Conference Agenda

Eighty years after Horkheimer and Adorno penned their founding charter of critical theory, their dialectic can be updated to embrace our new climate reality. Where their “Dialectic of Enlightenment” outlined the search for freedom as leading into totalitarianism, not as its negation but its consequence, this “Dialectic of Anthropocene” starts by backing human progress (in the Global North)—via industrialization, colonization, and imperialism—and ends on a path leading to planetary destruction. If this vicious dialectic is driven by our addiction to human comfort, let’s call it self-care, then extending such care to non-human entities may offer a way out. This can take different forms, e.g. Bruno Latour’s embrace of the Gaia hypothesis, Tim Morton’s aesthetics of intimacy-without-selfhood—or, indeed, Horkheimer-Adorno’s concern for the suffering of others.

Insofar as music played a privileged role within Adorno’s philosophy, it potentially promises a better understanding of our self-imposed predicament in the Anthropocene. John Cage’s “Child of Tree” (1975) makes an unexpected intervention here: Cage specifies that the music must include an amplified cactus—not just as an unconventional musical instrument but rather a non-human artistic collaborator. Cage, who, as an expert mycologist, knew a thing about non-animal life, does not spout New-Age mumbo-jumbo here, but articulates a cogent philosophical position: control is wrested away from one almighty performer to be replaced, in Cage’s words, with trans-species “co-existence.”

Climate change can, doubtless, only be solved by a combination of global government action and thoughtful engineering. To reach this inflection point, however, a change in human behavior, especially in the Global North, is urgently required. Adornian contemplation of music will not—and refuses to—bring about active change, but it can help us embrace a mindset of care that goes beyond the (human) self. And that is exactly what is needed if we envision a collective future.

In attempting to comprehend the Earthly expanses of the so-called New World, “missionary scientists” and other European visitors to early colonial New Spain and Peru assumed that the tropical climate shaped Indigenous inhabitants’ cultural capacities at all levels, including their musicking. Early colonizers’ understandings of the tropical “torrid zone” (from ancient and Scholastic geography) informed their audile techniques of apprehending Indigenous music-making to draw civic and biopolitical inferences from it.

However, colonizers disagreed about the torrid zone’s exact effects. Pessimistic understandings, exemplified by sixteenth-century Spanish naturalist Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo and seventeenth-century Jesuit missionary Bernabé Cobo, regarded the torrid zone’s climate as deleterious, deficient, and monstrous. Oviedo reports hearsay of drums in Peru and Caribbean islands made of human skins—alluding to longstanding suspicions of cannibalistic, monstrous practices among equatorial populations. Cobo’s theories of the torrid zone’s deleterious cultural effects lead him to associate Incan musical activities with drunkenness, vice, and idleness. Optimistic views, exemplified by sixteenth-century Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, regarded the torrid zone as a temperate, Edenic paradise. Las Casas insisted that the tropical climate’s perfection generated the perfection of Indigenous peoples’ character and cited their abilities to play and build musical instruments as evidence. These authors’ ideas about the torrid zone shaped their discursive, political aims: either designating Mesoamericans as beastly “natural slaves” or designating Mesoamericans as “docile” peoples requiring protection by crown and church.

Both frameworks, however, regarded the torrid zone a vast, exploitable wilderness. Musical descriptions depicting the torrid zone as monstrous and defective buttressed colonial aims of “repairing” American nature via intensive cultivation and bringing its supposedly “indolent” inhabitants under the reputedly “salubrious” brake of labor in mining and agriculture. Musical descriptions depicting the torrid zone as Edenic paradise ultimately supported early capitalism’s hunger for nature’s apparent abundance. Today, scholars increasingly recognize how colonial extraction led into the Anthropocene climate crisis. But climate and colonization were always linked, and early colonial writers heard Indigenous Americans’ musicking and sound as entailments of extraordinary tropical climates. Ultimately, the early colonial ear listened in accordance with ecologically disastrous, terraforming desires to remedy and exploit nature.

That bête noire, structural listening, exemplifies cognitive mapping in Fredric Jameson’s sense insofar as it produces a representation of the totality of musical relations, which, from an Adornian standpoint, are heard to hold up a mirror to the totality of social relations. Ethnography’s imperialist ear and, within sound studies, the notion of soundscape suffer from similarly totalizing, reductive impulses. Challenges to this stubborn presupposition in our disciplines—historicizing, hermeneutical, affective, decolonizing—have come thick and fast. This paper explores how pressure might yet be put—through an explicitly ecological prism—on structural listening as a form of worldmaking that reduces the environment’s rich diversity to what can be perceived from a single hegemonic vantage point. Understanding listening as a way of both being-in and creating the world, it examines how echolocation—traversing animal, human, and techno-prosthetic modalities—allows us to think otherwise about aurality’s worldmaking capacities. Echolocation is analyzed as a set of diversely embodied epistemologies that resist idealizing or metaphorizing “the ear,” whether in traditional metaphysical accounts or those of the ontological turn.

Human echolocation contests the assumption that, in contrast to inter-species corporeal diversity, listening varies intra-species according to different socio-cultural conceptions of music and sound or different systems of interpretation. The phenomenology of echolocation, dependent as it is on a multiplicity of human and non-human bodies and reverberations, and on multi-point perception, including on the interaural difference within that embodied field between (at least) two ears, undercuts any straightforward oppositions between mind and body, nature and culture, human and non-human. To develop a theory of ec(h)ological listening, I explore three water-bound case studies in which navigating the world amid climate or environmental catastrophe is at stake. Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s apprenticeship with marine mammals, Tao Leigh Goffe’s account of Caribbean marronage via Sylvia Wynter’s invocation of the bat, and technologies of ocean acoustic tomography each turn on the possibility of listening all around without reducing the world to what lies ahead of bipedal man—hence within his foresight and grasp. The conclusion draws out the consequences for transforming the listening methodologies that underpin music and sound studies.