On Third Listening

Thirdness as being-with

In her psychoanalytic work, Jessica Benjamin argues for an intersubjective model, one that aims at supporting processes of social, psychological repair as a collaborative undertaking. Foundational to Benjamin’s proposition is a desire to upset entrenched structures within therapeutic work that may perpetuate a dynamic of dominance and submission, where the analyst is seen to authorize the terms by which transformation or repair may take place. Challenging what she terms “doer and done to” as a defining structure, Benjamin instead poses the concept of the Third. The Third names a relational process by which persons approach the work of analysis as “two like-minds” equally shaping the experience. As Benjamin suggests, the Third is built upon the general human drive towards sharing, not as a means to an end, but an end in itself: the urge (and necessity) to connect, and the fulfillment that follows in being recognized and in recognizing others. Importantly, for Benjamin, the Third is posited as a transformative container for enabling acknowledgement of the suffering of others. Approaching each other as partners in a process of encounter and exchange, acknowledging as well as witnessing others, especially those burdened by trauma, impacts greatly on overcoming injury and injustice. Key to such work, as Benjamin suggests, is the ability to extend oneself beyond one’s identity – to identify or have an understanding for those that may hurt us, as well as those we may come to harm. Being able to offer recognition in ways that extend equally to perpetrator and victim is imperative for establishing the Third as a moral, material partnership. The Third thus emerges as a transformative proposition, opening a path for “holding a connection to suffering” in ways that we come to bear together. 

Ideas of thirdness find parallel expression in the work of Luce Irigaray. For example, in her book The Way of Love Irigaray challenges traditions of philosophical thinking founded on (patriarchal) objectivity, aiming instead to bring focus to an ethics of difference in terms of how we may engage the differences we are by specifically giving room to what may emerge between. She elaborates such an ethics through the notion of speaking-with, or what she additionally calls “the sharing of speech.” For Irigaray, the sharing of speech allows for working against systems that exclude, extract and enclose according to a fear of difference, or a lack of sensitivity for life as relational value. Rather, the sharing of speech is speech made between, where meaning and identity are not presupposed but are emergent, found in the words and gestures co-constituted by each other in moments of encounter and conversation, in the flows and ruptures of agreement and disagreement. As with the concept of the Third, the sharing of speech names a collaborative craft realized by way of cooperation and concern for others. This entails a giving of oneself, though importantly both Irigaray and Benjamin emphasize the importance of entering the process of intersubjective engagement as fully constituted individuals; it is not about losing oneself in another, or about fusing singularities – rather, as Benjamin highlights through the idea of the “differentiating third,” one works at a (vulnerable) form of openness that must be held as a strength, empowered or supported by recognition and respect for oneself and others. 

Following these propositions and concepts, questions or understandings of listening become pressing. Benjamin’s conceptualization of the Third offers a compelling guide for exploring what might constitute an ethics of listening, one particularly attuned to the complexities of intersubjectivity. I’m interested to follow this by considering the notion of a third form of listening: in what ways does the configuration of the Third, as a moral, ethical and material partnership, suggest a mode of third listening? Such questioning finds support by following Irigaray’s ethical formulation of the sharing of speech. As the sharing of speech works to call us into a “new culture of speaking,” does it equally demand a particular culture of collaborative listening? And what might this be? As an ethical proposition or challenge, the sharing of speech prompts a deeper reflection on listening, suggesting that a form of “listening-with” accompanies the dialogical labor essential to sharing-speech. Irigaray suggests as much when she makes reference to a “new listening” inherent to the emergent model or scene she describes. As she writes, “These words do not yet exist, and they could never exist in a definitive way. It is in a new listening to oneself and to the other that they will be discovered, pronounced” (my emphasis) (Irigaray 50).

