Listening and Democracy
Theory, Practice, Crisis
This project explores a novel hypothesis: that contemporary challenges to democracy can be analysed as a crisis of listening. While political discourse today is seemingly saturated by the rhetoric of listening, as a political-philosophical concept it remains little explored and under-theorized. The idea that democracy is noisy goes back to Plato, and the motifs of voice and audibility recur as metaphors for democratic representation and participation throughout the history of political thought. Listening has come to refer to diverse types of relation from cognition and comprehension to recognition, empathy, and responsiveness. Increasingly associated with an appetite for more direct forms of democracy, listening can refer to the experiments in deliberative, participatory processes championed by social movements, or it can signify compliance with a demand such as “Get Brexit Done.”
Yet why privilege aurality as the medium of democracy? As a political-theoretical concept listening continues, with few exceptions, to be understudied and ill-defined. In fact, it scarcely rises to the level of a concept. But listening is interrogated and conceptualized not only in philosophical texts but, moreover, in the collective actions and experiences of activists. This trandisciplinary projects aims to weave together theoretical analysis with sonic ethnography to unearth how listening emerges as a concept in these different contexts.
A critical study of listening offers not only a new analysis of today’s crises of democracy and the resurgence of the nationalist right but, moreover, a way to make connections between comparatively disparate areas of inquiry into these issues. Listening sits at the intersection of several different strands of analysis of today’s global political situation:
A political analysis of how the “cartelization” of political parties (Katz and Mair 2018) as they converged on a neoliberal economic consensus gave voters scant meaningful choice, with the perceived lack of responsiveness from governments sparking an anti-system backlash (Hopkin 2020)
A related political-economic analysis of how the surrender of decision-making to technocratic management—exacerbated by market concentration and runaway inequality under austerity—fuelled populist anger against elites and led to a disconnect between people’s experience and “the economy” (Lonergan and Blyth 2020)
A political-theoretical critique of (neo)liberal democracy’s inherent oligarchic or otherwise anti-democratic tendencies (Rancière 1999; Mouffe, 2009; Agamben et al. 2009; Brown 2015; Dardot and Laval 2019; Losurdo 2020) that have permitted its nationalist and authoritarian turns (Toscano 2017; Brown et al. 2018; Brown 2019; Boffo et al. 2019)
A cultural and critical-theoretical analysis of the affective and libidinal dimensions of Trumpism and the political economy of enjoyment (Berlant 2011; Beistegui 2018; Santner, Schuster, and Mazzarella 2019; Davies 2018 and 2019), alongside reconfigurations of mediatized politics and rhetoric (Couldry 2010; Lacey 2013; Docherty 2019).
Writing
I published an article beginning to discuss some of these issues in Portable Gray: “Listening Without Response-abiltiy.”
More writings will be posted here as the project unfolds.
Public events
In early 2020, I conducted a workshop at Nottingham Contemporary as part of their Sonic Continuum research strand exploring some of these questions with the general public. Loosely drawing on some of sound-art collective Ultra-red’s listening protocols, participants engaged with questions such as, “What does democracy sound like?” and “What did you hear?” after listening to a recording of a protest. They also listed sounds that empower or disempower them. Submit your own responses below!
