The Radical Potential of Listening and Speaking. A recording of the performance ‘Thoughts in Transit. Reflections on Writing, Feminism and Bad Habits’

Giulia Astesani

 

This contribution to Makings Journal documents a live intervention at the London Conference in Critical Thought (LCCT) in 2023. Alongside six performers, five live and one via a previous recording, I presented a creative essay entitled ‘Thoughts in Transit. Reflections on Writing, Feminism and Bad Habits. (Astesani, 2023)

Drawing from a genealogy of feminist and lesbian histories, the essay ponders on the material condition of knowledge production in academia and the precarity of the university, which often extends and reproduces the current neoliberal paradigm, forcing artists, writers, and educators into an ongoing state of uncertainty. In the essay, I use anecdotal forms of storytelling to explore how this precarious climate is historically and contemporary exacerbated for minoritarian subjects, in this instance, specifically women and lesbians. A form of biographical fabulation takes shape, connecting the subjective with the historical and the factual, ultimately proposing a mode of knowledge production that allows for wander, failure and dissonance.

Implementing the essay as a notation for the performative intervention at LCCT, these ruminations extended the pages and were enacted and voiced by myself and the performers, which I refer to as the ‘critical chorus’, a central concept of my practice and PhD research. A mutable entity I form collaborations with, the ‘critical chorus’ is at times embodied by community choirs, queer musicians and composers but also, like in this case, by untrained voices who are part of my extended queer and feminist community.

This way of practice is centred around a non-hierarchical and relational mode of thinking and doing, a form of live and ever-evolving knowledge deeply entangled with the everyday and the people that inhabit it. I use the term relational as described by Lauren Tynan and Michelle Bishop in ‘Decolonizing the Literature Review: A Relational Approach’(2023). In the essay, the authors propose a mode of knowledge production that veers away from Western academic epistemologies centred on ‘finding the gaps’, ‘establishing a territory’ and asserting one’s own knowledge over others. Instead, applying a decolonial approach, they suggest a methodology in which research begins with one’s own relationship with ‘people, places and knowledge’. (Bishop and Tynan, 2023, p.499)

These concepts inform my writing methodology and are widened through the live interventions. As I approach the realm of the sonic and of public performance as an amateur delving further into a space of uncertainty and methods of not-knowing, I establish the rehearsals as a space for conversations and reciprocal listening, relinquishing control over my work as different collaborators, voices and perspectives enter and exit the project. In this malleable space of meaning-making, which requires a certain degree of constant adaptability, the possibility of sudden turns, going off-route, and failures are always present. This process of rehearsing becomes a tactic to maintain an active space for ‘desirable indeterminacy’, as described by Emma Coker in ‘Tactics for Not-Knowing. Preparing for the Unexpected’ where she proposes that artist practices might challenge the expected outcomes of creating ‘new knowledge’, as long as ‘the new is that of which exceed existing knowledge not by extending its limits but by failing to be fully comprehended within its terms’. (Coker, 2013, p.127)

With these concepts lingering in my thoughts, as I begin to work on this sound piece, I resist the urge to re-record it instead of using the original version. While listening back to the live reading, I noticed the sporadic talking in the background, the audience’s laughter, the sound of paper being turned, and chairs scratching the floor. Noises usually cleared out of recordings, sounds that should not be there. Excesses and spillages. I am reminded of Jack Halberstam’s introduction of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Studies (Harney and Moten, 2013): ‘And so, when we refuse the call to order – the teacher picking up the book, the conductor raising his baton, the speaker asking for silence, the torturer tightening the noose – we refuse order as the distinction between noise and music, chatter and knowledge, pain and truth.’ (Halberstam, 2013, p.9)

As the recordings continue, I shrink at hearing the little mistakes in pronunciation – glitches throughout the reading, and I begin to perceive my accent and the ones of the ‘critical chorus’. ‘Sociopolitically, accent and accentlessness are not valued equally’ (Van Der Tuin and Verhoeff, 2022, p.11). After years of trying to minimise the Italian in my spoken English to sound ‘proper’, I slowly get excited at the cacophony of pronunciation and intonation that the ‘critical chorus’ is bringing into the conference. A mix of French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Scottish and British, adding unexpected accentuations, cadences, and so rhythm to the written words whilst troubling notions of ‘appropriate’ speaking. In Italian, ‘listening’ means both ‘to listen’ and ‘to feel’, and so through the recording, I listen to a form of embodied speaking that can’t fully forget what the mouth, tongue and vocal cords have learned before the arrival of English as a second language and, as the noises in the background, refuses to disappear.

