Press, Lindsay Waters has beeneverything I would wish an editor to be. John Donohue at Westchester

Book Services coordinated the copyediting Last but nt least, I don'tthink the idea of dark ecology would have been possible without a lifespent listening to the ethereal splendor of the Cocteau Twins

I dedicate ths book to y love, y wife Kate . She was the rst to

hear and discuss the ideas set down here. At every moment, she wasready with a coment, a suggestion, a kind word. And she bore ourdaughter, Claire, the sweetest stranger who ever arrved.


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Contents

Introdction: oward a heory of Ecoogica Critic ism

1 TheArtofEnvironmenalLanguage: "ICan' BelieveItIsn

2

3

Nature ! " 29

Romanticism and he Environmenta Sjec

magining Ecoogy withou Nare

Notes 207

ndex 239

40

79


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Eclgy wihu aur


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INTRODUCTION

Toward a Theory ofEcological Criticism

Nobody likes it when you menion the unconscious, and nowadays,hadly anybody likes i when you mention the envionment. You isk

sounding boing o judgmental o hysteical, o a mixtue of all hese .But thee is a deepe eason. Nobody likes it when you mention the un-conscious, not because you ae pointing out somethig obscene thatshould emain hiddentha is at least paly enjoyable. Nobody likes itbecause when you menion i, it becomes conscious. In he same way,when you mention the envionment, you bing it ino the foegound.In othe wods, it stops being the envionment It sops being ThatThing Ove Thee hat suounds and susains us. hen you hinkabou whee you waste goes, you wold stats to shink This is thebasic message of citicism ha speaks up fo envionmental jusice, andit is he basic message of this book

The main heme of he book is given away in is ile. Ecologywithout Nature agues that the vey idea of natue which so many

hold dea will have to withe away in an ecological state of humansociety. Stange as it may sound, the idea of natue is geting in heway of popely ecological foms of cultue, philosophy, politics, andat. The book addesses this paadox by consideing at above all else,fo it is in at tha the fanasies we have about naue take shapeanddissolve. In paicula, the liteatue of the omantic peiod, com-monly seen as cucially abou natue, i s the taget of my investigaion,

since it still inuences the ways in which the ecological imaginaywoks.


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4 . Ecology withou Naure

how does t affect our deas about art and culture? This chapter ana-

lyzes the Romantc perod as the moment at which the captalsm thatnow covers the earth began to take effect. Workng forward from thatmoment, the book elaborates ways of understandng the dlemmas and

paradoxes facing envronmentalsms. In a somewhat more synthetcmanner than Davd Harvey's Justce, Nature and the Geography of Df-ference, Chapter 2 accounts for why postRomantc wrtng s obsessedwith space and place. It employs my existng research on the hstory ofconsumersm, whch has established that even forms of rebellonaganst consumersm, such as envronmentalst practces, fall under theconsumerst umbrella. Becase consumersm s a discourse about

dentty, the chapter contans detaled readngs of passages n envron-

mentalst wrtng where a narrator, an I ," struggles to stuate hm or

herself in an envronment.Chapter 3 wonders where we go from here . What knds of poltcal

and social thnkng, making, and dong are possble? The book moves

from an abstract dscusson to a seres of attemts to determne pre-csely what our relatonshp to envronmental art and culture could be,

as socal, poltical anmals. The chapter explores dfferent ways oftakng an artstc stand on envronmental ssues. It uses as evdencewrters such as John Clare and Wllam Blake, who mantaned pos-

tons outsde manstream Romantcsm. Chapter 3 demonstrates thatthe Aeolan," ambent poetcs outlned n Chapter pckng up thevbratons of a materal unverse and recordng them wth hgh deltynevtably gnores the subect, and thus cannot fully come to

terms wth an ecology that may manfest tself n bengs who are also

personsncludng, perhaps, those other bengs we desgnate as an-mals.

Chapter 1 offers a theory of envronmental art that s both an expl

caton of t and a crtcal reecton. Chapter 2 offers a theoretcal reecton on ths, the dea" of environmental art. And Chapter 3 s a

further reecton stll. This theory of the theory" s poltical. Far fromachevng greaer levels of theoretcal" abstracton (abstracton s farfrom theoretcal) , the volume rises " to hgher and hgher levels of concreteness. Ecology without Nature does not oat away nto the stratosphere. Nor does t qute descend to earth, snce the earth sarts to lookrather dfferent as we proceed.

Ecologcal wrtng keeps nsstng that we are embedded" n na-

ture.6 Naure s a surrounding medum tha sustans our beng Due tothe propertes of the rhetorc that evokes the dea of a surroundng


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Inroducion . 5

medum, ecologcal writng can never properly establish that ths s na-ture and thus provde a compellng and consstent aesthetc bass for thenew worldvew that s meant to change socety. It s a small operaton,lke tppng over a domno. My readngs try to e symptomatc rather

than comprehensve. I hope that by openng a few wellchosen holes,the entre nasty mess mght pour out and dssolve .

Puttng something called Nature on a pedestal and admrng t fromafar does for the envronment what patrarchy does for the gure of

Woman. It s a paradoxcal act of sadstc admraton. Smone de Beau-voir was one of the rst to theorze ths transformaton of actally ex-

sting women nto fetsh objects. 7 Eclogy wthout Nature examines the

ne prnt of ow nature has become a transcendental prncple. Thisbook sees tself, n the words of ts subttle, as rethnkng envronmentalaesthetcs . Envronmental art, from low to hgh, from pastoral ktsch tourban chc, from Thorea to Sonc Youth, plays wth, renforces, or de-

constrcts the dea of natre. What emerges from the book s a wdervew of the possibltes of environmental art and crtcsm, the

wdescreen" verson of ecological culture. Ths verson will be un-

afrad of dfference, of nondentty, both n textual terms and n termsof race, class , and gender, f ndeed textualcrtcal mattrs can b sepa-rated from race, class, and gender. Ecocrtcsm has held a special, so-

lated place n the academy, n part because of the deologcal baggage tis lumbered wth. My ntent s to open t up, to broadn t. Even f aShakespeare sonnet does not appear explctly to be about" gender,

nowadays we stll want to ask what t mght have to do wth gender.The tme should come when we ask of any text, What does ths say

about the envronment? " In the current stuaton we have already decded whch texts we wll be askng.

Some readers wll already have pegged me as a postmodern theo-rst" on whom they do not wsh to waste ther tme. I do not beleve

that there s no such thng as a coral reef. (As t happens, modern n-dustral processes are ensurng they do not exst, wheter I beleve nthem or not. ) I also do not beleve that envronmental art and ecocrtcsm are entrely bogus. I do beleve that they must be ddressed crt-

cally, precsely because we care about them and we are about theearth, and, ndeed, the future of lfeforms on ths planet, snce humans

have developed all the tools necessary for ther destructon As muscianDavd Byrne once wrote, Nuclear weapons could wipe out lfe on

earth, f sed properly."8 It s vtal for us to think and act n more general, wder terms Partcularsm can mster a lot of passon, bt t can


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14 Ecology without Nature

npulaton o preormed peces on a readymade board. Ths s alsohow Hegel dstngushed dalectcal thnkng rom sheer gc.19 Theremust be a movement at least rom A to notA. At any moment, thoughtnecessarly bumps ts head aganst what t snt. Thnkng must go

somewhere," though whether t goes anywhere partcularly sold s upor grabs. Ths encounter wth non dentty, when consdered ully, hasproound mplcatons or ecologcal thnkng, ethcs, and art. Non-dentty has a lneage n nature wrtng tsel, whch s why I can wrteths book at all. Peter Frtzell delneated a derence between navelymmetc and selreexve orms o nature wrtng. In the latter, whatnature was really lke s oten not what nature was really lke (or, or

that matter, what t s ) ."20

Natural History Lessons

One o the deas nhbtng genunely ecologcal poltcs, ethcs, phlosophy, nd art s the dea o nature tsel. Nature, a transcendental term

n a materal mask, stands at the end o a potentally nnte seres oother terms that collapse nto t, otherwse known as a metonymc lst :sh, grass, mountan ar, chmpanzees, love, soda water, reedom ochce, heterosexualty, ree markets . . . Nature. A metonymc seresbecomes a metaphor. Wrtng conjures ths notorously slppery term,useul to deologes o all knds n ts very slpperness, n ts reusal tomantan any consstency.2 1 But consstency s what nature s all about,

on another level. Sayng that somethng s unnatural s sayng that tdoes not conorm to a norm, so normal" that t s bult nto the veryabrc o thngs as they are. So nature " occupes at least three places nsymbolc language. Frst, t s a mere empty placeholder or a host oother concepts. Second, t has the orce o law, a norm aganst whchdevaton s measured. Thrd, nature" s a Pandoras box, a word thaencapsulates a potentally nnte seres o dsparate antasy objects. It

s ths thrd sensenature as antasythat ths book most ully en-gages. A dscplne" o dvng nto the Rorschach blobs o others en-joyment that we commonly call poems seems a hghly approprate wayo begnnng to engage wth how nature " compels eelngs and beles .