By considering the relational proposition of thirdness, along with the ethical form of speaking-with, third listening may be positioned as a supportive concept. Listening in general can be appreciated as a capacity that enhances ways of understanding and recognizing others, and which opens oneself to a surrounding world. In this way, third listening is posed as an elaboration of what listening is already often doing; emphasizing the relational qualities of listening, third listening seeks to enhance and extend relationality as a particular kind of commitment, finding in thirdness a path by which to give greater traction to listening’s transformative power. This finds elaboration in Benjamin’s own analysis of particular national struggles, for instance in post-Apartheid South Africa, and how truth and reconciliation processes give articulation to listening’s place in transforming relations, especially in terms of working through histories of violence. Crucially this includes the ability to hold a relation to the “complexity” inherent to such histories, which helps to overcome any form of simple moralizing in terms of the good and the bad, the doer and the done to. Listening, in this sense, works at holding the third, where perpetrator and victim, oppressor and oppressed, must both be heard. 

These are challenging positions and propositions, as situations of political violence, with their extensive individual and collective traumas, unquestionably leave their scars and are not easily resolved. The philosopher María Del Rosario Acosta López elaborates an understanding of what she calls a “radical form of listening” necessary to challenge “traumatic violence.” As she outlines, “By radical I mean a form of listening committed to producing, in its enactment, the conditions that make this listening possible in the first place, namely, an act of listening that needs to create and imagine the grammars that make audible what otherwise remains unheard” (López 147). This is a listening tasked with giving entry to lives that are made disposable by power regimes and whose erasure demands ways of making audible their silenced voices. Third listening may be posed as a contribution to the grammars of listening López calls for, a radical form of listening that holds not only a connection to living others, but to the missing and disappeared whose absences remain to be heard.

Care, healing

Understanding third listening as influential to restorative processes and repair finds a point of reference in the work of Susan Raffo. As a craniosacral therapist working at what she underscores as healing justice (following the work of Cara Page and others), Raffo brings attention to the ways in which (slow) violence is carried in the (individual and collective) body. To work at healing justice is to work at ending (structural) violence Raffo argues, particularly as it impacts onto Black, Indigenous and People of Color. Key to such work is the cultivation of somatic listening, where listening greatly assists in attending and acknowledging personal trauma, the injuries and challenges one may carry, and that extends across communities and histories. This is a listening that turns inward, to care for oneself through the gaining of self- and bodily-awareness, and how bodies are shaped by intergenerational traumas and loves; it is also a listening enacted by others, in gestures that come to aid processes of recognition and repair, that work at nursing and healing. And importantly, it is a listening done with the body: to follow the body as it guides toward greater flourishing. As the Buddhist meditation scholar Willa Blythe Baker emphasizes, the body holds the key to mindfulness, and which Raffo finds by way of the poetry of anatomy. “Learning anatomy is not about assigning facts to parts but about sensing in and becoming that anatomy. It’s about experiencing our own lives in a place of nuance and detail, completely and always connected” (Raffo 38).

Understandings of somatic listening, or a listening done by way of the body, includes gaining or holding awareness as to one’s own implication in the perpetuation of violence. This is to recognize the entrenched structures of a dominant system built upon legacies of settler-colonialism, and which in being carried in the body greatly shapes and orients its social, relational vocabularies. Somatic listening is about attuning to one’s own body and behavior, and how one may inadvertently contribute to the pain of others; it is about retrieving the inherent health and vitality of the “body in the body” (Blythe), the body strengthened by a natural, earthly knowledge of connection. Importantly, this entails knowing by way of the “whole self,” necessitating a way of listening that attends to the story of the body, as one that stretches across generations and that is situated upon particular lands – the story of the body carries the story of land and place, it is a situated story marked by the textures and tonalities, the flow and force of a given environment and society. As Raffo suggests, knowing by way of the whole self is to acknowledge one’s “internal community,” which emerges as both a burden and a gift, as a history of pain and love, and all the ongoing, evolutionary intensity of a given ecosystem. 

