Soft letting of language:
Listening for emergent wor(l)ds
My ongoing research involves a dual enquiry: to attend and in turn attempt to bring to reflective awareness the live and lived yet often undisclosed experience of thinking-feeling-knowing especially within artistic collaboration: the contingent processes of thinking-in-action, the subtle moments of not-knowing and of feeling one’s way, the interdependency of different forces and agencies both human and more-than-human. Simultaneously, this enquiry involves searching for linguistic means capable of operating in fidelity to that embodied experience: to develop different language-based artistic research practices for speaking with, through and from rather than necessarily about. Towards the soft letting of language, of an emergent vocabulary for attesting to the experiential, relational dimensions of collaborative sense-making. This research process often unfolds through collaboration with other artistic researchers within durational projects where a studio-residency, site-specific or other time-framed context are approached as live ‘laboratories’ for shared exploration, for testing different ‘ecologies of practice’.1 Over the last decade, I have evolved a web of conversation-based and experimental reading practices, conceived as tentative methods for inviting immanent, intersubjective modes of verbal-linguistic sense-making emerging through different voices enmeshed in the occasionality of live exchange.2 Transcript materials generated from recorded conversations become re-activated and re-organised through various experimental reading practices where fresh insights and understanding happens through unexpected conjunctions and (re)combinations, through the circling and looping of language. This process involves the revelation of a nascent artistic-poetic vocabulary, where linguistic content is not already known in advance, but rather emerges en acte — that is, only through its exercise, in and through the practising itself, through a live working-with of language.
My presentation for Listen for Beginnings drew on a number of recent collaborations to explore how the ethico-aesthetic practice of listening (and being listened to) has increasingly become a vital thread within my enquiry: listening as receptivity and open-ness within collaborative co-creation; listening as affective attunement during the ‘turning together’ of conversation; listening as an act of returning, repeating and re-engaging through the slow process of transcription, listening as the basis of dialogic and kairotic sense-making within improvisational spoken-word. The performativity of my presentation involved weaving between different research artefacts and materials generated in and through artistic collaboration (including video and transcript extracts), alongside thinking-with a wider critical-contextual milieu (specifically the writing of thinkers such as Gemma Corradi Fiumara and Lispeth Lipari) to consider the relational and ethical ramifications of a ‘listening attitude’.3 I explored how forms of languaging developed through listening might in turn call for different kinds of reception (alternative ways of listening and reading), alongside proposing how a ‘listening stance’ might inform an approach to collaboration — collaboration conceived as a mode of in-touch-ness that also allows for adjacency and alongside-ness, for indirectness and obliqueness, for the reciprocity of listening and being listened to. However, I do not want to distil or précis that performative presentation into a shorter textual (or even video/audio) format for this publishing context. Instead, I wish to allow a ‘breathing space’ (perhaps even a ‘listening space’) for selected fragments of an emergent vocabulary of/through listening generated from within a process of collaborative research. The italicised text that follows comprises extracts of conversational transcript from three different collaborative projects where an immanent and reflexive language for attesting to the qualities and conditions of listening emerges in and through a language-based practice that is itself imbued with a listening attitude — one that involves listening to oneself, listening to others, listening for emergent wor(l)ds. The textual extracts have been generated largely through a practice of conversation and/or the experimental reading of conversational transcripts within the following projects in dialogue with the collaborators named below. My ongoing research enquiry (outlined above) weaves a thread through all of these projects. However, each also has its own distinct focus that has been developed collaboratively.
I — Dorsal Practices is an artistic research collaboration with Katrina Brown for exploring how a back-oriented awareness and attitude might shape and inform our embodied, affective and relational experience of being-in-the-world.4 Since 2021, Dorsal Practices has unfolded through the interrelation of three fields of experimental, embodied research practice: movement-based practices, conversation practices and experimental reading practices. Central to this enquiry is an attempt to explore how the experiences of listening, languaging, even thinking, might be shaped differently through the embodied tilt of attention towards the back.
II — thinking aesthetic thinking through aesthetic research practices is an artistic research project involving Alex Arteaga, Emma Cocker, Nicole Wendel (with Sabine Zahn in the first phase) that focuses on ways in which aesthetic research practices enable and realise a specific form of thinking: aesthetic thinking.5 Between 2021 and 2023, we came together within a series of intensive exploratory online sessions, evolving a distinctive way of working together which we call Ecologies in Action. The Ecologies in Action are conceived as an apparatus for enabling dynamic relations and modes of in-touch-ness between different aesthetic practices.
III — The Appearance of the More is an artistic research collaboration with Nicole Wendel for bringing-into-relation the unfolding, embodied processes of drawing and languaging as resonating fields of perception and cooperation.6 Since June 2023, we have come together in different online and in-person contexts, engaging in time-bound periods of ‘live exploration’ or what we call Ecologies of Relation (comprising drawing-based, material-based and language-based practices) to explore the mutually constitutive relation between drawing and voiced language. We ask: What might emerge as a physical embodiment in space (as drawing) or audibly through language (as voicing), through attending to the presently perceived moment, through sensitivity, receptivity and deep listening to the silence, to what is already there?
