To tend for, to care with: three pieces on listening as method - AM Kanngieser

Kanngieser, AM. “To tend for, to care with: three pieces on listening as method.” THE SEED BOX. September 11, 2020. https://theseedbox.se/blog/to-tend-for-to-care-with-three-pieces-on-listening-as-method/

“Our engagement with the world is always interdependent and situated within environments and place. Listening is a way into feeling these relations. Because listening is so ubiquitous, its complexity and expansiveness are often diminished.”

“Narrowly (mis)construed as conditional on the ears and the voice, listening is understood as instrumental to sharing language. Listening is, as all communication, trained. It is encultured and geographically specific, shaped by social, political and economic forces, violence and oppression. Despite this, it is expected that we listen in universal ways.”

“With these posts I want to emphasise why questions such as “from where do I listen? How do I listen? To what do I attend? What do I hear?” are necessary to thinking about environments and ecosystems. These questions show us that we are always working across difference, which is itself always in-becoming and unknown. The simplicity of such questions belies a profound and critical recognition and responsibility essential to any movement toward abolishing a world built on white supremacist violence and dispossession. The kind of listening that I am attempting to theorise alongside and play with here is unequivocally arduous, slow and constitutes many lifetimes work and thought undertaken by many people across many places. It seeks to undo how we know, live, relate and comport ourselves. It seeks to undo abstractions of harm, capitalist extraction, domination and complicity. It places us in definitive relation with how, where and what we inhabit and need to claim. What is at stake, then, in this listening is the dismantling of what we think we know toward an imagination of becoming otherwise.”

Listening as coming-to

“The heavy wet surrounded us, and we poured onto the ground as off-season tourists, pale and excited, reading into the humidity something we craved as novel and close. Breathing in the air, our exhales carried with them demands for recognition and servitude. The coloniser song.”

“This moment, with its familiar racisms, illustrates how much can be heard in a glance without a word being said. How to attend to these infinite tellings? There are many ways to approach listening and the relational possibilities that listening affords. Listening is complex, and has many lines of approach. Against the idea that listening is defined along an aural range of hearing that is attributed to the human, I consider listening as processes of sensing, attuning and noticing. I listen with my hands, my eyes, my skin, my gut. My body is a receptor for an atmosphere or ambiance. Listening, for me, is attention to where and how energy is transferred.”

“When framed as a turning towards or attending to, the practice of listening requires a change in disposition on the part of the listener, not necessarily to a stance of preparation or intervention, but to a willingness to be present with whatever comes. This is not an active listening, or a therapeutic listening because it dissolves the authority of the listener to determine what is being heard in a definitive way. It leaves the listener in perpetual recognition of not knowing. To both acknowledge and sit with what one brings, and at the same to continually let go of what one imagines is being said based on your own ideas of what you bring, requires a near constant navigation.”

“Listening is coming to somewhere. It is coming to a place, in a context, in an environment, on land. When we arrived in Fiji, we carried with us our whole world. We brought our histories and complicities and these tumbled out through our mouths and gestures as expectations and demands. To arrive as a tourist is to arrive already known to those who are required to serve. To arrive as a white tourist into a country that has been colonised, and is still negotiating and untangling the economies and cultures of white supremacy, is to always be coupled with injustice and harm. To arrive at any national border as a transgender person is to apprehend punitive disclosure. How one feels about this is neither here nor there, it is as it is. The question is whether one turns into it or away.”

To come through listening is to immerse oneself in how these worlds meet. It is to be present to what conditions this meeting as such. Coming to takes place across a threshold. Between here and there. Listening to this movement across the threshold helps you to configure how you comport yourself. Are you a guest, a stranger, kin, family? Is your presence invited? Unwanted? Are you where you are celebrated? What are your intentions? It asks you to be present in a body, present to how your body moves and shifts the environment through relation.

