Talk given at Rewire Festival, 3 April 2025

I’m here to talk about the ethics of listening in a technological age, which is the subject of my latest book, Luisteroefeningen, which came out last August. Thank you so much for the invitation, I really look forward to our discussion afterwards. The book is a philosophical journey into an ethics of listening, but it is equally the result of a lot of reading and thinking, and embodied research out there in the world. I didn’t want to only talk about listening without practicing it. Ethics is about ‘what to do’ – in real life and with others. And listening is an act that involves other people, the world, yourself, so that should be part of the investigation.

That started right from the beginning, in January 2021. Here in the Netherlands we were in lockdown because of the pandemic. Working from home, hardly seeing anyone, I decided to give myself a new year’s challenge. I wanted to follow a hunch that I had, about the importance of listening in our technological age. Writing on questions of social media, algorithmic targeting, polarization and so on, I had the feeling that while everyone is talking about freedom of speech, the public debate and making yourself heard, there was also a need to think about the importance of ‘the receiving end’. Could listening be an alternative to getting caught up in fierce debate and frantic messaging?

So, that January I asked everyone to give me tips and advice about ‘ethics and listening’. Starting, back then, with a tweet. And I listened. Every day of the month of, I noted down what I got back. People shared many, many names, sources, articles, ideas, and random thoughts with me. Even until long afterwards. One thing that immediately stood out was a cluster of sources that related to listening as bearing witness, which turned into one chapter in the book. I will come back to it later in this talk.

But why the theme of listening in the first place? I work on questions of ethics of technology. Listening in the context of technology immediately suggests issues like polarisation, overcoming differences, learning empathy etc. You might also think of overstimulation and the distractions of visual culture, the loss of attention we all suffer from. Listening is a form of attention right from the beginning. It could help in connecting with others and in finding some peace.

These are all huge issues. At the same time, listening starts with simply being open to your surroundings and to the sounds that you hear. It’s an invisible act, it requires being silent, open to others, not focused so much on yourself and your opinions… It could be an accessible means of resisting the dominant structures of our technologies.

But first, let me state a premise: the web allowed everyone to make themselves heard as never before in history. This is something that I’ve learned from experience, as a blogger who wrote herself into a professional writing career. There is huge value in how the web allowed people to speak up and join the public debate. Voices who could not easily participate before can now make themselves heard. It has given us MeToo and Black Lives Matter.

The democratic value of the internet should not be underestimated. I don’t want to get rid of that heritage. However, it has also given us a culture of #ophef, of false promises, fake news, prejudice, assumptions, and bias, all in a frantic, accelerated hype-cycle. So, while it’s fantastic that we can all join with our voices, I think it is as important to ask: who still cares to listen, why is it important and how does one actually do that?

In our culture, listening is a bit of a forgotten sense, in two ways. First, it is snowed under in a predominantly visual culture where sight is the most important, where we are surrounded by countless images all the time, where ‘seeing is believing’ (in science, court evidence and so on).

And second, it’s the underdog in a culture that puts lots of value on the freedom of speech. Voicing your beliefs and opinions is what makes you an autonomous person and responsible citizen within the democratic public debate. This is a hugely important characteristic of Enlightenment culture, which I don’t want to get rid of. But the value that is placed on speaking comes at the cost of listening.

Listening is thus placed across seeing and speaking – visual culture and a culture of the sender not the receiver. (These two come together in apps like Instagram and TikTok.) Put the other way around, listening could be a counterweight to these two. Moreover, something that sets us apart from computers and algorithms. I called listening invisible and silent – not like pictures and visuals, which are tangible, measurable, and concrete. And not like speaking, which is a form of sending, making yourself heard, bringing information into the world.

So, how can we understand listening as an ethics? In my book, I approach listening as a relation that is mediated by technology. When you listen, you listen to someone or something. There is a movement of reaching outward. It connects me to you, or in this case rather you as listener to me, listened to.

Technologies often mediate this relationship. Of course, a technology like the phone has hugely impacted our listening possibilities. Or recording equipment. Or take social media. Social media let us hear many different voices. But how is the relationship mediated? Our listening takes on the form of scrolling, constantly moving to the next thing. The relation is one with a heavy focus on consumption, amplification, confirmation. Even your attention is turned into sending. Your viewing brings something higher up in the algorithmic feed. The relationship created is flawed in many ways.

If you ask me what an ethics of listening is, or what a ‘good listener’ does, I refer to the subtitle to my book: On attention and receptivity. Listening has to do with the opposing forces of first, attention – focus, concentration, directed outward – and second receptivity – being open and welcoming, refraining from expectations and judgements. Attention and receptivity make a certain relationship. They need time and space, sensibility of all the senses, the body – things that tech doesn’t favour. It is not an easy practice, but we can do it.

And it’s important, it makes something happen. Pauline Oliveros talks about ‘the listening effect’. Speaking up can ignite change, this we all know. But listening, while it’s mostly silent, also makes things happen. Just speaking, without the words ending up somewhere, mostly designates a void. Someone listening, allows the words to get birthed. Listening is a maieutic practice. And of course, this immediately makes it an ethical practice as well.

Listening as a relation that makes something happens – this brings me to the second part of my talk, about listening as a form of bearing witness. As I found out early in my explorations, the philosophical ethics of listening owes a great deal to thinkers who have come to the theme from the perspective of ‘bearing witness’. It relates strongly to spiritual teaching and psychotherapy, but I believe this is also a very important topic in the context of technologies that constantly present us with news updates, first person accounts of war and trauma. Many people ‘on the receiving end’, like myself, are searching for ways how to respond and cope. I want to mention a couple of writers and what they have taught me in this regard.

