Poetics of Listening

Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer, and theorist working with sound culture, voice, and questions of agency. He is Artistic Director of The Listening Biennial and the Editor of Errant Bodies Press, Berlin. His books Acoustic Justice (2021), Acoustic Territories, Second Edition (2019), Background Noise, Second Edition (2015), and Lexicon of the Mouth (2014), are all published by Bloomsbury Academic.

This beautiful poetics of listening by Brandon LaBelle is a listening space about the activism of love – or in other words – a radical vibrating materiality about sonic global intimacy. As LaBelle suggests, the book itself is a listening space since it is both quiet and full of voice, rhythm and tone, melody and movement – an ecosystem that awakens under listening’s participation. The sonic affects us, touches us, moves through our bodies every day and alters our emotions, vibration and rhythm. Poetics of listening allows us to reflect upon ways that the materiality of sound, the emotions connected to the sonic, the censorship of sound, or the propaganda with sound, help us understand (counter-) power, claims to authenticity, authority, resistance, and deviance. This vibrating touching sonic narrative unfold before us about how to search for our sonic emotional knowledge and how to open common experiences and potential paths for change. LaBelle’s healing sonic thinking-matter shares a knowledge that will bring bodies together, because agential sonic listening matter matters. LaBelle reveals a method for transmission of sound knowledge as well and for novel ways of being in the world of self and others. This beautiful piece of sonic materiality teaches us that there is no distinct separation between different sonic porous bodies, non-living things, and the environment; instead, these are intimately interconnected—a thick entanglement—and the transmission of sonic affect constantly flows between matter, space, and place. If we are deeply listening-into, listening-toward, listening-with, listening-against, and listening-across, this sonic innovative poetry invites us to a journey that will transform how we are thinking about healing, responsibility and potentiality as well as about relational global action and an imagined balanced potential futurity. We are invited to learn to transform our rapid pace to a slower pace so we can begin to listen to the whispering plants, to the screaming hurricanes, to the singing deserts and to the lost bodies, who are not shouting out another grand narrative, but in a low voice and in a slower pace, sharing a fragmented story, maybe not even yet audible, of how we can begin to heal, to relate and to belong. I am listening to the book’s inner voice: “To listen, might be, to remain a student of the world.”

• AcknowledgmentsNote on TextIntroduction: An apprentice to listeningChapter 1: Listening-into: inner life, consciousness-raising, and the care of the selfChapter 2: Listening-toward: recognition, thirdness, and compassionate actionChapter 3: Listening-with: sympathy, bodily life, and healing justiceChapter 4: Listening-against: power, negative method, and the diplomatic artsChapter 5: Listening-across: ecological thinking, biopoetics, and planetary practicesPostface: The Will to ListenBibliographyIndex