This essay builds a concept of ‘late listening’, a mode of sonic witnessing and critical reflection responsive to the current planetary polycrisis of socio-ecological turmoil. Late listening is intended as a transdisciplinary organizing concept for putting sound studies research and sonic art in dialogue with contemporary critical theory. It draws in particular on work from trauma studies and critical theory elaborating a ‘crisis of witnessing’ after Auschwitz; this work is then brought forward, into the contemporary context of socially caused planetary environmental and biospheric disturbance and its multiple fallouts, including war. Finally, late listening is linked to the contemporary notion of ‘sonic witnessing’. I show that appropriations of ‘listening’ beyond sound studies are both actual and metaphorical; I argue that metaphorical notions of listening are no less important and should be embraced as a call for expanded ‘arts of noticing’.

‘Reflection’, Karl Marx noted early in Capital, ‘begins post festum’ (Marx, 1977, p. 168). After the feast, after the event is over, after the results of history make clear the full arc of its development. In money, the history of the commodity is revealed, and from the commodity, the laws of motion of capitalism itself can be constructed in theory. Today, however, the acceleration of social tendencies grants us no such luxury of analysis. The ‘automatic subject’ that Theodor Adorno called ‘the total social process’ appears now more than ever as an ‘animated’ or ‘inspirited monster’, speeding from catastrophe¹ to ever greater, ever deeper catastrophe. The worst tendencies of the twentieth century are now, in the twenty-first, driving an evolutionary swerve of planetary turmoil. The urgency of critical processing is such that we are pressed to grasp social forces and disruptive technologies that are rushed into information and battle spaces before any public debate or reflection about them can even begin. Thinking and reason must grasp the threats to survival, to the biosphere itself, before the feast of extinction now underway reaches terminal velocity and accomplishment.

Climate change, and in particular planetary heating, has prominently been called the ‘existential crisis of our time’ (US White House, 2022, p. 270). However, the socio-ecological polycrisis is not just about climate change: it also includes growing inequality and the weakening of democracy; the rampant proliferation of disruptive technologies and weapons of mass destruction; resource wars and critical mineral supply-chain conflicts; multiple forms of pollution and toxification; the loss of ‘(bio)plurality’, or the human and more-than-human co-produced worlds that make up earthly life; and the existential and nonlinear horizon of extinction.²

As we gather here, climate and biosphere are in convulsions of meltdown, and the storms of a new world war are gathering.³ It seems especially necessary at this time to remember that the wars and genocides of the twentieth century had already provoked a crisis of critical theory and the writing of history. Wars and genocides were not new, but in the mid-twentieth century they were realized and accelerated through new mergers of science, industry, and administration. Reflection ‘after Auschwitz’ suffered an ongoing shock and was compelled from then on to think against itself, as Adorno told us in Negative Dialectics (Adorno, 1996, pp. 361–65). The tortured have every right to scream, but perhaps only as a scream can a poem rightfully be written after 1945 (Ibid., p. 362). Following Adorno, reflection on the Nazi genocide exposed what came to be known as a ‘crisis of representation’ in history, art and the critical humanities (see Friedlander, 1993; LaCapra, 1994; Postone and Santner, 2003; Young, 2000). It also uncovered a ‘crisis of witnessing’ in the structure of testimony (Felman and Laub, 1992). We can now see better that the crisis of representation and the crisis of witnessing are two strands in the same knot of massively traumatic violence. However, this knot can hardly be consigned to the past. Over the last two years, the accelerations of data and computing have blown by new thresholds of violence, new and dismal transformations of quantity into quality, and today we have to admit that we have already lived through the advent of lethal autonomous weapons, the normalization of AI-driven assassination programs, and ‘live-streamed genocide’.⁴ And who can imagine confidently that remote gene editing and other dishes now cooking in the biotech labs, will not also be weaponized?

