The place where I have worked for more than three decades invites me to contribute to something called “Sydney Listens”. Hot on the heels of an invitation by Australia Post to reveal my customer experience of a recent book delivery, I am invited to answer yet another important questionnaire. This time, it is from the institution that has benefitted from three decades of my best attention and thought. Amazing. Together with thousands of colleagues of diverse disciplines and responsibilities my individual views are important. Do the custodians of this institution know us like Australia Post knows it’s customers? Sizeable salaries and superannuation benefits courtesy of the Australian taxpayer are paid, one should think in recognition of attention, knowledge and thought?
Well, let’s cut to the chase: this invitation is not a first. Previous iterations of “Sydney Listens” turn up a consistent answer: a large number of academics have embarrassingly little faith in the Executive of the institution they work in. There might be many reasons that can explain this. How about this one – too much babble and too little genuine thought. Without meaningful encounter with truth, words become chatter. Like muzak no one really listens. Universities might be in bigger trouble than they know!
Be that as it may, my interest here is philosophical. I am facing an invitation that is boldly framed as “listening”! If I look closer, this listening seems more like a trawling for responses, a harvesting of views to provide measurement supposedly informing action and “strategy”. What is the relationship between listening and measurement? On what basis can such a project claim that it listens? Is listening an extraction of views, a harvesting of facts or a gathering of opinions? Do we actually listen when we frame human views, lived experience and perceptions so that they become measurable?
As a philosopher and musician these questions must interest me. In particular, and put simply: What is listening? And, how does listening relate to- or manifest itself in action? Such questions are particularly important for performing musicians. So, I will start with what I know in the hope that it will help me understand my perplexity about being framed as staff or customer when I am essentially neither.
Musical players rely on listening to create and orient themselves in their worlds. They are like bats. I remember the frequent insistence of the great string quartet teacher and mentor Eberhard Fels that “…deaf bats fly into the fire”. The significance here is that listening is ultimately more than gathering information or views. It is a process of anticipation and detection – a sense that guides actions in the moment of unfolding action and life. Like life itself music is already under way when we listen and determine our actions. We cannot extract ourselves from this lived flow to pause, gather information and resume life. We must fly. We must steer between the alternatives of a “life of quiet desperation” and the fate of Icarus. In this task, listening is our chance, our possibility, our responsibility and our challenge. We hear how the future might arrive and meet us or – alternatively – how we might watch a disappearing train depart without us in the distance.
A performing musician’s fundamental orientation in the world of her art relies on her ability to relate her own playing to the context in which she plays music. This can be a complex context consisting of many voices which need to be balanced and brought into harmony. How this is achieved masterfully is dependent on knowledge, experience, attention, sense and intuition. It is achieved by our consciousness, by our attention and awareness within retention, perception of the present and anticipation of the future. It is an achievement of the imagination which integrates these dimensions into anticipation of action in the moment of play. Listening is a combination of perception and anticipation, transcending the mere present through an extension of our sensibility into the future, into realms of possibility.
Playing occurs as a manifestation of the imagination which achieves this integration. It is not possible for the performer to play first and then fix what they have just done. Play follows a model of action that is in Aristotle’s terms a praxis (a doing). Aristotle distinguishes this from poeisis (a making). The aim of playing is the activity itself. This activity only occurs when it actualises itself. Listening is the guiding sense of play. It is a gathering insofar as it facilitates imaginative anticipation, that is direction. It does not gather the present or past for their own sake. It does not extract information for any objective assessment. Listening to information- to the present alone absents itself from the direction of play.
Play is constituted anew through active, directed and anticipatory listening. It is naïve to assume that we could improve playing, just because we heard shortcomings in a previous performance. The listening that is required for improvement is an anticipatory listening, whereas the listening that gathers information is reflective and merely perceptive. These two types of listening undergo temporal transformation on account of our imagination and its direction through our attention. For play the objective listening has at best an indirect value to transform the player’s awareness and imagination to conceive play in the moment of playing. Play requires that our listening does not merely contribute to our sense of reality but to our conception of the phenomena that direct play. It is this conception of the phenomena that guides our actions and play.
Listening emerges from a search that does not simply grasp or measure what is already in existence. It comes into being through a differentiated understanding, a hearing of that which is being listened to and an intuitive sense for the not-yet audible. The musician needs to attune herself and hearken in advance of listening and hearing. Listeners must be attuned. They have – in some sense –heard already. They allow what is about to be heard to occur and come into being. Nothing is easier than to prevent listening. It is even easier to pretend that one hears something. All we need to do is to emphasize the importance of presence and frame the future as nothing more than another presence to arrive some time as a result of our actions. The future, however, is never just a presence in a yet-to-arrive time. The future is the imagined possibility that informs the understanding of the topical, current presence already. This is where “Sydney Listens” falls into an abyss of thoughtlessness. Attunement to what is audible and to what is yet unheard needs to be maintained through active attention. This enables the fundamental possibility of listening as it reaches out into the future. “Sydney Listens” cannot listen. In its deafness it naively thinks that it needs to gather more measurable information and opinions.
The fundamental difference of listening and measurement is then as follows: While listening seeks the unheard, measurement gathers the known and straightforward, the unsurprising and predictable. For us to measure there must be a measure which allows measurement in the first instance. Measurement is already committed to an ontology determining the measurable. We face the constant assumption that we already move within measurable dimensions. Ultimately, we can only measure what discloses itself as measurable or what we frame to be measurable. However, what if the essential truth of that which we seek to know and understand lies outside this measurable dimension? What if this truth escapes the present? What if we are concerned precisely with the possible?
Music, work and life, essential thought and human speech do not lend themselves to measurement. Measurement requires steadiness and presence. Life and work are never fully present. They are directed into – and determined by an unmeasurable future. Music is never fully present. Essential thought and speech are always on the way. Measurement requires an ontological reduction that dissolves the essential nature of such phenomena. Listening, however, respects the integrity of these phenomena. It sets a demand for renewed, active attention and interpretation, for an intuitive expansion of possibilities of understanding and for an anticipation of the future that determines action in the present.
What is the consequence of the insight that measurement and listening are not congruent? Two realisations show themselves: Listening requires the attunement to possibility and an openness to the unheard and as-yet-inaudible. Listening tunes ears to the frequency of thought. It directs antennae to a bandwidth of possibilities. This provides listening with transcending possibilities.
Measurement remains deaf to such transcendence. It simply orders what is already disclosed and obvious. This might help practical assemblies, but it cannot in itself determine thoughtful action. Its results and insights occur automatically and in predictable ways. Suggesting that measurement is a form of listening or that listening is a form of measurement is essentially thought-less. This makes “Sydney Listens” a more or less tedious manifestation of deafness.