A Broader Understanding of the Ethics of Listening: Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Media Studies and the Ethical Listening Subject

Abstract

This article recognizes the importance of traditional, empirical research on listening but questions whether that research is adequate to ground a theory of ethical listening. By focusing on listening as an activity and cognitive process, that research undermines our recognition of listening's role as a practice in the ethical constitution of the subject. This essay looks at philosophical history (e.g., Foucault, 1997), cultural studies of sound (e.g., Schafer, 1977, revised 1994; Corbin, 2003; Smith, 2001) and of music (e.g., Adorno, 2001; Wong, 2001; Botstein, 1992) and media and communication texts (e.g., Finucane & Horavath, 2000) to articulate the ways that listening structures our subjectivity and yields limited agency to the individual in constituting our own ethical being. That research in listening is used to refine Ratcliffe's metaphorical model for Rhetorical Listening with reference to the empirical experiences of the ear. The essay closes by generating five key choices we all make in ethical listening, choices that are the basis for evaluating the ethics of our communicative practice: the choice to listen individually, the choice to listen selectively, the choice not to listen, the choice to listen together, and only then the choice to listen to each other.

Notes

¹Schafer interest is both antiquarian, in that he recommends works of acoustic preservation, and critical, in that his work is located alongside the environmental movement of the 1970s. From the historical perspective, Schafer calls for recordings of “sounds threatened with extinction”—and that list includes “the ringing of old cash registers, clothes being washed on a washboard, butter being churned, razors being stropped, kerosene lamps …” and so on (p. 209). And he calls for documentation of the acoustic environment of specific places.

²F. H. Shera tells us that the widespread success of the radio and phonograph did cause a brief resurgence in musical performance in the home as people sought to imitate the music that was becoming widely available via those technologies, but it clearly did not stick!

³Wong talks at length about Asian-Americans adopting the music of African-American artists and complicating their own cultural identity in the process; Adorno talks about avant-garde music.