Unmuting Listening

The Right to Listen by Astra Taylor
The New Yorker, January 27, 2020

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“All living is listening for a throat to open,” writes poet Claudia Rankine, “the length of its silence shaping lives.” These lines resonate with Astra Taylor’s assertion in “The Right to Listen” that listening, like speaking, is a powerful act and a democratic right worth defending. Yet, as Taylor notes, listening is underappreciated in our democracy. “Our lack of attention to listening,” Taylor asserts, contributes to “the larger crisis of American democracy, in which the wealthy and powerful shape the discourse while many others go unheard.” Our need to listen is muted, Taylor suggests, by social media platforms like Facebook that facilitate speech yet create the illusion that we are continuously listening. Such platforms are responsible, Taylor writes, for “the deliberate pollution of our common listening space,” what could be understood as “an anti-democratic act.” While Taylor’s discussion focuses on habits of activism and citizenship, her question – “What would such a democracy sound like?” – could be asked of schools as well. What would such a school that cultivated listening sound like? What if we developed a student’s listening as intentionally as we do their voice? How might we be better audiences for each other?