Counterlistening

Counterlistening Gascia Ouzounian (bio) 1. counterlistening is listening against: against unequal systems of power and uneven modes of exchange; against official and hegemonic narratives of events, histories, places, territories, groups, communities; against normative and dominant cultures of listening; against one's own habits of listening, including those habits that have been engrained through culture and that are entrenched through disciplining. Counterlistening is undisciplined or even anti-disciplinary listening. It is anarchic, unbounded, and free. It reveals the holes and edges of listening bounded by discipline and predicated on disciplinarity. It disrupts, averts, subverts, and confounds disciplinary boundaries, revealing them to be porous, ductile, leaking. Counterlistening is listening against empire—against those who maintain it and "for" those who are subjected to its spectacular violence. Counterlistening is listening for the tremors that threaten unbridled state power; it is listening for evidence of the corrupt and criminal state. [End Page 311] Counterlistening is subversive, dangerous, and self-sacrificing. It takes risks in seeking to hear what would or "should" remain unheard: what is ignored, concealed, or denied. Counterlistening is listening in the margins. It is listening with those who are not listened to. Counterlistening is speculative and futuristic. It is listening for possible other worlds and, through listening, manifesting those other worlds. Counterlistening is shared, collective, and plural. It resists the concept and figure of "the listener" and the impulse to territorialize through listening. Counterlistening is relational and situational. It is concerned with the social and political relations that listening both reflects and produces. Counterlistening expands the limits of the listening body as they have been determined and reproduced through dominant traditions of listening (for example, scientific, cochlear, Eurological, formalist, or objectivist traditions of listening). Counterlistening is informal, open, and corruptible. It eschews listening "in order to" analyze, define, determine, demarcate. It resists the fixity and stability of "an" analysis. It is listening that is dynamic, unstable, and destabilizing. Counterlistening is listening against the tyranny of meaning. It is listening for plural and divergent meanings or for no meaning at all. Counterlistening is anti-utilitarian. It is listening that may not have any use or use-value. Counterlistening is listening against capture. It is attuned to histories of appropriation, extraction, and oppression that are enacted through the recording, classification, and measurement of sound. It understands the idea of objectivity in listening to be fallacy. Counterlistening is listening against received histories and knowledges. It is listening to the gaps, the omissions, the absences, the erasures. It is anti-ontological in that it does not necessarily listen "to know" or to embody [End Page 312] or perform ways of knowing. It can be listening as a way of unknowing, unlearning; it can be listening as a way of dissolving knowledges. Counterlistening is spectral, ghostly, haunted. It is listening as part of an historical continuum: as informed by and attuned to the past and its audible traces in the present. Counterlistening is illicit, illegitimate, clandestine. It is listening outside the permitted frames and frameworks. It is listening to the taboo, the prohibited, the forbidden. It is furtive and fugitive. Counterlistening is listening-as-critique. It does not need to be translated into text, sound, or any other medium to be valued or understood; it considers and asserts listening alone to be enough. Counterlistening is listening-as-resistance; it is tactical, urgent, transgressive. Counterlistening enacts, produces, and protects the right to listen. 2. We can trace counterlistening in the work of such practitioners, researchers, and activists as: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, an "independent investigator or Private Ear" (Abu Hamdan) who listens forensically to crimes committed by states, state authorities, and corporations; and whose listening—including co-listening with victims of state and corporate violence—produces evidence of those crimes; and Rayya Badran, a radio producer and translator from Beirut who traces the violence of the Lebanese state through the sounds it "deploys" during a mass uprising, sounds that are "just as consequential as their aim to squash, maim, and injure" (Badran); and Mhamad Safa, an artist-researcher who works across sound, architecture, and the law, and who develops methods for listening to the long-term reverberations of traumatic sounds, including those that result from conflict, war, and...