2. Context: From Colombia to Chicago

Before I get into the conceptual details of the project, let me start first by sharing a bit of the kind of experiences that have prompted me to ask the questions that give shape to it, and the specific historical and political situations that deeply inform my approach – particularly, as I hope to show, with an emphasis on the erased and silenced memories and histories of violence and the injustice of their access to representation. My project develops in close connection to my context, namely, Colombia's more than 70-year-long armed conflict and the unspeakable horrors plus normalizing forms of violence that characterize the last century of the country's history, together with the institutional silences that have accompanied this history. The country is currently going through what some may describe as a transitional justice process, which started in 2005 by way of an agreement between the government and the larger paramilitary groups in Colombia (the AUC, Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia), and continuing in 2016 with the peace agreement process with the country's larger guerrilla group, Colombian Armed Revolutionary Forces (better known as the FARC).Footnote ³

In this context, much is being done to address one fundamental side of any transitional justice process, namely, the development of institutional and non-institutional forms of memory as reparation. As part of this process, the Colombian Historical Memory Center (CNMH) was created in 2005 and designated as the entity in charge of recovering the memories of the Colombian conflict with a special emphasis on victims and survivors.Footnote ⁴ I was given the opportunity to work with the CNMH for a few years. As part of this work, I had the privilege of getting trained as a memory practitioner with the tools that had been developed for this purpose by some of the Colombian researchers that had founded the Center (see Riaño and Wills, Reference Riaño and Wills2009, and Riaño and Uribe, Reference Riaño and Uribe2016). I also participated in the production of written reports and documentaries that seek to make audible at a larger scale the kinds of violence that many isolated communities had gone through during the peak of the paramilitary regime. This involved an extensive fieldwork process, including workshops and interviews with survivors of mass atrocities. The memory workshops were designed, and allowed for communities, to give an account of the events in their own terms, with their own cultural resources and their own tools for interpretation. These forms of memory building were also often perceived and articulated as political forms of resistance to the ongoing forms of violence operating around them.

After my work in Colombia, I took this set of tools with me and continued this kind of work in Chicago in connection to the Chicago Torture Justice Center (CTJC) and the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials (CTJM). The CTJC was created in 2015 after an ordinance from the city of Chicago that officially recognized a group of 96 African-Americans as having been tortured by police between the years of 1972 and 1991 under police chief John Burge, and ordained (for the first time in the history of the United States) a package of economic and symbolic reparations including the creation of the Center, a memorial for the survivors and their families in the city of Chicago, and the mandate to teach the case in every public school in the city in 8^th and 10^th grade.Footnote ⁵ I had the opportunity to work with the team that put together the Center and that started the process towards the memorial. The tools I had learned in Colombia helped me imagine, together with the survivors, who are the real force behind the Center, a space for healing and remembering – together with a number of activities that I had the honour to be a part of, such as the production of an oral histories archive, and training survivors as liberatory memory workers.Footnote ⁶

This experience outside academia was all-decisive for the kind of philosophical work I am currently doing: on the one hand, having the chance to share political spaces and to conduct memory workshops with survivors of traumatic forms of violence, listening to their stories and trying to figure out how to make them audible in a more public context, to gain both legal and historical recognition for the harm inflicted on them; on the other hand, learning the importance of producing counter-memories for the official and institutional versions which, at least in these cases, had almost entirely erased survivors’ perspectives, replacing them with official ‘records’ that usually criminalize survivors and justify state violence as legitimate and legal.

