The Anticipation of Listening
Janan Ganesh's Financial Times article on conversations and listening is a reminder that creative listening is a critical skill in anticipation
In the Financial Times Weekend, Janan Ganesh’s column ‘The Quest for Interesting Conversation’ addresses the method that is at the heart of his practice as a columnist in seeking out insight, “I am condemned to a life of perpetual listening, lest a globule of someone else’s insight gets lost in the wind.”
Listening is tricky – part of the ‘how’ of listening is for Ganesh to recognise the ‘when’.
And so to the rule that shapes my life. People don’t know when they are being interesting. Someone will yak away for an hour on their core theme and then, as we settle the bill, mumble something en passant that unlocks an entire column idea. The gold is so often in the digression.
This sensing of the moment in listening, or how a moment disguises itself in something arbitrary or minor, is also the skill of the psychoanalyst in recognising how and when a patient is disclosing something significant in their storytelling that they don’t want heard.
Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes in Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst that, “We spend our lives, Freud will tell us, not facing the facts, the facts of our history, in all their complication; and above all, the facts of our childhood […] And to face all these improbable facts we need a different way of listening to the stories of our lives, and a different way of telling them.”
An effective psychoanalytic experience then, is one where creative ways of listening help us open up futures that aren’t anchored in difficult pasts.
Listening is a critical anticipatory skill, and it’s what artists do in sensing the future. It’s not the kind of diagnostic, causal listening, in a doctor’s practice of auscultation described by anthropologist Tom Rice in his seminal paper on medical listening ‘Learning to Listen: auscultation and the transmission of auditory knowledge’ [more later]. Auscultation, is the medical practice of listening to the body for signals with a stethoscope. The artist listens for different kinds of signals.
In 1975, Russian American mathematician and management thinker Igor Ansoff published a paper in California Management Review, titled, ‘Managing Strategic Surprise by Response to Weak Signals’, and this idea of weak signals illustrating less obvious trends became central to futures and foresight work. But anticipatory listening requires us to develop new practices of listening.
One of the differences between traditional futures research and anticipation is how creativity plays a role. 1960s pop philosopher Marshall McLuhan wrote that we march into the future through the rearview mirror. He argued that our take on the future is fashioned by inherited ways of seeing and sensing. The ‘future’ is really just a version of what we already know from given modes of perception and ways of listening. Instead of the ‘rearview’ let’s think with an ‘earview’.
Art and Design School Ears
McLuhan was known for his aphoristic way of thinking captured in phrases such as “the medium is the message”, but he was less well known for his belief that artists, their artworks, were a kind of ‘radar’ of the future that we need to tune into.
Originally published in 1964, in the introduction to the second, 1966, edition of Understanding Media McLuhan wrote that, “The power of the arts to anticipate future social and technological developments, by a generation and more, has long been recognized. In this century Ezra Pound called the artist ‘the antennae of the race’. Art as radar acts as ‘an early alarm system…”.
Art is able to do this McLuhan argues because it acts as an “anti-environment”, allowing us to hear and see the future as it hidden in the normal, in everyday common sense (common sensing makes the future inaudible). He says, “Art as anti-environment becomes more than ever a means of training perception and judgment.”
It’s one of the many extraordinary things our art and design schools do, they train and change perception! If they are not really understood by policy and decision-makers (that’s also to do with the fact that no-one in government has been to art school) it is partly because in McLuhan’s language, art and design school is an anti-environment! Art and design students train themselves and their teachers, to listen to the future, to the ‘unheard’ (the topic of one of the graduate researchers I am working with).
It is possible to educate perception for anticipatory listening. Mark Peter Wright, a Reader in Critical Sound Practice at the London College of Communication, explores some of these issues around listening and recording in Listening after Nature: Field Recording, Ecology, Critical Practice. Wright’s work examines the many different forces operating in what seems to be a simple act of listening.
Wright cites for example a field recording during Australian bushfires in 2019-2020, which captured the sound of a magpie mimicking the emergency sirens of fire engines arriving to put out the fires which he notes were the consequence of man-made climate change.
Just as the magpie’s listening enables it to call out to the bush something new, how can we listen, or as Wright asks, ‘how has my listening changed […] The uncanny sounds of a magpie mimicking sirens in the context of anthropogenic change glitches knowledge, makes meaning all the more anxious, all the more multiple. As Donna McCormack reminds us, “our ethical responsibility is to listen to what we cannot understand, as well as the familial and the comprehensible.”’ (Wright, pp 152–153) We need to change our habit of listening to create futures different from the dangerous ones that have already arrived.