To be present in this way dislocates abstraction, it disavows any pretence that you are impartial, inconsequential. It takes away objectivity. This way of listening can be very uncomfortable because it is the recognition of oneself as always in relation to others, in all of its forms; a recognition makes one vulnerable through troubling the narrative of self as control. While there are always desires to escape the hauntings attached to us, listening reminds me that my body is always collective and historical. It reminds me of my lineages. And this is necessary, particularly when there is a tendency to erase and forget that the dispossession, exploitation and extraction that these lineages bring are ongoing. Listening is coming to a place as who you are, and who you are perceived to be, in relation to where you are and accepting that this is never benign, and nor is it arbitrary. In fact it is the very ground from which one unfolds and must be prioritised.

Because we are never just one thing and no encounter is ever just one thing, listening is a practice composed by and through difference. Listening tells us that there are infinite ways that encounters happen and infinite interpretations. What listening does is offer a pause for these variations to be tended to. It creates an opening for suspension (being-with), it gives no answers and offers no absolution – there is no end or conclusion to be drawn. While it situates it also takes away certainty of thought. It questions overrepresentation and analysis. It makes one aware without needing to know what comes next. It shows us how we story where we are because we always hear things from where we are. What I take from this is a knowledge that my body inhabits space and that space inhabits my body, that I am always in relation, but I don’t know what that relation is. I can presume, of course. But there is no knowing.

Listening is not a prescription for anything, it is antithetical to prescription because perhaps it is simply a willingness to see where things go. It is approaching encounters without anticipation or expectation with an awareness of, but not attachment to, what one brings and how your presence may change or charge the air. It is being generous toward mishearing, misunderstanding, projection, confusion, undoing. This is why listening takes something from you. Because it confronts you with ambiguity, at the same time as the very materiality of being in a body.

** all of this is from the article; need to come back another day and READ it. Not for today.

Part 2: https://theseedbox.se/blog/listening-as-being-with/

Listening, when what is making the sound is unseen, is an act of faith. I had no idea what kind of encounter might arise. It had happened many times before that my recordings were not what I had hoped for or been told to expect; it was different when I was alone because then that ‘failure’ went unwitnessed. Listening in this way was always a relinquishment of knowing. We didn’t know if we would hear something and then we didn’t know what we would hear. On listening, neither the headman nor I could identify the creatures that lay below by their soundings. All we heard was their presence, somewhere down there. From the diverse noises we suspected there were many different creatures. The fact of not-knowing did not diminish the headman’s curiosity, it was enough to hear. In listening, we were with what was below, in proximity but with no certainty. Listening became a belief in being-with. In the suspension between hearing and knowing, what we encountered was abundance.

The suspension between hearing and knowing is tremulous and potent. There is often a strong urge to make sense of, to figure out, to fill the gap with names, to seek a horizon upon which a name might be found. To embrace not-knowing, namelessness, is difficult because it dismantles knowledge as currency and moreover, possession. To assert, I have heard and now I conclude, is what is expected in this work. To say, I have no idea what I am hearing, but I am hearing and that is what it is, is to divest from the authority of certainty. In listening as being-with suspension is made up of imagination. There was still naming through speculation of course: the bubbles that might have been crabs, seagrass, fish, or insect larvae, that might have been a stray rope touching against the boat, microphone interference. The grunts that could have been one of twenty documented species, or none of them at all. The shrimp that could have been three or three hundred, below us or fifty meters distant. But other sounds, registering only on the edges of perceptibility, could not be named, could not even be spoken. In not knowing, possibilities were open.

In this expanse of possibilities, in being-with sounds as what is not known but is in relation, attunement comes to play. Attunement is an active tuning into. It is active in the sense that it invites a constant dance, sensing and flowing with, noticing and moving together. It is a responsiveness to what is being heard – heard not only as aural hearing. Tuning-into thrives in unhurriedness because listening cannot happen faster than the sound being made. Everything takes the time it takes. What is to come cannot be foretold. Being-with sounds, as they are, without name, as they unfold, is a practice of relation without conditions.

This listening as being-with is not for any purpose outside itself. It’s to be with whatever comes.

