Bureau for Listening – Failed Attempts at Listening / Failure as a Strategy for Listening

By Bureau for Listening

Today, Passive/Aggressive shares a guest post by the Danish artist and research group Bureau for Listening, in which they consider which resources can be derived from failure when listening to others, ourselves and the world we inhabit.

At Bureau for Listening, we would like to propose, practice and continue to reformulate failure as an essential strategy for listening. We understand listening as more than a passive act of receiving sounds or data. Instead, listening becomes a critical practice of being present, of fostering attention and of staying with the shifts of our orientations – both internal and external. In this framework, failure itself becomes a generative direction, a form of disorientation that invites us to reconsider and challenge our ways of knowing and being in the world. 

To listen, then, is to fail at understanding in the traditional sense. It is to tremble and await, to dream, to explore and to remain open to the dissonance that arises in the encounter with otherness. Through failure, we come to realize that understanding is not a final destination but a continual process of questioning and renegotiation. Listening as failure is not about getting it right; it is about staying with the messiness, the uncertainty, and the profound unknowing that is necessary for true connection.

“We are implicated and so is our listening.”

This form of listening allows us to engage with the contradictions that arise from living within a society shaped by racism, colonization and capitalism. It asks us to critically examine our participation in systems we wish to dismantle, acknowledging that even in our attempts to break free, we remain entangled in the very structures of oppression we seek to escape. We are implicated and so is our listening. Failure, in this context, becomes a radical tool for transformation. It is in the failure to completely escape these systems that we find the space to imagine other ways of living, being and listening. 

We argue that we need ‘messes’, disorientation and failures to cultivate listening otherwise. When we fail together, we do not collapse into despair; instead, we rebuild from the ground up, fostering new capacities to dream, imagine, love and heal. In this process, we fail miserably in the hearts and minds of oppressors, for it is in our refusal to conform, our refusal to listen only to those in power, that we find our strength. Failing, then, becomes a form of resistance – a refusal to accept the status quo and a commitment to creating new spaces for listening to the unheard, unseen and unsaid. 

Listening, then, must thrive in failure. For it is through failure – through the refusal to settle for easy answers and the rejection of one-dimensional understandings – that we discover the profound potential of listening. Listening is in this context more than sensing audible signals or training such an ability. Rather, listening is practiced as a relational capacity, a (re)generative and critical engagement and a philosophical framework, nurturing listening as an evolving process of awareness, reorientation and attunement, thus proposing a continuing process of failure and learning. 

The following as an equally real and imagined list of failed attempts at listening: 

1. Failing at tuning into the collapsing soundscapes of species gone. 
2. Failing at falling into deep dreaming while listening to the voice of a friend.
3. Failing to listen as the world’s wounds reverberate through the fragile ecosystems of my own body. 
4. Failing to find comfort in the rhythm of my own breath, steady and fragile.
5. Failing at being slow, soft, stealthy as modes of being in the world. 
6. Failing at trusting your touch, your pulses and rhymes; your unexpected capsulating waves surrounding my body. 
7. Failing to trust that untamed listening can carve pathways through uncertainty and open thresholds to liberation.
8. Failing to listen without the filter of my privilege shielding me from discomfort.
9. Failing to understand my own listening as a form of taking. 
10. Failing at tuning into the hum of untranslatable worlds vibrating beyond words.
11. Failing to remain in the always already uncertainty of sound. 
12. Failing to discern what my body refuses to hear. 
13. Failing at listening to the fear and trembling in myself as I attempt to listen to others.
14. Failing at joining the protest of noise.
15. Failing to honor the quiet courage of those whose voices remain unheard.
16. Failing at hearing the pulse of solidarity in the chants that shake the streets. 
17. Failing to listen to my own body’s quiet requests for rest amidst the roar of urgency.
18. Failing at listening untamed and full of desire. 
19. Failing to let silence speak louder than my need to fill it. 
20. Failing at not being a capitalistic listening body. 
21. Failing at hearing the satire in a bird’s mimicry of machines.
22. Failing at registering the inaudible as vital and alive. 
23. Failing at recognizing my activism’s soundscape as complicit in the noise of oppression.
24. Failing to recognize the sound of silence as an act of defiance.
25. Failing to keep listening when it hurts, when it accuses, when it demands.

Afterthought

In this exploration of failed attempts at listening, we confront the tension between the ideal of perfect comprehension and the reality of disorientation, discomfort and contradiction that true listening demands. Listening, as we propose, is not merely a mechanical act of reception, but an embodied process – always evolving, always unfinished. Through failure, we discover that to listen is to embrace not knowing, to acknowledge the complexity and richness of the world without the presumption that we can fully grasp it.

“By failing radically, we open ourselves to new possibilities, to a listening that is untamed, unfixed and always in process.”

Each failure is an invitation to listen more deeply, to reconsider the power dynamics embedded in our modes of hearing, and to honor the unheard voices and silences that shape our collective experience. The failures we describe are not points of defeat but opportunities for radical growth – where listening itself becomes a form of resistance to the dominant narratives that shape our world.

In failing to listen, we disrupt the very idea of mastery, allowing space for new forms of connection, learning, and unlearning. These failures are not an end, but a continual process of attunement, of engaging with the messiness of the world as it is, rather than retreating into comfort or certainty. By failing radically, we open ourselves to new possibilities, to a listening that is untamed, unfixed and always in process. Through failure, we listen differently – not for answers, but for the spaces in between, for the dissonances, and for the potential of what is yet to be understood. 

Failing at listening to the fragile hum of my body’s resilience, trembling between pain and possibility, as it pulses with the rhythms of survival. 

Failing to hear the quiet revolution in the cracks of my bones, where brokenness becomes the melody of healing, echoing across the landscape of a wounded world.

For a proposed list for further readings on the subject of listening, follow this link.

Info: Bureau for Listening (2021-ongoing) is an artist and research group investigating and promoting listening as critical, empathic and artistic practice. They work nomadic, transdisciplinary and strive to engage others in shared practices and projects. Through publications, workshops and other activities, they work with listening within the context of numerous other topics, including community relations, decolonial and eco-feminist initiatives, co-learning and more. For more information about Bureau for Listening, visit their website.