Rethinking the Sonic Pastoral
3. The Post- or Parallax?
These examples show that, even if the opposites – nature/culture, pas-toral/anti-pastoral, urban/rural, civilized/non-civilized – cannot validly describe our environmental reality any more, they are still governing our (European) collective imagination. In order to overcome these divisions, we cannot simply dismiss them, but we have to search for reasons for their persistent presence in the perceptions of our environment, and explore actions that search beyond them. As I suggested ear-lier, they are the remnants of dialectical thinking that Western (and especially Euro-pean) society seems to have difficulties in getting rid of. The concepts that we still use in describing our environmental reality actually coincide with the interpretative model described by Slavoj Žižek in his Parallax View (Žižek: 2006). From a paral-lax perspective, the opposites of nature/culture and the like contain the gap that seems irreducible. But according to Žižek, this gap is actually the place of intellec-tual and critical strength: its tension is not meant to be resolved. On the contrary, it should be perpetuated while possible truths spring out from the constant interplay between the opposites. Truth to be told, the idea of multiplying differences and their negotiation seems to be less relevant than usually believed in contemporary culture.
On one hand, there is flattening of meaning performed by the spectacle of main-stream media, in which apparent abundance of difference produces difference that is indifferent, that is, after all, the same. On the other, there is a need for unity and new common interest caused by real and threatening changes in our global environment.
If we are in the age of the anthropocene, there is something that we all, without regard of our identity or class, need to relate to. But is the parallax what helps us in understanding environmental issues as well as the pastoral?
The most relevant musical element that relates to the parallax as a gap and reflects irreconcilable subjectivity is the dissonance, currently exiled to the peripher-ies of the global musical mainstream. It is a musical version of what Žižek calls “the concept of the inherent 'tension,' gap, noncoincidence, of the One itself” (Žižek, 2006: p. 7). For good or bad, music testifies that the contemporary subjectivity is rarely split. And this lack of sonically personified conflict confirms a constant insis-tence on pleasure in contemporary culture. But the concept of dissonance as a meta-phorical parallax gap can also be applied to other levels of musical meaning. And it is the relationship between music and ethics that reflects a constant battle: can music be beautiful but bad? What counts as bad music when it is so difficult to negotiate musical meaning? This insurmountable conflict has been one of the most important dilemmas posed by music from Plato to Pussy Riot.
In writing about sound and music, this tension (a parallax gap) between na-ture and culna-ture can be seen in the current popularity of ecomusicology and sound studies. It is sound and not music, noise and not dissonance, silence and not conso-nance that create a new interpretative circle, and describe our already current sonic future. But the ethical aspect of this “current future” in European context is rather disturbing. Positive ethical attributes commonly related to the categories of pastoral, urban, civilized, and natural as heard in our environment, create attempts of sonic redesign that successfully perpetuate the parallax tension contained between them and their opposites. Playing classical music in order to simulate security in public transportation in Munich, or quieting down the noise of public market place in
Is-Ljubica Ilic 126
tanbul, reveals the dominance of one (Western, European) cultural model in the world that is long past gone this homogenic cultural reality. Civilized sound (quiet-ness in public communication, high-brow culture) versus the possibility of the other (noisy, popular/ethnic) originates from the same world-view that still nourishes the public imagination with the idea of pastoral utopia, or the possibility of retreat. As much as the engineers of the classical train try to recreate security, listening to Han-del at the metro stop in the middle of the night can actually create quite the opposite effect.89 Accordingly, quieting down the traditionally noisy Beşiktaş market does not have to necessarily simulate the environment that is somehow more civilized i. e.
European, but only uncomfortably quiet. This biased sonic engineering of the cities testifies about the fundamental misunderstanding of the current complexity of the European social reality.
It is becoming more and more apparent that there is no real refuge from the noise, pollution, and numerous other downsides of our technologically developed society. If there is no place to get away (to retreat), then there is no place to return to either. We are, globally, faced with the fact that the environment is one whole. The tension between the opposites, although still heavily exploited in public discourses, does not offer any positive models for shaping our environmental reality.90 The symbolic mesh that we live in, intertwined in all possible manners, requires more subtle choices, even when sound is in question. For, the issue of coexistence – cur-rently beyond the possibility of retreat and return – is the first and foremost an ethi-cal question.
References
ATTALI, Jacques (2001): Bruits: Essai sur l'économie politique de la musique. Nouvelle édition, Paris, Fayard/PUF.
BOYM, Svetlana (2001): The Future of Nostalgia, New York: Basic Books.
BRUNWASSER, Matthew (2012): “Silence in the Stands: Istanbul Tries to Stop Shouting by Vendors”, PRI's the World, 17 May, http://www.theworld.org/2012/05/no-shouting-istanbul-vendors/
BUELL Lawrence (1995): The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture, Harvard University Press.
GERBINO, Giuseppe (2009): Music and the Myth of Arcadia in Renaissance Italy, New York, Cam-bridge University Press.
GIFFORD, Terry (1999): Pastoral, London and New York, Routledge.
GIFFORD, Terry (2006): “Post-Pastoral as a Tool of Ecocriticism”, in SKOIE Mathilde and Sonia Bjørn-stad-Velásquez (eds.) (2006): Pastoral and the Humanities: Arcadia Re-inscribed, Bristol Phoenix Press.
ILIC, Ljubica (2012): “To Listen or Not to Listen?”, Evental Aesthetics, vol.1 no.3, p. 82-89.
LATOUR, Bruno (1993): We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
MORTON, Timothy (2007): Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
MORTON, Timothy (2010): The Ecological Thought, Cambridge & London, Harvard University Press.
MÜLLER, Timo (2011): “From Literary Anthrolopology to Cultural Ecology: German Ecocritical The-ory since Wolfgang Iser”, RIGBY, Kate and Alex GOODBODY (eds.) (2011): Ecocritical TheThe-ory:
New European Approaches, Charlottesville and London, University of Virginia Press.
89 This is how the author of this article feels every time she happens to find herself in one of those metro stops. Even classically trained musicians (or maybe especially them) do not have to respond to this kind of sonic intervention in a positive manner.
90 According to Žižek, this impossibility of positive outcome is the strength of the parallax. But, in the case of the pastoral, the tension between retreat and return is warn out: it does not bring any fruitful ideas in how to deal with issues of environment and coexistence.
Between Retreat and Return: Rethinking the Sonic Pastoral 127
PATTERSON, Annabel (1987): Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press.
PHILLIPS, Dana (2003): The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America, New York, Oxford University Press.
SCHAFER, Murray R. (2012): “The Soundscape”, in STERNE, Jonathan (ed.) (2012): The Sound Studies Reader, London and New York, Routledge.
WILLIAMS, Linda (2011): “The Social Theory of Norbert Elias and the Question of the Nonhuman World”, in RIGBY, Kate and Alex GOODBODY (eds.) (2011): Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches, Charlottesville and London, University of Virginia Press.
ŽIŽEK, Slavoj (2006): The Parallax View, Cambridge, MIT Press.