Ears Worn Out: On Precarious Listening
by Ale Borea
I.
The concept of precarious listening emerged from the flesh. With my ass flattened against a black plastic chair, guarding an exhibition room submerged in immersive installations, drowned in drones and loops that hemmed me in within a high-fidelity quadraphonic system, I earned minimum wage for each hour of exposure inside that sonic catacomb.
The aseptic white light and the soundscapes corroded my thoughts. Desynchronized videos repeating without end. One three-minute piece of shattering glass; again and again, each crash collided with a triggered beat: we were on alert. Men’s screams leaked in from a nearby video and marked the passage of every ten minutes. A high-pitched buzz, sustained for a minute and a half, returned every eight. Every thirteen, the subwoofers roared, shaking the room. Uninterrupted playback for days, weeks, months, until the end of the season. Visitors entered, moved through the room, took a couple of photos on their phones, listened, crumpled the brochures into their pockets, and left, sated by a controlled burst of artistic intensity, their aesthetic palate refreshed. For them, the loop was an event; for me, it was a condition.
That embodied experience—and the long stretches of “dead time” inside the white cube—led me to reflect on how listening, under certain circumstances, is not neutral, voluntary, or remotely pleasurable. Sound can be curated, analyzed, discussed; but it can also saturate, exhaust, and persist. Those who endure it daily—those who work not only with sound, but despite it, or even against it—inhabit another kind of listening (Ericksen 2024).
My reflections emerge from that place: where cultural workers—badly paid workers navigating unstable contracts—put their bodies on the line to keep in motion the material conditions that make art possible and, in doing so, remain exposed for prolonged periods to the “schizosonic” environment that animates the visitors’ fleeting aesthetic experience. But this logic of exposure exceeds the contemporary art museum and the institutional field as a whole. It manifests not only in sonic intensity, in endlessly repeated arrhythmic stimuli, or in chalk-white light, but also in softer, seemingly harmless sensory forms: the faint acoustic atmospheres of reception desks, the bossa nova version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in the mall, the unbearable hold tones that bounce you from extension to extension like a ping-pong ball. The ubiquity of that “background music” manages circulation, attention, and mood for its target publics, and inevitably spills over onto unintended listeners. Day after day, workers lend their ears to the supermarket’s upbeat playlist which, along with the incessant beep of scanned products, accompanies a third of their lives as it slides before their eyes like a yogurt dragged along the checkout belt.
II.
Listening has always taken place within the economy of labor, even if it has not always been recognized as an explicit demand of the productive environment. Since the beginnings of modernity, listening, too, was work. Expert forms of listening—doctors, telephone operators, luthiers—coexisted with technical devices that extended, refined, and disciplined the ear until it became an instrument, a specialized body of knowledge, even a professional field. On the other side, on the assembly line, workers learned to tame the machine by ear, through exposure and endurance: less as sensitivity and refinement than as adaptation and discipline, with its corresponding dose of virility (Bijsterveld 2008).
To return to that history is to abandon the idea of listening as something external to labor, a merely subjective residue of production. Listening was always part of the ways of producing and, at the same time, was something continually produced by the sensory conditions of labor itself.
What changes in the nineties is the historical form of that relationship. Precarity appears then as a reconfiguration of the old opposition between bourgeoisie and proletariat under neoliberal regimes of labor flexibilization. Out of that process emerges the “precariat”(Standing 2011), that grayer, mobile and unstable zone of those who split themselves between two or three part-time jobs and still barely make it to the end of the month. But it also appears as a condition that expands and becomes sticky, insofar as that vulnerability spills beyond the workplace and penetrates sensory life itself—and with it, listening.
Today, with the rise of immaterial economies—where value increasingly lies in the production of experiences and services, and not only tangible goods (Lazzarato 1996)—that listening diffuses into soft infrastructure, attention, and disposition: a smile as kind as it is tense, outlined in a carmine red aligned with company policy; the metallic voice of customer service on the other end of the line: “Good morning, how may I help you?”. In that displacement, listening becomes less evident, less nameable, less legible as work. It is no longer the authorized ear of the physician bent over the stethoscope; it is, merely, the smile of the flight attendant reassuring you while you confess your fear of takeoff (Hochschild 1983).
The disposition to listen is not usually recognized as a form of affective involvement or bodily effort. Yet even in this apparent dematerialization, one always listens from a body situated under specific conditions:
What becomes audible to the migrant worker in a call center in Colorado? How does the bus driver in Calcutta move through the city’s sounds? What does a construction worker in Lima hear during ten-hour shifts? How does the airport guard in Bamako listen? How does a Palestinian mother listen every day? What do they hear, from within, that we—visitors, users, consumers, publics—do not hear?
