Incommensurable Work (or the Labour of Listening)

2011

In Wieczna Radość. Ekonomia Polityczna Społecznej Kreatywności. (Polish) Eds: Michał Kozłowski, Agnieszka Kurant, Jan Sowa (redaktor prowadzący), Krystian Szadkowski, Kuba Szreder. Warsaw: Fundacja Nowej Kultury Bęc Zmiana, 2011.

The Audience is Present

Beyond the Q&A sessions delineated by a conference program into allocated time-slots when the audience is permitted to speak, the articulation of ‘listening labour’ is manifest in the notebook, that basic technology of personal notation. Unlike a diary, where one notes narratives of the self, prying into one’s consciousness, the notebook is an outward reflection nestled in that third space between self and other. Similar to the ancient activity of writing hypomnemata discussed by Foucault as an exercise or praxis of self-care, hypomnemata is an activity of inscribing (for subsequent recollection) ‘fragmentary logos’ imparted through the act of listening, reading or observing. The subjective nature of what one chooses to write (what is of pertinence to note) is already a gesture of appropriation, before being put into ‘use’. In the labour of listening, such gestures of citation, are not merely the setting into motion of idea from an other, but interrupt an idea through its fragmentation, setting it into contingent proximity of that which has been previously inscribed. As a recording technique of localized apprehension, the discontinuity of the notebook opens a novel space for the emergence of thought, thought manifest as an abutment between subject, other and a situation in common.

Excerpt

In Wieczna Radość. Ekonomia Polityczna Społecznej Kreatywności. (Polish) Eds: Michał Kozłowski, Agnieszka Kurant, Jan Sowa (redaktor prowadzący), Krystian Szadkowski, Kuba Szreder. Warsaw: Fundacja Nowej Kultury Bęc Zmiana, 2011.