A personal archive of sound publications (since 2007) addressing human vulnerability from different perspectives and questioning policies of listening and silencing.
“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.”
Walter Benjamin
We know that we are vulnerable because of the possibility of being wounded, as indicated by the etymology of the word itself (1). Vulnerability is not an occasional friction between reality and being, but a fact: we are vulnerable. Open wounds and social ruptures exist among us and may take the form of economic crises, wars, terrorism or pandemics (2).
Listening to what we do not want to hear entails attending to differences and, more precisely, to alterity. Listening to the Other means approaching the edge of our own existence and identity. Listening to the Other is always to become vulnerable.
Ironically, the differences that confront our identities generate a noise we cannot stop hearing, even when we do not wish to attend to it. Policies of listening are also policies of alterity: they participate in the construction of each individual’s social reality. Deafness to death, suicide, terrorism, intimacy, sex or capitalism—in the age of the Anthropocene, climate change and pandemics—is part of what defines us.
The act of listening delves into the anatomy of social listening and approaches issues that affect us silently. The project uses listening as both source and process through recordings in which our voices and silences can be heard, making audible the differences that separate us as individuals while identifying us as a society. Everything we leave outside the field of listening, even when it remains audible, gives us away.
The silence that rises between us and the place where we choose to locate the wound of listening make us vulnerable. In listening, the object of study is always ourselves: our vulnerabilities and our shame, as we try to avoid the fact that we are hearing what we do not want to listen to.
Listening is essentially about vulnerability in its different degrees and the many forms of violence: physical, psychological, emotional, sexual, economic and many others. Every encounter with the Other contains a violence that opens a wound; there, vulnerability becomes flesh and takes form in listening.
“The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch and to violence.”
Judith Butler, Precarious Life