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The Art of Listening
Emotion, Space and Society 2 (2009) 74
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Emotion, Space and Society journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/emospa
Book review The Art of Listening, Les Back. Berg, Oxford and New York (2007). 256 pp, £19.99/$34.95 – Paperback ISBN: 1-84520-121-3, £55.00/ $105.00 – Hardcover ISBN: 1-84520-120-5. In what ways do academic and popular knowledge fail to engage the contemporary social world? If language is unable to fully capture or convey the subtle human intricacies that saturate modern life, how is it still possible to think and communicate about them? To what end and what effect? Les Back’s book The Art of Listening respects, subsumes, and tries to move beyond the questions raised above. The result is consciously incomplete and productively fraught. Now a sociologist, Back was trained as an anthropologist and ethnographer. Much of his previous work has focused on the often uncomfortable inter-linkages between racism, class, nationalism, and popular culture in England. The Art of Listening expands and situates these issues within broader themes of identity and emotion in ‘globalized’ London. Methodologically, the research utilizes a combination of structured observations, interviews, visual methods, and readings of popular media. Similar to Walter Benjamin’s Grave by Michael Taussig (2006), The Art of Listening is structured as a group of five contrasting essays bookended by meditations on the craft of social scholarship. The essays differ broadly in subject and scale, including analyses of immigration; tattoos; the relationships between the war on terror, sentiment, and misrecognition; street portraiture as a method; and young people’s racialized micro-landscapes of fear and belonging in multicultural neighborhoods. Echoing C. Wright Mills, Back urges social scientists to connect private troubles to global, highly public issues and, when necessary, to cast doubt on the public attitudes that prevail. This type of patient approach is posited as a counter to the quick, shallow, and all too certain knowledge produced by the popular media. The book thus serves as a reminder that listening inquiringly to – as opposed to professing definitively about – particular social problems can reveal their extent while informing possibilities for a different future. The text is constructed in a way that is remarkably consistent with its analytical intent. Back demonstrates the appeal of a social science that strives ‘‘to hold the experience of others in your arms while recognizing that what we touch is always moving, unpredictable, irreducible, and mysteriously opaque’’ (3). The arguments are framed between a number of personally intimate and ubiquitously public poles. For instance, the recent death of Back’s father is juxtaposed with the London bombings of July 7, 2005, and both generate fundamental questions about the purposes that social research should ultimately serve. Back argues that, ‘‘Partiality and failure do not suggest that the lines in our portraits have no semblance of likeness’’ (155). Indeed
doi:10.1016/j.emospa.2009.03.003
he shows as much and is able to weave powerful narratives from empirical fragments to create an arresting and emotionally contoured impression of London’s social and cultural intricacy. Careful and tender writing conveys a layered sense of conjoined presences and absences; lives lived and lost; and fear, love, and misunderstanding, all swirling in the immutable and often contradictory motion of modern social experience. The chapter entitled ‘‘Inscriptions of Love’’ gently unravels crass stereotypes of the working class by telling the startlingly nuanced and sentimental stories of several people through their tattoos. Back argues that a tattoo, parallel to the way that time and labor inscribe themselves onto working bodies, is a way of recording passions, sorrows, and life experiences that might never be expressed any other way. Another essay, ‘‘Falling from the Sky’’, deftly traces UK immigration policy beyond markets, labor shortages, and political posturing by connecting these to the hopes and lives that wait behind numbers and paper trails. The title of this chapter references numerous people that have stowed away inside the landing equipment of aircraft in desperate attempts to enter the UK only to perish in transit and plummet to earth, sometimes never to be found. In an era of ostensibly unprecedented mobility it is difficult to imagine a more haunting and powerful exemplification of the still brutal global unevenness of human freedom. The book’s few shortcomings do not detract from its value. At moments it reads as if it were stitched together from separate projects, which indeed it was. Most of the chapters have been published elsewhere and expanded here. While an assemblage of partial and interconnected social fragments is an entirely appropriate form for the book’s argument, elaboration of this point remains underdeveloped. This aspect of the text could have been more conscientiously worked out and used reflexively to push the analytical and theoretical content even further. Additionally, readers from other disciplines may find that too many of the arguments and passionate appeals are constructed only in reference to sociology. The Art of Listening grapples with topics that should interest scholars from across the social sciences and humanities. In the end, the ideas that this book takes on and produces are simply too vital to leave to sociology or any other lone discipline.
