Cate Thill’s (2009) work with remote Indigenous communities and their response to the Australian Commonwealth Government’s 2007 Intervention highlights the fault lines in liberal discourses of listening, and its operationalisation on the ground. Thill observed how listening was used in the Australian federal government’s Northern Territory Intervention response
:
While listening can figure as a way of responding to the other ... it is certainly not always open, empathetic or transformative. On the contrary, I would suggest that public debate about the NT Intervention manifests a range of communicative practices, including argumentation, therapeutic and selective listening, which function to preserve rather than transform established hierarchies of attention (541).
Of particular relevance to my analysis is Thill’s reference to therapeutic and selective listening, which I briefly address in turn below. While both modes of listening have important roles to play in democratic processes - such as in formal truth and reconciliation frameworks, or community consultation processes - Thill shows how the state can deploy these very same strategies of listening to solidify, rather than diversify or dissolve, existing relations of power and systems of knowledge, while masquerading as a form of community engagement and responsiveness to the needs and desires of community. While political listening of the kind Bickford and others put forward demands a certain kind of openness and orientation towards the other, therapeutic listening is instead directed towards marking
Both post-Foucauldian (Rose, 1989) and feminist (Becker, 2005) frames of analyses have exposed these relations of power at play in ‘the therapeutic’, and the way it shapes subjectivity through intimate mechanisms of social regulation. The ascendency of “therapeutic culture” (Nolan, 1998) over the last few decades - and its attendant form of listening - holds out a promise of engagement (‘tell me your concerns’) but are often detached from a commitment to action, as the above quote reveals. Therapeutic culture operates on a dual logic of confession and optimisation; where speech is connected to self- reflexive and enterprising tendencies, and modes of listening are moulded around these. In this economy of listening, the performance of registering what one has to say may create the feeling of being heard without the necessary political effects: ‘the therapeutic’ becomes the dominant frame that prescribes how one can listen and what one hears (to borrow from Bickford). From a post-Foucauldian standpoint, therapeutic culture and, by extension, therapeutic listening, operate regulatory forms of social control, and a mechanism through which particular kinds of subjectivity are designated, shaped and maintained (Rose, 1989; Wright, 2008). Rose’s (1999) work on the governing of the self in advanced liberal
democracies reveals how individuals are increasingly rendered responsible for decisions and choices. Following Rose, John Tebutt (2009: 550-551) argues this involves “learning to listen” as part of a therapeutic approach to governance that internalises and psychologises responsibility as a requisite for being a ‘good’ citizen.
Approaching Thill’s account of the NT Intervention with this post-Foucauldian frame, we can see how therapeutic listening can become intimately entangled with the “biopolitics of healing” (Million, 2013: 147), where the psychological trauma of
dispossession within First Nations and indigenous communities becomes the object of listening at the expense of accounts of structural injustice, oppression, or making claims to human rights. This continual expansion of therapeutic modes of listening into the realm of politics and state sovereignty not only blurs the political and therapeutic, it also dilutes the power of a transformative politics of listening put forward by scholars like Bickford and Dreher. In his critique of national reconciliation projects and strategies of ‘healing’ in post- conflict societies, Michael Humphrey (2005: 209) contends that historical injustice is increasingly managed therapeutically and reconceived as psychological injury or individual trauma. This therapeutic ethos, he insists, “dominates relations between the state and its
citizens”. This subsuming of the political by the personal is a far cry from the emancipatory politics of ‘the personal is political’.
What Kaushik Sunder Rajan (2006: 179) diagnoses as the “enlarged of the domain of the therapeutic” also privileges a particular politics of voice based on the exposure to and the subsequent overcoming or managing or risk, and stories of optimisation that are paradoxically embedded within a precarious and ongoing site of maximisation. Individual stories take shape within this biopolitical field of governance, rendered intelligible via a neoliberal subjectivity (and their associated forms of recognition). When considered in this context, therapeutic listening practices can reproduce structures of colonial power rather than decolonise the terms of engagement between mainstream and marginalised
communities (Dutta, 2014). This echoes Humphrey’s (2005: 203) caution that the therapeutic reframing of historical injustice is “no substitute for the reconstruction of an inclusive society”.
Thill’s (2009) analysis of “selective” listening suggests a related practice that involves a deliberate ‘tuning in’ and ‘tuning out’, or a kind of switching on and off of attention, that is contingent upon the degree to which what is said supports or challenges the position of the listener. As I have argued, listening shapes and regulates the boundaries of acceptable (and possible) speech, so that what is narratable is partially shaped by the priorities, purposes and objects of listening (Tebbutt, 2009). In modulating the degree and direction of attention, selective listening can be employed as a subtle but deliberate strategy of exercising power and authority. As Thill attests to in the case of the NT Intervention, when the listener - as a representative of the state - holds the power to determine when and how the object of listening is heard, listening itself is implicated in the reproduction of systems of oppression. This logics of listening also becomes a way of managing risks, categorising and prioritising segments of the population over others, as well as marking out subjects for reworking - in this case, Indigenous communities themselves. But it also helps me think through how listening can shift between a mode of attention and a mode of attunement as it becomes attached to competing priorities and political rationalities.
