![\"Four](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/readysubjects.org\/portfolio\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/publicsquare.jpg?ssl=1\")
<\/a>“The Public Square,” Krannert Art Museum, 2004.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
The assumption that the more-than-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.<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
And yet, even as I have employed concepts like the \u201cfeminist politics of listening,\u201d I remain at some level skeptical that any sensory practice actually constitutes a politics. This skepticism has only been compounded by the proliferation of \u201clistening tours\u201d conducted by elected representatives and \u201clistening sessions\u201d held by neoliberal academic bureaucrats alike. During the racial justice uprisings of 2020, the injunction to earnest White liberals to \u201clisten to the most marginalized\u201d joined that of \u201ceducate yourself\u201d to launch a thousand podcasts and book clubs\u2014an absurd situation that did not go unobserved by comedians or the philosopher Ol\u00faf\u00e9mi O. T\u00e1\u00edw\u00f2, who wrote that such understandable \u201cepistemic deference<\/a>\u201d invites the \u201celite capture<\/a>\u201d of formerly radical or liberatory ideas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Certainly, foregrounding listening over speaking implies (though does not guarantee) an ethical position<\/em> of humility and curiosity about encountering the world in all its fullness and complexity. But most ethical frameworks emphasize behavior and action<\/em>. Indeed, in choosing what in the sonic field to attend to, under what circumstances, and for how long, the listener is always<\/em> making a set of active judgments, ones that may be more easily obscured by than suspended the presumption that \u2018listening\u2019 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 \u201cwhat 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,\u201d as Emily Hansell Clark<\/a> 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 \u2018listening\u2019 become a deferral of responsibility, another settler move to innocence<\/a>, an artful dodge?<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was in this mindspace that I turned to the recent work of AM Kanngieser<\/a>, a geographer and sound artist I\u2019ve 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 \u201creal,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Going into \u201cNative Spaces,\u201d I had no illusions that audio recordings were an innocent medium, but I have not \u2013 and probably cannot \u2013 answer all the questions Kanngieser asks of listening and sound. I have come to see the non-linearity of \u201cNative Spaces\u201d 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, \u201cNative Spaces\u201d 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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like my friend Anthony Romero<\/a>, 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<\/em> is preferable to resolving an ethical problem<\/em> \u2013 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 \u2013 where \u2018nature\u2019 and \u2018culture\u2019 (really industrial capitalist settler colonial culture) are so interwoven that there is no possibility of purity (or its sonic simulacrum) \u2013 expose the liberal illusion\/delusion of the bounded, rational subject granting consent to another bounded, rational subject. In the soundscapes deemed \u201cdegraded\u201d by judgmental, mostly White acoustic ecologists, it quickly becomes clear that any field recording is also self-portrait\u2014which 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\u2019s hard not to feel like its too late to ask for permission while at the same time wondering how we might start now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Emily Hansell Clark, \u201cThe Ear of the Other: Colonialism & Decolonial Listening<\/a>,\u201d Quietus<\/em>, 23 January 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AM Kanngieser, \u201cEnlivening our responsiveness to the world through listening<\/a>.\u201d Green Dreamer<\/em> 9 April 2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Anthony Romero, \u201cAsking for Permission\/Listening for Consent<\/a>,\u201d Forge Project, 18 December 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Alexis Shotwell, \u201cAgainst Purity<\/a>,\u201d Against the Grain,<\/em> 23 January 2017.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ol\u00faf\u00e9mi O. T\u00e1\u00edw\u00f2, \u201cBeing in the Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference<\/a>,\u201d The Philosopher vol. 108, no. 4, 2020.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019ve been thinking about (and doing a lot of) listening lately as I finish the pilot iteration of \u201cNative Spaces.\u201d Although it is the most substantial sound-based project I\u2019ve done in recent years, audio\u2014and more specifically community radio\u2014originally functioned as … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":778,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"kt_blocks_editor_width":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/readysubjects.org\/portfolio\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/publicsquare.jpg?fit=300%2C400&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/readysubjects.org\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2587"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/readysubjects.org\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/readysubjects.org\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readysubjects.org\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readysubjects.org\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2587"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/readysubjects.org\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2587\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2593,"href":"https:\/\/readysubjects.org\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2587\/revisions\/2593"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readysubjects.org\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/readysubjects.org\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readysubjects.org\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readysubjects.org\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Further Reading\/Listening<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n