Two Article Tuesday: Melancholia and Euphoria

I’ve been reading around in my “articles to read pile” this week as I try to finish a very rough first draft of my “micrograph.” My “articles to read” pile has no particular order. I neither read from the top nor the bottom, but add to it and take from it almost at random. The second article in today’s “two article Tuesday” prompted me to re-read the first, which is a bit of a classic.   

Article the First: Melancholia

Stephanie LeMenager’s “Petro-Melancholia: The BP Blowout and the Arts of Grief” in Qui Parle 19.2 (2011) offered a complicated perspective on melancholia in the context of the BP blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The BP blowout came hard on the heels of the Hurricane Katrina disaster and this informed the reactions of residents in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast. For LeMenager, the BP blowout presented a challenge for the residents of coastal communities because unlike Katrina, the oil spill was not visible. In this way, it finds a parallel with the Tioga terrestrial oil spill that released tens of thousands of gallons of oil underneath a farmer’s field. The invisibility of these events parallels the slow violence of carbon fueled climate change. And like climate change, the impacts on communities tend to be violent and sudden. Narratives of boom and bust, the abruptness of oil booms and their equally rapid dispersion made it difficult to trace specific causality until one is overcome by events. In these conditions, there are reasons to expect that narrative itself is inadequate to convey the emotional consequences of the situations. In other words, reducing these situations to narrative exposition threatens to depersonalize the causes and by extension the consequences of these events. Trauma becomes the product of complex systems and, at worst, the kind of tragedy where all agency is subsumed into the inevitability of the outcome.

The need to express melancholia means both making tragedy of disasters accessible to human emotional response without being drawn into narratives that erase the culpability through their sheer complexity. LeMenager’s arguments are subtle and complex, but she suggests that melancholia surrounding the BP disaster is not simply the mourning for the polluted water, the economic consequences to fishing and tourism, and the long term exposure to subsidence along the Gulf Coast that is a product of 70 years of sustained extraction, but for the failure of modernity. The failed promise of progress, of improvement, and of our ability to not only control nature but to marshal its power to our advantage and advancement.

Article the Second: Euphoria

Yorgos Paschos and John Schofield’s article “‘In the moment’: Euphoria as a heritage value” in the International Journal of Heritage Studies considers euphoria as heritage. Paschos and Schofield argue that sites of euphoric experiences represent meaningful places not only according various criteria for heritage, but also for communities and individuals.

Because Schofield is Schofield (and presumably he and Paschos have shared interests), the paper considers dance halls, raves, music pubs, and concert venues as places where groups achieved euphoric states through music, dance, or mood altering drugs. While Schofield’s work to normalize the recognition of music venues (and other sites associated with the recording and popular music industry) is well known, this paper considers places that can be far less formal. Raves, for example, occurred in disused buildings — abandoned warehouses, industrial sites, and other spaces — created temporary landscapes of euphoric experiences that were prone to dissipate almost as soon as they arose.

Tracing the heritage of such fleeting experiences, even when they are regularized in a historical venue such as the “Cranker” in Adelaide, offers a less through which we can understand the ephemeral. It was disappointing, for example, that Schofield didn’t refer to Carolyn White’s brilliant archaeology of the Burning Man festival, but he did acknowledge Rachael Kiddey’s similar work to understand the heritage of homelessness. Another text that would fit with this would be Kostis Kourelis’s efforts to follow the movement of campus and migrants in Greece who leave only ephemeral traces in the landscapes, but whose experience were every bit as profound as the euphoria of a late night rave.

Some Discussion 

Both LeMenager’s and Paschos and Schofield’s articles emphasize quality of experience at the heart of the contemporary encounter. That melancholia and euphoria are both fleeting reflects that ephemerality of the contemporary world and the fragility of our modern experiences. My current project considers how photographs allow us to understand the experience of the Bakken oil boom. Like euphoric moments, the boom itself was improvised and ephemeral. It was also deeply laced with melancholia as the experience of the boom itself introduced the inevitability of a bust while also representing a disruption to the expected experiences of life in Western North Dakota. This tension between the abruptness and tragedy, between euphoria and melancholia, and between narrative arcs informed by the expectations of contemporary narratives and experiences that defy narration, require new forms of expression and new ways of apprehending (and documenting) heritage. These two articles offer perspectives on this.