The Longish Read: on listening and speaking

I’ve been thinking about (and doing a lot of) listening lately as I finish the pilot iteration of “Native Spaces.” Although it is the most substantial sound-based project I’ve done in recent years, audio—and more specifically community radio—originally functioned as my bridge from a studio to an expanded creative practice. I was attracted to sound for reasons now so familiar as to be cliché: the friction it offered to Western ocular-centrism, the tactility of its vibrations (what Murray Schafer called “touching at a distance”), its enormous expressive malleability, the potential for productive slippage between hierarchical and Eurocentric classifications like “music,” “sound” and “noise.” Sound called me into a different kind of noticing, one that was less about identification and more about attunement. My favorite teaching moments disproportionately come from the weeks I have introduced Generation Airpod to practices of soundwalking and deep listening.

And yet, even as I have employed concepts like the “feminist politics of listening,” I remain at some level skeptical that any sensory practice actually constitutes a politics. This skepticism has only been compounded by the proliferation of “listening tours” conducted by elected representatives and “listening sessions” held by neoliberal academic bureaucrats alike. During the racial justice uprisings of 2020, the injunction to earnest White liberals to “listen to the most marginalized” joined that of “educate yourself” to launch a thousand podcasts and book clubs—an absurd situation that did not go unobserved by comedians or the philosopher Olúfémi O. Táíwò, who wrote that such understandable “epistemic deference” invites the “elite capture” of formerly radical or liberatory ideas.

Certainly, foregrounding listening over speaking implies (though does not guarantee) an ethical position of humility and curiosity about encountering the world in all its fullness and complexity. But most ethical frameworks emphasize behavior and action. Indeed, in choosing what in the sonic field to attend to, under what circumstances, and for how long, the listener is always making a set of active judgments, ones that may be more easily obscured by than suspended the presumption that ‘listening’ in and of itself is open, non-hierarchical, virtuous, even radical. Judgments about sound are made so quickly and often so subconsciously that it is easy to fall back on well-worn Eurocentric sonic epistemologies of differential personhood in which “what constituted that legitimate voice, melody, or tonal system mapped onto European ideas of culture, rationality, and history and contrasted with sounds that were perceived as uncivilized, degenerate, or inhuman,” as Emily Hansell Clark has described. And even if the listener suspends or contests such schemas in an intentional anti-colonial practice, at what point does the deference implied in ‘listening’ become a deferral of responsibility, another settler move to innocence, an artful dodge?

It was in this mindspace that I turned to the recent work of AM Kanngieser, a geographer and sound artist I’ve long admired. They have compellingly complicated the moral and political economies of sound practice by foregrounding the ways that listening can also be a form of surveillance, control, and possession and recording an act of extraction from landscapes and communities via technologies of military origin. Reminding us that listening is always subject to interpretation and never the same as understanding, Kanngieser emphasizes the glitches and imperfections of hearing that stem from the embodied, affective, and political experiences that every listener brings to their apprehension of sound. Moreover, sound is usually experienced in artistic practices through forms of technological mediation usually rendered imperceptible by standards of professionalism that offer the listener a problematic fantasy of unmediated access to the “real,” even though perception of sound is known to be highly manipulable by anyone who has ever watched a video of foley artists on YouTube. Finally, Kanngieser probes the question of consent in recording, noting that ethical practices developed over the past decades (largely in response to activism against cultural plunder) have essentially nothing to say about what it would mean to gain consent from other-than-human beings. The assumption that the non-human world is incapable of consent and therefore available for use as (cultural) resource fundamentally recapitulates Euro-American species hierarchies, even in the world of eco-artists who would otherwise reject that assertion.

Going into “Native Spaces,” I had no illusions that audio recordings were an innocent medium, but I have not – and probably cannot – answer all the questions Kanngieser asks of listening and sound. I have come to see the non-linearity of “Native Spaces” as highlighting that not all people hear the same thing when they listen, and how the platform sometimes pitch-shifts sound when the data network is experiencing heavy demand or cuts off a speaker in mid-sentence a means of making mediation and artifice evident to the listener. While the project centers the perspectives of contemporary Massachusett tribal members on such topics as property, relations to land, and the colonial encounter, “Native Spaces” also features the voices of non-Native residents and scholars offering their own reflections on the ongoing colonization of which their presence is both a contributor and a result. This has been important to Elizabeth and me from the start: even though we ask the non-Indigenous audience to, yes, mostly listen, we are mindful of how listening can also be an act of consumption and extraction. We are planning events through the coming year in which we will, occasionally and within agreed-upon boundaries, invite our non-Native audience to the vulnerability and co-implication of recording their own acts of speech.

Like my friend Anthony Romero, I am yet sure what it would mean to hear a consent response from the more-than-human world (although Kanngieser offers some compelling stories of permission NOT granted). I generally believe that being continually unsettled by ethical questions is preferable to resolving an ethical problem – not because irresolution is some inherent good but because ethics (like politics) are relations to be lived, not problems to be solved. The places I tend to work – where ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ (really industrial capitalist settler colonial culture) are so interwoven that there is no possibility of purity (or its sonic simulacrum) – expose the liberal illusion/delusion of the bounded, rational subject granting consent to another bounded, rational subject. In the soundscapes deemed “degraded” by judgmental, mostly White acoustic ecologists, it quickly becomes clear that any field recording is also self-portrait—which in no way means that it is not also an artifact extracted from others. In these places, where we are both listener and listened, it’s hard not to feel like its too late to ask for permission while at the same time wondering how we might start now.

Further Reading/Listening

Emily Hansell Clark, “The Ear of the Other: Colonialism & Decolonial Listening,” Quietus, 23 January 2021.

AM Kanngieser, “Enlivening our responsiveness to the world through listening.” Green Dreamer 9 April 2024.

Anthony Romero, “Asking for Permission/Listening for Consent,” Forge Project, 18 December 2023.

Alexis Shotwell, “Against Purity,” Against the Grain, 23 January 2017.

Olúfémi O. Táíwò, “Being in the Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference,” The Philosopher vol. 108, no. 4, 2020.