Listen Up!

Abstract

Although listening holds a central position in communication and politics, it has been devalued through a too one-sided focus on the voice. Listening, as distinct from the speech act, has been bound up in a cultural hierarchy of the senses that privileges the visual over the auditory, and positions listening as something passive, as opposed to acts of writing, reading, and speaking. We want to rethink listening as an embodied and critical activity, one that is not only focused on words but also heeds atmospheres, body languages, and silences. If we learn to listen, we no longer decide in advance to what we want to listen. Listening embraces unpredictability: to listen, to see, to experience, without making preconditioned judgments or analyses. We could say that the act of mutual listening directs us to that which we do not already know: to listen for the unexpected.

Keywords:

• listening
• practice
• performance
• deviation
• saliva
• politics

Notes

1 Kate Lacey, Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age (Cambridge: Polity, 2013).

2 Ibid.

3 Karl Palmås and Otto von Busch, “Quasi-Quisling: Co-design and the Assembly of Collaborateurs,” CoDesign 11, nos 3–4 (2015): 236–249.

4 Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989), 120–134.

5 Sarah Ahmed, “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 4 (2006): 543–574.

6 Ibid., 12.

7 Ibid., 15.

8 Ibid.

9 Susan Bickford, The Dissonance of Democracy: Listening, Conflict, and Citizenship (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).

10 Ibid.

11 Jonna Bornemark, “Planerarens fronesis, intellectus och icke-vetande: en undersökning av den praktiska kunskapens djupdimensioner,” in Medborgardialog: om det svåra i att mötas – praktikers reflektioner om ett av demokratins viktigaste verktyg, ed. Jonna Bornemark et al. (Stockholm: Stiftelsen Arkus, 2016), 129–146.

12 Tanja Dreher, “Listening Across Difference: Media and Multiculturalism Beyond the Politics of Voice,” Continuum 23, no. 4 (2009): 445–458.