The notion of sonic witnessing makes most sense to me in relation to these twentieth century debates about events of violence that exposed the abysses of humanism and enlightenment. But these debates have to be rethought in the context of the twenty-first century, in which the nightmares of capitalist modernity have biospheric consequences and are taking fully planetary form. Today it is better understood that genocide and ecocide are modes of violence that have accompanied and enabled modernity from its beginnings in settler colonialism and plantation slavery. Yet, critical reflection on Auschwitz – from Hannah Arendt and Adorno to François Lyotard, Giorgio Agamben and Georges Didi-Huberman – remains the zero point of what Shoshona Felman and Dori Laub described as ‘the crisis of witnessing’. The crisis stems from an impossibility in the structure of testimony about Auschwitz. ‘A witness is a witness to the truth of what happens during an event’ (Felman and Laub, 1992, p. 80). Not the facts, but the truth of what happens. But in the case of Auschwitz, those who were forced to the inside of that genocidal event cannot testify to the truth about it because that event, as massive trauma, was not fully present for them. And outside Auschwitz, speech about the event was silenced as a state secret or by the pressure of a general amnesia. As a result, the witness cannot find the other witnesses needed to hear their testimony. In this sense, Felman and Laub assert in 1992, Auschwitz is ‘an event without a witness’ (Ibid., pp. 80, 231-32).

Agamben, responding to Felman and Laub’s ‘crises of witnessing’, elaborates the aporia a bit differently. Witnesses are necessarily survivors of the event to which they testify. But Auschwitz names an event the full reality of which only those who were destroyed by it could testify to. The surviving witnesses to the gas chambers remain outside of what happened in them and can only gesture to that horror. For Agamben, this is why testimony about Auschwitz arrives in aporia ‘since no one can bear witness from the inside of death, and there is no voice for the disappearance of voice’ (Agamben, 1999, p. 35). In Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben extends the effects of this impossibility in witnessing to the very writing of history: ‘Facts so real that, by comparison, nothing is truer; a reality that necessarily exceeds its factual elements – such is the aporia of Auschwitz’ (Ibid., p. 12). And again: ‘The aporia of Auschwitz is, indeed, the very aporia of historical knowledge: a non-coincidence between facts and truth, between verification and comprehension’ (Ibid.).

Reflection – the grasping of history in the attempt to reach the truth about it – cannot truthfully construct the impossible testimony. It can only approach it and read the gaps that riddle it. Critical reflection, Agamben argues, has to refuse two temptations here. The first is the temptation of the full account, the presumption that everything can be said and explained exhaustively and adequately. The second is the temptation that nothing can be explained, the retreat to mysterium. ‘The only way forward lies in investigating the space between these two options’ (Ibid., p. 13). This negative double procedure, I suggest, aligns neatly with Adorno’s project of ‘negative dialectics’ and negative aesthetics. Philosophically, the disaster initiates the ruination of positivism, that naïve faith that ‘the facts’ will unproblematically add up to ‘the whole truth’. Aesthetically, in Adorno’s view, the disaster can only be represented negatively, evoked indirectly, obliquely, hermetically, by showing without saying.⁵ Agamben again: ‘This means that humans bear within themselves the mark of the inhuman, that their spirit contains at its very center the wound of non-spirit, non-human chaos atrociously consigned to its own being capable of everything’ (Ibid., p. 77). Or as Adorno put it more acidly, ‘After Auschwitz, all culture is garbage’ (Adorno, 1995, p. 367, translation modified).⁶