By following Raffo’s insightful perspectives, a third form of listening may also be found, perhaps as that listening adept at attuning to the whole self, that listens-with the body, keeping close to the body in the body, as populated by a multiplicity: of voices, languages, histories, feelings and experiences, the biome of the gut and the neural pathways of sensing and thinking. These are the layers of embodiment cultivated through various meditation traditions, as well as the internal families figured in psychomotor therapy, suggesting that the story of the body is ceaselessly written and rewritten – it is the never-ending story of human living and thriving, found and held in the body. While Irigaray and Benjamin highlight thirdness and betweenness as a question of two persons, together and in dialogue, Raffo invites an appreciation for the inner world as a relational arena as well, as one that equally calls for greater sensitivity as to the loves and pains shaping subjectivity and which necessitates active forms of speaking and listening to and with oneself. These are perspectives and practices that work at challenging the ongoingness of violence: to work at healing justice and ending violence is founded on listening. As Alexis Pauline Gumbs calls for in the opening pages of Healing Justice Lineages, learning to listen to the elemental presences of fire and air, water and earth, is essential for healing work (Gumbs 15-20).

Emphasizing listening as influential onto health and healing, as what contributes to challenging ongoing systems that do much to injure and harm our bodies (especially those of Black, Indigenous and People of Color), contributes to conceptualizing a third listening. To listen-to and -with the body is to meet the body on its own terms; it is to sense often difficult stories or specific symptoms, as well as to nurse those in pain and where being listened to helps restore a willingness to live. As Raffo suggests, such a somatic process affords ways of “staying in the middle,” which is a way of holding the body and its internal community, opening a time and space for hearing all that it has to say and give. This may lend to imagining third listening as a way of “listening from the middle,” a listening that stays with all the body carries or is burdened by, and importantly, what it offers, guiding us toward living and dying well.

The spectral 

Third listening, listening-with, listening from the middle, these are poetic figures or frameworks in support of listening as what opens us to ourselves and others, and which may impact experiences of witnessing and repair, ethical encounter and dialogue, health and healing. As in the greater field of “third discourse,” third listening can be appreciated as an attempt to celebrate a plurality of listenings, along with the potentiality of the not-yet in terms of a listening to come. As Gideon Calder argues, it is important to listen to others, in the maintenance of a democratic society, but it is equally important to listen out for the previously unheard. Listening out for necessarily extends itself toward the limits of the known and the familiar; it positions itself in ways that allow for acknowledging one’s own limited view, giving onto the possibility for change. It calls for as well as honors the inherent vulnerability of bodies and selves, inviting humility and supporting the dignity of others: to stay close to interdependency as a foundational base for human flourishing.

Third listening is offered in support of such invitations; it invites and celebrates while also carrying that awareness Raffo calls for – to keep attentive to the fact of structural violence that makes vulnerability more risky for some more than others. Listening as a strength and as an aid in healing justice is also marked by those legacies of settler-colonialism, carrying within itself the structures that perpetuate all types of discrimination and hurt. Third listening is therefore imagined as a listening done together, relying on each other to help in acknowledging and overcoming certain listening habits or when listening may fall short. It is a listening that recognizes the internal community, that supports staying in the middle, keeping close to a thirdness through which accepting the limits of oneself becomes available. These are limits often tensed by the normative structures of ableism. Ableism is an extremely pronounced aspect of dominant structures, and which wields a violence that is deeply pervasive as it calls bodies into particular performances.

This includes challenging the ways in which listening is positioned as necessary in working at greater social inclusion. As J. Logan Smigley argues, listening too has its normative, ableist imperatives, lending to its own form of proper performance. “Listening comes with political, ethical, and rhetorical stakes that risk framing bad listeners as elitist, unsympathetic, and even anti-feminist” (Smigley 2). To be a bad listener is not only to fail at listening, it is also to listen in ways that challenge how listening is positioned as part of “the good” or ethically proper; from deep listening to restorative listening, and even to third listening, listening is made to matter in ways that can make it hard to perform properly – what if I forget to listen, or listen poorly? Is not listening also always distracting, leading me away from others? While third listening is there, as a dialogical journey, an ethic that places a demand on holding steady, keeping attentive to its ever-shifting dynamic, it may equally become exhausting, and it may also quite often fall short. These are moments that Smigley seeks to capture as equally important, in that they give room to a non-normative, cripped form of listening: a not-listening that helps in admitting diverse abilities and bodyminds. 

