In Recognition of Their Desperation: Sonic Relationality and the Work of Deep Listening

This essay places composer Pauline Oliveros’s philosophy and practice of Deep Listening in conversation with analytic theories of listening in a duet that explores one central question: What can listening do? Thinking through the impact of cultivated listening practices on the sensorium, the relational implications of listening across difference, and the centrality of practices of listening to the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis as well as the transformational capacity of performance, this essay claims Oliveros as a practitioner and theorist of a central psychoanalytic practice: listening. Deep Listening has the capacity to act as an amplifier for extending the reach of analytic listening beyond the clinic into an expanded cultural field. Likewise, psychoanalytic thinking allows for a rich exploration of the interpersonal and intrapsychic dynamics of Oliveros’s sonic meditations as they resonate in the circuits between the psyche and the social. Her 1970 composition To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe In Recognition of Their Desperation acts as a case study for exploring the dynamics of feminist listening.