The limits and lacunae of language in this crisis of witnessing led Felman to emphasize the need to listen to what the voice of the witness says, between and beyond words: ‘Each testimony speaks to us beyond its words, beyond its melody, like the performance of a singing’ (Felman and Laub, 1992, p. 278). The critical unfolding of the notion of sonic witnessing seems to me to begin there, in the claims and problems of that sentence. What gets a bit conflated there is that the psychoanalyst, the historian, the critic, and the artist are all trying, in different ways, to listen to the impossible testimony and in response to carry out whatever registration of truth may be possible. Felman’s sentence, which exercised Agamben greatly as we will see, appears in her discussion of Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 film Shoa. Lanzmann brings Simon Srebnik, the boy-singer survivor of Chelmno, back to the site of that death camp and films him there singing the songs he was made to sing some forty years earlier. Song and singing then provide Felman with the bridge to artistic witnessing. The postwar debates around negative aesthetics had already staked out the basic artistic choices and positions. Arguing for the negative strategy of indirection, Adorno had approvingly brought Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (1957) close to Arnold Schoenberg’s The Survivor of Warsaw (1947). Hanns Eisler’s score for Alain Resnais’ groundbreaking 1955 film Night and Fog showed a different possibility for critical musical commentary. Composers such as Luigi Nono (1966) and Steve Reich (1988) followed divergent musical strategies in their own works on Auschwitz.

But the testimonies gathered to devastating effect in Lanzmann’s 1985 film clearly changed and reignited these debates (see Liebman, 2007). Lanzmann’s film followed a radically negative visual strategy in its refusal of archival images; Lanzmann notoriously refused even the possibility of any true image of the gas chambers (see Didi-Huberman, 2008). However, the testimonies in the film are presented with full and often agonizing visual and sonic attention on the witnesses, shifting the focus to the dynamics of the interview and the interpretation of the performance of testimony. Felman and Laub considered the results to be ‘the work of art of our times’ (Felman and Laub, 1992, p. xix). But for Agamben, Lanzmann’s handling of testimony has nothing to do with singing. For him, Felman’s escape from ‘the paradox of testimony through the deus ex machina of song’ marks an illicit aestheticization of testimony. ‘Neither the poem nor the song’, he insists, ‘can intervene to save impossible testimony; on the contrary, it is testimony, if anything, that founds the possibility of the poem’ (Agamben, 1999, p. 36).

We do not have to relitigate that debate to see that the sonic witnessing Felman and Laub point to is a witnessing at two removes from the gas chambers: it describes what the critical analyst does in order to witness the testimony of the primary witnesses, the survivors of Auschwitz, who in turn are haunted by the ‘complete witnesses’ who were annihilated in the gas chambers and cannot testify. This is what Laub calls ‘being a witness to the process of witnessing’ – and this is the form of witnessing that is available to us as latecomers. Kelly Oliver has emphasized that while Auschwitz is the extreme case, the process and performance of witnessing is a vital part of subject formation, especially in situations of oppression and historical harm (Oliver, 2001). We can also see that the ‘listening’ proposed by Felman and Laub is both actual and metaphorical: actual, because the analyst or critical reflector really does listen to the grain of the voice, the stuttering and stoppages in the performance of testimony, and not just to the literal meaning of the words, as if meaning and truth could simply coincide. Metaphorical, because listening is proposed as a method, a reflective comportment, a ‘third ear’ that proceeds negatively from gap to gap, rather than from positive fact to positive meaning. It is important to note that the impossibility of verification here is no support for denialism. The true or complete witnesses did not survive. The surviving witnesses can testify not to the inside of the gas chambers but only to the reduction to ‘naked life’, as Agamben puts it, of those people forced to work the gas chambers and the camps around them. ‘If the survivor bears witness not to the gas chambers or to Auschwitz but to the Muselmann, if he speaks only on the basis of an impossibility of speaking, then his testimony cannot be denied. Auschwitz – that to which it is not possible to bear witness – is absolutely and irrefutably proven’ (Agamben, 1999, p. 164).

Felman and Laub are not alone in this recourse to listening as a metaphor. In the so-called Anthropocene or Capitalocene, the deconstruction of anthropocentrism often proceeds in a similar way. The relation to the non-human and the more-than-human is not a bridge of perfect understanding. It is a negotiation across the limits and gaps of culture, language and modernist scientific knowledge. There is no shared symbolic language between people and mushrooms, say. But there is a common interest in survival. When Anna Tsing in The Mushroom at the End of the World, for example, relays a call for ‘political listening’, she means listening metaphorically. ‘Political listening’, which seeks to identify potential allies and collaborators, stands here not just for the sense of hearing but for new arts of noticing and attention attuned to the difference of non-human testimony. Indeed, she invokes listening only to quickly go beyond it:

To listen politically is to detect the traces of not-yet-articulated common agendas…. How for example shall we make common cause with other living beings? Listening is no longer enough; other forms of awareness will have to kick in…. We need many kinds of alertness to spot potential allies (Tsing, 2015, pp. 255–256).

