What is Called Listening? Patti Smith and the Soundwalk Collective’s Correspondences

I originally wrote this short reflection on Patti Smith and the Soundwalk Collective’s exhibit Correspondences, which I visited at Bogota’s El Centro Nacional de las Artes Delia Zapata Olivella in September 2023

I’m glad I got to see Patti Smith and the Soundwalk Collective’s exhibit Correspondences before it closed. The organizers fought hard to have it brought here to Bogota, and it was worth it.

The basic setup was a series of 8 screens, ambient musical accompaniment, two physical installations, and recordings of Patti Smith reading poems layered over the audio. The screens showed a variety of images, so the visual mash-up changed depending on the combination of screens you watched at that time (audio was consistent).

I stayed for more than an hour and saw maybe 3–4 of the poems. I think I missed quite a bit. I’d hoped to make it back, but I believe it just closed.

Outside of the installation, the organizers had posted the transcript of a conversation between Patti Smith and Soundwalk Collective member Stephen Crasneanscki. Something Crasneanscki said about listening stood out to me:

Listening… As I said before, in listening, there’s an act of presence. And what I notice most often when I’m recording is that it requires me to be present. When we are in the present time, then synchronicity happens; you see the world. Most of the time, we are hijacked by our mind or the talking of ourselves or others. The field recording is a practice of presence. It’s a very slow process. Some times we think there’s something and then, no, we go somewhere else. Progressively, layer by layer, it gets solidified and crystallized, in a sense. These little stones or truths or little clarity or little peradam… they come during the journey and eventually the piece is created slowly, by having back and forth conversations, but also different studios where we’ll go, in London, Berlin, New York, Paris. We’ll go back and sometimes Patti will redo everything from scratch. There’s a piece we’ve redone many times over many years and suddenly something happens, and then that’s it: we know this is working, it’s there. We don’t have a goal, and it’s just in the process that it becomes clear.

I think it’s important that Crasneanscki emphasizes that listening is not a passive activity or form of absence. Much to the contrary, listening is about being present and attentive to one’s surroundings. Particularly in educational circles, people can forget that to listen quietly isn’t to be absent.

From this, it makes sense then that listening can allow for synchronicity to happen. I see Crasneanscki’s point. Close awareness of one’s surroundings can facilitate recognition of weird coincidences or opportunities that might not be obvious even if one is paying attention — much less if one is distracted by conversation with others, one’s own inner dialogue or one’s own expectations.

Indeed, one’s setting addresses you. A lived environment isn’t inert: as is implicit in Crasneanscki’s remarks, it calls out to you in different ways (“Wow, what a weird coincidence. I hadn’t noticed that. I wonder if ….”). I seem to remember Heidegger discussing a similar idea in What is Called Thinking? (1952), though it’s been several years since I looked at that one.

So, I like this idea of listening as an active form of receptivity. On one rendering, this variety of listening is about trying to minimize the impact of one’s biases and preconceived expectations (the “beginner’s mind,” and so forth). Furthering this point, one could make the case that this style of listening has a certain ethical basis. Listening is about being addressed, but it is also a manner of addressing. This operates in a lot of ways: what you pay attention to can reflect your values, as well as our choice to work to minimize your biases (which of course as an aspiration reflects a certain value orientation).

Beyond all of that, to meet something on its own terms by listening reflects an implicit attitude of respect or regard. Attentive listening is not just a matter of being perceptually aware of something but also having the personal willingness to attend to the results of that awareness, which requires that one have enough respect for the results of that awareness to take them seriously.

From that insight, it’s only a short jump to recognizing the link between love and listening. To know how to love) is to know how to listen. A relationship will fail if one doesn’t know how to hear as well as attend to the address issued from the beloved (whether human or not).

The question then is how to respond when those signals fall flat. It seems to me that art (broadly conceived) can play a role in those cases. Artistic address can foster attentive listening by aggressively speaking to the listener or emphasizing particular considerations. It can underscore them — sometimes forcefully, if necessary. The world can and does call out to the interlocutor, and receptivity to that address requires a certain ethical comportment. However, one thing that’s unique about art is that it is consciously designed to address human subjectivity on its own terms, which makes it powerful.

Of course, this isn’t a guarantee of anything in terms of receptivity, but it can make an address be a little harder to ignore. Reaching for a metaphor here, there’s a wonderful scene in the horror movie Hostel where a German tourist requests to have his torture victim muzzled when the victim begins addressing him in his own language (German). The murderer can tolerate listening to his victim plead for his life in a foreign language, but he can’t tolerate hearing those pleas in his own. Art can issue an address put in a parlance that is just a little harder to ignore.

There are of course many varieties of listening, and they can reveal and communicate different things at different times. I don’t remember where, but I seem to recall an interview in which Foucault refers to styles of silence. I would argue listening is similarly diverse. I would be curious to see a typology of listening — particularly in its relationship with different styles of ethical comportment, perceptual awareness, and lived experience.

Put differently: I’d be willing to listen to the address such a typology would make.