Performative Listening

Abstract

Communication as transaction implies the importance of listening, but it leaves room for the mistaken impression that listening fails to shape the content of the encounter. Listening scholarship focuses on the constituent elements and effects of the act but has left unaddressed the ways the listening act is entirely sufficient to fulfill duties and/or create relationships. Borrowing the elements of speech act theory, I describe three categories of illocutionary performative listening-listening toward relationship, toward leadership, and toward fairness-and call for research into such corollaries as listener credibility and meta-listening.A commonplace in listening pedagogy entails pointing out the gap between active communication time a typical person spends listening and active instruction time educators devote to teaching the skill. Students spend hours learning to read, write, and speak, but most receive little or no formal instruction in listening. Few would take seriously a claim that listening was unimportant or that powerful listening skills made no contribution to career success and lifelong wellness. Nevertheless, listening and interpersonal communication texts make the case again and again that listening is important, while listening educators express puzzlement and frustration that the apportionment of instructional resources to the subject remains stingy. I begin this essay with the assertion that in repeating this juxtaposition endlessly we miss the point, and we leave our pedagogical project stunted and unable to grow toward its transformative potential.Among the different functions that direct listeners' priorities (Wolvin & Coakley, 1993), empathic or therapeutic listening stands apart as the only mode a listener cannot carry out in solitude. The effectiveness of empathic listening is almost entirely measured via the perceptions of one or more outside observers. Because a listener in this circumstance cannot optimize behaviors based solely on her own needs, the listening takes on a performed quality absent from the other functions, and it is from the performative dimension of encoding behavior that I derive the second major premise in this argument.Although other scholars have built extensively on their foundation, Austin (1962) and Searle's (1969) works in speech acts remain worthy starting points for considering performative communication acts. At the core of the theory is a distinction among the locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary traits of an utterance. If someone asks me what time it is, and I report "It's six

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