Listening, Democracy, Deconstruction

From Nationalist Myths to Typographies of Resistance

What is the relation between listening and democracy? Today we are witnessing, on the one hand, increasingly implacable demands to be heard and, on the other, paradoxically both a dearth and a surplus of listening. The themes of listening and democracy have been more or less tightly interwoven in political philosophy since Plato, but there has been no sustained study of how aurality, participation, representation, and the people are bound together as these concepts evolve in the continental philosophical tradition. The contemporary global situation, with the resurgence of anti-system politics and the turn within neoliberalism towards nationalist variants, throws this nexus into the spotlight and calls for a fresh analysis of the current crises of democratic representation specifically as a crisis of listening.

This project is a pilot piece of research, funded by the Research Development Fund at Warwick, in preparation for a much larger research project that will address these questions from an innovative, transdisciplinary perspective, combining theoretical and empirical work. One of the novelties of the larger project will lie in its multipronged approach to tackling the connection between listening and democracy, which deploys the tools of political philosophy alongside the practice of sensory ethnography, specifically field recording.

The large-scale project will cover three main sites—France, the UK, and the US—building on my own research expertise and working with a network of international collaborators. While there are striking differences, in all three countries democratic representation has been grounded in an historical dominance of two main parties and a neoliberal consensus that led to the weakening of the centre left and fuelled the rise of populist movements. There are also interesting exchanges and debates between actors in these sites about tactics of resistance and the promotion of democracy at local levels. The pilot will focus on the contemporary situation in France where the trajectory of the gilets jaunes offers a particularly rich example. While the larger project will examine how the concepts of voice and listening have been imbricated in accounts of democracy since Plato through 18th- and 19th-century European political philosophy to recent French thinkers, the pilot will focus on a chapter in this history. Derrida’s work on nationalism is an ideal pilot study because of the singular attention he pays to voice and listening and because his analysis of nationalism in the European context illuminates the current amalgam of anti-EU sentiment and appeals to a pseudo-democratic notion of the people.

The first strand of the pilot has been to conduct an in-depth study of Derrida’s largely unpublished and unexamined seminars on nationalism delivered in 1984–88 at EHESS. In the fragments published from this body of work, the themes of voice, hearing, and silence are never far away (e.g. how Heidegger’s understanding of the German people is linked to the prominent notion of hearing in this thought). This project is timely insofar as the recent publication of Geschlecht III has directed attention towards the seminars from which it is partially drawn. The one study by Oisín Keohane that touches upon this archival material has barely begun to scratch the surface of Derrida’s vast work on the theme of nationalism here and elsewhere, and it does not broach the question of aurality. These texts will be read alongside an extended set of interviews, broadcast by Bayerischer Rundfunk in 1988, on the topic of silence in relation to political responsibility and complicity.

The second strand of research will deploy my expertise in field recording to address the role of listening in democratic action, asking how field recording can be used as a method to investigate changing conditions and practices of listening and democratic participation and what can it tell us about typographies of resistance in social movements and other forms of activism. Much of my fieldwork to date has been conducted in the Parisian banlieues where long-standing issues of (post)coloniality and police violence mix with the far-right threat. Building on this work, the pilot will focus on the tensions and possibilities for convergence between the gilets jaunes movement and activists in the quartiers populaires, taking listening as both object and method of enquiry better to understand its risks, challenges, and opportunities for building intersectional coalitions and collectively formulating democratic demands. The field-recording practices developed pave the way for a more general methodology in which listening is itself used as a reflexive tool to study how listening is changing in social movements and in democratic participation more widely with the insinuation of digital platforms into all aspects of social reproduction.

Earlier in 2020, I wrote a piece published in The Independent on the connection between listening and nationalism in British politics: “Lisa Nandy's latest promise is straight out of the Thatcher playbook: The Labour leadership candidate’s pledge to listen to voters echoes the Tory underdog’s winning pitch.”