It is along these lines that a third form of listening also potentially cuts against an ableist orientation by emphasizing process and the emergence of what may arise, which admits the ebb and flow of attention, the capacity to keep up and to let go, or to simply fall back, retreat or ask for help. Third listening, as I’m leaning towards appreciating, aids in countering the obligation of self-management and self-possession mostly defining individual selves within capitalistic societies and which often gestures toward future-oriented goals of progress and success. To keep up with dominant rhythms and timings of ableist society ropes one into a set of normative frames that call persons and bodies into forms of proper performance. In figuring a betweenness, as this that challenges one to listen otherwise, a third form of listening invites a diversity of listenings – to listen in fact may be to refuse proper performance as defined by dominant capitalistic society which calls one into speaking up, being heard, showing up and being on time. While these are all forms and enactments that contribute greatly to also challenging dominant systems, I’m concerned to question the ways in which they equally bind one to a normative structure through which dominant power maintains its organizing pace. It is along these wavering, cripped lines that third listening is envisioned as not so much “good” or “bad,” as “deep” or “shallow” – rather, it is a listening always to be discovered, invented, even disputed, lending to an aural diversity paradigm. Such a propositional form may help in recognizing how listening is called upon to perform in certain ways, because third listening is a listening done together, as stretched across bodyminds, and made to matter in ways that attend to the particularities of place and people. 

This may be akin to what Anastasia Khodyreva has termed “spectral listening,” which draws out thick, situated forms of sensing, and which we may appreciate as placing listening on the spectrum. This is a spectrum that figures a plurality of timings and spacings, that is not a straight line but a circling or spiraling, a stepping forward only to step back; it may also be, as Maja Zeco offers, a form of stumbling that shows the body in the thickness of a sensorial world. Spectral listening is a way of sensing that stays in the middle, keeps to the thick realities of current times, and which comes to honor a world of many worlds following Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena. The spectrality that Khodyreva emphasizes makes it possible to delay the obligation to perform in certain ways directed by the overarching need to stake out one’s individual territory, gaining cultural currency by way of “the break through”; or that sets the deadline defining what it means to “make it.” In contrast, I’m interested in lifelines, as what opens onto ways of doing things that support diverse abilities and that revels in insight and mishap, that is clumsily agile and that follows the currents of a given time and place. 

Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, a hard of hearing scholar and artist working across hearing and deaf worlds, poses the concept of the Third Ear as a way to foster meeting points, or contact-zones, between diverse hearing abilities. In particular, she is concerned to elaborate a performative space where so-called hearing and deaf artists and audiences may encounter one another and participate in a “third space.” Thirdness, within this context, becomes a speculative, experimental, dissonant space and experience, where one is invited to leave behind one’s “sensorial habitus” or listening habits. Such spaces rather enable cross-cultural exchange that can lend to more “emergent” forms of hearing, seeing, sensing. This leads Kochhar-Lindgren to argue for a synaesthetic normativity expressed in the notion of the Third Ear defined as “a cross-sensory listening across domains of sound, silence, and the moving body in performance” (Kochhar-Lindgren 2). The Third Ear becomes a site for a hybrid form of listening, one that is more nuanced, more attentive to the movements across sound and silence, the gaps between image and sound, the vibrations of gesture and the resonating reach of presence and absence: to listen between the lines. 

Importantly, the Third Ear aims at expressing a more nuanced form of politics as well: what can this more nuanced form of politics be? Can we think a Third politics? One informed by the intersubjective movements of the Third? To upset the often rigid schema of self and other, us and them, a Third politics may be envisaged as what holds a space, a threshold for emergent forms of expression as well as identity. And which echoes Homi Bhabha’s work on Third Space, envisaged as contact zones in which hybrid identities, cultures, languages and worlds emerge and are given traction. Harking toward the greater work of Third Discourse, Bhabha’s postcolonial proposition underscores thirdness as supportive of less dualistic constructs.