The urgency here is that of the possibility of mutual survival in the ‘capitalist ruins’. How do people and non-human living beings collaborate with each other in sustaining life within processes of planetary ruination? A different comportment and alertness, perhaps a different sensorium, is needed. Sound studies are mainly concerned with literal rather than metaphorical listening. But I want to argue that the metaphor in these examples is no reason to dismiss or banish them, as something less than literal or actual listening. They are pointing to a comportment of attention, a negative method, that is compelled by critical reflection on the ongoing disaster. The metaphor needs to be embraced; its migration from the context of genocide to that of ecocide is no accident.

Genocide and ecocide are twentieth-century juridical concepts. Genocide is strictly defined and strongly established in international law, even if, as we are seeing now, attempts to prosecute instances as crimes are usually defeated by the asymmetries of power in the post-1945 so-called rules-based international order. Genocide not only continues in the twenty-first century, but its technological apparatuses are orders of magnitude more powerful than the crude industrialized mass murder that the new legal category was devised to define and deter. And let’s say the relevant name: Gaza. Israel’s targeting of Palestinian civilians, including shocking numbers of children, and deliberate destruction of homes and critical infrastructure, including hospitals, water and emergency food and relief supplies, accompanied by appalling and dehumanizing political rhetoric, has been deemed a contemporary genocide by numerous legal scholars, historians, and human rights organizations.⁷ Indeed, Felman and Laub are correct, not only is Auschwitz ‘essentially not over’, its repercussions remain ‘omnipresent’ and its traumatic consequences ‘are still actively evolving’ (Felman and Laub, 1992, p. xiv, italics in original). The effects of one massive intergenerational trauma are not and cannot be redressed by the infliction of another one.

Ecocide, by contrast, still struggles to establish itself as a legal concept (see Higgins, 2015). For good reason: modern society as a whole, and certainly its globalized contemporary forms, is thoroughly ecocidal. To be clear – and taking into account the debates about Auschwitz discussed above – the crisis of representation and the crisis of witnessing are not exclusive to the Nazi genocide but are a feature of every genocide and every ecocide, whether these are events or historical processes of longer duration.⁸ The inscription of these crimes in law, necessary as that may be, is something different. However deflected and frustrated attempts to prosecute genocide and ecocide have been, both categories have a use-value and a truth-value that exceeds their legal definitions. Even in common language usage, both terms appear as speech acts, as performative indictments of the given, normalized social practice; both point insistently to the gaps and lapses of law and to the higher claims of a justice that does not yet exist. Taking into account today the deepening critique of anthropocentrism driven by the loss of our common Holocene climate and bioplurality, the project of justice implicit in these two terms would now have to be transformative, more-than-human, and planetary. At this moment, such a project or any project of justice may seem like love in vain. Critical witnessing of the present would have to be a witnessing of that frustration, too: it is not enough, from within the processes of modernist ruination, to simply avow and aver what has happened and goes on happening. The logging of testimony and evidence, the pressing forward of indictments and the registration of defeats, as necessary as these may be, are but fragments of the truth. We have the critical means to think an abolitionist politics that would advance a strong conception of reparative planetary justice, but we lack the social forms, institutions, and strategies to realize it. We reflect on that, not to accept it but to get critical traction on what must change.

