ABSTRACT
This essay considers Luc Ferrari’s 1974 tape piece Petite symphonie intuitive pour un paysage de printemps in light of the emerging subdiscipline of postcolonial ecocriticism. Work in this area has highlighted the ideological premises of Western constructions of nature and the environment, disclosing the power relations, structural inequalities, and material conditions inscribed in hegemonic representations of nature. At the same time, postcolonial ecocritics have revealed the degree to which much ecocritical scholarship continues to subscribe to these same hegemonic representations.
In extending these insights to Ferrari’s Petite symphonie, I argue that differences in subject-position translate into discrepant understandings of the pastoral landscape the work evokes. Inspired by a visit to the Causse Méjan, a plateau in France’s Massif Central, Ferrari sonically conjures its desolate landscape via a quasi-minimalist musical setting, across which are interspersed fragments of recorded interviews with local residents. Crucially, the work’s incorporation of the speech of the Causse’s inhabitants opens up a space for dissensus in the Petite Symphonie. Their remarks produce a fissure between an aestheticized vision of the plateau, a function of the metropolitan subject’s “tourist gaze,” and the very different understanding of the landscape given voice by the subaltern rural other: an understanding characterized not by disinterested aesthetic appreciation, but by interested practical action. The self-critique enacted by the Petite symphonie emphasizes how differences in social position underwrite different constructions of landscape. It also indicates how the interaction and mutual interference of these constructions may generate new, reflexive perspectives on the environment.