Third listening may move one toward a third space, as an extra-territory shaped or evoked by listening’s attentional power. Listening creates an important holding environment that allows for important forms of inhabitation, ways of staying with the noisy silences, the vibrational affects, the rhythms that bind and that are made otherwise, in the cripped timings and spacings that admit diverse worldings. Listening allows for bringing attention to specificity, to the details of particular experiences, memories, persons, while at the same time to recognize or glimpse a global view, one that may help in moving together. Listening is transformative, as well as hope-giving. This double-move of listening, from the specific to the general, the local to the global, is suggestive for a third form of listening – as a listening that works across binaries, that is spectral. This may be a form of listening that moves toward the analogical, in terms of provoking associative ways of thinking and perceiving: finding connections, recognizing relations, holding tensions, engendering affiliations and coalitional manifestations. 

Third sphere as betweenness

As Luce Irigaray suggests, something emerges amidst the sharing of speech: a space, a dwelling that affords ways of being-with. Holding a relation to thirdness leads to ways of inhabiting and cultivating betweenness, to sense and feel and recognize the potentiality as well as the insecurity of being-with. Betweenness requires commitment, desire, courage, faith and curiosity; it encourages the recognition of the truth of interconnectedness, the binding to which one is held, and that one is often forced to hold. Such bindings are deeply tensed by power, by structures that make some more vulnerable than others. As Raffo argues, bodies are burdened by lineages of (colonial-settler) violence and their ongoingness, reenforcing the logics of (racial) dominance. The space, the dwelling that Irigaray finds in the sharing of speech is also a political environment, requiring acknowledgement of the uneven relation to rights and privileges, access and influence. To surrender is to enter into a complex labyrinth that entails negotiation and courage, for one may certainly be reminded of existing power relations, of things experienced and things held. As thirdness may offer a sense of hope, it inevitably carries feelings of hopelessness. Yet, these are processes in which one is never alone – third listening is a listening-with power, it is a way of holding a connection to suffering, to the badness Smigley identifies. There are perhaps multiple thirds within any given third: inhabiting thirdness is potentially akin to feeling stretched across multiple betweenesses, multiple forms of love and violence, pleasure and pain; some forms of betweenness may feel supportive, giving onto safe spaces and particular communal bonds, while others may feel more demanding and uneven, and which require other ways of speaking, of navigating and negotiating what it is we may do together. 

It is in this way that betweenness may be conceived as a type of Third Sphere, a sphere threaded or diffused across and through private and public, individual and collective worlds. This is an emergent, atmospheric and affective sphere held by people, by what each brings or struggles to bear; it is a sphere constituted by multiple privacies and publics, by innumerable selves and others, by what one is able to show, tell, know or hear. The third sphere pulls at us, it pushes us in and out; it hurts and it is equally healing – it is the making of an ongoing story. In fact, it could be said that thirdness is the taking of the story that is already being told, and which works at telling it differently: in surrendering to the third, in taking up the ethical demand of sharing-speech, the truth of interconnectedness is made the starting point for a relational journey.

A third sphere may be conceived following Trinh T. Minh-ha’s notion of “elsewhere, within here.” In her writings on living between worlds, shaped by forms of colonialism, migration and exile, of being split across locations and societies, Minh-ha looks toward the interstitial states or interwoven realities that constitute the modern subject: these are states shaped by colonialism, migration, by economic and political work, and which call for a different conceptualization of self and other; rather, the elsewhere, within here names a nested, entangled and interwoven condition, where identities are multi-faceted, staggered, and where here and there, center and margin, continent and island, tense the stability of each. Following Minha-ha’s arguments and reflections, I’m led to appreciate the third sphere as that which is held between, as a messy, thick arena constituted by here and there, by selves and others, as a betweenness continually inflected and informed by multiple voices and listenings. To inhabit the third sphere is to perhaps acknowledge and work with the inherent fragmentation of a modern world.