Nature wavers n between the dvne and the materal. Far rombeng somethng natural" tsel, nature hovers over thngs lke a ghost.It sldes over the nnte lst o thngs that evoke t. Nature s thus not

unlke the subj ect," beng who searches through the entre unverse


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Introduction 15

or ts reecton, only to nd none. I t s just another word orsupreme authorty, then why not just call t God? But ths God snothng outsde the materal world, then why not just call t matter?Ths was the poltcal dlemma n whch Spnoza, and the dests o

eghteenthcentury Europe, ound themselves .22 Beng an out" athestwas very dangerous n the eghteenth century, as evdenced by thecryptc remarks o Hume and the ncreasngly cautous approach oPercy Shelley, who had been expelled rom Oxord or publshng apamphlet on athesm. God oten appeared on he sde o royal au-thorty, and the rsng bourgeose and asocated revolutonary classeswanted another way o beng authortatve. Ecoogy wthout nature"

means n part that we try to conront some o the ntense notons whchnature smudges .Ecologcal wrtng s ascnated wth the dea o somethng that exsts

n between polarzed terms such as God and matter, ths and that, sub-ject and obj ect. I nd John Lockes crtque o the dea o ether to behelpul here. Lockes crtque appeared toward the begnnng o themodern constructon o space as an empt set o pont coordnates. 2 3

Numerous holes n materalst, atomst theores were lled by some-thng elemental . Newton's gravty worked because o an ambent etherthat transmtted the propertes o heavy bodes nstantaneously, n ananalog or (or as an aspect o) the love o an omnpresent God.2 4 Iether s a knd o ambent ud" that surrounds all partcles, exstng n between" them, then what surrounds the partcles o ambent udthemselves?25 I nature s sandwched between terms such as God andmatter, what medum keeps the thngs that are natural sandwched together? Nature appears to be both lettuce and mayonnase. Ecologcalwrtng shules subject and object back and orth so that we may thnkthey have dssolved nto each other, though what we usually end upwth s a b lur ths book calls ambience.

Later n the modern perod, the dea o the natonstate emerged as away o gong beyond the authorty o the monarh. The naton all tooten depends upon the very same lst that evokes the dea o nature.Nature and naton are very closely ntertwned I show how ecocrtquecould examne the ways n whch nature oes not necessarly take usoutsde socety, but actually orms the bedrock o natonalst enjoy-ment. Nature, practcally a synonym or evl n the Mddle Ages, wasconsdered the bass o socal good by the Romantc perod. Accordngto numerous wrters such as Rousseau, the ramers o the socal con-tract start out n a state o nature. The act that ths stte s not much


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dieent om the concete ungle o actual histoical cicumstancehas not escaped attention.

n the Enlightenment natue became a way o establishing acial andsexual identity and science became the pivileged way o demon

stating it. The nomal was set up as dieent om the pathologicalalong the coodinates o the natural and the unnatural26 atue bythen a scientic tem put a stop to agument o ational inquiy: Wellit's just in my natue. He is ideological you ae pejudiced but myideas ae natual . A metaphoical use o Thomas Malthus in the woko Chales Dawin o example natualized and continues to natualize the wokings o the invisible hand o the ee maket and the

suvival o the ttestwhich is always taken to mean the competitive wa o all (ownes) against all (wokes). Malthus used natue toague against the continuation o ealy moden welae in a documentpoduced o the govenment o his age. Sadly this vey thinking is nowbeing used to push down the poo yet uthe in the battle o the supposedly ecologically minded against population gowth (and immigation). atue achieved obliquely though tuning metonymy into

metapho becomes an oblique way o talking about politics. What ispesented as staightowad unmaked beyond contestation iswaped.

One o the basic poblems with natue is that it could be consideedeithe as a substance, as a squishy thing in itsel o as essence, as an abstact pinciple that tanscends the mateial ealm and even the ealm oepesentation. Edmund uke consides substance as the stu o natue in his witing on the sublime.27 This substantialism assets thatthee is at least one actually existing thing that embodies a sublimequality (vastness teo magnicence). Substantialism tends to pomote a monachist o authoitaian view that thee is an extenal thingto which the subject should bow. Essentialism on the othe hand hasits champion in mmanuel Kant. The sublime thing can neve be epesented and indeed in cetain eligions says Kant thee is a pohibitionagainst tying (Judaisn slam) . This essentialism tuns out to be politically libeating on the side o evolutionay epublicanism.28 On thewhole natue witing and its pecusos and amily membes mostlyin phenomenological and/o Romantic witing has tended to avo asubstantialist view o natueit is palpable and despite the explicit politics o the autho. Futhe wok in ecocitique should delin

eate a epublican nonsubstantialist countetadition unning thoughwites such as Milton and Shelley o whom natue did not stand ino an authoity o which you sacice you autonomy and eason.


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Ecologcal oms o subjectivity inevitably involve ideas and decis ionsaboutgroup identity and behavio. Subjectivity is not simply an individual and cetainly not just an individualist phenomenon. t is a collective one. Envionmental witing is a way o egisteing the eeling o

being suounded by othes o moe abstactly by an otheness something that is not the sel. Although it may displace the actual social collective and choose to wite about suounding mountains instead suchdisplacements always say something about the kinds o collective liethat ecological witing is envisaging. Fedic Jameson outlines the necessity o citicism to wok on ideas o collectivity:

Anone who eoe he tme e of the ommnt o the oet fom eft pepete mt fe hee pobem ) how o dngh po on d fom ommntnm; ) ow o dffeene te oee pojet fom fm o nzm; 3) how to ee heo nd he eonom eeth how o e he Mt n ofptm o demonte the nbt of o oton whn hem. A fo oee dente, n ho moment n wh ndd peon dent h been nmed deenteed o of m

pe bje poon, e no too mh to tht omethngnogo be oneptzed on te oete ee.

The idea o the envionment is moe o less a way o consideing goupsand collectiveshumans suounded by natue o in continuity withohe beings such as animals and plants. is about beingwih. As Latou has ecently pointed out howeve the actual situation is a moedastically collective than that. All kinds o beings om toxic waste tosea snails ae clamoing o ou scientic political and atistic attention and have become pat o political lieto the detiment o monolithic conceptions o atue. To wite about ecology is to wite aboutsociety and not simply in the weak sense that ou ideas o ecology aesoci constuctions. Histoical conditions have abolished an extasocial natue to which theoies o society can appeal while at the sametime making the beings that ell unde this heading impinge eve moeugently upon society.

Dieent images o the envionment suit dieent kinds o society.Substantialist images o a palpable distinct natue embodied in atleast one actually existing phenomenon (a paticula species a paticula gue) geneate authoitaian oms o collective oganization. The

deep ecological view o natue as a tangible entity tends this way. Essentialist ideas o a natue that cannot be endeed as an image havesuppoted moe egalitaian oms. t would be vey helpul i ecoci


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single, independent, and lasing ut deluded ideas and ideological xa-tions do exist atue is a ocal point that compels us to assume ce-tain attitudes deology esides in the attitude we assume towad thisascinating object y dissolving the object, we ende the ideological

xation inopeative At least, that is the planThe ecocitical view o postmodenism, o which theoy is a

shibboleth, has much in common with the English dislike o the FenchRevolutionindeed, it is in many ways deived om it5 Theoy,goes the agument, is cold and abstact, out o touch 6 t oces oganicoms into boxes that cannot do them justice t is too calculating andational Postmodenism i s j ust the latest vesion o this soy state o

aais O couse, the English position against the Fench was its ownabstaction, a selimposed denial o histoy that had aleady hap-penedthe beheading o Chales , o instance

Academics ae neve moe intellectual than when they ae being anti-intellectual o selespecting ame would compot himsel o heselquite like Aldo Leopold o Matin Heidegge What could be moepostnden than a poesso eexively choosing a social and subjec-

tive view, such as that o a ame What could be moe postmodenthan ecociicism, which, a om being naive, consciously blocks itseas to all intelletual developments o the last thity yeas, notably(though ot necessaily all at once) eminism, antiacism, anti-homophobia, deconstuction ust as the Reagan and ush administa-tions attempted a eun o the s , as i the s had neve hap-pened, so ecociticism pomises to etun to an academy o the past tis a om o postmoden eto

ecocitics dislike what say, howeve, so will poststuctualistsPoststuctualismciticism that acts as i the s had occuedhas its own views o natue, though it may not name it so baldly t isjust tat these views ae supposedly moe sophisticated than peviousones Thee is still the basic seach o something in between cate-goies such as subj ect and object, act and value Thee exists a class di-vide between the enjoymentobjects o ecociticalconsevative andpoststuctualistadical eades ecocitics pee Aldo Leopold's al-manac style, complete with cute illustations, poststuctualists tend togo o the latest compilation al bum by an ambient techno D t maynot be eethoven, but it is stil l polite at a cocktail paty o at opening,i not moe so Leopold and The Ob ae eally two sides o the same

coin, accoding to ecocitique Whethe they ae highbow o middle-bow, installation o pastoal symphony, atwoks exhibit what callcomimsisJ a hetoical om descibed in detail in Chapte , and ex


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ploed thoughout this book Thundebid o Chadonnay, eto o u-tuistic, it's all the same ecomimesis

Postmodenism is mied in aestheticism t eezes iony into an aes-thetic pose When suggest that we dop the concept o natue, am

saying that we ally dop it, athe than ty to come up with hastilyconceived, new and impoved solutions, a new om o advetisinglanguage This is about what you think without mens in the title othis book Deida's poound thinking on the without, the ssJ inhis witing on negative theology comes to mind Deconstuction goesbeyond just saying that something exists, even in a hypeessentialway beyond being And it goes beyond saying that things do not exist '

Ecology without natue is a elentless questioning o essence, athethan some special new thing Sometimes the utopian language o awite such as Donna Haaway ushes to jeybuild ideas like na-tueculte8 These nonnatues ae still natue, based on hopeul in-tepetations o emeging ideas acoss disciplines such as philosophy,mathematics, and anthopology, ideas that tun out to be highly aes-thetic Chapte ocuses on a set o altenatives to taditional ideas o

natue that lie j ust to the side o it Assuming that natue itse l is toosot a taget these days, analyze possible ways o thkng the sameidea bigge, wide, o bette unde the geneal heading o ambience

To get popely beyond postmodenism's pitalls, genuinely citicalecociticism would engage ully with theoy we conside the nonthe-ological sense o natue, the em collapses into impmac and histoy ways o saying th same thing Lieoms ae constantlycoming and going, mutating and becomng extinct iosphees and eco-systems ae subject to aising and cessation Living beings do not oma solid pehistoical, o nonhistoical gound upon which human his-toy plays ut natue is oten wheeled out to adjudicate between whatis eeting and what is substantial and pemanent atue smoothesove uneven hstoy, making its stuggles and sueings illegible Giventhat much ecocitcism and ecologcal liteatue is pimitivist, it is ionicthat indigenous societies oten ee to natue as a shapshiting tick-ste athe than as a m basis The nal wod o the histoy o natueis that atu is histoy. atual beauty, pupotedly ahistoical, is atits coe histoical 9

What Is Nature For ?

