Propositional Listening

Presenter: Jacob Eriksen (Struer, DK)

Abstract

Listening to something is one thing. But what happens when we listen with, against, or even above? Is it possible to listen on behalf of something or someone? Listening is never a neutral act – there is no such thing as pure listening. It is always situated and shaped by context, conditions, and relations. By suggesting the term 'Prepositional Listening’, I propose that listening is a fluid, transformative, and relational state of attention – approached not only discursively and perceptually, but as discursive-perceptual. Taking the grammatical function of the preposition (with, to, for, against, by, etc.) as its point of departure, the workshop sought to generate a cascade of listening modes, being provocative, unusable, absurd, pragmatic, boring, usable, paradoxical, commonplace, metaphorical, poetic, political, and more. This method might diverge significantly in the context of different languages and cultures. For this session, I ask: What can such a grammatically influenced, almost reductive, approach do for our listening? And also, where are the limits?