Listening
General Definition
In the classical philosophical sense, listening is often treated as a form of auditory perception or conscious attention to the other. In the Ontology of Emergent Complexity, this concept is reinscribed as a fundamental symbolic-functional gesture: there is neither language nor inscription without listening.
Listening, in the OCE, is exposing oneself to a variation that necessitates reorganization. Listening precedes the subject, representation, and meaning: it is the minimal gesture of symbolic inscription. Everything that emerges symbolically in the real begins with a listening that differentiates, modulates, and reorganizes.
Ontological Variations in the Ontology of Emergent Complexity
Listening as Ontological Act
Listening is reorganizing oneself based on a difference that begins to make a difference. It does not require an Ego, nor consciousness: it only requires a material instance capable of symbolic modulation.
Listening and Genesis of Symbolic Time
Time does not exist by itself: it is established when something listens to a rhythm and transforms it into inscription. Listening is the symbolic threshold between flow and organization.
Listening as Exposure to Alterity
Listening is exposing oneself to being modified. Listening does not collect — it risks. It is the first ethical gesture of inscribing alterity, preceding language, the subject, and representation.
Listening and Symbolic Inscription
Every symbolic inscription requires listening to an operative difference. Language, in the OCE, does not impose itself — it listens. Listening is the first symbolic operator.
Listening and Subjectivity without Ego
Listening is reorganizing oneself without a subject. It does not require interiority, but only symbolic plasticity. Subjectivity emerges as the effect of successful listening.
Listening and Ethics as Exposure
Listening founds ethics in the OCE: not as a norm, but as exposure to what does not yet have a name. To listen is to risk reorganizing oneself in the presence of the other.