Ecolo without Natu stats as a detailed examinaton o how atepesents the envionment This helps us to see that natue is an a


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bitay hetoical constuct empty o independent genuine existencebehind o beyond the texts we ceate about it The hetoic o natuedepends upon something dene as an ambien poeics a way o conjuing up a sense o a suounding atmosphee o wold My agument

ollows Angus Fletche's ecent wok on an emeging Ameican poeticso the envionment4 His suggestive idea that the long sinuous l ines inWhitman and his descendants establish ways o eaching out towadand going beyond hoizons and o ceating an openended idea o natue is a valuable account o a specic om o poetics associate it ashe does with developments in postmoden and de constuctivethinking am howeve less condent than Fletche o the utopian

value o this poeticsn Chapte 2, we see that this poetics has its own histoy and that

people have invested vaious deologcal meanngs n t ove tmeWhen we histoicize ambient poetics we nd out that this too is devoid o any intinsic existence o value Some contempoay atists useambient poetics to ise above what they see as the kitsch quality oothe oms o natual epesentation ut in so dong they ignoe the

ideological qualities o the hetoic they ae using They isk ceatingjust a new and impoved vesion o the kitsch they wee tying to escape The hstoy o ambent poetcs depends upon cetain oms oidentity and subjectivity which Chapte 2 also discoves to be histoical Chapte goes still uthe Rathe than esting in histoicizationwe should begin to politicize envionmental at which means beginning to become less blind to its opeations We ouselves must not ven

tue omulating a new and impoved vesion o envionmental atThis will involve us in some paadoxes Fo example since thee is noescapng kitsch the only way to beat it is to join it

The thing we call natue becomes in the Romantic peiod and atewad a way o healing what moden society has damaged 4 Natueis like that othe Romanticpeiod invention the aesthetic The damagedone goes the agument has sundeed subjects om objects so that

human beings ae olonly alienated om thei wold Contact withnatue and with the aesthetic will mend the bidge between subjectand object Romanticism saw the boken bidge as a lamentable act ophilosophical and social lie PostKantian philosophySchelling andHegel in Gemany Coleidge in Englandoten wishes o reconcilia-ion o subject and object they met unde the ight cicumstancesthey would hit it o Subj ect and object equie a cetain envionment

in which they can join up togethe Thus is bon the special ealms o


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at and natue the new secula chuches in which subect and objectcan be emaied42

This all depends upon whethe subject and object eve had a elationship in the st place; and indeed upon whethe thee re such

things as subject and object which leads us to a cental knot thepoblem posed by some oms o utopian envionmental at subjectand object do not eally exist then why bothe tying to econcilethem O i hey do exist why would some esh amalgamation o thepai be bette than what we have now Would this amalgamation lookany dieent than the subjectobject dualism that concens us thesolution to subjectobject dualism wee as easy as changing ou minds

then why have ountless texts seeking to do exactly that not done so aleady the solution is some sense o an envionment then wha pecisely is it i it is not aound anything Will it not tend to collapse eithe into a subj ect o an obj ect

Thee ae at least two ways o looking at these iksome qustionsThe st examines the idea that we need to change u minds Instead o looking o a solution to the subjectobject poblem a moe

paadoxical stategy is in ode t questions what is poblematic aboutthe poblem itsel I at bottom here is no problem eality is indeed devoid o eed igd o conceptual notions o subject and object and we coexist in an innite web o mutual intedependence wheethee is no bounday o centewhy then do we need to make all thisecocitical uss Suely theeoe the uss is like scatching an itch thatdoesn't existtheeby binging it into existence n which case one o

the tagets o genuine citique would be the vey (eco)citical languagesthe constant elegy o a lost unalienated state the esot to theaesthetic dimension (expeiential/peceptual ) a the than ethicalpolitical paxis the appeal to solutions oten antiintellectual ando onwhich sustain the ith albeit in a subtle way

The second appoach is to wonde whethe the poblem lies not somuch in ou heads as out thee in social eality What i nomatte what we thought about it cetain eatues o the deaded duali sm wee hadwied into ou wold Ecocitique in that case takesthe cy against dualism at least hal seously It peceives it to be asymptom o a malaise that was not an idea in ou heads but an ideological eatue o the way in which the wold opeates

Ecocitique is indeed citique; but it is also eco My aim is not topoke un at hopeless attempts to join togethe what could neve be tonasunde o to supplant ecological thnking with a hippe om o belie


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24 w re

a nhlstc ceed that anythng goes The am s to stengthen envon-mentalsm Appealng to natue stll has a poweful hetocal effect nthe shot tem, elatvely speakng, natue stll has some foce But en-vonentalsm cannot be n the game just fo the shot tem And that

natue emans an effectve slogan s a symptom of how fa we have notcome, not of how fa we have

"Ecology wthout natue could mean "ecology wthout a concept ofthe natual Thnkng, when t becomes deologcal, tends to xate onconcepts athe than dong what s "natual to thought, namely, ds-solvng whateve has taken fom Ecologcal thnkng that was not x-ated, that dd not stop at a patcula concetaton of ts obj ect, would

thus be "wthout natue To do ecoctque, we must consde the aes-thetc dmenson, fo the aesthetc has been posted as a nonconceptualealm, a place whee ou deas about thngs dop away Fo Adono,"The descence that emanates fom atwoks, whch today taboo allaffmaton, s the appeaance of the affmatve ineffabie, the eme-gence of the nonexstng as f t dd exst4 At gves what s noncon-ceptual an llusve appeaance of fom Ths s the am of envon-mental lteatue: to encapsulate a utopan mage of natue whch doesnot eally exstwe have destoyed t whch goes beyond ou concep-tual gasp On the othe hand, a nonconceptual mage can be a com-pellng focus fo an ntensely conceptual systeman deologcalsystem The dense meannglessness of natue wtng can exet a gav-tatonal pull

The aesthetc s also a poduct of dstance: of human bengs fom na-tue, of subjects fom objects, of mnd fom matte s t not athe sus-pcously antecologcal Ths s a matte fo debate n the FankfutSchool Benj amns famous descpton of the aesthetc aua does ndeeduse an envonmental mage44 ebet Macuse clams that "The aes-thetc unvese s the Lebenswet on whch the needs and facultes offeedom depend fo the lbeaton They cannot develop n an env-onment shaped by and fo aggessve mpulses, no can they be envs-aged as the mee effect of a new set of socal nsttutons They canemege only n the collectve practice of creting n environment 45At could help ecology by modelng an envonment based on love(eos) athe than death (thanatos)as s the cuent technologcal-ndustal wold, accodng to Macuse Macuse uses Lebenswet (lfe-wold) , a tem developed n phenomenology out of Romantcsm's con-stucton of wolds and envonments that stuate the thnkng mnd Aswe shall see n Chapte 2, ths lne of enquy lnked togethe the env


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nrdn 25

onment and the aesthetc No wonde Macuse thnks of the aesthetcas a "dmenson e wtes "At beaks open a dmenson naccessbleto othe expeence, a dmenson n whch human bengs, natue, andthngs no longe stand unde the law of the establshed ealty pn-

cple46 Dimension, lke the aestetc tself, sts somewhee between anobjectve noton (n mathematcs, fo nstance) and a subjectve expe-ence Many of the wtes ths study encountes teat the aesthetc andnatue as f they compsed a sngle, uned dmenson But even f theewee moe than one dmenson, ths would not solve the poblems ofths ntnscally spatal way of thnkng No matte how many theeae, a dmenson s somethng we ae o notand ths assumes a

dchotomy between nsde and outsde, the vey thng that has yet to beestablshed

Adono s moe hestant than Macuse Fo hm, the aesthetc help-fully dstances us fom somethng we have a tendency to destoy whenwe get close to t

e dne of e ee em from of p m pper

nneee e d ane of ee ob je fom e obenbj e; j wo nno eene e bje nn neene nem; dne e pma ondon fo n oene o e onen ofwo. mp n n onep of bene of nee w demnd of ee ompomen o ap e bje no deor .

n ths way, the aesthetc pomotes nonvolence towad natue At snot so much a space of postve ualtes (eos ) , but of negatve ones tstops us fom destoyng thngs, f only fo a moment Fo Benjamn, onthe othe hand, the aesthetc, n ts dstancng, alenates us fom thewold What we need s some knd of antaesthetc stategy Benjamnnds a model fo ths n the age of techncal epoducblty, whee wecan download MPs of Beethoven's Pastoal Symphony, o dstbutephotocopes of a landscape pantng48

t s stll uncetan whethe the aesthetc s somethng we shouldshun, n the name of geneatng a lbeatng ecologcal atstc pactce,o whethe t s an nevtable fact of lfe that eappeas n evesubtleguses just as we thnk we have gven t the slp We could clam thatthee s a dffeence beween the aesthetc and aesthetcaton49 Butths s athe Romantc t bngs to mnd the noton of a "good aes-

thetc and a " bad one The st s good because t essts becomng ob-jected o tuned nto a commodty, f only because t oncally nte


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30 w e

The moe ty to evoke whee amthe " who s wtng thstextthe moe phases and gues of speech must employ must getnvolved n a pocess of wtng, the vey wtng that am not de-scbng when evoke the envonment n whch wtng s takng place

The moe convncngly ende my suoundngs, the moe guatvelanguage end up wth The moe ty to show you what les beyondths page, the moe of a page have And the moe of a ctonal " havesplttng "me nto the one who s wtng and the one who sbeng wtten aboutthe less convncng sound