Part 3: https://theseedbox.se/blog/listening-as-taking-leave/

To talk about being unwanted is most often done with regard to people, in interpersonal relationships. It is far easier to tell when my presence is harmful or undesirable when it can be directly spoken to or gestured towards. Even when it is not said, it is possible to pick up on dispositions – silences, intonations, averted eyes, limbs turned away – there are millions of subtle signals our bodies are trained to respond to, to know when we are displeasing others. Being unwanted by environments requires a finer attunement, because it is harder to hear. To even consider an imposition on environments requires a shift in how environments are perceived; it is not possible to think of them as inert and immutable, as estranged or fungible, which are all common attributions given through Anglo-European onto-epistemologies. This is not how Pacific scholars articulate environments, which are understood as always entangled and co-constitutive. As Unaisi Nabobo-Baba explains, in Indigenous Fijian (iTaukei) languages the word vanua denotes “land as well as place…everything on it and in it…all flora and fauna as well as waterways, oceans, mountains and forests…is of physical, social and spiritual significance to people”(2006: 81).

If Anglo-Europeans can undo our conception of nature, of environment, and conceive of our relations to/with places as dynamic and interdependent, then attuning to a ‘no’ becomes much more imaginable. That environments hold histories within them is incontestable. The world is filled with stories of places haunted by spirits and memories, by the energetic and atomic residues of traumatic events. There are many places that are not to be entered, or even spoken of, by certain people. Sacred sites for ceremony or important transitions are not to be encroached on, and it is not possible to always know what places hold what significance. The acknowledgement of such places through conservation and heritage designations map awkwardly over spiritual perimeters. I can feel, even when human permission is given, that there are places that are not appropriate for me to be in. The moment in the rainforest showed me that even where clear protocols of asking and granting permission are undertaken with villagers, this does not mean that such negotiations can be translated onto the specific place itself. Permission needs to be sought again and again, each and every time, from everyone and everywhere.

What I carry with me in listening is that I cannot assume consent based on prior interaction. Listening as taking-leave is about acknowledging that my presence is doing something to where I am. I have learnt to attend to what I sense, even when I might not understand why. I-Kiribati and African-American scholar Teresia Teaiwa writes that “Indigenous knowledge is not always transparent or accessible to all, nor is it meant to be” (2005: 16). Knowledge of environments, knowledge of places are not always mine to ask for or to hear, and to meet the world with this as a reminder is very important. To be able to listen to, and appreciate, what is not for us as Anglo-European scholars and artists is one of the most imperative things I have been taught to accept and practice.

It is critical to note that in the Anglo-European interest in Indigenous knowledge and eco-relational practices that take focus away from the human, the ongoing resonances of colonial dispossession and harm are not also jettisoned. Angela Last writes that these moves to decentre the human have sought to “‘reconnect people with the Earth while ignoring their situatedness at sites of colonial trauma” (2018: 88). As I sat there that morning I didn’t know what the land I was on held, and I will likely never know. That didn’t change what I felt. European colonisation is driven by the need to know and take. Underpinning what Goenpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls the logics of the ‘white possessive’ is a “desire to invest in reproducing and reaffirming the nation state’s ownership, control and domination” (2015: xii). The academic and artistic white possessive is demonstrated in the sense of entitlement to environments and peoples that whiteness is founded within. In this comes the demand for transparency. Becoming attuned to environments, to the ways in which our bodies affect and are affected by environments, is part of careful engagement that can challenge and undo these demands.

To listen and to take-leave with care I must express my appreciation as I go. By coming to a place, uninvited, I anticipate that my presence can be a violation. To realise that I am unwanted troubles my self-conception of my being as innocent and benign. It is tempting to fall into resistance and antagonism through this discomfort, to find ways to reinterpret what I am being told, or to refuse to pay attention. But to be able to hold the kindness of a directive to elsewhere with respect is something that I cultivate. To thank a place for its generosity despite my imposition, to thank environments for some transfer of energy, is the very least that I can offer. To respect that somewhere is not mine to know or experience is fundamental to living in relation. As I packed my microphones away, I thanked the trees and cicadas and dirt and air. The atmosphere around me felt tense like a breath held, a suspension. I emerged out from the bracken back onto the mountain peak and the feeling in my body sunk back down through my throat, my chest and stomach into my feet. When I turned to look back the sun was glancing off the leaves, dappling the path with light and I felt a profound sense of relief. The insects had begun to whirr louder again the further I got, and I knew without a doubt that the world held within those sounds was not meant for me for hear.