What I want to call late listening is a focused and sustained attention on what appears to be an approaching terminal polycrisis of capitalist modernity. True, the end of capitalism has been predicted repeatedly since the mid-nineteenth century. This mode of production has proved to be tenaciously resilient and dynamically expansive, beating back challenges and converting energy, science, new technologies and even catastrophe into accelerants for its growth. What Werner Sombart and Joseph Schumpeter long ago called ‘creative destruction’ has mutated into what Naomi Klein named the ‘shock doctrine’ of ‘disaster capitalism’ (Sombart, 1913; Schumpeter, 1942; Klein, 2007). Yes, but surely this polycrisis is unlike any of the past. Socially caused planetary heating, with all its knock-on effects, is utterly unprecedented. Capitalist modernity has an energy problem for which there is presently no solution that does not either cook the planet, turn it into a toxic open pit mine, or tamper recklessly with the atmosphere and climate. We know the first two options will accelerate the obliteration of ecological communities and drive on the extinction of species. We don’t know for sure what damage the last option – geoengineering – may cause, but we know the risks are extreme. The great wish, I won’t say hope, is that the tech sector can pull a rabbit out of its hat with the help of AI and quantum computing – nuclear fusion, for example. Already the race to control sources of lithium, nickel, cobalt, rare earths and water – all needed for AI, smartphones, weapons systems and data centers – is intensifying ‘great power competition’ – what used to be called imperialism – and helping to tip conflicts into wars. ‘Move fast and break things’, the juvenile and hubristic motto of the Big Tech oligarchs, is hardly a wisdom formula or path to mutual safety. The denial of the precautionary principle – ‘first do no harm’ – is a feature, not a glitch, of modernity’s code. That the old rules-based-international order is unravelling as agents of chaos rise to power is widely recognized and much discussed.

At this time, with very rare exceptions, every nation that can is arming up and going all-in again on fossil fuel extraction. Every week we hear or read about greatly increased military budgets, while in the shadows of the war in Ukraine, the President of Russia wages hybrid war against ‘the west’, and high-level reports, spy chiefs and generals call on Europeans to get their national societies onto a war footing (see for example Niinistö, 2024). Much the same is going on around the South China Sea, and the new climate imperialism is in high gear in Africa, Latin America, and the Arctic. In the Middle East, rampaging Israel defiantly perpetrates genocide against Palestinians with the direct support of the United States and its allies. Meanwhile, greenhouse gas emissions, planetary temperatures, and investment in new hydrocarbon infrastructure all continue to climb the curves, despite the dire warnings of the scientists. Makes sense, though: war machines don’t run on renewables. Yes, all of this points to war, as does the politics pursued by the remnants of liberal democracy, largely taken over by oligarchs and hard ethno-nationalists. If we are afraid of the word ‘Fascist’, euphemisms can always be found. And needless to say, another world war would be a massive carbon, genocide and ecocide bomb, if not the final extinction bomb. It’s no wonder that the late Fredric Jameson’s great quip about neoliberalism – that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism – had to be revised: the end of capitalism is now quite imaginable, as the end of the world (Jameson, 2003). But the world that is possibly ending, in my view, is that of modernity, the world of extraction, techno-acceleration and endless growth. That is not the same as the end of civilization or the end of life on earth. There are other paths into the future than this one.

Nevertheless, I don’t propose this term late listening as yet another prediction about the immanent collapse of capitalism. The late in ‘late listening’ recalls established usage in two critical disciplines. First, from trauma studies, I draw on the psychoanalytic notion of ‘belatedness’, what Freud called Nachträglichkeit, which could also be translated as ‘after-Effectiveness’. The psychic vulnerability and temporal belatedness that structure the experience of trauma mean that the traumatic hit can only be a ‘missed experience’ (Lacan, 1981, p. 55).⁹ Trauma hits because the psyche is unprepared. A loss and a wound result that in some sense remain irreducible to experience. Not the full truth of the experience but the impossibility of its full assimilation as reflected experience, is what the traumatized witness can testify to. In the register of trauma, awareness arrives late into a reality that is already and irrevocably altered by loss, by the hit of τύχη, chance or fate (see also Caruth, 1995). The losses and collateral damage of planetary heating and the Sixth Extinction must certainly count as traumatic – a slow-motion catastrophe for which no one was prepared, the initiation of which is now too late to stop, and which yet continues traumatically even after global awareness has been reached. The Real, the hit, is arriving every day as the planet’s forceful rejection of capitalist modernity. Missed now, the experience of this will arrive later.