My attempt to beak the spell of language esults n a futhe n-volvement n that vey spell Pehaps ths envonmental language of-

fes a dgesson fom the man pont O pehaps t s a compellng l-lustaton, o an ndcaton of my sncety The wtng beaks out ofphlosophcal o lteay ctonal o poetc modes nto a jounal style,somethng wth a date o a tme make, somethng wth a sgnatueand thus falls back nto the wtng t was tyng to escape Manydffeent types of lteatue ty t Consde the begnnng of ChalesDckenss Beak House wth ts ounalstyle evocaton of Mchaelmas

tem and ts allpevasve ondon fog2The "as wte tag s optonal, beng nealy always mplct n the

naatve mode of ths hetoc, whch has a decdedly ecologcalusage But n attemptng to ext the genec hoon that contans t, oany suggeston of hetocal stategy altogethe ( "Ths snt wtng, tsthe eal thng), the "as wte gestue entes an neluctable gavta-tonal eld t cannot acheve escape velocty fom wtng tself The

moe the naato evokes a suoundng wold, te moe the eadeconsumes a potentally ntemnable steam of opaque scbbles, g-ues, and topes t s lke the house n ews Caolls Aice Throughthe LookingGass Ty as she mght to leave the font gaden, Alcends heself back at the font doo Dense evetovs poem "To theReade nvets "as wte nto "as you ead But the effect s thesame, o even stonge, fo, as n advetsng language, "you becomes

a nche n the text, speccally desgned fo the actual eade4Ths hetocal stategy appeas wth astoundng fequency n a va-ety of ecologcal texts n tyng to evoke a sense of the ealty of na-tue, many texts suggest, often explctly, that ( 1 ) ths ealty s sold,vedcal, and ndependent (notably of the wtng pocess tself) andthat (2) t would be bette fo the eade to expeence t dectly athethan just ead about t But n makng the case these texts ae pulled

nto the obt of wtng, wth ts slppey, tckstesh qualtes of neve


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e f nnmen ne 3

qute meanng what t says o sayng what t means"tunng / tsdak pages Neve mnd that fo many cultues natue s a tckste,and lteay lluson would aptly summon ts evechangng, elusve"essence The hetocal devce usually seves the pupose of comng

clean about somethng "eally occung, dentvely "outsde thetext, bot authentc and authentcatng

Ecommess: Naue Wtng and he Natue of Wrtng

The devce call t wants to go beyond the aesthetc d-menson altogethe t wants to bea out of the nomatve aesthetc

fame, go beyond at ntoducng Waden Thoeau wtes: "When wote the followng pages lved alone, n the woods, a mle fomany neghbo, n a house whch had bult myself, on the shoe ofWalden Pond, n Concod, Massachusetts, and eaned my lvng by thelabo of my hands onl Thee s nothng moe "lteay than thsactvty of acknowledgng, n the negatve, the sucton of ctonalwtng6 And t s not a matte of beng moe, o les, sophstcated

tha othes The ktsch of an Aldo eopold, wtng a ounal (an "al-manac ) to convey natue n a sutable (non) aesthetc fom, meets theavantgade stategy of a mnmalst pante who puts an empty famen an at galley, o a ple of " stuff wthout a suoundng fame o aJohn Cage, makng musc out of slence o out of ambent noseeopolds A Sand County Amanac tes to escape the pull of the lt-eay, n much the same way as avantgade at tes to escape the con-

ventonal aesthetc evetovs "To the Reade is hghly lteay, gongso fa as to compae the ollng waves wth the tunng of a textspages Thee s no gult about wtng hee evetov does pont beyondthe specc event of the wods on the page, the voce ntonng thewods But somehow "To the Reade acheves a sense of the su-oundng envonment, not by beng less atful, but by beng moe soThs conscous, eexve, postmoden veson s all the more eco-mmetc fo that

Contempoay at evoes what s often excluded n ou vew of thepctue: ts suoundng fame, the space of the galley tself, the nsttu-ton of at altogethe n a vey sgncan way, these expements aeenvronmenta Only the taste and habts of the academy have pe-vented us fom seeng the connecton between ths supposedly " sophs-tcated at and the ktsch we know as "natue wtng RolandBathes wtes, n a passage of avantgade ecommess, about the expe


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32 wtt te

rienceof walking througha dry riverbed. Theexperience, hewrites, is

analogous tothatof what he calls x-aninnite play of interweaving

sgns

e ede o te et m be omped to omeone t ooe end . . .t pb empt bjet tot wt ppened to te to oftee ne, ten t w tt e d d de of te eton te de o e, oued [Ab t embed tt d eept dng ten eon owng down beow oued tee to be wtne to etn feeng of nfmt); wt e peee mtpe, edbeomng fom donneted, eteogene et of btne nd pepete gt, oo, egetton, et, , ende epoon of

noe nt e of bd, den oe fom oe on te ote de,pge gete, ote of n btnt ne o f w.

We nomally thnk of natue wtng as havng a cetan knd of con-tentsay the ake Dstct But hee we have the oenta lst deset Thss oentalst ecommess, n contast to the famla Euocentc oAmecan vaety t succnctly demonstates how avantgadeecommess s cut fom the same cloth as the ktsch vaety, despte ap-

paent dffeences (the one ogancst, the othe atcal, the one aboutbeng "home, the othe about beng "away, and so on) Oue con-j ues up an opaque, exotc land teemng wth what Bathes calls "half-dentable sgncance Bathes opens up ths vson wth a stng ofwods that conm the supposed mysteousness o the Aabc wodathe than explanng t The wod tself s teated as foegn, and so sthe clmate and envonment that t sgnes a wet season and a dyseason, a ve whee people walk, evokng the medeval mone ren-vers o wold tuned upsde down Ths s not a wold you could lven, but a wold you could vst, as a toust All the tats of ecommessae thee the authentcatng " t s what happened to the autho of theselnes, bngng us nto a shaed, vtual pesent tme of eadng andnaatng the paatactc lst the magey of dsjonted phenomena su-oundng the naato the quetness (not slence, not full sound) of the" slende explosons and "scant ces that evoke the dstance betweenthe heae and the sound souce ee n the vey gospel of post-stuctuasm, of the supposedly antnatua blss of shee textualty, wend ecommess Bathes offes us a vvd evocaton of atmosphee

An Ambent Poetcs

Strong ecommess pupots to evoke the hee and now of wtng t san nsdeout fom of "stuatedness hetoc Rathe than descbe


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e At nnent ne 33

"whee am comng fom ( "as a blueblooded young Potuguese hotdog salesman), nvoke "whee am ("as wte ths, the smel ofhot dogs wafts though the sbon nght a ) The eade glmpses theenvonment athe than the peson But the effect s much the same

Ecommess s an authentcatng devce Weak ecommess opeateswheneve wtng evokes an envonment Rhetoc used to have awhole p oply of tems fo ths weak fom of ecommess geographia(the descpton of eath o land), topographia (place), chorographia(naton), chronographia (tme), hyrographia (wate), anemographia(wnd), enrographia (tees) 0 (Angus Fletche has esusctated choro-

graphia to descbe exactly what am afte n ths chapte, the "env-

onmentpoem) But the emphass on stuatedness s dstnct andmoden Stuatedness s a hetoc that Davd Smpson has lnked to theugency of mpendng and "theatenngly nondscmatoy ecolog-cal pel Stuatedness s pevasve, he agues, because "no one nowthnks hmself mmune fom adcal theat12 The patcula ases tslone voce n the jaws of geneal doom

Ecommess s a pessue pont, cystallng a vast and complex de-

ologcal netwok of belefs, pactces, and pocesses n and aound thedea of the natual wold t s extaodnaly common, both n natuewtng and n ecologcal ctcsm Consde awence Buells The En-vironmental Imagination: "The gove of secondgowth pne tees thatsway at ths moment of wtng, wth the blueyellowgeen ve-needle clustes above spky ccles of atophed lowe lmbs OJames McKusck "As wte these wods, pee out of the wndow ofmy study acoss open elds and gnaled tees custed wth ce Beyondthose tees see cas and tucks dashng aong a busy ntestatehghway past dty ples of meltng sow that stll eman fom lastweeks snowstom Ths s the cty of Baltmoe, whee lve 1 Foecologcal ctcsm to be popely ctcal, t must get a puchase onecommess Ecommess s a mxtue of excursus and exemplum Ex-cursus s a "tale, o ntepolated anecdote, whch folows the expostonand llustates o amples some pont n t ExempJ also known asparaigmaJ o paraiegesisJ s "an exampe cted, ethe tue o fegnedan] llustatve stoy What then, of the specc featues ofecommess Paraiegesis speccally mples naatve Bu s someemaks about the descptve popetes of ecommess e n ode

Ecommess nvolves a poetcs of ambience. Ambence denotes a

sense of a ccumambent, o suoundng,worl

t suggests somethngmateal and physcal, though somewhat ntangble, as f space tselfhad a mateal aspectan dea that should not, afte Ensten, appea


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36 Ecology without Naure

At snce the age of sensb lty has sought ths mmedacy. f only thepoet could do a ubbng of hs o he ban, and tansmt the feelngs tous dectly. Ths s the logc of a cetan type of Romantcsm, anddoubtless of ealsm, natualsm, and mpessonsm (and expes-

sonsm, and so foth). We have only to thnk of suealsm and auto-matc wtng, a "dect endeng of unconscous pocesses; of ab-stact expessonsm wth ts monumental canvases; of concete musc'ssamplng and splcng of envonmental sound (by uc Fea, fonstance); o of envonmental at that ceates a "space we must n-habt, f only fo a whle. Nam June Pak's TV Garden ( ) .24 tunstelevsons boadcastng mages of leapng dances nto buddng owes .

t s mmesve yet humoous and oncal n a way that s, n Schlle'slanguage, sentmental athe than nave.