This is not, of course, a matter of assembling a multicultural inventory of soundscapes, nor of romanticizing some supposed perceptual richness of the margins. It is, rather, about recognizing that sounds do not fall on everyone equally. If listening is not untouched by gender or racialization, why would it be untouched by class?
Here I am speaking of a precarized listening: an extended form of listening shaped by unequal conditions of exposure; a listening under pressure, constrained by duty, saturated, vigilant, hurried; a listening “on call”, administered, compressed, cheapened, fatigued, stripped of the time and means to become aesthetic. Where listening is precarized, the audible world narrows. Attention is restricted, sensory availability is cut back, and listening is confined to its passive dimension, becoming suffering or service rather than practice, under a sensory economy that administers wear and tear.
There is no need to resort to the image of children sewing sneakers for Nike in an Asian factory, as if exploitation only became legible when it happens far away, always somewhere else. It is enough to shift a little from the service area in some local company, just a few meters: cross a door, turn down a hallway, feel how the air changes. Executive offices over here, behind insulating glass, AC, wi-fi, and mahogany finishes; spaces of production or customer service over there, amid the hum of fluorescent lights, hard surfaces, beeps, and constant traffic. Institutional design keeps certain bodies away from noise, saturation, and exposure, while others become cannon fodder: bodies destined for exposure as part of their place in the world. “Noisy” bodies, “public” bodies, bodies out in the open, those who pay the sensory costs of the social order.
III.
Could listening become a way of thinking precarity beyond the field of labor? If vulnerability exceeds work and spills over into life as a whole, then, as Judith Butler (2004) suggests, precarity can be thought as a way of being in the world: a constitutive porosity of life, the vulnerable condition of opening oneself to others, of bodies that affect and are affected because they exist in relation. But when that vulnerability is not distributed evenly, it becomes precarization. That is where the problem appears. Its differential management means that, while some bodies find greater ease in moving, speaking, and listening, others are obstructed and more exposed to harm, interruption, and overload (Ahmed 2014).
Jacques Rancière calls this sensible order an unequal “distribution” of what can be said, heard, and seen, as well as of who can do so and under what conditions (2004). Brandon LaBelle extends this argument into the field of the audible and the modes of listening that such a distribution of sounds configures and nourishes (2021). And, as Ericksen (2024) would put it, one does not listen in the same way when one is accustomed to listening to, with, or in as when one listens against, despite, or for.
Inequality does not simply organize sounds; it is inscribed in the very ways of hearing. Sharing a sonic environment does not mean sharing listening: the environment may surround us, but each act of listening begins from its own starting point and from a singular history. Sound and silence—and even the possibility of dwelling on them—are not equally distributed, because the material and symbolic conditions of listening are not equally distributed either. Some can afford the distance, time, and space required for aesthetic attention: to linger with sounds and speculate about other possible modes of listening, including non-anthropocentric ones (how does a robot hear, a plant, an alien?). Others, by contrast, are drawn back again and again to human concerns, not out of imaginative narrowness but out of material necessity. Precarity returns listening to a body oriented by fatigue, alertness, fear, and the need to sustain life. Between anxiety and exhaustion, a defensive mode of listening takes shape.
The possibility of stepping away from a sound, of modulating one’s own exposure, is more often than not a class privilege.
I first used the term precarized listening to describe listening shaped by unequal conditions of exposure. But the precarization of listening becomes something more than damage when it renders audible the structural difference that organizes it. At that point, precarious listening no longer names only a wounded sensibility; it begins to name a practice of attending to its own conditions. What is at stake is an expanded, existential, and political mode of listening, one that attends not only to what sounds say, but also to how they are distributed, how they act, and how fragility and indeterminacy are inscribed in and between bodies, until they surface in ordinary scenes: we’re all exhausted!
IV.
So far, precarious listening names a diagnostic practice, a way of reading the sensory fabric as it is organized by unequal relations of exposure. But that diagnosis also opens up another possibility: that the precarity shaping sensory experience, once reoriented, might become a condition of the common.
This is not about “choosing to listen better,” nor about aestheticizing discomfort, but about asking what can be done when vulnerability leaves no outside. It is there, in the thick of discomfort, that precarious listening finds its force. Far from promising escape or repair, it insists from within constraint and turns exposure into an ethical and political disposition.
It is from within the density of exposure that precarious listening takes up Gabriel Giorgi’s urgent call to parar la oreja—to listen closely, reorienting the attention—: to conceive of listening as a public, situated practice capable of intervening in the configuration of the audible in the face of the numbing din that the far right has learned to exploit so well (2025). Precarious listening extends that gesture to the point where exposure folds back on itself, revealing what sustains it: the sensory and affective infrastructure of exhausted bodies. What is amplified here is not the voice—the democratic metaphor par excellence—but listening itself.
