Listening Toward Integrity in the Digital Age

• In Event: 43.059 - The Philosophy of Listening in Intercultural Perspective

Abstract

Listening Towards Integrity in the Digital Age
Purpose and Objectives
Being “networked” in the cyberspace, where bodies collapse into a virtual spatiality of screen/surface (O'Riley, 2003), is not the same as being “connected” in the embodied space. While embodied curriculum requires oral-based communicative interactions, with good grasping of context, increasingly technologized curriculum experience emphasizes more on sight-based reaction and individual interpretation. Having realized the increasing desire of shifting pedagogical space from “ground” to “cloud”, desire of displacing conversation with graphic simulations, which makes the students more like a “gazer” and graphic “perceiver”, rather than “storyteller” or “listener”, this paper grows out of a hope to reclaim listening as a way of reconstructing integral relationship in the digital age.
Theoretical Framework
This paper grounds its theoretical framework on Eastern and Western understanding of embodiment and relational complexity, and recognizes that: (1) Listening as immersion (not disappearing) of self in others situationally. While listening with the totality of being, one does not only pay attention to the “things”, but also immerses into the time and space the speaker establishes; nor impose self to the others. Listening towards integrity requires self-emptying immersion, self-forgetting, rather than self-expansion. (2) Listening as response to difference ethically. Since the information during listening flows in a circuit, it requires constant attention to the patterns of metacommunication (changes in tone of voice, physical spaces, facial expression, and so forth) (Bowers, 2000, p.154), as well as patterns of culture, which well represents the ongoing and reciprocal responses to the "difference which makes a difference." (Bateson, 1997) Listening as response to difference signals the participants are experiencing an irreducible integral relationship, rather than autonomous individualism. (3) Listening as appreciation of stuttering aesthetically. Within stuttering there is space for both sounds and silence (Deleuze, 1994, p.22). It is crucial to note that “silence” in conversing could be meaningful. To challenge the proposition that "nothing will come of nothing" without information, Bateson (1997) argues that the converse of this proposition is conceivably possible--“because zero, in context, can be meaningful” (p.42-43). Significantly, Taoist philosophy strives almost instinctively toward “non-being” or “nothingness”, as Lao zi reveals the law of interdependence and mutual exchange between being and non-being--"All things of this world come from being; and being (comes) from non-being." (Lao zi, 1963)

Modes of Inquiry and Data Sources
Hermeneutics serves as the primary inquiry mode in delineating, interpreting, and extracting meanings from texts. On one hand, classical Taoism literature and a critical scope of literature on embodiment, relational complexity, and cyberspace will be the main research sources; on the other hand, meanings and insights draw from data sources will be carefully contextualized within the field of curriculum studies.


Scholarly Significance
The study echoes this year’s AERA theme with a call for renewed attention to the significance of listening as modest situational, ethical and aesthetic experience, and thus as a way of reconstructing of integral relationship in digital age, where listening is risking erosion in the cyberspace.

Author

• Xuyang Qian, Hangzhou Normal University