Interview by Sarah Muir

https://www.dukeupress.edu/genres-of-listening

Sarah Muir: In the book, you describe the extraordinary history and contemporary status of psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires, Argentina.  For those who haven’t yet read the book, how does examining this psychoanalytic culture (in local terms, la cultura psi) help us understand broad questions about Argentine society and politics?

Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas: The book makes two important claims. The first is that psychoanalytic listening, both inside and outside of the clinic, can be understood as a genre of listening. At the most basic level, what I identify as the genre of listening follows a particular structure and differs from other forms of listening, such as denotational listening, for example. Sound reception is not neutral, it always involves an ideological and practice intervention, and it is never automatic. The book explains in detail how this process ensues. This has far-reaching consequences beyond the Buenos Aires context, since the proposition is that just as there are many ways of speaking, there are many possible ways of listening. Therefore, any social situation can potentially be analyzed from the receptive end of communication through the analysis of how social actors position vis-à-vis sound production.

The second claim the book makes is that, in the city of Buenos Aires in Argentina, a form of listening based on psychoanalysis (above all, unconscious practices and resonances) circulates outside of the clinic. The idea is that Porteños (as the inhabitants of Buenos Aires are called) have developed a sort of psychoanalytic ear that they deploy freely in varied settings and that emerges through the responses during dialogic encounters in everyday interactions. After a statement has been made, porteños usually offer different readings or interpretations of the hidden meaning of the words, trying to get beyond the denotation to find the what is understood as the unknown in speech. Consequently, it is not uncommon to hear statements such as “I think you mean something else,” “I don’t hear your voice in what you are saying” or “what you said sounds strange,” during everyday conversations. Thus, in Buenos Aires there is a culture of listeners whose personal identities, conceptions of citizenship, and constructions of the political are rooted less in the performativity associated with speaking than in a particular form of listening based on psychoanalysis. And this has important political consequences, because the understanding of the selves as interconnected poses a direct challenge to the liberal ideal of a bounded and self-sufficient subject. In Buenos Aires, people understand the interconnectedness of personal experiences and don’t react negatively to the idea that people other than themselves can potentially have knowledge about their own lives.

Sarah Muir: Within linguistic anthropology, one significant conversation has explored listening as an embodied, socially variable, and ideologically regimented practice. In developing the concept of “genres of listening,” how do you speak to that conversation? What do you hope this concept can draw our attention to and open up for analysis?

Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas: Most of the discussion of listening in linguistic anthropology has been centered on the concept of uptake, understood, following J.L. Austin, as the hearer’s recognition of the speaker’s communicative intention, which sometimes reduces the hearer’s role as that of a ratifier. For Austin, uptake is a necessary condition on performing illocutionary acts, because if the hearer does not understand/accept the intention of the speaker, then the felicitous conditions for a successful act of communication would not be present and communication would therefore fail. See for example the work of Chuck and Candy Goodwin, and the conversation analysis scholars: they understand listening as an important role for communication, but as a way of giving cues to the speaker for the next turn of speaking, that is, how an interlocutor reacts by adopting a particular stance, body disposition, or verbal approval (sounds like “aha,” “mm,” and the like). From this perspective, the speaker, by expressing a particular communicative intention, predetermines what kind of illocutionary act the interlocutor might perform. Communication appears as a dialectic process of producing/receiving signs with the goal of attaining felicitous acts.

What I am proposing is very different. Running against the current focus on intertextuality, I am proposing to conceptualize listening as generic; that is, as having a sort of bounded (even if ephemeral) quality that helps delineate and create particular contexts, just as much as language do. The idea is that we don’t listen the same in every social situation—for example, we do not listen the same way to a professor as we do to a lover or a family member. The way we listen alters the social situation and, in some cases, helps creating it. That’s why I think it is important to focus on the productive side of listening because, as my book shows, in Buenos Aires people listen in a way that sharply differs from other places by listening to what the words invoke in the listener rather than the denotation. I also discuss how listening is performative, in that it creates social positionalities, like when we anthropologists listen to our informants through what I call an anthropological genre of listening. Hence, in my conceptualization of genres of listening, listening is productive in every step of the way: creating social identities, generating the context of interactions, and sustaining social relations.

Sarah Muir: Your book charts the far-reaching, mass-mediatized dissemination of psychoanalytic listening across a wide variety of contexts. In what ways does this process of recontextualization transform psychoanalytic listening and talking? How does this recontextualization also transform the other genres of listening and talking with which psychoanalytic listening comes to be juxtaposed?

Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas: One of the interesting things about Buenos Aires is how present psychoanalysis is in a variety of forms. You can find comic strips depicting the analytic encounter in the daily news, commercials that show psychoanalysts in their most iconic representations (glasses, beard) to sell potato chips, car insurance, furniture, and so on. Psychoanalysts are also invited to TV shows where they “psychoanalyze” showbiz celebrities and fútbol players and comment on political issues ranging from the recurrent economic crises to the presidential elections. Let me be clear: I do not claim that these iterations of psychoanalytic discourses that circulate in the media are actual psychoanalytic practices. Psychoanalysis is a therapeutic method that requires a clinical setting, should generate a transferential relationship, and other things. What these mediatized forms of psychoanalysis produce is a kind of didactic map for how to listen psychoanalytically. In all of these mediatized examples, listening is always key, and it is always spelled out. The most important feature of these psy-discourses is that they tell the consumer that words have meanings beyond their intended referential meaning. For example, when a TV host asks an analyst to explain to the audience why a star in a reality show said the name of a male actor, Fernando Bal, instead of the word aval, which in Spanish means grantor. Or when in an interview a famous psychoanalyst says that communication is a miracle because words never express the real intentions of the speaker, and thus is developing an interesting metalinguistic theory of language. The idea is that words have meanings beyond their mere denotation. Hence, without trying to establish a causal relationship, I think that being exposed to these ideas in a variety of contexts allows for psychoanalytic ideas to circulate. People in Buenos Aires have more or less accepted that words can have multiple meanings, and that some come from unconscious practices.

Psychoanalysts, generally speaking, don’t like the hyper-dissemination of psychoanalytic discourses. The psy (psico in Spanish) suffix has become so prevalent that in Buenos Aires you can encounter psico-tango, psico-tarot, psico-transmusic, and many other forms of corrupting, in the view of many psychoanalysts, legitimate therapeutic practice, and allowing the proliferation of what some describe as charlatanerías or quackery stuff, or at the very least, practices that certainly are not psychoanalysis. According to many analysts, these iterations are worrisome in that they de-legitimize an important practice that has helped millions of people worldwide. But at the same time, and paradoxically, the circulation of these mediatized discourses expands the audience and, perhaps, the market for psychoanalysis.

Sarah Muir: One important feature of your book is that psychoanalysis is both an object of analysis as well as a source of theoretical insight that helps to frame and animate your analysis. Given the long history of exchange between anthropology and psychoanalysis, could you say a bit about how your work contributes not only to linguistic anthropology but also to psychoanalytic theory and praxis?​

Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas: Psychoanalysis and anthropology share some critical features. Contemporarily to and independently from Sigmund Freud, Franz Boas developed an argument against the racialization of mental differences by coining the expression “secondary rationalizations,” or patterns of habitual behavior transmitted inter-generationally that social actors practice unconsciously, to the extent that there is a lack of reflexivity. We can think of Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus as a continuation of Boas’s proposition. From this perspective, the role of the anthropologist is to disentangle the “secondary rationalizations” produced by the communities we study. Psychoanalysis proposes something similar, from a different approach. Rather than focusing on concealed patterns of social behavior, the psychoanalyst tries to enable the analysand to see the individual patterns, guided by unconscious impulses, she or he are reproducing. In both cases language is key. But what I am proposing is that listening plays a role as important as language and, in some cases, an even more important one, to understand social behavior either conscious or unconsciously produced.

In my book I propose four qualities of psychoanalytic listening: first, it is cumulative (a trait shared with anthropological listening). Sound images will find a concept (or not) through a resonance, that echoes inside one’s self, triggered by something that surpasses the conscious dimension. This listening is not linear, and while it develops in time, it possesses its own temporality. Second, listening practices can be cultivated: they require a long process of habituation, which in the case of psychoanalysis are learned by suspending attention to the denotation of the words and focusing on what the words invoke in the listener. Third, the prosodic enunciation of words matters and, in some cases, it trumps the denotation by focusing on what I call “the music in the words”—what matters is how words sound (and resound) inside one’s self, rather than their specifically referential meaning. Finally, in psychoanalytic listening one focuses in lo vivencial, a sort of experiential listening that includes a polyphony of social voices. The producer of an utterance embodies different social personae through a single sound. These categorizations can extend to other fields, so my hope is that anthropologist find these categorizations as helpful guidelines in their exploration of listening practices.

Psychoanalysts have of course developed their own categories of listening within the psychoanalytic encounter. For example, Salman Akhtar developed the concepts of objective and subjective listening, emphatic listening, and intersubjective listening. I’m not sure how my book will be received by analysts, but my hope is that they engage critically with it, and hopefully we can establish a productive dialogue.