As much as there is already here, as one can expect, a problem of translation – how to make the testimonies audible to a larger audience without falling into a betrayal of what those stories are recounting – the first difficulty that truly arose in the context of this kind of work was how to truly listen to what was happening and being passed on in these encounters. Not merely words – and their failure to name properly the experiences in question – were being communicated, but also profound and eloquent silences, grounded in a kind of harm and pain that accompanies a shattering of language when it comes to speaking about what had happened (cf. Acosta López, Reference López and Andrade2018). On many occasions – including in later work with police torture survivors on the Southside of Chicago – it became clear that, beyond the demand for listening and the challenge of inscribing the breakdown of language itself in the record, what is especially needed is a further experience of being believed in spite of the fragmentary, sometimes contradictory forms of narrative that emerge in and as testimony, and which were rendered ‘illegible’ by official and instituted grammars. The kind of violence that many of these communities have had to endure is so extra-ordinary – and yet also so structural and pervasive – that the testimonies coming out of these contexts seem sometimes ‘unreal’, even to those who are telling their stories.Footnote ⁷

It is in this context that my project on grammars of listening started to take shape. Even though at first it seemed that philosophy had not prepared me at all to deal with the difficulties that were raised in these encounters, I then understood that the challenge was precisely to make philosophy speak and participate in these conversations. I did not do it with an optimistic view of what philosophy can do in these contexts, but rather with the conviction that it has a responsibility to react creatively and actively participate in the critical task of transforming the grammars that define our political and ethical worlds, and of bringing to light the forms of violence that are perpetuated and result from not taking this task as seriously as one should.

3. Listening to Trauma: A Philosophical Perspective

Let me start by considering briefly the following story – or to be more precise, the story of a somewhat failed encounter between testimony and listening. The following excerpt is taken from the fieldwork notes made by Alejandro Castillejo, who used to be a field researcher for the CNMH and was until its very end one of the members of the recently concluded Colombian Truth Commission.Footnote ⁸ It describes a meeting held between a witness – known here only as the ‘old man’ – and a team of field researchers appointed by the district attorney's office to collect information to support one of the investigations regarding the actions of paramilitary groups near the town of Puerto Gaitán:Footnote ⁹

These words powerfully illustrate the different aspects of the kind of challenges, both aesthetic and epistemic, that are raised in the context of listening to testimonies resulting from traumatic forms of violence. On the one hand, the description of the encounter, as recounted by Castillejo, allows us almost to ‘hear’ and witness the complicated relationship between experience and communicability in cases of traumatic memories. The story of the old man maintains its own pace and conflicting temporalities. It is not only what he says that matters, since perhaps there are truly no words that can communicate the experience he is recounting. This (apparent) failure is not only a failure of language, but also and moreover, of the grammars that frame what is being communicated – ones so different in kind, it seems, that the old man's testimony cannot be recorded by the members of the research team. Patiently, they listen to his story without being able to ‘do’ anything with it.

On the other hand, what we encounter here is the problem of the different and sometimes conflicting ways of doing history and taking a step from trauma and testimony into memory. The legal outlook, in this case, frames and orients a form of listening that cannot be attuned to the nuances, singularities, and specific forms of temporality taking place in the old man's testimony. What the legal record can document does not coincide with what an ear attuned to other registers may be able to hear. The answer is perceived as evasive, partly because of the necessary ambivalence it needs to perform, partly because the question it is answering is a different one, and lives in different registers, temporalities, and conceptions of history, from the question asked.

My initial reaction to the encounter with these difficulties, as mentioned above, was paralyzing. I had neither the tools nor the proper training to offer anything beyond my willingness to listen – a listening, however, that was more and more aware of its failures and limitations to do justice to what was being shared. The philosopher in me, however, felt the need and the responsibility to investigate further, fully aware of the radical challenge these experiences posed to more traditional philosophical accounts of experience and its communicability. The problem, I insisted, needed to go further than pointing out language's limited ability to name the horror. The issue here is not only a lack of words and cannot be addressed only in terms of how un-representable and in-communicable trauma is. These two features are commonly acknowledged in trauma studies; but renouncing the possibility of understanding trauma on its own terms and giving up the chance to listen to the voice that comes out of these experiences and is claiming to be heard (even if the claim is silent or can only express itself in silence) is, in my opinion, avoiding our ethical responsibility to render trauma audible.