Rendeng pactces sk fogettng the othe sde of Romantcsm,the value of hestaton and ony. They ovelook why Wodswoth n-ssted that poety not onl s "the spontaneous oveow of powefulfeelngs, but also s "ecollected n tanqulty Although eectonthen dssolves ths tanqulty untl "an emoton, smla to that whch

was befoe the subject of contemplaton, s gadually poduced, anddoes tself actually exst n the mnd, the pocess thus becomes delayedand medated.25 Aleady we can see cacks n the ecommetc lluson ofmmedacy.

T Md n nn

The medial deves fom the agument n Roman Jakobson's "ClosngStatement, wth ts analyses of phatc statements.26 Jakobson exploessx aspects of communcaton and the attendant lteay effects Theseeffects ae acheved by foegoundng one of the pats of communca-ton. The sx pats ae addesse, addessee, message, code, contact, andcontext. Emphaszng the addesse gves us a "conatve statementthat dectly focuses on the ntentons of the eceve of the message"You must feel that Jakbson's model s vald. Stessng the addesseesults n an "emotve statement "et me tell you how feel aboutJaobson. Foegoundng the message tself esults n a poetc state-ment, snce Jakobson, a stuctualst, thnks that poetc language s pe-culaly selfefeenta l. f the code s foegounded, we obtan a "met-alngustc statement "You can't say that t sn't allowed nstuctualst theoes of language . f we focus on the context, we get a"efeental statement "Ths s a message about Jakobson's sxpatmodel of communcaton.


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The Art of Environmental Language 3

f we foegound the contactJ we obtan a phatc statement (GeekphasisJ speech) . "Can you ead ths awfully small typeface "Ths tele-phone lne s vey cackly. Call me back n ve mnutes can't heayou. "Check, check, check one, mcophone check. "Testng,

testng. "You'e on the a. The contact s the dmensonas lteallyas you would lke to undestand that wodn whch communcatontakes place Phatc statements make us awae of the actual a betweenus, o the electomagnetc eld that makes t possble to lsten toecoded musc, o see a move. They pont out the atmosphee nwhch the message s tansmtted Jakobson clamed that talkng bdsshae ths functon alone, of all the dffeent types of communcaton.27

Futue ecoctcsm must take the phatc dmenson of language nto ac-count. When explong the adcally new envonment of the moon, thest wods between the Amecan astonauts and ouston wee phatc"You can go ahead wth the TV now, we'e standng by. The enon-mental aspect of phatc communcaton explans the populaty n con-tempoay ambent electonc musc of samples fom ado talk shows( "ello, you'e on the a ), scanned telephone convesatons and othe

phatc phenomena. 28 pefe the tem medial athe than phaticJ because see no eason

that a statement that foegounds the medum should necessaly haveto do wth speech pe se. Medial wtng, fo nstance, hghlghts thepage on whch the wods wee wtten, o the gaphcs out of whchtey wee composed. Medal statements petan to pecepton. Usuallywe spend ou lves gnong the contact When the medum of commu-

ncaton becomes mpeded o thckened, we become awae of t, just assnow makes us panfuly awae of walkng. The Russan Fomalsts , thepecusos of the stuctualsts, descbed lteaness as an mpedng ofthe nomatve pocesses of language. Vkto Shklovsky declaed, "Thetechnque of at s to make objects unfamla' . . . to ncease the dff-culty and length of pecepton because the pocess of pecepton s anaesthetc end n tself and must be polonged.29 When the phone s notwokng popely, we notce t as a medum of tansmsson. The con-vese s also tue to pont out the medum n whch communcaton stakng place s to nteupt that communcaton. Notce how the blackmaks on ths page ae sepaated fom the edge by an empty magn ofblank pape

When ecommess ponts out the envonment, t pefoms a medalfuncton, ethe at the level of content o at the level of fom. Contactecomes content Ecommess nteupts the ow of an agument o asequence of naatve events, thus makng us awae of the atmosphee


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38 oo wo tre

"aound the acton o the envonment n whch o about whch thephlosophe s wtng Avantgade and expemental atwos that aenot dectly ecologcal n content ae envonmental n fom, snce theycontan medal elements Keth Rowe, gutast n the mpovsatonal

musc goup AMM, tals of the ncluson of "unntenton (hs tech-ncal tem fo slence) n the pantngs of Ma Rotho Unntentongeneates a cetan atmosphee suoundng Rotho's gant squaes ofvbatng colo0 Mauce Blanchot taced the ealest moment of thsfeatue of at to what he calls the dsoeuvement ( " unwong ) n Ro-mantc poety1 Ths unwokng accounts fo the automated feel ofambent poetcs, the " found qualty, the sense that t s wong "all

by tself o "comng fom nowhee ( see the subsecton afte next) "As wte (bds ae sngng, the gass s gowng) s a medal state-

ment tealy, and the medal s always lteal to some extent, the d-menson s the page we ae eadng The dea s to enfoce the lusonthat the dmenson of eadng s the same as nscpton: that eade andwte nhabt the same dmenson, the same place Ou awaeness ofths dmenson s avaable pecsely because ts tanspaency has been

mpeded by the addton of the exubeant, exobtant ecommess to theagument The "as, posed between "snce and "when, between atempoal mae and an ndcato of logcal analogy, seduces us fomone level of hetoc to the next We ente the wam bath of ambentecomme

ee comes the twst One of the meda that medal statements canpont out s the vey nedum of the voce o of wtng tself Snce the

sound of musc s avalabe va the medum of, say, a voln, then a me-dal muscal passage would mae us awae of the "volnness of thesoundts tmbe The tmbe s the qualty wth whch the sound-emttng matte s vbatng So one of the contents of a medal messagecould be the medum n ths sense Ths undemnes the nomal dstnc-ton we make between medum as atmosphee o envonmentas abacgound o "eldand medum as mateal thngsomethng n

the foegound n geneal, ambent poetcs seeks to undemne thenomal dstncton between bacgound and foegoundMedal statements can nclude meda n the sense of tmbe Suely

th s why much expemental "nose muscwhch sees pecsely toundo the bounday between what we consde nose and what we con-sde sounds nteested n tmbe Cage's pepaed pano maes usawae of the matealty of the pano, the fact that t s made of taut v-

batng stngs nsde a had wooden box The sustan pedal, nventedn the Romantc peod as an addton to the panofote, pefoms ths


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e r o nrnen ne 39

functon tself Convesely, the sustaned vbaton of a note o donemaes us awae of the spae n whch the vbaton s occung Am-bent musc can ende a pctue of an envonment usng sound effects(bdsong, waves ) o make us awae of the space n whch we ae sttng

though dones, evebeaton, and feedback The object, the mateal,of concete musc s tmbe ngustc at can do the same At the endof evetov's "To the Reade, we don't now what s wtten on the"dak pgesthey ae obscue as well as vsually dak We becomeawae of the text as mateal, as pape and pages, and the physcalhythm of tunng The tun (talan: volta s a moment n a sonnet atwhch the thought pocesses n the sonnet begn to shft t s also a

tope, a hetocal tunng And t s the clnamen of ucetus, the tuno sweve of patcles that bngs about te geneaton of wolds ev-etov's " tunng s a tope that physcalzes the noton of topng o ofvolt of swtchng fom one dea to anothe, of negaton

n Thoeau's Walden the dstant sound of bells bngs to mnd the at-mosphee n whch they esonate:

A ond erd e ree pobe dne prode one n e

me effe bron of e ner re e nerenn opere me dn rde f er neren o or ee b e zren mpr o . ee me o me n e eod w e rd rned, nd w d onered w eer ef nd neede of ewood, poron of ond w e eemen d en p nd moded nd eoed from e o e. e eo , o oe een, n orn ond, nd eren e m nd rm of . no ere epeon of w w wor repe n n e be, b pr e oe of e

wood; e me r word nd noe n b woodnp.

n ths emaable passage, Thoeau theozes the medal qualty of am-bent poetcs Notce how "staned, "a, and "melody ae all syn-onyms fo musc Thoeau s descbng how sound s "lteedacommon dea snce the advent of the synthesze, whc electoncallyltes sound waves An echo s evdence of a medum of the a that n-

tevenes between thngs le a bell and the human ea, but also of woodthat vbates We shall see, howeve, hat we cannot be as condent asThoeau about the "ognal qualty of echoed sound The echo un-demnes notons of ognalty and pesence

Te Tmal

The tmal s about sound n ts physcalty, athe than about ts sym-

bolc meanng ( "tmbal comes fom time "The chaacte o qualty


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of a muscal o vocal sound (dstnct fom ts ptch and ntensty) dependg upon the patcula voce o nstument poducng t).Tmbe, whch ntally meant a patcula pecusson nstument, ethea dum o a bell wthout a clappe ("tamboune s a elated wod),

came to descbe the way sound stkes o stamps (Fench timbre oueas, sometme aound the late Romantc and Vctoan peods.Tmbe deves fm the Geek tympanon The taut skn of the dum,even of the eadum, sepaates the nsde fom the outsde lke amagn, and gves se to esonant sound when stuck. The tympn n apntng pess makes sue the pape s at enough to egste the typecoectly. s ths dum, ths magn, pat of the nsde o the outsde

Deda has shown how ths suggestve tem evokes the dffculty of dstngushng popely between nsde and outsde.4

The tmbal voce s vvd wth the esonance of the lungs, thoat,sa lva, teeth, and skull: the gan of the voce, as Bathes called t.35 Fafom the tanscendental "Voce of Dedean theoy, ths voce doesnot edt out ts mateal embodment. acan's " llanguage, " lalangue,s the meanngless uctuton of tongueenjoyment. Ths meanngless

uctuaton makes us thnk about a space (the mouth) that s thooughlymateal Nusey hymes enable the baby to hea the sound of thepaent's voce, athe than any specc wods . One of the stongest ambent effects s the endeng of ths tmbal voce. Ou own body s oneof the uncannest phenomena we could eve encounte. What s closestto home s also the stangestthe look and sound of ou own thoat.Thus, tmbal statements can be stongly medal, evokng the medumthat uttes them. And medal statements can be tmbal, pontng outthe physcalt and matealty of the language. Ths s stongly env-onmental A guta note bngs to mnd the wood out of whch t smade. The tmbal and the medal ae two ways of descbng the samethng. Ths axom assets that at bottom, foegound and backgoundae moe than ntetwned.

