Poetics of Listening

Poetics of Listening Brandon LaBelle (bio) It has already … begun … the time … the time-space … of … speaking. … a speaking that … moves itself toward … knowing nothing … something … you, the yous that arrive from … the particularities … as the basis for a giving … enacting … a rhythming of … breath … breathing toward … away … As a field of artistic research and practices, sound art brings focus to listening as a particular sensory, perceptual experience and capacity. Through a range of methods and approaches, including spatial and installational to performative and relational work, sound art positions the public as listeners. In doing so, listening is never only figured or conceived as a passive, receptive position; rather, sound art intensifies listening as an experience, inviting or demanding a shift toward more active forms and understandings. By way of sound art, listening is constituted as an experimental practice, one that involves itself in the world in such ways as to foster multiple or polyphonic conceptualizations of life and manners of existence. I focus on sound art in order to highlight its place within a broader framework of artistic practice and to underscore how it dynamically introduces listening as a particular sensory, perceptual capacity and practice [End Page 273] while equally defining it as a topic of research. I understand sound art ultimately as an art of listening, where a range of media and methods are crafted and deployed as means for mobilizing listening—evoking a listening subjectivity. If artistic practice can be captured as an arena of actions that seek to construct worlds of experience, sound art brings us into worlds in which subjectivity is aurally conceived or constituted. This is not to overlook the fact that sound art is never only sonic or strictly sounded and audible. Sound itself is elaborated as vibrational and haptic, visual and imagistic, embodied and disembodied, organic and machinic; it is pulled into a range of shapes and forms and is utilized equally as a method. Sonic methodologies often proceed by way of what sound evokes or makes possible in terms of conceptualizing pathways of orientation that work at attuning to the more-than-representational and that aim for a politics of frequency often shaping who or what is heard within given environments. Here, listening matters as the very capacity to attend to ethical, relational challenges and potentialities. Sound art constitutes worlds that therefore lend to shaping an acoustic knowledge, an acoustic episteme, positioning listening as key to understanding. In doing so, it works at reorienting traditions of Western philosophy, and constructs of reason, that define the world by way of a visibilization of truth. Reason, as Gemma Corradi Fiumara argues, has been hegemonically held by the idea of an optical-rational capture, a position of "seeing is believing" that conceives the mind as an eye and analytical work as a process of illumination and arrival. In contrast, listening lends to an alter-logic, one less dependent upon displays of discursive strengths and ability, keeping rationality close to the material entanglements, bodily sensing, and limits of knowing. Such views are grounded in an understanding of sound as an energetic figuring of worldly matters which is never quite graspable, reliable, or fixed and yet which delivers a profound presencing—sound as what animates and involves one in a spatial-temporal flow. As many wisdom traditions posit, sound acts as the carrier of cosmic presence due to its capacity to both envelope and exceed human experience and knowing; its vibrational, resonant movements (which provoke movement itself) are readily aligned with spiritual worlds and the bridging of being and not-being, the terrestrial and cosmic, the visible and unseen. While "seeing is believing" contributes to an individuation of reason, self-secure in its capacity to grasp the truthfulness of things in a logical manner, listening puts reason on hold, perennially in touch and supplanted by a movement toward others. As Fiumara suggests, listening moves logos to an ecological [End Page 274] position (16). Listening, as such, never quite lends itself to states (or an imaginary) of self-completion, nor does it fully control that which it encounters; rather, it follows and is frustrated by the temporal passing of things and continually enriched by the...