What one hears in testimonies coming out of traumatic forms of violence is the shattering of all available grammars to make sense of what is being communicated. This is due, on the one hand, to the unprecedented forms of violence to which they bear witness (forms of violence that many times are also directed towards destroying and controlling the means for their representation, see Acosta López, Reference López2022a), and thus to the lack of available categories that can properly render intelligible (even audible) what is being conveyed. It is also due, on the other hand, to the fact that the form of experience struggling to communicate itself is one we are not accustomed to recognizing as experience, since it radically challenges the frameworks that allow us to make sense of a story in its telling (see also Acosta López, Reference López2019b).

Considering all these levels of difficulty, I would say that a philosophical perspective on the question of listening to traumatic forms of violence leads therefore at least to three main key or guiding points:

1. (i) First, the question must focus on the conditions that first make possible the task of listening to testimony in contexts where violence deeply affects the very possibility of production of sense. By production of sense I mean precisely what I was indicating before in terms of ‘grammars’. Namely, what is involved here is the recognition of how deep traumatic forms of violence affect those who survive it, not only at a corporeal and existential level, and in their profound psychological and psychoanalytic effects, but also at the level of an aesthetic and epistemic disruption of the frameworks that usually organize our experience and shape our broader sense of the world and of ourselves within it. How much then – we ought to ask – may the available tools at our disposal prove insufficient to render audible the experiences coming out of trauma? How much will the frameworks that structure our perception as well as our conceptual judgements about the world (epistemic and ethic alike) need to be revised – and perhaps even disrupted and produced anew – to allow for survivors to tell their stories, but also to allow us to truly listen to their testimonies? My project wants to emphasize this latter side since it is mostly concerned with our ethical responsibility towards the kinds of harm left by trauma in the fabric of our world – a world we are all responsible for.

2. (ii) Thus, in my project, this is translated into the possibility of imagining and offering what I call a ‘radical form of listening’, capable of tuning our ears to the silences, erasures, and fragmentary meanings produced by traumatic forms of violence and very often reproduced and intensified by the ‘historical violence’ of their forgetting (see Acosta López, Reference López and Andrade2018, Reference López2019a, and Reference López2019b).

3. (iii) This comes too with a philosophical and not a medical/pathologizing approach to trauma. Traumatic violence needs to be understood in its deeply devastating effects, not only on survivors’ lives but also on their worlds of perception and meaning. Trauma, on the other hand, needs to be addressed as a singular type of experience, resulting from but not reduced to these effects. The voice coming out of trauma is one capable of producing, while also demanding, its own grammars in order to be rendered audible and communicable (see Caruth, Reference Caruth1996, Martínez Ruiz, Reference Ruiz2020, and Acosta López, Reference López2021b).

Now, if we take seriously the effects that trauma has on whomever survives it (i), and if we take up as a responsibility the task of understanding not only the damage trauma causes, but the form meaning might take as a result of its effects (iii), then a philosophical perspective on the question of listening in traumatic contexts (iii) leads to the need for a critical analysis of the criteria and conditions of possibility for becoming audible. That is, the criteria that determine (many times in advance, and without us even realizing it) what fulfils or does not fulfil the conditions for what we regard as intelligible (audible, even believable). Only when we listen to something as making sense can we truly render it audible, that is, only then we can offer, too, a site for believability as a precondition for its remembrance. In the specific case of traumatic forms of violence, as I was suggesting, these criteria require a revision of the very structures that determine experience and render it legible, recognizable, including its spatial-temporal frames.

Thus, when I speak about rendering trauma audible, I mean by this, too, understanding it as meaningful, listening to it as ‘making sense’ instead of discarding it as nonsensical or renouncing the possibility of its communicability. I mean, ultimately, not only listening to the ways in which trauma speaks, but also listening to it as believable without questioning its legitimacy, and as rememberable, as worthy of being registered and recognized as historical truth (see Acosta López, Reference López2020a and Reference López2022a). For that to be possible, we also need to revise what we mean by historical truths, what we consider worthy of remembrance, and how memory and history are intertwined with our criteria for believability and audibility (see Acosta López, Reference López2022b). Hence, once again, my emphasis on attending to the grammars that govern the way in which we perceive, shape, and understand our experiences and those of others, which are, too, the grammars that govern our listening.