Slippages, pauses, overlaps – we speak alongside each other whilst being listened to. And I wonder if what I’m hearing in the recording, what I’m noticing, is what the audience has heard too. How did it sound to them? Which words have they missed, and which others arrived to their ears? Anouchka Grose in ‘Uneasy Listening. Notes on Hearing and being Heard’ writes, ‘What you hear will be governed by what you think the person is trying to tell you. Both your speaking and your listening will be inflected by everything you’ve heard and said before. And somehow, in this cacophony of guesswork, trial and error, something that we loosely call ‘meaning’ might migrate between one body and another. Speech and listening are forms of touch. (Grose and Young, 2022, p.34).

As the recording finishes, I think about how feminists have developed radical politics through embodied practices that troubled the relationship between listener and speaker in conscious raising groups since the 1970s. Perhaps the coming together of seven women related to each other by a web of love and friendships, speaking communally outside any profit or capital-related logic, could re-position and enliven the potential of those radical ideas. In a talk I attended recently, the Italian feminist Lea Melandri reminded us, the public, how the term ‘radical’ comes from ‘root’ and how radical politics and ideas are destined to return because of the strengths of their roots. Amidst the structural failure of academia and the cultural sector and the deep uncertainty and violence posed by this historical moment, I find much radical potential in coming together as a form of resistance, ultimately rooting against the atomised world of semio-capitalism (Berardi, 2009), through acts of listening and speaking.

‘Happy endings can be joyfully pursued when we feel empowered together with others, although as we surely should know by now, such endings can never be said to have finally arrived.’ (Segal, 2017, p.268)’

A deep thanks to my friends who shaped this embodiment of the ‘critical chorus’ and continuously provide inspiration to my work.

Maria Domènech Serrano

Paula De Brito

Juliette Ezaoui

Marta Fernàndez

Rori Hawthorn

Kirtsy McEwan

 

About the author

Giulia Astesani is a writer, artist, and educator. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Glasgow School of Art and lectures on the BA Photography course at the London College of Communication.

Through an expanded writing practice that includes performance, sound, and printmaking, her work and research employ tactics to enliven and reposition feminist and queer historical evidence in the present, using forms of autobiographical fiction. She closely examines how this evidence might help shape strategies of dissent within contexts for cultural production while proposing creative approaches to disseminating knowledge beyond academia.

 

Bibliography

Astesani, G. (2023). ‘Thoughts in Transit. Reflections on Writing, Feminism and Bad Habits’, Passing Notes, 3, 22-28.

Berardi,F. (2009). ‘Precarious Rhapsody Semiocapitalism and the pathologies of the post-alpha generation’. London: Minor Compositions

Coker, E. (2013) ‘Tactics for not knowing. Preparing for the Unexpected’, in E. Fisher and R. Fortnum (ed.) On Not Knowing. How Artists Think. London: Black Dog Publishing. 126-135

Grose, A. Brewer Young, R. (2022). Uneasy Listening. Notes on Hearing and Being Heard. London: Mack.

Halberstam, J. (2013). Introduction. in Harney, S. and Moten, F. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Wivenhoe, New York, Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 5-12

Tynan, L. Bishop, M. (2023). Decolonizing the Literature Review: A Relational Approach. Qualitative Inquiry, 29(3-4), 498-508.

Van Der Tuin, I. Verhoeff, N. (2022). Critical Concepts for the Creative Humanities. London: Rowman & Littlefield

Segall, L. (2017). Radical Happiness. Moments of Collective Joy. London and New York: Verso.