Some scholars might argue that such logics of listening give rise to non-listening or listening that is not ‘true’ listening because they do not challenge existing hierarchies, structures or conditions of voice poverty. However, I maintain it is more productive to
consider how these particular kinds of listening emerge within an economy of voice that is both connected to, and departs from, democratic and neoliberal imperatives. Specifically, in the way that certain strategies of therapeutic and selective listening are no longer accorded value through their attachment to a reciprocal ethics or intention of openness, but rather in the way they privilege certain modes of address to regulate the contours of what can be said, normalising the terms through which certain narratives come into being. For instance, when listening is incorporated into a logic of inclusion, narratives produced through these frames are increasingly based on the articulation of difference and belonging. When listening becomes a mechanism of therapeutic governance, narratives bound up with ideals of self-transformation and actualisation are favoured over narratives that insist on questioning prevailing sites of authority.
Further, listening practices that are attuned to, and coproduce, therapeutic narratives bear out a tension between capitalist narratives of progress and neoliberal narratives of self- regulation. This economy of listening is can be understood in the broader context of “therapeutic authority” (Miller and Rose, 1994: 59) and “emotional capitalism” (Illouz, 2007) that have emerged in advanced liberal democracies over the last thirty years. In the 1990s, Toby Miller and Nikolas Rose (1994: 59) charted the emergence of this “new species of authority” attached, as they saw it, to a diverse range problems concerning the governing and conduct of life, through reflexive modes of self-scrutiny and regulation. With this therapeutic authority came new “[e]xpertises, technologies and representations that give a form to the therapeutic machine [which] redefine the limits of vision, and create new ways of acting upon that which is brought into view” (59). Therapeutic listening then reconstructs the neoliberal subject by ‘listening out’ for narratives of empowerment, autonomy, optimisation and individual responsibility. This kind of listening is acutely attuned to registering the twin discourses of individual choice and responsibility, bringing into view various biopolitical strategies for transformation and intervention.
The cultural junction between therapeutic listening and neoliberal imperatives brings about an intensification of the ways in which subjects are incited to continually work on themselves. American sociologist Eva Illouz (Illouz, 2007: 56) - whose work focuses on the intersection of values, emotions and modernity - convincingly argues that the
therapeutic narrative favoured by emotional capitalism is located at the “tenuous, conflict- ridden and unstable junction between the market and the language of rights which saturates
civil society”. This “enlargement of the domain of the therapeutic” (Rajan, 2006: 144), when underpinned by “emotional and economic discourses and practices [that] mutually shape each other” (Illouz, 2007: 5), conditions particular modes of listening. This mode of attunement is distinct from a moral economy of voice based in an ethical obligation to need. Rather, this kind of listening can prioritise continual narratives and practices of self- care and self-craft at over broader narratives of structural exclusion and disempowerment. As Illouz (2007: 54) describes in relation to the expanding domain of health, “therapeutic narratives create market niches” and encourage particular subject formations; the ‘good’ subject is recognised according to particular narrative identity formations that privilege self- empowerment and optimisation and rendered intelligible according to a therapeutic mode of attentiveness.
Here we can begin to see the transformation of listening from attention to
attunement. This is not a “listening across difference” as theorised by Dreher (2009), but a listening out for difference (or dissonance, as I will return to further on) - a regulatory listening that works to reshape subjectivities according to market, neoliberal and
biopolitical priorities; a therapeutic logics of listening out for difference and discord that operates in order to bring outliers back into consonance with values of the political
orthodoxy. The exact quality that makes listening a regulatory force that forecloses certain kinds of narratives and conditions the production of others is also connected to the transformative potential of a politics of listening that addresses social inequalities and political power differentials. The regulatory effects of listening - both liberating and constraining - are often downplayed in calls for a shift from ‘speaking up’ to ‘being heard’. In emerging economies of listening, practices of reciprocity and obligation connected to the historical arrangement of voice are recuperated in the name of neoliberal enterprise and individual self-craft.
Whether listening to the self, or state forms of listening to the population, listening contains a double imperative: democratic and inclusive tendency on the one hand, and a mechanism for biopolitical governance on the other. Tensions, contradictions and
uncertainties are smoothed out in the process of this kind of listening, not with the aim of building consensus or with activating change, but with the reincorporation of these back into the individual story. For instance, neoliberalism’s insistence on individual
broad narratives of difference and enterprise. This was partly evident in the example of the
It Gets Better campaign discussed in Chapter Three.
Listening carries with it an enormous power - to open or shut down debate - as the political gap between ‘speaking up’ and ‘being heard’ goes some way to reveal. As such, listening can have both chilling or liberating effects: it can be an unwelcome intrusion or incursion into the space of another (whether personal or ethical), so that the metaphor of ‘tuning in’ - one so often invoked in discourses of positive psychology and therapeutic culture (and now embedded within the norms of everyday life), corporate leadership and other self-development mantras - takes on a more uncomfortable tone and register. It can operate as both a liberating and regulating force.
As new technologies fundamentally reconfigure the social fabric of everyday life and neoliberal culture proliferates across the globe, sophisticated techniques of listening and surveillance regulate the relationships and stories that flow between the subject and the state. Regulatory forms of listening reshape the behaviours, strategies and actions of the objects of surveillance. But as Robin James (2013) argues, and as I will elaborate in the following section, even these accounts of listening fail to recognise how listening works in these rapidly shifting conditions.