Late also recalls the critical concept of ‘late capitalism’ used by twentieth-century theorists to grasp and periodize the self-destructive systemic dynamics of modernist globalization. I am thinking especially of Adorno, Ernest Mandel, and Jameson, as well as the more recent work of Alberto Toscano (see Adorno, 1975; Mandel, 1975; Jameson, 2008; Toscano, 2023). Modernity itself, as well as its dominant mode of production, is now late, in the sense of being caught by the consequences of business-as-usual, which now appears as a vicious circle speeding downward. We have reached the point where all systemic contradictions, all antagonisms are intensified, and accelerated financialized capital drives a wanton destruction of its own conditions of possibility. The systemic energy problem noted earlier is not so much that finite resources have been exhausted; it is more that their continued extraction and exploitation will accelerate the degradation of the biosphere and loss of ecological communities. There is no livability, no love, in an open pit mine. From now on, evidently, business-as-usual can be sustained only as war and ruination. As the ‘great acceleration’ of globalized life after 1945 seeks techno-exits from the cul-de-sac of fossil energy, the progress stories of modernity are severely in doubt and the sounds of the New are ciphers surging unheard in the roil of the given (McNeill and Engelke, 2014). All this – context and feeling structure – saturates every soundscape, directly or indirectly.

My use of listening in ‘late listening’ is largely metaphoric but not only so. Certainly, there are ample acoustical markers of the planetary polycrisis I just sketched. We know quite a bit about what modern war and interrogation sound like (see Cusick, 2008; Daughtry, 2020; Papaeti, 2013). And the soundscapes of violence have been given meticulous forensic attention through the methods of ‘investigative aesthetics’ (Fuller and Weizman, 2021). But what are the soundscapes of extraction and infrastructure, fracking, the percussive hammering of undersea seismic prospecting, the gigantic machinery and detonations of mining, the drumming propellers of containerships, the buzzing, humming and pinging of undersea fiberoptic cables and pipelines? How about the lethal roaring of wildfires, the shrieking winds of heat-fueled super hurricanes, the rushing liquid onslaught of atmospheric rivers and catastrophic flash floods? What are the soundscapes of loss that document the devastation of key ecological communities such as forests, wetlands, and coral reefs? What are the acoustics of ‘heat domes’, drought, crop failure and famine? What does the rising curve of extinctions sound like? We already have, I think, quite a clear sense of most of these. But certainly, there is still much to notice and interpret.

Do these fragmentary soundscapes and bad vibes add up to a sonic archive of planetary conjuncture? Yes, it would be possible to recognize and relay the sonic knottings of violence, migration, and climate at a higher level of abstraction than the particular, situated soundscape. But no, such a sonic assemblage could never be exhaustive or equivalent to an adequate truth. The problem is similar to that of representing capitalist modernity itself as a total social process. We know it is there, even if no single image or representation can capture all of it. If the scale of such a planetary soundscape is finally beyond a comprehensible perception and positive representation, could it be grasped negatively, through the extrapolation or montage of particular sonic fragments? Here, the negative strategies of indirection I mentioned earlier seem still to be key – not really an accident: the loss, in an ecological soundscape, of particular calls and cries – what David George Haskell calls ‘the crisis of sensory extinction’ – would hardly be registered otherwise (Haskell, 2022). Like the gaps of impossible testimony, the multispecies soundscapes of climatic and biospheric crisis are texts to be read negatively, against the temptations of the full account and the sacralizing mysterium. There is plenty here for sonic researchers and artists to work on.