Finally, we may find support for understanding the dynamics of the third sphere through the work of Gilles Clément and what he terms “third landscape.” Third landscape is constituted by the intersection of human and more-than-human others, found in the interstitial zones, abandoned territories and unkept areas within man-made environments and where a certain unexpected biological flourishing appears. These are re-wilded and emergent areas that gesture toward a third nature, figuring a cross-pollinating, indeterminate weave of human and more-than-human lives. As Clément proposes, third landscape suggests a particular approach in relating to earthly entities founded on “indecision”: for Clément, indecision emerges as key to enabling greater collaborative processes spanning human and more-than-human worlds. Third landscape comes to suggest a conceptualization of design – or what Clément comes to define as “planetary gardening” – beyond a dualistic positioning between nature and culture. Thirdness, instead, figures a scene of interspecies connection and contagion, a sort of “frontier” in which an ecological situation may thrive. Importantly, third landscape is marked by the ability for humans to notice the environment surrounding, where indecision gives way to “careful observation” of natural habitats, thereby allowing for ways of acting in collaboration with the embedded intelligence of living things (Clément 47).

Planetary gardening, and the indecisiveness that stands behind third natures, are suggestive for a third listening as what extends beyond human sociality, that is open and susceptible to the difference of others, including that of earthly beings. By way of a third form of listening, attention and attunement may shift toward greater planetary understandings and experiences.

Biopoetics, a vitalist position 

In considering the notion of third listening, I’m led to appreciate it as a form of listening – an imaginary, a prompt, a creative-critical figure – that may support greater focus on practices of reciprocity. Practices of reciprocity are envisioned as ways of honoring the sacredness of the Earth and the vitality of living worlds. These are breathing practices, where inhalation and exhalation operate as a primary rhythm, keeping us close to feelings of interdependency which are equally material, elemental bonds. Reciprocity names the inherent interweave of situated realities, the messy, thick relationalities that define or are carried in each breath: what I take in and give back articulates the nature of a greater ecosystem. To gain sensitivity for and awareness of such relationalities may be found in a third form of listening, as what attends to the inner life and all that is bodily carried, the internal communities and original wounds, and which also reaches out or is pulled by social worlds, to figure a broader or more supple form of intersubjective partnership. And which relates itself ecologically, always already in touch and touched by the more-than-human, planetary reality of coexistence. It is along these thick and wavering lines or cloudy dimensions that I imagine a third listening, as a form that accentuates listening’s relational potentiality, positioning it as key to practices of reciprocity. A listening that is a breathing, figured by the intersubjective and interdependent movements underpinning a world of many worlds.

Where does such listening take us? What might be its political potential? What are its stories, its rhythms, its poetic tendencies? While third listening is never free from the many cultural languages, historical genealogies, political debates and environmental challenges – it is in fact steeped in the stuff of struggle: the way of love is far from harmonious plenitude, rather it names an “erotic tension” at the center of a shared messy world, throwing itself into the tussle as a means for grappling precisely with the never-ending challenges around what it means to coexist – as such, third listening is posed as what protects on behalf of human flourishing, giving onto a planetary sensibility, as the cherishing and giving of more life. These are ultimately poetic stories and songs, a listening that helps in learning the language of places as Robin Wall Kimmerer emphasizes, and that speaks-with the body in the humming vitality of care and curiosity. If practices of reciprocity define a certain culture of shared vitality, in terms of taking in and giving back, in the breathing-listening rhythms that recognize and support a cosmological interweave, feeling the matters of bone and tissue as being of the planets, they can be appreciated to celebrate and care for a biopoetical vision. As Andreas Weber highlights, biopoetics names the meaningfulness of life as connection, as the movements that enrich one’s singularity – in the knowing sense of being touched and touching in return – as always already communal, showing the limits of the body as held by others. Practices of reciprocity are biopoetical stories and celebrations, they are struggles and battles that work at maintaining earthly connection. And that write themselves as a third literature, giving onto the myths, the songs, the poetry and the incantations that both carry and conjure the divine memory of the living. “Poetry helps us breathe well” writes Gaston Bachelard. I might say the same for listening. Yet, importantly, such breathing must be emphasized as being bound to air and the environment surrounding – to breathe well is to also give a breath in return, recognizing how wellbeing is dependent on a greater ecosystem of breaths, airs, currents and winds. If listening helps us breathe well, it is in so far as it’s done reciprocally, with compassion and joy, especially in collaboration with the elsewhere, within here.