4. Grammars of Listening or Gramáticas de lo Inaudito

Let me recap a bit first: traumatic violence brings about what Nelly Richard, a theorist and sociologist in post-dictatorship Chile, aptly calls a ‘catastrophe of meaning’ (Reference Richard2007, p. 13). There are certain types of violence, Richard argues, that cause ‘the collapse of traditional categorial orders’ (p. 13) all while introducing unprecedented forms of violence whose excess has not yet been – and perhaps is not entirely meant to be – made intelligible. Not only are these realities horribly original (to remind us once again of Arendt's dictum, see Reference Arendt2004, p. 309), but their originality is also meant to remain unthought, since their attempt is not only to destroy life but also the tools by way of which we make sense of the world and interpret it, denounce it, remember it.

Now, it is important to keep in mind here that while this is the intended effect of traumatic forms of violence, they do not necessarily succeed in doing so, that is, in stripping away our capacity for understanding and for the production of meaning. The force displayed by resistance in these contexts is never to be taken for granted, since it is born in conditions designed to impede it – but it is also precisely where the most creative, unexpected, and admirable forms of resistance, subversion, and resilience take place. Giving testimony in the contexts I have mentioned above is one of these instances of resistance where everything – including the mechanisms designed to ‘give voice’ to victims and survivors – ends up, once again, silencing them, erasing them, or presenting their testimony as illegible. In spite of all, survivors do speak – the question is how we can truly listen.

How then to properly listen at the site of trauma, that is, from out of that open wound that addresses us and claims our listening (see Caruth, Reference Caruth2016)? How to hold on to the experience to which these testimonies bear witness without translating, betraying – leaving aside the breakdown of language – the erasures and the absences that are also part of the story to be told (see Hartman, Reference Hartman2008)? And most importantly, how to carry the voice and produce the conditions of possibility for its audibility without speaking for another?

My project thus proposes to inquire into the kinds of grammars that need to be inaugurated – and that testimonies do actually inaugurate – each time anew in order to render audible what otherwise remains unheard as a consequence of traumatic forms of violence and their capacity to silence, erase, hide, and deny their own shattering effects. In Spanish I call them ‘gramáticas de lo inaudito’, since the word ‘inaudito’ points both to the unheard and the unheard of, namely, what hasn't (yet) been rendered audible and what confronts us as ethically unacceptable (see Acosta López, Reference López2022a). There is a close connection between the two in my work: my claim is that it is precisely because traumatic violence inaugurates unprecedented forms of harm – forms of harm absolutely unheard of and which thus challenge our ethical imagination in radical ways – that we do not yet have the grammars to approach them properly and make them audible, much less intelligible or even believable. And with this, we risk doubling the effect of forgetfulness and inaudibility that trauma usually imposes on its survivors.

A grammar of ‘lo inaudito’ opens thus a site for listening to what does not ‘make sense’ as meaningful within available and hegemonic frameworks of meaning. While signifying and opening a site for audibility, it is also capable of denouncing erasure, concealment, and silencing. And in this capacity to denounce and remind us of the responsibility to listen to the unheard of, it also finds ways of interrupting and subverting the structures that have made the erasure inaudible by having presented it as illegible, unbelievable, unrecognizable and thus forgettable, not worthy of remembrance, not legitimate enough to be heard and documented as true.

These are all central aspects of my project. It is important for me, then, to insist that my search is not only for the inauguration of sites for audibility, and for the conditions that may allow for testimony to be shared and be heard. My inquiry is also about a form of critique that the search for those grammars enacts, about the kind of structural violence it wants to denounce, and, equally important, about the creative possibilities embedded in the forms of resistance that are both produced and demanded in these contexts in order to subvert, interrupt, and irrupt into the regime of the audible. By no means I want to be understood in terms of reinforcing the wrong (and very wrongfully applied) idea of passive survivors who need to be ‘translated’, be ‘made audible’, ‘helped out’ of their trauma. This is not what I mean here by the responsibility to listen to the unheard of.