Reference Taussig, Michael, 2006. Walter Benjamin’s Grave. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Christian M. Anderson Earth and Environmental Sciences – Program in Geography, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, USA E-mail address: [email protected]
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Emotion, Space and Society journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/emospa
Book review The Art of Listening, Les Back. Berg, Oxford and New York (2007). 256 pp, £19.99/$34.95 – Paperback ISBN: 1-84520-121-3, £55.00/ $105.00 – Hardcover ISBN: 1-84520-120-5. In what ways do academic and popular knowledge fail to engage the contemporary social world? If language is unable to fully capture or convey the subtle human intricacies that saturate modern life, how is it still possible to think and communicate about them? To what end and what effect? Les Back’s book The Art of Listening respects, subsumes, and tries to move beyond the questions raised above. The result is consciously incomplete and productively fraught. Now a sociologist, Back was trained as an anthropologist and ethnographer. Much of his previous work has focused on the often uncomfortable inter-linkages between racism, class, nationalism, and popular culture in England. The Art of Listening expands and situates these issues within broader themes of identity and emotion in ‘globalized’ London. Methodologically, the research utilizes a combination of structured observations, interviews, visual methods, and readings of popular media. Similar to Walter Benjamin’s Grave by Michael Taussig (2006), The Art of Listening is structured as a group of five contrasting essays bookended by meditations on the craft of social scholarship. The essays differ broadly in subject and scale, including analyses of immigration; tattoos; the relationships between the war on terror, sentiment, and misrecognition; street portraiture as a method; and young people’s racialized micro-landscapes of fear and belonging in multicultural neighborhoods. Echoing C. Wright Mills, Back urges social scientists to connect private troubles to global, highly public issues and, when necessary, to cast doubt on the public attitudes that prevail. This type of patient approach is posited as a counter to the quick, shallow, and all too certain knowledge produced by the popular media. The book thus serves as a reminder that listening inquiringly to – as opposed to professing definitively about – particular social problems can reveal their extent while informing possibilities for a different future. The text is constructed in a way that is remarkably consistent with its analytical intent. Back demonstrates the appeal of a social science that strives ‘‘to hold the experience of others in your arms while recognizing that what we touch is always moving, unpredictable, irreducible, and mysteriously opaque’’ (3). The arguments are framed between a number of personally intimate and ubiquitously public poles. For instance, the recent death of Back’s father is juxtaposed with the London bombings of July 7, 2005, and both generate fundamental questions about the purposes that social research should ultimately serve. Back argues that, ‘‘Partiality and failure do not suggest that the lines in our portraits have no semblance of likeness’’ (155). Indeed
doi:10.1016/j.emospa.2009.03.003
he shows as much and is able to weave powerful narratives from empirical fragments to create an arresting and emotionally contoured impression of London’s social and cultural intricacy. Careful and tender writing conveys a layered sense of conjoined presences and absences; lives lived and lost; and fear, love, and misunderstanding, all swirling in the immutable and often contradictory motion of modern social experience. The chapter entitled ‘‘Inscriptions of Love’’ gently unravels crass stereotypes of the working class by telling the startlingly nuanced and sentimental stories of several people through their tattoos. Back argues that a tattoo, parallel to the way that time and labor inscribe themselves onto working bodies, is a way of recording passions, sorrows, and life experiences that might never be expressed any other way. Another essay, ‘‘Falling from the Sky’’, deftly traces UK immigration policy beyond markets, labor shortages, and political posturing by connecting these to the hopes and lives that wait behind numbers and paper trails. The title of this chapter references numerous people that have stowed away inside the landing equipment of aircraft in desperate attempts to enter the UK only to perish in transit and plummet to earth, sometimes never to be found. In an era of ostensibly unprecedented mobility it is difficult to imagine a more haunting and powerful exemplification of the still brutal global unevenness of human freedom. The book’s few shortcomings do not detract from its value. At moments it reads as if it were stitched together from separate projects, which indeed it was. Most of the chapters have been published elsewhere and expanded here. While an assemblage of partial and interconnected social fragments is an entirely appropriate form for the book’s argument, elaboration of this point remains underdeveloped. This aspect of the text could have been more conscientiously worked out and used reflexively to push the analytical and theoretical content even further. Additionally, readers from other disciplines may find that too many of the arguments and passionate appeals are constructed only in reference to sociology. The Art of Listening grapples with topics that should interest scholars from across the social sciences and humanities. In the end, the ideas that this book takes on and produces are simply too vital to leave to sociology or any other lone discipline.
Reference Taussig, Michael, 2006. Walter Benjamin’s Grave. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Christian M. Anderson Earth and Environmental Sciences – Program in Geography, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, USA E-mail address: [email protected]