Nearness and Distance: Towards a Phenomenology of Listening

Abstract

This dissertation advances a phenomenology of listening that positions sound as a primary mode of world-making. Whereas phenomenology has often privileged vision as the model of orientation, listening herein foregrounds relation, proximity, and permeability. Attending to sound reconfigures nearness and distance. I argue for listening as an active practice through which environments, identities, and social relations are constituted. By examining works of sound art like Max Neuhaus’s Times Square and LaMonte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Dream House alongside cinematic works like Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria (2021), and my own film installation, I demonstrate how listening shapes the conditions of cohabitation and participation, enabling forms of attention and orientation that exceed visual paradigms. In this work, I situate listening as a generative practice, the dissertation shows how new ways of engaging with the sensible world open onto new worlds themselves. This is both a philosophical and a political claim: philosophical, in that it expands phenomenology to account for the constitutive role of sound; political, in that it foregrounds how listening configures the terms of relation, recognition, and belonging. Listening is thus presented as a mode of orientation whose stakes lie not only in perception but in the shaping of lived worlds.