It is true that trauma leaves its survivors exposed to a very particular kind of vulnerability, one that requires us all to understand the responsibility it bears on all of us as listeners, and as responsible for a world where that kind of harm needs to be taken up by all.Footnote ¹⁰ However, as I have mentioned above, the background of this project is very much connected to the work being done with, and mostly by, resilient, creative communities, capable of rendering their own voices loud and clear, but whose stories are permanently being shut down by systems of meaning that are supported, enacted, and permanently imposed by political and historical structures that need to be dismantled. The approach needs to move therefore from what can be understood initially as a psychoanalytic and perhaps more figurative understanding of trauma towards a greater emphasis on its historical, material, and political dimensions.

A few clarifications are thus in place, just to finish with what I think is essential in any philosophical endeavour, but particularly in the kind I have been presenting above; that is, a recognition of the project's scope and its limitations. First, what I am proposing is to change the perspective from what would be, broadly speaking, a focus on the conditions of possibility (or impossibility) for the production of testimony in the context of memory production (and particularly in the context of the production of counter-memories) to the conditions of possibility for the task of listening to testimony. In other words, I propose to reflect on the kind of ‘hermeneutical sensibility’ (see Medina, Reference Medina2012, p. 207) that is required to listen to what can't be communicated in already given and available grammars; namely, to the kind of openness and creativity – both at the conceptual and aesthetic level – that is required to perceive, understand, and interpret realities that can challenge in radical ways our own. This emphasis puts the weight of the responsibility on the listener. However, this does not mean that the listener is also responsible for producing ‘meaning’ in these contexts: it is not our job as listeners to provide a narrative for what can otherwise not be told. It is our responsibility, rather, to guarantee conditions for audibility so that testimony can be told in its own terms and without having to reach a demand for translation into already available meanings. In this way, the task of listening is more connected to providing resonance than to the production of sense. And it requires a development of an acute ear for other forms of meaning that are usually not made audible within our already predetermined sensory registers.

Second, I am also interested in proposing a shift from the focus on veracity and verifiability of testimony to a focus on credibility. To foster grammars of listening in these contexts means to imagine modalities of memory building and possibilities of historical register that break with the criteria dependent on a verification of the past and its location in the archive. To produce spaces for credibility means to open in the present a space for the production of a past that has not yet been produced and/or recognized, and whose history of violence continues operating in the present, saturating the latter with the meanings that such structural violence imposes over and against other grammars of sense (see Zambrana, Reference Zambrana2021).

Third and last, the experience of a radical form of listening must not be understood as a linear process of progressively revealing, discovering, and unveiling that which has been silenced and erased, as if the task were to broaden the spectrum of what should be made audible within our usual frameworks. If we understand traumatic violence in its radicality and complexity, what becomes clear is that listening to its testimony is not the task of unveiling a truth that otherwise remains hidden, nor it is about unblocking its passage towards memory – it is rather the task of subverting the criteria for audibility, including therefore the criteria for producing historical knowledge and for what it means to remember.

This latter point must lead in turn, I contend, to an understanding of history as invention and of memory as resistance. I do not have the time to go into detail about these other sides of my project (which I usually refer to as the need for decolonizing history and memory, see Acosta López Reference López2020a, Reference López2022a, and Reference López2022b). Let me just mention before finishing that, from this point of view, the act of listening and of making oneself heard are, at the same time, the act of producing a world that was not but should have been. This is a subversive act of invention whereby invention is not opposed to history but rather actualizes it, making possible resistance to structural forms of oblivion.Footnote ¹¹

The first step towards this, is the demand for reclaiming the memory of what should not have happened. Grammars of lo inaudito, therefore, should also be conceived of as the articulation of frameworks of sense capable of granting us access to this ethical face of both history and memory. This is the resistance to acceptance that memory must exercise in the face of violence and its radical forms of destruction. The resistance to admit the world as it is, and the political task of imagining and producing an otherwise – for the present, for thought, and for the sake of a past that is not yet over.