Listening to images
It's also why Wright calls us to listen to another work about listening by Tina Campt, Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University’s Department of Art and Archatoeology and the Lewis Center for the Arts. Campt’s Listening to Images is about the sensing of ‘quiet photography’, in vernacular everyday photography such as that shown in an exhibition in New York of work from the Gulu Real Art Studio, by photographer Obal Dennis, and curated by Martina Bacigalupo.
The images show people sitting, posed for portraits – but the portraits shown are without faces. Taken in the Ugandan city of Gulu, the uniform, white squares on each photo signalled where the faces would have been, cut out for identity photos. Campt recognises similar ‘low frequency’ vernacular images in the ‘overlooked’ passport photos she found (and initially overlooked) in the Birmingham City Archives that speak of the fugitive, of aspiration and respectability of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora that settled (along with the Irish, South Asian communities) and helped to re-build post-war Britain:
They are photographs that engendered new circuits of movement, relation, and dwelling that reshaped the postwar culture of the Black Atlantic. They are some of the least audible and, for many, most ordinary of photos. To me, these sublimely quiet images enunciate an aspirational politics that are accessible at the lowest of frequencies – frequencies that hum and vibrate between and beyond the leather binding and governmental pages to which they were intended to be affixed. (Campt, p. 26)
Campt outlines a kind of archaeology of listening, an anticipatory practice where voices and futures that have been erased, muted, can be accessed. This archaeology she practices is also an aesthetic, in the sense of aesthetic as a sensory way of knowing. It is a practice of become attuned to the hypernormative, to the normed everyday.
What is the frequency of these images? Quiet. A quiet hum full of reverb and vibrato. Not always perceptible to the human ear, we feel it more in the throat. To look at these images is to see genre and form. To look at them is to look through their sitters and see function and format, to “oversee” them in ways in which black people have been erased and overseen for centuries. To listen to them is to be attuned to their unsayable truths, to perceive their quiet frequencies of possibility – the possibility to inhabit a future as unbounded black subjects. Listening to these images gives us access to something much more mediated and perhaps far more powerful: the hum of utopian dreams and diasporic aspiration. It is a hum that resonates the unsayable truths of black folks at the lower frequencies of quiet photography. (Campt, p.45).
For Campt, the practice of listening to images opens a futurity that has been created by the ‘unseen’ sitters.
If the future is already here as sci-fi writer William Gibson suggests, perhaps the future is already hear too.
Perhaps our traditional modes of scenario-making in futures are too restricted by our norms, procedures and the voices we allow in the room. It is something Ganesh nods to in the print version of his column lying on my kitchen table. Dinner parties, he suggests are not likely to be sources of insight – the setting is too private, too polite perhaps, too much (good) consideration of the cook, the food, the hospitality of the host.
I also wondered what the online FT Art Director heard in Ganesh’s article because while the print version has no photo or illustration, the online version leads with a telling black and white documentary image. It’s a 1961 photograph by Fred W. McDarrah, of a house party (not a dinner party) in Christopher Street, New York. Guests fill the room, drinking and chatting in the apartment of actor writer and poet Robert Cordier.
But at the centre of the image, at the centre of the gaze and the listening of the party-goers is the figure of black American writer James Baldwin. It’s not part of a genre of quiet photography. But it’s an interesting choice of image to suggest that as much as many different bodies and listening ears are needed to tap into a future. Anticipation like Baldwin himself, is a creative act of fashioning self and world.
Kodwo Eshun, co-founder with Anjalika Sagar of the Turner Prize nominated Otolith Group [oto-lith, Greek for ear stone] reflects in an interview with art, biology and sustainability institution Mediamatic, that listening isn’t passive:
Sometimes listening to music is more about listening to your own ways of listening, hearing your own ways of hearing. Wondering what you’re hearing. And sometimes you need time to do it, and that’s when the anxiety sets in. Everyone around you says that listening is time-wasting, but you have to remind yourself that listening is an active form of creating.
Futures have been made mute, but are audible. Anticipation requires us to create listening with an earview on it.
Dive Deeper
Ansoff, I. (1976) ‘Managing strategic surprise by response to weak signals’ California Management Review
Campt, T. (2017) Listening to images (2017) Duke University Press.
McLuhan, M. (2013) Understanding media: The extensions of man (2013) Gingko Press
Wright, M.P. (2022) Listening after nature: Field recording, ecology, critical practice Mark Peter Wright. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional.
Podcasts
Tina Campt - Episode 63 of Imagine Otherwise