AM Kanngieser

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 (Stoever 2016; Robinson 2020) Despite this, it is expected that we listen in universal ways. The fallacy of this is clear when you consider that even though we assume we listen carefully, being unheard, misheard or misunderstood is a common complaint.

How we listen is entwined with how we live and may give insight into how we tend to ourselves and others. Over three texts I will offer some reflections on listening as coming-to, listening as being-with and listening as taking-leave. These are based on events and encounters that occurred during time spent across several Pacific Islands as a visibly transgender, white German Australian geographer. With these texts I want to emphasise why often simple yet unasked 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 (Kanngieser and Todd, 2020). 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 (Bawaka Country et al., 2019; de Leeuw, 2017; Sundberg, 2014; Tynan, 2021). What is at stake, then, in this listening is the dismantling of what we think we know toward an imagination of becoming otherwise.

(References for all three parts can be found following part III: Listening as taking-leave)

I. Listening as coming-to
We came in between cyclones, in the grey heat. 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 pitch of voices rising with exclamations and entitlements, passed from parent to child, flowed over the quieter directions of airport staff steering us into the customs building, its concrete lines blurred against the green and haze. Inside the building a Fijian airport worker strummed a guitar in welcome, an assuaging of the weather-borne tensions. Here, the air spun slowly. Between the sweaty impatience and pushing of those who had landed, and the glances shared between officials stamping passports and security guards, the tension of this encounter was palpable.

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 follow many in considering listening as processes of sensing, attuning and noticing (Gay’wu Group of Women, 2019; Nabobo-Baba, 2006; Nozka, 2021. Tsing 2015). 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 the same as 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 I bring, and at the same to continually let go of what I imagine is being said based on my ideas of what I bring, requires 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 visibly 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 me to configure how I comport yourself. Am I a guest, a stranger, kin, family? Is my presence invited? Unwanted? What are my intentions? It asks me to be present in my body, present to how my body moves and shifts the environment through relation.

To be present in this way dislocates abstraction, it disavows any pretence that I am impartial, inconsequential. It takes away objectivity. This way of listening can be very uncomfortable because it is the recognition of myself as always in relation to others, in all of its forms. This makes me 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 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. Colonisation is not an event (Wolfe 2006). Listening is coming to a place being conscious of 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.

Because we are never just one thing and no encounter is ever just one thing, listening is a practice composed by and through difference. Dylan Robinson suggests that if listening methods are to be applied to material decolonisation efforts, they need to accommodate heterogeneity, showing all positionality, including settler identity as “a stratified and intersectional process” (2020, 39). Listening tells us that there are infinite ways that encounters happen between people with infinite interpretations, that identity is always contingent and conditional. 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 definite truth. 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 also not an end in itself. It is approaching encounters without anticipation or expectation with an awareness of, but not attachment to, what I bring and how my presence may change or charge the air. It is being generous toward mishearing, misunderstanding, projection, confusion, undoing. This is why listening takes something from me. Because it confronts me with ambiguity, at the same time as the very materiality of being in a body.

When we got up to the counter at customs the official barely paid us attention. She was laughing with her colleague sitting next to her about something that wasn’t for us to share. “Where are you going?” she asked as she stamped my passport. “To Suva for a while”, I answered, and she mentioned her sister that lived there and that there was a lot to do, with the markets and such. She wished us a safe trip down. The singer kept singing and the line clustered forwards. We passed through the gate and the next tourist took our place.