Precarious listening attends less to the soundscape in which listening takes part than to the socially distributed relation to the audible within which a listening subject —a body, a life— is inscribed. It attends less to sounds themselves than to modes of listening: painful, ugly, horrible listenings, worn down by the present yet inescapably lodged within it. Cautious in their openness to the world, hypersensitive after injury, habituated to fractured time, these listenings are oriented toward threat and survival; disjointed, interrupted, damaged, or overstimulated, they are exhausted by a rhythm and intensity that barely moves us anymore. Precarious listening lingers, torn open, over how others’ listening gets caught between birdsong and warplanes, while other listeners choose not to heed the discomfort of the world.
It names more than the fact of being affected by sounds that produce unstable sensibilities; it also names the practice of staying with that condition without aestheticizing it, attending to it as a condition of relation. If, as Mark Fisher suggested (2009), there may be no outside to capitalism, then the question is no longer where to seek an exteriority, but what listening can do when it has always already been there inside, at the center, and yet does not readily translate into value, consumption, or contemplation.
Will the soundscape of a call center one day be turned into ambient music, into a lo-fi labor aesthetic recommended by Spotify’s algorithm? The question is not whether those ugly, uncomfortable, or recalcitrant modes of listening—bound up with the ordinary sounds of labor and class experience: repetition, volume, affectation, saturation, intermittence, and other soft forms of coercion—can become attractive, but whether their opacity, tedium, or acidity might interrupt the economy of attention, taste, and aestheticized listening by resisting full incorporation into circuits of consumption. And whether, in that very gesture, they might open onto forms of the common.
That opening requires, first of all, that we return to our own place as listeners, to the position from which we listen, and ask why certain modes of listening interest us, attract us, or speak to us more than others. Why, when we imagine “possible listenings,” do we go so far afield and choose those that do not contradict us, that confirm our assumptions, the ones into whose mouths we can place words so that they tell us what we expected to hear all along, the ones we can keep at an aesthetic distance without much effort. When, all of a sudden, we are confronted with an infraordinary mode of listening—the gardener’s, the teacher’s, the cleaning staff’s, the kitchen assistant’s, retail workers’—a listening uncomfortably close, right here in the present, things become more difficult. We attend then to a precarized listening for which the imagination of possible futures loses urgency in the face of the material pressure of the present. The battlefield is not “the possible” as an endlessly deferred horizon, but the conditions of possibility being fought over in the now. And so we lend an ear to that listening—that body, that life!—which responds to a world in crisis, growling at it, barking at it, with an exasperation that many will dismiss as resentment, though it stems, rather, from overexposure to a transparent, almost bleached kind of damage, like diluted bleach cracking the skin at our fingertips.
From this follows an important consequence, already suggested throughout this text: exposure to the “same sound” does not produce a solidarity of listening a priori. That “same sound” becomes something else the moment it touches another person’s ear, because every act of listening carries its own density. The solidarity of listening is not given; it emerges through political work on the conditions that make it possible to hold listening in common without erasing difference. In that movement, listening otherwise appears as an instituting form of the common, arising from a situated, intimate, close-to-the-skin experience that renews itself like an open wound. The skin listens too, said Pauline Oliveros (2000): there, in that skin where the subjective and the material meet.
Perhaps it is precisely from that exhausted, saturated, half-angry ear that a more honest and more common way of recognizing how hard it has become to listen to this world might begin. A stubborn listening, despite the stiff neck and the aching lower back. Because what is at stake, in the end, is opening oneself to be transformed by what one hears, together with the commitment to transform the unequal conditions that prevent others from listening—and from being listened to—otherwise.
Coda
I return to that black plastic chair knowing I am free. I quit my job as a museum guard just a few days ago, and I feel naked. Will I miss those sounds I so deeply resented? Will they remain in me like a layer of grease in the ear, like the opaque sediment of everything I’ve heard? Something that accumulates, thickens, and ends up forming a new membrane: a second-degree eardrum.
I leave the museum on that last day, only a week after the pompous opening of the spring-summer 2026 season. I cross the heavy glass front door and think of the art workers protesting outside the Tate, holding a tricolour banner that reads, “Another Art World is Possible,” and I want to believe it too. My eardrum vibrates arrhythmically.
I glance back and see a group of visitors, art students, clustered at reception, notepads in hand, eager for the spectacle. Suddenly, my reflection in the glass looks back at me: an asymptomatic face.
I walk away at a steady pace, wondering whether some impulse, like a withdrawal pang, will drag me back from time to time to that sonic catacomb where this acid listening I carry with me was forged.
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