From personal listening to environmental listening. Approaches to an out-of-field concept in Hildegard Westerkamp

Abstract

This article proposes a review of two perspectives on listening, one personal and the other environmental. Approaches from psychology, art and philosophy are brought together in a methodological hybridisation that brings us closer to different treatments of the subjectivity inherent in listening. On the one hand, we will review the proposal of Carl Rogers, an American psychologist and therapist, who proposes a person-centred approach to listening. On the other hand, we will see that listening is amplified by devices that communicate a personal reception with the other of oneself, extending the internal dynamics of subjectivity. From a production of self-referentiality, with full meaning in the second half of the 20th century, to its critique based on Rolnik, Haraway, Deleuze, Guattari, we will see that active personal listening projects reference systems that are harmful to the health of the environment and its cohabitants. In their study, we will identify how the out-of-field concept of listening favours an opening of subjective self-production through an operation that induces a transformation in communication; thus, listening goes beyond a subjective self-referentiality to try to weigh the forces of the world. The ludic mechanisms that the article offers allow us to trace ways of constructing new referential systems that facilitate social development on the basis of active co-involvement of its cohabitants.