Listening Activism

If sound and listening are deeply enabling for social exchange, acting as essential means for encountering and sharing differences while nurturing mutual recognition, can we envision a broader project? A type of amplification of this listening that may cater to a multiplicity of narratives and accounts, stories and their lessons? Is it possible to cast listening as an activism that may give challenge to existing demarcations or structures of domination? As Kate Lacey suggests, what is needed within today’s environment is not only to secure the right to free speech, but also, to turn our attention to the freedom of listening. Freedom of listening is posited as being essential for enabling a “plurality” of voices to be heard; in other words, freedom of listening produces an extremely active relational space within which voices may resound. Yet, the potentiality of freedom of listening may aid in discovering and nurturing new formations of solidarity by also explicitly relating us to things beyond the voice. The silences of still bodies, the vibrational and rhythmical intensities of collective acts, the tonalities disturbed or distributed by cacophonic volumes, and the co-soundings and echoes of planetary creatures and matters – these are equally defining of the public sphere and expressions of political desire. To enact one’s freedom of listening is to necessarily aim for a broader and richer engagement with the range of voices and things to be heard and shared.

Listening activism, as we begin to understand it, gives elaboration to the many forms listening may take; deep as well as shallow listening, horizontal and vertical hearings; a listening that flexes itself, that surrenders as well as punctuates: a listening around or through, toward or against others – this listening that I give as well as through which I take. Forms of listening are ultimately productions of subjects and sites, knowledges and relations, contouring and shaping the subjective and the intersubjective, the energetic and the material features that greatly effect personal and political life. Listening is often tuning us to the interplay of meaningful layers that constitute the world, bridging the seen and the unseen, foreground and background, things and bodies with animate forcefulness: listening draws one in, toward certain depths, while drawing out the underheard into greater volume.

What may happen then in instances of collective listening? A listening together taking place not only within spaces of music, for instance, but drawn out into the open? That may move us, as music often does, into states not only of euphoric dance, but also into other types of movement? This might be a listening activism directed at particular sites, for instance, around situations of conflict or within communities, applied to spaces of presence or emptiness, locating us around that which is missing. In these situations, listening may express concern as well as indignation by bringing attention to the said and unsaid – this sound that relates us to the not yet. A gathering of listeners, in the squares, or in the classrooms and market places, the backrooms and storefronts, may perform to create a gap, a duration drawn out, detouring the flows of normative actions, of declarations and decrees, with a persistent intensity – a nagging quietude, possibly: this act of doing listening, together; and by gathering attention it may also create an image: the image of the listener as one who enacts attention or consideration and, in doing so, nurtures the conditions for mindful engagement. The listening … that works … that interrupts, or … that produces … in those gaps of … time and space … another pause: the … interval in which … something … someone, or … … others … force onto particular contexts … – the classroom, the hall of justice, the park … or the home – this attention … the listening that … … demands … … and that gives … and that may resonate … that may amplify … the potentiality of … being … side by side …