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.