Sonic Compost: Playing in the Chthulucene

Lydia Wagenknecht

University of Colorado Boulder

It might well be the greatest feat of human procrastination: spending decades debating the beginning of the Anthropocene just to avoid talking about the end.

The above statement might also be my greatest feat of overreduction. However, as the Anthropocene Working Group enters the final stages of marking 1950 as the Anthropocene’s starting year, it becomes painfully clear that the Anthropocene functions on a linear timeline with a marked end. And many of the potential ends coincide with other ends: the end of species, the end of habitable lands, the end of traditions. [1] It’s no wonder that topics of nature in music and sound studies have acquired a “sense of urgency” as a defining factor (Ochoa 2016, 113). And it’s no surprise that we’ve adopted the potentially fatalist Anthropocenes, Capitalocenes, [2] and Plantationocenes [3] as part of our rhetoric.

Alternative or post-Anthropocene models like Glenn Albrecht’s Symbiocene (2019) or Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene (2016) have generated discussion in art, education, religious studies, and environmental studies, but they have gained little traction in music studies. Perhaps this elusion has to do with these models’ aspirational, collaborative natures, which can result in blind spots toward human and interspecies conflict. Perhaps it’s an impulse against the continued alignment of music with what Ana María Ochoa Gautier calls the political Good (Ochoa 2016, 126). Or perhaps the interdisciplinary potential of Anthropocene is too exceptional to pass up. At any rate, I’d like to dip a toe in the water: what potentials might alternative models hold for 21st century sound studies?

In her 2016 book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Donna Haraway suggests an alternative temporality to the Anthropocene. [4] Building on Bruno Latour and James Livelock’s Gaias, Haraway imagines Chthulucene as multispatial, multitemporal collaboration wherein multispecies actors work symbiotically through “the trouble” that comprises our planet’s crises. Chthulucene exists as a site of becoming-with, of pressing through the difficulties of interspecies communication to promote local flourishing. Haraway employs her concept of SF, combining science fiction, speculative fabulation, and string figures to describe a mode of generative storytelling practice at the nexus of all three. She deploys SF as a tool for telling Latour’s “geostories” that unseat humans as the owners and actors of history. Accordingly, she positions the Chthulucene as an antidote: “The unfinished Chthulucene must collect up the trash of the Anthropocene, the exterminism of the Capitalocene, and chipping and shredding and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures” (Haraway 2016, 57). At the heart of growing Chthulucene lies “making kin,” that is, seeking out and developing symbiotic interspecies relationships.

As a recent transplant from the Colorado Front Range to the Strait of Magellan, I’ve been acutely aware of the kin-making process as my consciousness reconfigures to new ecological realities during dissertation research. Of course, there is the matter of convivencia, of living together in the community with musical collaborators, of building meaningful and reciprocal human relationships (Trinidad Galván 2015). But there’s also learning to work with the neighborhood dogs as we navigate through garbage and construction vehicles in our neighborhood. There’s the coliza bread taking control of my microbiome. The newness of these partnerships alerts me to their presence, giving me opportunities to intentionally develop symbiosis. They provide a glimpse into Haraway’s Chthulucene, inviting me to imagine an alternative to Anthropocene even as I dive into research on identity and music making in the climate crisis.

This alternative appears as soon as my first day in Punta Arenas, when I go for a run in the National Reserve near my house. The city is one of five major jumping-off points to Antarctica, and as I crest a hill covered in dense brush, I strain my eyes searching for the southernmost continent though I know I won’t find it. It’s still hundreds of miles away. I run through herds of cattle, Southern beech trees, and beards of Spanish moss, their scents at once familiar and novel. I meet a fellow trail runner as he waits for his training partners. He introduces me to the calafate bush; its branches grasp my skin as it surrenders a berry. My new friend jokes as he sings a bar from “Himno a Punta Arenas:” “el que come calafate ha de volver…” [5] He says I’ll have no choice but to return to the city once I eat the berry. I wonder how many returns the calafate bush has experienced, how partners of many species have come back to exchange energy for seed-spreading.

As I remember this moment, I imagine how singing can operate as a mode of Chthulucenic kin-making. Out of our mouths flow tendrils, tentacles, waves of connection that vibrate corporeal beings, blurring the distinction between bodies. The vibrations of the calafate bush, [6] the air, the dirt, the humans configure what Nina Eidsheim calls “a unique node” that is best understood on its own terms (2015, 156). It is a mode of touch and collaboration on the atomic level, a symbiotic, sympoietic assemblage. Each note creates conditions for a process of decay and regeneration, creating a sonic compost with further potential for growth.

The invitation of the Chthulucene is to play with storytelling, with relationships, and with temporalities. It provides a platform for engaging symbioticism on a nodal level with systemic effects, and it gives space to work through “the trouble.” And for music studies, it can serve as a site of experimentation for reconfiguring relations of sound and silence in imaginative ways. However, the visitor should heed the calafate principle: if you foray into the Chthulucene, you’ll feel the pull to return again.

Notes:

References

Albrecht, Glenn. 2019. Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Crutzen, Paul and Eugene Stoermer. 2000. “The ‘Anthropocene.’” Global Change Newsletter, 41: 17-18.

Eidsheim, Nina Sun. 2015. Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice. Durham: Duke University Press.

Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.

Haraway, Donna, and Anna L. Tsing. 2019. “Reflections on the Plantationocene: A Conversationwith Donna Haraway & Anna Tsing.” Edge Effects. https://edgeeffects.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/PlantationoceneReflections_Haraway_Tsing.pdf.

Jung, Jihye, et al. 2018. “Beyond Chemical Triggers: Evidence for Sound-Evoked Physiological Reactions in Plants.” Frontiers in Plant Science 9: 1-7.

Latour, Bruno. 2017. Facing Gaia. Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Boston: Polity Press.

Maynard, Robyn, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. 2022. Rehearsals for Living. Chicago: Haymarket Press.

Moore, Jason W. 2017. “The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of our Ecological Crisis.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 44(3): 594-630.

Ochoa Gautier, Ana María. 2016. “Acoustic Multinaturalism, the Value of Nature, and the Nature of Music in Ecomusicology.” boundary 2 43, no. 1: 107-141.

Perich Campana, Danny. n.d. “Himno a Punta Arenas.” Accessed March 15, 2023. https://www.cancionerodelapatagonia.cl/cancionero/H/himno_punta_arenas.htm.

Trinidad Galván, Ruth. 2015. Women Who Stay Behind: Pedagogies of Survival in Rural Transmigrant Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.