On Listening

I don't really know what I expected for last class except that I thought that being "a listener" would feel more official, or would come with some attendant recognizable responsibilities that would fit in with my conception of more traditional models of transmission-oriented learning. Throughout the class I felt like I wanted to speak, to prove that I'd taken in something or that I'd learnt something specific, to end an awkward silence or to prove that I was in the class and paying attention. That's the crux of what was so interesting about being in the position of "listener", that I felt frustrated in that I didn't feel I could prove that I was listening. What "listening" in the context of a university class looks like, traditionally, was something I couldn't prove with my speech. Amusingly, when Erin was asking for input I would initially make eye contact with the intent to ask a question or to make a comment, but then once I remembered I was one of the designated readers I would look down and break the eye contact. It's interesting to have these deviations from the norm introduced into the university setting to remind us of just how constructed and artificial a lot of the norms and standards we take to be self-evident are.

After I reconciled myself to questioning listening for the duration of the class, and attempting to ensure that I was doing so, I took up the challenge of just listening to the way people read Moten's words, and where the difference lay between reading him in my head and hearing him in others' voices. One of the most startling things which really came out for me last class was the way that grammar dictates tone, and the way in which one has to grapple with these brackets, commas, and forward slashes without articulating them directly.

At one point in the text Moten uses the term "idiom(atic)" and then a few pages later uses "idiomatic" (Moten 44-47, actual book). Listening to how people read those terms differently really reminded me that not only does reading aloud provide an ineffable set of qualities, but that both of these modes of reading, reading the page and reading out loud, are required to get at just how subtle and well crafted Moten's work is. He is a writer and a reader and the material really does work on different registers in different manners. I think the value isn't just located in reading
"The thing is, these organizational principles break down; their breakdown disallows reading, improvises idiom(atic difference) and gestures toward an anarchic and generative meditation on phrasing that occurs in what has become, for reading, the occluded of language: sound" and then later reading "The echo of what is not but nothing other than unremembered is a wound in Derrida (for example), confounding the dream of another universality, conflating that dream with the vision of an old song, old-new language, homely sound, naïve or idiomatic writing" while noting the play between "idiom" and "idiom(atic)" and then "idiomatic" and how these different usages alter the content of the phrase, or simply in listening to someone read these passages and noting that the bracketed "(atic)" takes on the quality of an aside in someone's voice while "idiomatic" comes out naturally and without obstacle in another's, but in the combination of both of these modes of reading. Reading with yourself and reading with others, in concert with listening to others' reading, opens up the text and provokes a new acknowledgement of the ways in which written text and speech inform, embrace and distort one another.

/Joshua W