But most of all, I mean late listening metaphorically: a method or comportment of attention that can be learned and cultivated and which operates alongside everyday attention – a focus and alertness akin to listening, if not exclusively auditory. Such a listening requires the critical concepts and contexts that can inform attention and connect the dots; it includes a determination not to look away or close the ears to what is going on, on the systemic level. A comportment, then, that acknowledges the loss and trauma – the offense even, to invoke the register of justice – but which like critical theory remains oriented toward practice. Late listening registers in order to respond to the challenges of surviving the mutual imbrication of society and planet, the plural causality of polycrisis, and the dynamic interactions of social violence, migration and climate. The sonic turn in the arts, humanities and social sciences teaches us to listen to the soundscapes we co-inhabit and to bear witness, however indirectly, to the acoustic reverberations of geopolitical and planetary turbulence. We also have to think through these knottings themselves: eco-genocide, for example (see Crook, 2025; and Short, 2016).

What would be the purpose of late listening and in what context would it be used? Given the limitations of present political trends, I intend it as a transdisciplinary organizing concept that could initiate dialogues, exchanges, debates and productive synergies between sound studies researchers, sonic artists and critical scholars, analysts, and theorists. These could be realized and made public through seminars, workshops, conferences, special journal issues such as this one, edited volumes, art exhibitions and film series. The point of late listening would be to give critical reflection some sensory anchors, but also to challenge it to reach for the truth about the processes now unfolding, in which the imminent drift of globalized social systems is colliding with planetary feedbacks. Under the concept of late listening could be constellated a number of critical streams that do not necessarily meet to collaborate at present: the critique of capitalism and the critique of anthropocentrism; the critique of what are called geopolitics and capitalist realism; the critique of modernist technology and myths of progress. The introduction of biospheric and planetary perspectives and thinking compels strategic and speculative reflection to go beyond the given social systems, which are evidently hell-bent on dooming us all. In this sense, late listening is comportment or stance, antenna or amplifier, as well as concept.

And by concept here, I mean a ‘constellation’ in Adorno’s sense: that is, an incitement to thinking, not an air-tight definition or closed system.¹⁰ The elements, images and soundscapes of this constellation – capitalist modernity, extractivism, genocide, ecocide, geopolitics, technics, but also biosphere, bioplurality, climate, the planetary – the elements exceed the horizon of what Mark Fisher called ‘capitalist realism’, which is merging today with the non-linear horizon of extinction (Fisher, 2009). Latent in this concept-constellation of late listening is a feeling that there are also opening horizons of analog survival, of biospheric realism, mutuality, common causes – even, to speak the unspeakable, horizons of deacceleration and degrowth. On the far side of extractivist energetics are the exits of other social forms and ‘post-growth’ enjoyments. Witnessing and reflection foster a counter-speculation of latencies.

We are witnesses and sonic witnesses at multiple scales and at multiple distances: we need our concepts to go from the local, particular land-, sea- and soundscape to the planetary conjuncture. But at that planetary level we are all witnesses together, connected by globalized media, cultures, and infrastructures. This is the sense in which I would insist on the necessity of the first-person plural address: this ‘we’. All of us who are alive now are experiencing and living through what I have cursorily described. We are situated differently, and our exposure is, to be sure, differential, unequal, and asymmetrical. But even in our non-identity, whatever class, race, or gender we may be, and across our situated differences, we do share a common cause in survival. And this is a material interest that we humans share with all the living beings on this planet. The Holocene community of life, to which we belong and which we have no right to destroy, surely has claims on us. The rescue of bioplurality is a political, ethical, philosophical, and aesthetic imperative. That, I suggest, is the truth of the now, under some shared horizon of more-than-human justice. Consensus on that point can’t be assumed and doesn’t yet exist in any organized or actionable form. But it is the rational and affective basis for mutuality and commoning, which is what we have left when modernist realism and geopolitics offer nothing but greater and faster ruination. As late listeners, we witness so that missed traumatic encounters can become reflected experience. We also listen to the calls of other possible futures, witnessing forward. Metaphorically and actually, we are all ear witnesses now.