Gramáticas de lo inaudito as Decolonial Grammars: Notes for a Decolonization of Listening

Abstract

This paper proposes to reflect self-critically on an ongoing research project entitled “Grammars of listening,” which started as a philosophical approach to the question of listening at the site of trauma and the challenges this kind of listening poses to our conceptions of memory and history, and has recently shifted to asking about the possible limitations to such a reflection when confronted with a decolonial perspective on temporality. I start by presenting a conceptual background for my inquiry, and asking what kind of listening is required when trauma is considered as a colonizing form of violence – that is, when its effects are not only understood as an assault on life but on the conditions of production of sense that make life legible. Following the kind of challenges that such an understanding of trauma poses to the responsibility to listen to its testimony, the paper moves on to propose that only a decolonial approach to listening can truly do justice to the task of rendering testimonies of traumatic violence audible. By decolonizing the frameworks that organize and determine colonial and colonizing distributions of sense, I propose that grammars of lo inaudito understood as decolonial grammars contribute to resisting and disorganizing the criteria for legibility and audibility that colonizing forms of violence not only institute but constantly actualize in their attempt to perpetuate their silencing power.1

Grammars of Listening: Or On the Difficulty of Rendering Trauma Audible

“…What one hears in testimonies coming out of traumatic forms of violence is the shattering of all available grammars to make sense of what is being communicated. This is due, on the one hand, to the unprecedented forms of violence to which they bear witness (forms of violence that many times are also directed towards destroying and controlling the means for their representation, see Acosta López, 2022a), and thus to the lack of available categories that can properly render intelligible (even audible) what is being conveyed. It is also due, on the other hand, to the fact that the form of experience struggling to communicate itself is one we are not accustomed to recognizing as experience, since it radically challenges the frameworks that allow us to make sense of a story in its telling (see also Acosta López, 2019b).…”

“…Thus, when I speak about rendering trauma audible, I mean by this, too, understanding it as meaningful, listening to it as ‘making sense’ instead of discarding it as nonsensical or renouncing the possibility of its communicability. I mean, ultimately, not only listening to the ways in which trauma speaks, but also listening to it as believable without questioning its legitimacy, and as rememberable, as worthy of being registered and recognized as historical truth (see Acosta López, 2020a and 2022a). For that to be possible, we also need to revise what we mean by historical truths, what we consider worthy of remembrance, and how memory and history are intertwined with our criteria for believability and audibility (see Acosta López, 2022b).…”

“…My project thus proposes to inquire into the kinds of grammars that need to be inaugurated – and that testimonies do actually inaugurate – each time anew in order to render audible what otherwise remains unheard as a consequence of traumatic forms of violence and their capacity to silence, erase, hide, and deny their own shattering effects. In Spanish I call them ‘gramáticas de lo inaudito ’, since the word ‘inaudito’ points both to the unheard and the unheard of, namely, what hasn't (yet) been rendered audible and what confronts us as ethically unacceptable (see Acosta López, 2022a). There is a close connection between the two in my work: my claim is that it is precisely because traumatic violence inaugurates unprecedented forms of harm – forms of harm absolutely unheard of and which thus challenge our ethical imagination in radical ways – that we do not yet have the grammars to approach them properly and make them audible, much less intelligible or even believable.…”

“…This latter point must lead in turn, I contend, to an understanding of history as invention and of memory as resistance. I do not have the time to go into detail about these other sides of my project (which I usually refer to as the need for decolonizing history and memory, see Acosta López 2020a, 2022a, and 2022b). Let me just mention before finishing that, from this point of view, the act of listening and of making oneself heard are, at the same time, the act of producing a world that was not but should have been.…”

“… 3 For more on this context, see the contributions to the most recent publication on the subject, Acosta-López y Acosta López (2022). …”