First, the psychiatrist Dori Laub. He makes an important distinction between the witness who experiences everything ‘on the ground’, the eyewitness so to speak. And the one who listens to the story of that witness: the witness-of-the-witness. Then there can be a third step, when you take in a testimony as a reader or viewer. Laub, for instance, listened to Holocaust survivors and wrote about their testimonies, in a book with Shoshana Felman, that in turn allows me to bear witness. Or, when I watch a video, recorded by someone who takes me through the devastation in Gaza, I am a witness to an eyewitness – and as I tell you about it, you are in turn witnessing. This creates what you could call a chain of testimonies and witnesses.

The links of the chain are connected and that creates a relationship that I can take care of. Building this chain is very important work. And listening is a tool for doing it. Another example is the work of Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich. In her book The Unwomanly Face of War, for example, she lets hundreds of women speak. Over many years, she has chronicled their testimonies. It presents a chain of witnesses: from the woman in the war, to the writer, to me as a reader and you here in the room. For the first time, these women are heard, there stories can be told. Alexievich, who calls herself ‘one big ear’, says: ‘I often see how they sit and listen to themselves. To the sound of their own soul.’

Now, this notion of a chain not only allows us to untangle different testimonies and their connections – all these linkages are in turn mediated by technologies. And that mediation, I believe, influences the testimony like the medium does the message. The further up in the chain, the more technologies will have worked on the content of the story.

Another important lesson that can be gleaned from Laub is when he states that in listening as bearing witness, for the duration of the listening, we need to let go of the truth. Since the person speaking often does so from a point of trauma, the story that is being told is not fully known to the speaker themselves. It is through their act of speaking – with someone listening – that the story, the testimony, comes into existence. If the listener is out for the truth – or even a goal like understanding, connection – then the space for developing testimony diminishes and chances are that it won’t happen.

This means that a testimony needs a listener as much as a speaker. Alexievich writes how the women she interviews tell their own stories for the first time in decades. No one wanted to listen to them before. But because there now was someone – Alexievich – who gave time and attention to them, the stories could grow into existence. The testimony in this case is the birth of a new perspective – again, a maieutics of listening. It can only come into being if the listener makes room for the unknown, for that which isn’t there yet.

Another point I want to mention is a lesson learned from the Mexican-American writer Valeria Luiselli. In Tell Me How It Ends, she reports on her experiences as an interviewer and interpreter of children who have fled north from Central America, across the border to the United States. Within the procedure of the immigration court, Luiselli must ask them forty questions, from ‘Why did you come to the United States’ to questions about family, their home situation and the journey they made.

It seems like a simple task, Luiselli says; she interviews the children and translates the stories she hears into English. But how to draw a line between listening, translating, interpreting and categorising? The questionnaire does not respect such boundaries in any way. It pretends to be a neutral tool, but the questions assume a straightforward story that leads from A to B. But, writes Luiselli, ‘the children’s stories are always shuffled, stuttered, always shattered beyond the repair of a narrative order’. ‘The problem with trying to tell their story is that it has no beginning, no middle, and no end.’ The questionnaire is a tool or technology that complicates rather than enables good listening.

Interestingly, a few years after the essay, Luiselli publishes a novel on the same subject: Lost Children Archive. Once again, she acts as a translator, transforming fact into fiction, perhaps transcending it into something that escapes that dichotomy. That, too, is not so simple. She writes how ‘it doesn’t seem right to turn those children, their lives, into material for media consumption.’ How can she, as a witness to them, who tell their own story of witnessing, pass on their experiences to the reader-witness? Apparently, fiction is (also) needed to do so. A different form of mediation.

An ethics of listening as bearing witness asks us, then, to let go of the quest for truth, to make it possible for the speaker to listen to themselves, and to embrace the fragmentary – so that a testimony can unfold, a story that didn’t exist before.

Back to the context of technology. This form of listening is not exactly what social media invite us to do. Such listening requires time, attention and an open attitude, while social platforms call for acceleration, confirmation, always moving on. A culture of calling out, an obsession with facts, with the ego. We, as internet ‘users’, need to understand how media and technology shape our role as witnesses. We need to halt at our own position in the chain of testimonies. Can we give time and attention to what comes to us, before rushing to the next link in the chain?

The chain of testimonies as a chain of technologies gives insight into my own actions. Sharing, forwarding, liking, searching: all are means to push a story further and provide them with a new context. It makes me even more responsible for being a good witness and listener.

Concluding, what does all this mean for the notion of collective listening, that is on the programme today as well?

Importantly, technologies such as social media are collective technologies, even if they approach us as individuals. Especially with the notion of witnessing, we have seen how an act of testimony in social media can lead to collective witnessing, a collective chain. People speaking up, one after the other (like in MeToo), people listening, others still reporting further. There is great potential in technology precisely for such forms of collective listening.

However, I think it’s also important to consider mediation by other means, like the writing of fiction of Luiselli, or the questionnaire which was a negative example. There is the lecture format and the festival program. We can learn a lot from studying these as well as technologies for listening and for collective listening – and how they enable or hinder it.

This happens not in the least in artistic practice, which is why art in all disciplines plays a big role in my book. First, art foregrounds mediation and shows us how it works. Second, it can portray examples of listening, in using sound or depicting listening situations. And third, art itself asks for us to listen to it. It is a site for the practice of attention and receptivity. We have a whole weekend of such wonderful opportunities to practice listening together ahead of us. I look forward to kicking it off together in dialogue with you.

Thank you.