I
Settling, sinking. A different kind of gaze — almost like the liquid of the eye drops back into its orbit. Dropping back, letting go. Softness and the closing of the eyes … this blurring, this dissolving of differentiated categories. To take attention to the sides of language, the grey areas of language. A different kind of register.
Orienting backwards, towards the back. A more radial sense — my ears are listening in a different way. Temperature and air — listening through touch and through the skin as well as through the ears. Sensing vibrations of bodies, objects — micro-frequencies. We are kind of sensing machines — you can pick up static, air circulating, tiny vibrations of many different things. Vibration, resonance — listening not only through the ears but through the skin, through the whole body.
There are two different kinds of listening: through the ear, skin or nervous system, or just the sensitivity to everything that is vibrating. Lingering in it and being with the movement of the world. A sense of being among, being one of those vibrating things. There is kind of located-ness through vibration and being present — more linked to listening. Releasing, releasing. Releasing the eyes. Releasing, releasing. Easiness in the eyes. Letting the eyes be released of orientation in a different way. Soft eyes to activate this dorsal listening.
How is it to listen, to be listening? How is it to listen, what kind of listening is required? To open into another dimension of noticing, noticing how the body reconfigures. Towards receptive listening. Allowing things to take time. Patience, quietness. Not having to recall — but really to listen. Slipping into a dorsal listening — listening to something, to someone and a sense of listening to oneself or of being listened to. A listening with or listening alongside that includes oneself in the listening.
Shift of preposition: from listening to, to listening with or listening alongside. With and alongside — there is more of a dorsal sense of around-ness, of co-existence, of inhabiting the same space and time. It is not only me listening. A more inclusive sense of listening. Soft enquiry, soft listening. This dwelling and inhabiting and moving and listening — the capacity to be. Not listening to get something but listening to experience. It opens a different relationship to the body, to space, to time. A not-facing form of listening — as a way of witnessing, of really listening. Really listening — what do I mean by really listening? Not being too forceful — finding a sweet spot between turning in and turning away. Between turning in and turning away — a kind of soft attention, not a direct glance. This way of listening, coming from the back. There is a kind of intimacy, a kind of intimacy with the environment and intimacy with oneself. Intimacy — a closeness with things. Open to the complexity of what is happening — this dorsal practising opens up the poly, the multi, the around-ness, rather than a single direction or focus. Listening with it, this alongside-ness. Not wanting something from it.
Swimming around in this soft thought space. This intermingling — a kind of thinking or languaging emerging in this space in-between. A soft dance between thinking and listening. A peculiar listening space, or language space, opens up. Soft slippages — a soft amorphous space but very precise at the same time. There is a density. More like a woven web. It opens up a different time. This listening and speaking at the same time, and the occasionality of that, the present tense of that. This intermingling between listening, speaking and thinking. Intermingling of voices and thoughts — being able to read, speak and listen to one’s own voice and the voice of the other, whilst acknowledging someone else’s listening and the complexity of that. The language creates a space of listening, a space for reflecting, a space for thinking, a space for connecting.
A dorsal listening — which isn’t listening to, isn’t trying to glean information. Not trying to tell something or say something or communicate something as such. There is almost nothing there to hold — it doesn’t accumulate. Letting the thoughts just come rather feeling this pressure to speak. This pressure to speak is to do with a preoccupation with what is coming next, the future, an orientation to what is going to come. There is something about activating a different kind of listening, it calls for a different kind of listening. A dorsal voicing that does not accumulate, does not build towards argument. The form of the voicing itself might disallow or disrupt a certain kind of sense-making that is looking for cohesion or evolution of sense, something that can be discerned. Listening, less about attending to the content, but staying with the feel. Sometimes one of the phrases resonates — and I hear it, I really hear it, or I hear it as if I have never really heard it before.
What the voices are saying beyond their texture. Absorbing language through the body, through the skin. The content is not always graspable — words passing through me. The feeling of language, the tone, the feeling tone. Content that feels mercurial, liquid. Letting it wash through. To listen — over and over, again and again, each time landing differently, feeling differently. Circling, cycling, entering in a different way. Listening to the single words and short phrases mingling, becoming more enmeshed. Taking time and taking of time. You don’t have to think the words, the words are there to be felt. Forgetting everything that was spoken, that was listened to — it’s all gone. Not being able to recollect it or not being able to hold it. To recognise the desire for capture, to want to distil, to make sense of — and yet each time it slips away. The feeling of the phrasing, a felt tone or sense. There is a kind of cadence, of one voice moving into another. The one bleeds into the other, the one merges into the other, the one becomes the other.
II
Letting the world slip into my senses, attentive to what is happening. Deactivating the willing. Waiting. Saying nothing. Waiting. Listening. Remaining. Vibrating — a time frame opening. Remaining. Abandoning. Dissolving. Letting — there is a call there. There is a quality I can sink into, breathing in and out. To receive something. The simultaneity of naming and the thing named — both give rise to the other. Let the synchronicity appear. A sense of one direction unfolding and then suddenly something arising and responding to the pull of that. Yet, this response is not made.