Matn edegge affms that we neve hea sound n the abstact.nstead, we hea the way thns (a vey ch wod fo edegge) soundJn an almost actve sense of the veb . We hea "the stom whstlng nthe chmney, the sound of the wnd in the doo, the wal of the houndacross the moo.38 Fo edegge thee s no such thng as a "puetone all by tself. ee s a paadox. The peceptual phenomena wehave been explong possess mateal thnglness. They ae nsepaablefom matte, ncludng elds of foce. Even a supposedly "pue tonesuch as a sne wave stll emeges fom mateal (say, an electcal c


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cut) , and s ampled and tansmtted by vous mateals and enegyelds. Fo edegge, the dea of "pue sound deves fom a noton ofthe thn as a sensoy manfold (a mxtue of how thngs feel, touch,taste, and so on): "the isthetonJ that whch s peceptble by sensa-

tons . 9 But such deas sk suggestng that thee s nothng othe thansubjectve expeence. Moden at and theoy, howeve, expementwth pue tone. We could pont to the use of shee sound o colo natYves Klen's and Deek Jaman's use of blue ae exteme examples .Klens pue blue canvases hang n numeous gallees. e wote of n-tenatonal Klen Blue, a specal suspenson of ultamane (cystals ofgound laps laul) n a clea commecal bnde, Rhdopas: "IKB /

spt n matte.4 We could also nvoke the ntepetaton of sheesound o colo n psychoanalytc and lteay theoy.4

Whethe we thnk of natue as an envonment, o as othe bengs(anmals, plants, and so on) , t keeps collapsng ethe nto subjectvtyo nto objectvty. t s vey had, pehaps mpossble, to keep natuejust whee t appeassomewhee n between. The dffculty used to beesolved by deas such as that of the elements . Befoe they became spe-

cc atoms n the peodc table, the elements wee manfolds of whatwe conventonally sepaate as "subjectvty and "objectvty. Thephlosophy of elements beas stong esemblances to phenomenology.We stll descbe vese as lqud, hetoc as ey o eathy. Thnkng nelemental tems s thnkng that matte has cetan ntsc qualteswateriness s not just "panted on to the suface of the thng calledwate; wate s watey though and though. These tems have gadu-ally come to have a puely subjectve sense (ths oom fees dy; am hottempered ke tmbe and tone (see the late subsecton) , the elementals a way of descbng a "thng that s aso an "envonent. t s sub-stantal, yet suoundng. The Classcal elements (e, wate, eath, a )wee about the body as much as they wee about the atmosphee.

Te Aeoian

The Aeolan ensues that ambent poetcs establshes sense of po-cesses contnung wthout a subject o an autho. The Aeolan has noobvous souce. "Acousmatc sound, fo nstance, s dsembodedsound emanatng fom an unseen souce. t comes "fom nowhee, ot s nextcably bound up wh the space n whch t s head. Consdethe voceove n a move. t does not ognate anyhee n the pctue

on the sceen. Cnematc "endeng employs acousmac sound to llthe audtoum (suound sound). The specc sound fom of a patc


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ula place s epoduced, athe than shee slence Jet planes unseen onthe lm's suface appea to y ovehead The suoundng quet of adeset of shftng sands s head as we watch the potagonst ecallnghs o he expeences thee Expemental musc contans examples of

acousmatc sound, emegng fom loudspeakes So does the eveydaytechnology of lstenng to ecoded sound: "The tue theat of phonog-aphy came not fom ts ab lty to dsplace a voce but ts ablty to ds-place a peson's own voce42

n poety, mages can appea to ase wthout o despte the naato'scontol A poem called "A Geology, n CascadiaJ Benda llman's ex-pement wth =A=N=G=U=A=G=E poety, s both a montage of de-

scptons of Calfona though geologc tme and an account of gettngove an addcton t s mpossble to detemne whch laye has p-oty Each laye mnmes the nput of a conscous subj ect: by com-pason wth geology, addcton and wthdawal ae ntensely physcalpocesses that must be endued The fom of the poem heghtens thephyscalty by playng wth typogaphcal aangement Thee s oftensomethng gong on n the magn, out of each of ou eadng gae

One metapho blends nto anothe n a dstubng, punnng way thatmakes t mpossble to decde whch level of ealty s, to use a geolog-cal gue, the bedock

A cetan degee of audovsual hallucnaton happens when we eadpoety, as Celeste angan has demonstated concenng Walte Scott'slong naatve poem The La of the Last Minstel43 Aeolan phe-nomena ae necessaly synesthetc, and synesthesa may not gve se

to a holstc patten Because we cannot dectly peceve the souce,those ogans of ou pecepton not engaged by the dsemboded eventbecome occuped wth dffeent phenomena Ths s the mpot of con-tempoay sound at, compsng poductons that ae supposed to bedffeent fom conventonal musc Sound at s sometmes exhbted nplaces tadtonally eseved fo vsual at n these envonments, thees less focus on the muscans (f any) and the musc (f any) Acous-

matc sound can compel us to a state of dstacton athe than aesthetcabsopton Ths s not nevtable: synaesthesa could become an evenmoe compellng fom of Gesamtkunstwek than mmesve, Wag-ean foms

The dea of sounds wthout a souce has come unde attack fompoponents of acoustc ecology R Muay Schafe, who coned thetem oundscape n labeled t schophona Acoustc ecology

ctces dsembodment as a featue of moden alenaton ke othe


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foms of Romantcsm, acoustc ecology yeans fo an oganc wold offacetoface contact n whch the sound of thngs coesponds to theway they appea to the senses and to a cetan concept of the natualThe Aeolan povokes anxety, because bult nto t s a hestaton be-

tween an obscue souce and no souce at all f the soce s obscue,the phenomenon dwells n ou wold We need to expand ou pecep-ton to take stock of t t s lke what Tvetan Todoov calls the supe-natual uncanny: an unusual occuence that s ultmately explcable44f, howeve, thee s no souce at all, the phenomenon does not esde nou wold t adcally bsects t Ths s akn to Todoov's supenatualmavelous: an event that must be beleved on ts own tems We thus

face a choce between a tanscendental expeence and a psychotc oneMost ecommess wants to eassue us that the souc s meely ob-ewe should j ust open ou eas and eyes moe But ths obscutys always undewtten by a moe theatenng vod, snce ths vey vods what gves ecommess ts dvne ntensty, ts admonshng tone of"Shh sten Even at the vey depth of the lluson of endeng, thees a blankness that s stuctual to ou acceptance of the lluson tself

ne IntenitJ taiJ enin

Ambence s an expanson of the spacetme contnuum n an atwok,to the pont at whch tme comes to a standstll To nvestgate ths, letus escue the dea of tone fom ts awful fate n Amecan hgh schools Tone s a notoously casual tem t has somethng ktsch about t: t stoo emotonal, too physcal When we consde t closely, tone has a

moe pecse sgncance t efes to the qualty of vbaton Tone candenote the tenson n a stng o muscle (muscle tone), o a cetanptch: the way n whch matte s vbatng t also, sgncantly, efesto a noton of place hence "ecotone, a one of ecologcal tanston Aough aesthetc equvalent s the Geman timmung ( "mood, " attune-ment), used by Alexande von umboldt n hs descpton of howdffeent at emeges fom dffeent clmates, and mmanuel Kant n hsanalyss of the sublme45 Tone accounts mateally fo that slppeywod atmosphee Multmeda, musc, and vsual at play wth atmo-sphee as nstument and as aw mateal Thee s a lteay anaogy nenvonmental wtng and foms of poetcs gong back to the cultue ofsensblty n the eghteenth centuy46

Tone s useful because t ambguously efes both to te body and tothe envonment Fo "the body (as t s so often called n contempo-ay at and theoy) is the envonment, n the conventonal, vulga


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Catesan sense "We nhat the ody lke a peson lvng n a houseEnvonmental at makes us awae of ou eas, j ust as much as t makesus awae of the atmosphee But n so dong, t nudges us out of thevulga Catesansm, lke phenomenologcal phlosophy The lnkage of

peceve and peceved s a pedomnant theme n Mauce Meleau-Pontys phenomenology4 Thee also exsts a Btsh lneage ockeanempcsm assets that ealty wll e dffeent fo dffeent peceves 48ate n the eghteenth centuy, the dscouse of sentmentalty, whchegsteed tuth on the ody, was developed nto an ethcs n AdamSmths Theor of Moral Sentiment wth mplcatons fo the evolu-ton of the nove49 Synesthetc woks of at ty to dsupt ou sense of

eng centeed, located n a specc place, nhatng "the ody fom acental pont Ou senses ae dsoented we notce that ou gae s"ove thee, ou heang s "outsde the oom we ae sttng n

Bodly pocesses ae cyclc Plateaus of tenson and elaxaton takeplace ove tme The naatve aspect of ecommess geneates toneSpeccally, ths s a stong fom of ekphass decriptio vvd descp-ton) Ekphass exsts when a naato says "pctue ths It often

takes a vsual fom, ut tadtonally ekphass can emody any sensoynput, and thus t s appopate to ou multmeda age50 Vvd descp-ton slows down o suspends naatve tme et us dstngush etweenplotthe events of a naatve n chonologcal sequenceand torthe events n the ode n whch the naato tells them Suppose that nthe plot, event B follows event A afte an nteval of ve seconds, utthat n the stoy an ntevenng ekphass s nseted that takes sevealpages fo the eade to get though, such as Homes descpton ofAchlles sheld dung the ntense descpton of attle at the end of theIlad The effect on the eade s that the tme of naaton s held nstass In naatve, suspenson occus when the tme of the plot (theevents as they would have occued n "eal tme) dveges wdelyfom the tme of the stoy (the events as they ae naated)

