...are you still listening? Hello?
In this past weekend’s Sunday Review section of The New York Times, a common thread seemed to weave through a few featured articles; learning through listening, and sharing with the awareness of being listened to. We reside in an age of frenetic, fragmented “sharing” where digital is the medium of choice. Here, succinct tidbits and abrupt momentary thoughts are catapulted with only the general intention of hitting someone with something of indeterminate value. The basic objective is to have something you think or feel or say resonate- at least vaguely- with someone else. In this type of hyper-networked globalized society (Too contrived? Apologies.), listening becomes an increasingly significant and unfamiliar concept to address.
I considered the concept of listening while reading an Opinion piece by Molly Worthen, an assistant professor of history at UNC. Worthen began her piece, entitled "Lecture Me. Really.”, by recounting the tribulations she faced when attempting to locate a lectern for her otherwise well equipped classroom (equipped predominantly in the digital sense, of course). Worthen depicted an increasingly familiar situation in which professors are pressured by modern morals to denounce the classical lecture style in favor of a more interactive approach. In reflection of both scholarly and lay criticisms of lecturing the question is posed, “How else can we learn to listen to someone who knows more than we do?” How do we function in an environment where opinion is king, where speaking one’s mind comes before- and in lieu of- forming an opinion on which to speak?
The classical lecturing style may seem less hands-on than the more modern “interactive” learning styles finding their way into university classrooms, but lecturing is far from passive. The act of listening requires cognition beyond the ambiguous stickiness required to catch the bits and pieces of compressed facts and data that we pick up halfheartedly while scanning news feeds and summarized lists. Worthen points out that technology’s ability to capture the entirety of a lecture in the most exact and literal sense results in a dystrophy of the cognitive muscles used to synthesize the lecture, muscles used to transform what is said into something heard and understood, possibly (optimistically) even wondered about.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word “listen” as “(v.): Give one’s attention to a sound.” The operative word in this definition is attention. Attention is not always easy to give, or to channel in singularity. This brings me to another perspective on the act of listening presented in the Sunday Review this past weekend. In an article entitled “A Conversation on the Edge of Human Perception,” psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas discusses his experiences listening to, and (secondarily) interacting with, a schizophrenic patient.
His piece manages to subtly address the dichotomy of conversation’s two structures; listening and speaking. The conversations that take place between Bollas and this particular patient happen over the phone, with a complete lack of sensory cues, apart from the apparent aural cues associated with listening to another person speak.
Bollas’s fervent listening matches the intensity of his patient’s soliloquies, on which Bollas ruminates then interjects with questions when and how he deems appropriate. He points out (as, he recounts, does his patient in many instances) that he does not always guide the conversation faultlessly. Then again, he is not an automated system or machine. He is a man attempting to listen, synthesize, then speak. However, he argues that this can be enough.
In his piece, Bollas states, “We all know the wisdom of talking. In trouble, we turn to another person. Being listened to inevitably generates new perspective, and the help we get lies not only in what is said but also in that human connection of talking that promotes unconscious thinking.”
What he is saying here is vastly more significant than we can know; that by listening, we are allowing not only ourselves to gain from what is being said, but we are allowing the speaker to form a deeper understanding of what they themselves have ventured to say. If this seems hokey and/or existential, it’s because we have become accustomed to conversation as synonymous with data exchange. Input is given through some medium (whether digital or otherwise) by some speaker, “x”, and the output is collected by some listener, “y”. The function, “f(x),” of this exchange is sometimes conversation, but more often is simply collection; collection of factoids and opinions contrived to account for brevity and lack of attention.
This form of conversation exchange does not always exist, but this is a standard that many of us fall wayside to, whether for convenience, contextual necessity, or merely by lack of awareness.
This brings me back to the OED definition of “listen,” attention being the operative word. Attentiveness, mindfulness, and a presence in conversation are vital components of the true act of an exchange in dialogue between participants. Half of this exchange, in quality rather than quantity, is listening. I venture to think that one archetype of human existence is the desire to be heard and understood by another. At the risk of sounding quixotic, I must point out that there is joy for the listener as a result of this act; that striving to understand someone else is a significant undertaking- though not always easy- and invariably essential for counteracting the fragmented structure of meaning which our modern life has deemed acceptable.