Not to amplify the I. Holding back a sense of recognising. What does it mean to hold back? A condition of a certain kind of thinking. Something shifts and new possibilities become visible or tangible or felt. Resting, inhaling. No ‘me’ controlling this play of momentums. From the beginning, no ‘me’ controlling. There is a matter of relaxation — waiting, receiving. Different registers of not knowing — where there is no I. I was not appearing. Subjectivity as ego-centric experience disappears. A non-egocentric use of subjectivity. And in these moments of no-I — a sense of no-time.
There are all these nameless situations or moments that are not graspable. Not to bring to language. Not forcing language to be a grasping tool, but a touching tool — to let words appear. Not already language — to carry into language, continue experience into language. Language unfolding from experience, in the same key or texture. This language-with, thinking-with. Extension of the non-verbal — language has to learn a different pace.
Closing the eyes. Letting the eyes be somehow softer. Recognising this desire to recognise, to name — language beings, language begins. A sense of grasping … and then needing to pull back, stepping back. Letting go of names. Before I name there is a potentiality, as if it is guiding, as if the knowledge itself can unfold before I name it. Language can quickly escalate into a certain kind of thinking, away from the sensing. Taking my attention back to the movement as a way of drawing back, of settling, coming back. Letting the eyes close.
Letting in, welcoming. Waiting, waiting to see. No, actually, not seeing, yet still waiting. There is something that is evolving by itself — through the material, through the logic of material. The material is resonating — in this moment of becoming. It opens a field of experience, of difference. The logic of material needs to orient first. Shimmering. Pulsing. Inhabiting hesitation — fine thin delicate membrane. The indirectness of this kind of thinking. Keeping it soft requires a different tone of voice. From time to time — listening, sinking, settling. Following the trusting. And I wonder, what is this mouth, this tongue, forming?
Against the radical silence of the background. The silence of language is part of the continuity. Silent as immanence, vibrating. The texture of silence — not as a break and not as a pause. Not having the continuity broken. Sensitivity to the texture of silence, the agency of silence. Silent letting — requires training. A waiting, a learning related to the body, yes. It is hard for language. It is hard for language. Listening in the gaps between the words. What unfolds there? Soft, fluid, pulsing. Ex-pecting. An empty frame — this pulsing of listening and inbetween-ness. Receptivity at the edges to what might be unfolding. It requires a different tone of voice. This sense of coming-to-be, a middle way, the silence of soft letting. There is a call to enter into dialogue, a language also allowing for no words.
III
Even before it begins, to hold back. To sink into — not to grasp, but to let it come. This letting go — the quietening of a certain kind of thinking. To hold back and really pay attention to what is happening here. Creating the conditions for something, but not trying to make it happen. Working with materials — there is something else which also speaks back, talks back, wants to do things. It is already collaborative; it is already a dialogue. To approach — the material helps to orient in a way. Always in relation to listening, to the situation, to what is there. How different things might need different kinds of listening — like whether I need to listen to the stone in the same way that I listen to the stick or I listen to you or to language. What does each thing want to say, and how do they say it, and do they say it differently, and how does this difference in saying call for different kinds of listening or response?
Listening as a continuum, yes, listening as a continuity — sometimes more receptive, sometimes in the midst of something else. More like a flow of attentiveness. Listening as the ground for all of this, as the ground for all of what appears. Not only a physical listening, also the receiving, yes, the receiving of signals. A field of relation is created or established in this form of togetherness. There are all these things happening, all of these things happening. To let unfold whatever is arising, this experience of trust. A potential, a horizon. Being written in the moment as a sensible form. Letting it travel through the body. This very soft quality of encountering and relating. There is nothing to do in a way. Almost like not wanting to come to something too quickly. Not willing or not needing of anything, not wanting. The I is not thinking — stepping back makes possible new arisings. Yes, maybe the absence of the I in all of this.
The beginning was a not knowing. It has nothing to do with the wanting — it is more being able to receive, or becoming able to receive, it is a process of receiving. There is a care, a careful space, a care for being able to trust, for being able to make the next step through into the unknown. The unknown is the constant ground. Wishing, wishing for an encounter that is more than my own making in a way. I let go and I feel myself letting go, and there is this ease and this widening out, opening up and something happening. This very delicate line of alertness. The act of witnessing has this quality of a certain receptivity or even passivity, but extreme alertness as well. A quality of listening — as a dynamic energy, so not this leaning back completely. It is a spaciousness of a completely different kind somehow. Like it opens into a completely other world — like you could fall into it somehow. Like almost vertigo — this feeling that something is opening up. Receptivity to what is beyond the eyes and being attentive to what is there. Something is calling. To slow down also gives possibility to listen, to read what is there, what is appearing. Slowing down and with the slowing down — trusting, letting things appear.