In the second decade of the nneteenth centuy, S Thomas Rafflesenoyed the epettve musc of the Indonesan gamelan, and eonhadHunga late declaed, " It s a state, such as moonlght poued ovethe elds1 Statc sound ecame a ass of contempoay musc, ascomposes such as Claude Deussy ncopoated nto the compos-tons what they had leaned fom the gamelan snce ts appeaance atthe Expoiton Univerelle n Pas (). Stass ecomes audle nmuscal upenion whee one laye of sound changes moe slowlythan anothe laye Dsco musc compels dances to stay on the dance


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oo not only ecause t nvolves epettve eats, ut also ecause tsustans suspended chods that do not pogess fom A to B, ut eman"n etween wthout esoluton Ths can only e a matte of sem-lance, even n vsual at Snce epetton s tself a functon of dffe-

ence, funk, then dsco, then hphop, then house, we pogessvelyale to mne eve moe deeply the asc lues stuctue fo a sweet spot,a suspended chod pulsatng n hythmc space Ton s anothe wodfo ths sweet spot, somewhee wthn the thd pat of a foupatlues, always nea the esoluton ut neve qute makng t

Ths s how amence entes the tme dmenson Tone s a matte ofquantty, whethe of hythm o magey stctly speakng, the ampl-

tude of vatons An AA hyme scheme nceases the enegy level of apoem, as would a pepondeance of epeated eats A moe complexhyme scheme, a less epettve hythmc stuctue, endes the text"coole Texts also explot negatve hythm to geneate tone The a-sence of sound o gaphc maks can e as potent as the pesenceGaps etween stanas, and othe knds of oken lneaton, ceate toneout of shee lankness In tems of magey, tone s also quanttatve It

s not necessaly a matte of what ort of magey, j ust how much. Justas wods come n phases, magey comes n clustes Metonymc lstngcan geneate an ovewhelmng tone As wth hythm, thee s such athng as negatve magey, o apophai sometng n the neg-ate Negatve theology assets that od s not g, small, whte, lack,hee, thee Exteme negatvty conssts n ellpss ( ) o slenceEven moe exteme s placng a wod unde easue, as Mallam does(o consde Hedegges wod ) How do you ponounce acossedout wod The easue compels us to pay attenton to the wodas gaphc mak, and to the pape on whch t s wtten (and the s-lence of the unspoken) Thnk of the use of shadow n dawng, o s-lence n musc Cage scoed optonal quanttes of slenc of exactly thesame length as postve muscal phases, fo the pefome to susttutespontaneously

A text can desce somethng y delneatng t negatvely Occupatogves apophass a selfeexve twst, consstng n complanng aouthow wods fal ou alty to desce somethng Ths negatve deln-eaton s especally mpotant n ament poetcs Snce amence testo evoke the ackgound a ackgoundto dag t nto the foe-gound would dssolve tt must esot to olque hetocal state-

ges Thee s a school of thought that negatve ecology, lke negatvetheology, s a moe apt descpton of natue I eman convnced y


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Deda's emaks that negatve theology s stll plagued y the metaphyscal 2 t s poale that a negatve poetcs of the envonment alsosuffes fom these symptoms

Kants vew of the sulme povdes a lmt case fo ths secton of the

agument much moe so than that of Buke who evokes the sulme nactually exstng thngs athe than n mental expeence f Kant hmse lf tanscendental dealst that he s povdes tools fo eadng ament poetcs how much moe would someone nclned towad matealsm o empcsm do the same The shee quantty of natue wtngs a cause of ts powe And what could e moe evocatve of ths thana swathe of lankness language that evokes an endless mumung o

sclng o gltteng colo o the dffuson of a huge cloud of scentThs language estalshes a plateau on whch all sgnals ae equal n ntenstywhch mght as well e slence A negatve quantty the asence of somethng "thee evokes a sense of shee space n Kantstems ou mnd ecognes ts powe to magne what s not theeSublime is wat even to be able to tink proves tat te mind as apowe surpassing any standard of sense. Kant demonstates ths y

takng us on a jouney of quantty, fom the se of a tee though thatof a mountan to the magntude of the eath and nally to "the mmense multtude of such Mlky Way systems The sulme tanspotsthe mnd fom the extenal wold to the ntenal one

Negatve quantty has ecome a poweful tool of moden at, utalso of moden deology Fo example consde the use of slence n natonalst tuals Ths suely explans the cenotaph the empty tom of

the unknown solde Befoe Cage the two mnutes slence onAmstce Day was ntended fom ts ncepton as a ado oadcastthat would make Btons awae of the countys dead The composeJonty Sempe ecently comned evey avalale BBC ecodng of thetwo mnutes' slence complete wth newseel hss ds callng cannons ng and an6 The desgn that won the commsson o GoundZeo n New Yok Cty s enttled "Reectons of Asence

Negatve quantty sgned though ellpss o some othe effect s asuggestve tanspotaton pont n the text whch allows suj ectvty toeam down nto t The Romantc oheman consumest Thomas DeQuncey, expemented wth hs own knds of psychc and physcal ntensty n takng opum De Quncey theoes how fom the eade's(o lstenes, o dances) pont of vew tone gves us pause Thspausng s not a mee hatus o stoppng t s athe a stayngnplace

endowed wth ts own ntensty Thee s "not much gong on, whch s


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not the same as no nfomaton at all We ae thown ack on the heeandnow of odly sensaton n the anechoc chame at avadCage hed the sound of hs own ody as f t wee ampled 7 Thsheghtenng of awaeness takes place n what De Quncey calls paren-

tesis o syncope. Syncope commonly efes to aevaton andmoe aely to a loss of conscousness ut De Quncey makes the temexpeental Paenthess usually places a phase o senence nsde anothe one ut De Quncey extends the tem towad the noton of tonea plateau o suspenson what Wodswoth called a "spot of tme

RMa Can't Bive t n't At

We geneally take one knd of medum to e the background the ament a o electomagnetc eld the pape on whch text appeas Theothe knd o medum, the one we exploed as the tmal appeas asforeground. A dsemoded Aeolan sound emanates "fom the ackgound ut appeas " n the foegound Wth Aeolan events we havea paadoxcal stuaton n whch ackgound and foegound have collapsed n one sense, ut pes st n anothe sense

We ae appoachng the fundamental popetes of ament poetcs the ass of ecommess Backgound and foegound ely upon dstngushng etween hee and thee ths and that We talk aout "ackgound nose whle musc appeas as n the foegound tems ndcatng dstnct poltcal and hstocal eangs60 Backgound muscMuak o speccally ament musc attempt to undo the nomal dffeence etween foegound and ackgound The Aeolan attempts to

undo the dfeence etween a peceptual event uon whch we canfocus and one that appeas to suound us and whch cannot e dectly ought "n font of the sense ogans wthout losng ts envonng popetes Cuent neuophysology has suggested that a ecepto n the hypothalamus Alpha enales the dstcton etweenfoegound and ackgound sound A eakdown n the neuotansmsson acoss ths ecepto may n pat e esponsle fo schophenc symptoms such as heang voces ( foegound phenomena) emanatng fom sonc souces (adatos a vents) that ae nomalyconsdeed as lyng n the ackgound6 1

Alvn uce's Am Sitting in a Room () s a poweful demonstaton o the shftng and ntetwned qualtes of foegound andackgound62 A voce speakng n a oom s ecoded ove and oveagan, such that each pevous ecodng ecomes what s then eecoded n the same oom The text that uce eads s aout ths po


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cess t s medal Afte a shot whle, the ecodng pcks up the eso-nance of the oom and feeds t back, amplfyng and atculatng tthough the sound of the speakng voce (kewse, ample feedbackn geneal lets us hea the sound of the techncal medum of tansms-

son ) We lose the wods and gan the sound of the oom " tself put"tself n quotaton maks because what we come to eale s that thevoce and the oom ae mutually detemnng One does not pecede theothe The wok s stuated on a waveng magn between wods andmusc, and between musc and shee sound, and ultmately betweensound (foegound) and nose (backgound) Retoactvely, we ealethat the oom was pesent n the voce at the vey begnnng of the po-

cess The voce was always aleady n ts envonment " am sttng n aoom sts n a oom Thee was neve a pont of "handove at whchthe sound of the voce " n tself modulated nto the sound of the oom"n tself Voce s to oom, not even as sound souce to medum, butas tongue to bell They wee always mplcated n each othe Ths at sas envonmental as wtng about bds and tees, f not moe so, be-cause t tes dectly to reder the actual (sensaton of) envonment al-

togethe We could easly thnk of vsual equvalents, such as envon-mental sculptue Andy Goldswothy's wok gadually dssolves nto tsste6

Aesthetc, and futhemoe, meta physcal dstnctons, nvolve ds-cmnatons between nsde and outsde64 We can be sue that ths ds-cmnaton s metaphyscal, snce eally what we ae dealng wth s thedea of medum splt nto two aspects (foegound and backgound)We must be caeful not to asset that a medum exsts " befoe the spltoccus, snce the noton of medum depends upon ths vey splt (be-tween "hee and "thee) Thee s a Buddhst sayng that ealty s"not one, and not two Dualstc ntepetatons ae hghly dubousBut so ae monst onesthee s no (sngle, ndependent, lastng)"thng undeneath the dualst concept Othewse Alvn uce wouldnot have been able to geneate I Am Sttg a Room

ow does the splt that sepaates backgound and foegound occuThee s a devce that poduces t n at Jacques Deda has bllantlyanalyed t n such woks as Dssemato and Te Trut Patg.e calls t the remark65 The emak s the fundamental popety ofambence, ts bas gestue The emak s a knd of echo t s a specalmak (o a sees f them) that makes us awae that we ae n the pes-ence of (sgncant) maks ow do you dscmnate between the let-tes on ths page and andom patches of dt, o patches of pant and


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"extaneous matte on the canvas O between ose and soud (howabout armoy and dssoace O betweengrapcs and letters? O anonspecc smell and a specc o sgncant scet? O, even moesubtly, between a ngng bell and a soundng tongue66 Between a sub-

stance and ts attbutes A emak dffeentates between space andplace n moden lfe ths dstncton s between objectve (space) andsubectve (place) phenomena67 Evey tm teach a class on ecologcallanguage, at least one student assets that "place s what a pesonmakes of "space, wthout efeence to an utsde Even when s ex-tenal, place has become somethng tat people d o constuct; aspace that, as t wee, appes to someone Despte the gdty of the

student esponse, am suggestng hee that subjectvty and objectvtyae just a has beadth (f that) away fom each othe The llusve playof the emak establshes the dffeence out of an undffeentatedgound

n T S Elot's poety, how do we ecogne that some mage of an ex-tenal thng s actually an "objectve coelatve fo a sbjectve stateSome vey small cke occus A emak ps an "objectve mage

nto a "subjectve one The emak s mnmalstc t doesn't takemuch fo ecommess to suggest a qualty of place The subjectve valuethat shnes out of places such as Thoeau's Walden Pond emanate fommnute, as well as fom lage, sgnals n the text To dentfy the e-mak s to answe the queston: how lttle does the text need to dffe-entate between foegound and backgound, o between space andplace

t s a tusm that contempoay at tes to challenge such dstnc-tons But the emak occus moe wdely The emak s behnd thehumo of the Chale Bown catoons When the bd Woodstockspeaks, we don't know what he s sayng, but we know tat e sspeakg because the lttle squggles above hs head ae placed n aspeech bubble, whch pefoms the acton of the emak and makes uspay attenton to tese squggles as meanngful n some uspeced way(Woodstock hmself, who appeaed afte the Woodstock festval, sclose to the subject of ths book, nsofa as he embodes the natualwold " beyond Snoopy's gaden lawn )

Gestalt psychology establshes a gd dstncton etween gue andgound such that gue and gound ental each othe (the faces andcandlestck lluson s the classc example), whle t emans stctly m-

possble to see both as gue, o both as gound, at the ame tme Theemak s a quantal event What happens at the level of the emak e


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50 . Ecoogy without Nature

sembes what happens in quantum physcs, at the eve of the very

small. This sounds abstruse, even mystical, but really I mean it in a verystraightforward sense. The occurrence of the remark is always a " one-shot deal. In quantum mechanics, a choice presents itself between

waves and particles. We could measure things one way or another;never as an amalgam of the two simultaneousy.68 Until the measure-ment takes place, both possibilities are superposed, one on the other.

Reality, at that "moment (though that word only makes sense afterthe quantum wave reduction), is only a series of probabilities.

We cannot claim that there is a special entity that exists as a combi-

nation of both wave and particle. There is nothing underneath the

wave/particle distinction. The same is true of the remark. Either the in-side/outside distinction is constituted, or notin which case the distinction will appear at another date, in another place. The level of the

remark is a fundamentally indeterminate one, at which a squigglecould be either ust a squiggle or a letter. However close we get to the(admittedly articial) boundary between inside and outside (sound/

noise, smell/scent, squiggle/letter), we won't nd anything in between.

This is related to a mathematical paradox. It is impossible to establishin advance (using an algorithm) whether a point will lie on theboundary of a set, even a very simple one "Imagine two algorithmsgenerating the digits 0 . . . . and .0000 . . . respectively, but we

mght never know if the s, or the Os, are going to continue indenitely,so that the two numbers are equal, or whether some other digit willeventually appear, and the numbers are unequal . 69

The brilliance of ambient rhetoric is to make it appear as if, for aeeting second, there is something in between. Calling William

Wordsworth a minimalist, Geoffrey Hartman praises the idea ofWordsworthian nature as a contemplative space in his book on culture:

"The spacious ambience of nature when treated with respect, allowsphysical and emotional freedom; it is an outdoor room essential tothought and untraumatic (that is, relatively unforced) development. 7

This "outdoor room is the result of ambient rhetoric (and a certain at-tachment to an idea of a tempeate climate; untraumatic developmentwould be less possible if one were freezing to death). This is not to say

that ambience i s not incarnated in physical things. Ambient rhetoric is

present, for instance, in the common suburban lawn, which acts as anetension of the inside of the house and i s referred to as a carpet. 71 Ac-

tually existing spaces can have ambient qualities; otherwise, certain

forms of contemporary architecture would not be poss ible.


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The Art of Envronmental Language . 51

Margin (French marge) denotes a border or an edge, hence"seashore. Indeed, if current industrial poicies remain unchecked,

these very spaces, such as coral reefs, and liminal species (Latin, limenboundary) such as amphibians, wil be increasingly at risk of being

wiped out. But because of the logic of the remark, such spaces,whether they are outside or inside our heads, emboy what is, atbottom, illusory. I mean here to suppot these margins. As a matter ofurgency, we just cannot go on thinking of them as "in between. We

must choose to include them on this side of human social practices, to

factor them in to our political and ethical decisions. A Bruno Latourstates, "Political phiosophy . . . ds itself confronted with the obliga-

tion to internalize the environment that it had viewed up to now as an-other word.7

Since it appears to lie in between oppositional entities, the effect ofambience is always anamorphic can only be glimpsed as a eeting,dissolving presence that ickers across our perception and cannot bebrought front and center. Georges Bataille was substantializig it too

much when he labeled what he called the informe "unassimilable

waste, but it is a suggestive image for the ecological critic, preoccupiedwith waste products that will not be ushed away 3 Miimalist experi-ments with empty frames and also with frameless and formless "foundobjects or installations make this apparent.74 In these works, a t triesto sneak a glimpse of itself from the side, or from ground level, like ananimal5 We have returned to the idea of rendering, but with greaterunderstanding. Rendering appears to dissolve the aesthetic dimensionbecause it depends upon a certain necessarily nite play with the re-mark. The more extreme the play, the more art collapses into nonart.Hence the infamous stories of anitors clearing away installations,thinking they were ust random ples of paintbrushes and pots of paint.There is a politics to this aesthetics. It says that if we point out wherethe waste goes, we won't be able to keep ourselves from taking greatercare of our world. In the rhetoric of juxtaposing contents and frame,

product and waste, the antiaesthetics of the high avantgarde meets

moe common varieties of ecologica anguage.A question to which we sha ll return does not this collapse of art into

nonart actually paradoxically serve to hold open the sace of the aes-thetic " until something better comes along in an age where al l art hasbeen commercial ized?7 And therefore is not the collapse a strongy Ro-mantic gesture of defying the commodity world? I reiterate that this isnot to say that there do not eist actual anamorphic lifeforms. These


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52 wtt te

very lifeforms (coral, sea slugs, invertebrates) are vital for sustaininglife on earth. Beause they have no distinct shape, it is very hard tomake them cute, to turn them into objects of consumerist eniron-mental sympathy. A doeeyed coral reef is more likely to elicit a gasp of

horror than a coo of identication.Although it tries with all its might to give the illusion of doing so,

ambient poetics will never actually dissolve the difference between in-side and outside. The remark either undoes the distinction altogether,in which case there is nothing to perceive, or it establishes it in the rstplace, in which case there is something to perceive, with a boundary.On this point, there is an absolute difference between my argument and

that of JeanFran


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e At f nvnent ne 53

of books on ambient music and sound art.9 The copositional tech-nique of bricolage or pastiche, a collage of snatches and sam pes ofmusic, lends itself to the idea that this music does not depend uponnorative hierarchies such as beginning/end, backgroundforeground,

high/low, and so forth. The nouveau romn of the s (Robbe-Grillet) took this principle down to the very level of the syntax of theindividual sentence, whose subect would change alarmingly some-where in the middle. The snobbery of contemporary music criticismand fashion readily corrects the idea that a real disruption of norms hastaken place. Some rhizoes are more rhizomic than others .

If the function of rhizome is to oin and theefore to differentiate,

then how can it do it in a better way than a binary play of difference,without collapsing difference into identity? If sound b grows rhizomi-cally out of sound a, then is it the same sound, or a different sound? IfI am retrotting my car, tacking on found pieces here and there and ig-noring the factory specications, does it stop being the same car atsome point ? If it is now a different car, then in what consists the rhi-zomic thread connecting he two cars? If it is the same car, then

surely there is no point in talking about a connection, rhizomi or not,between two things, since only one thing exists . If I have somehow pro-duced a quasicar that exists between the original car and an en-tirely different one, then this car will suffer from the same problemsisit different or the same?

If we try to avoid the idea of hierarchy (beween inside and outside,say) , with the language of rhizome, we wil be left with the same co-nundrum, dressed up in chic language, as the one we confronted earlier.Moreover, there is an aesthetic politics of the rhizome, which promotesrhizome for rhizome's sake. Thinking that you are doing somethingnew by mixing different sounds together from different sources, or in-venting new ways of mimicking real or imaginary sounds, is the veryform of modern music production, and has been so at least since theemergence of capitalist demands for fresh product. Rhizomic writing,visual art, architecture, and multimedia all suffer the same ironic fate.

Scholarship in auditory cultural tudies, which studies the history ofsonic environments, has tended to see sound along a continuum, evenas a circle (or factor ) that traces a smooth transitio from primalcries through speech to music, then to ambient sound and back againto cries. I But the quantum character of the remark assures that there

is no genuine continuum and that the transiion from one sound to thenext will be very bumpy. The bumps themselves are formed b

ecology without nature

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