For An Inoperative Listening: Communities of Infancy in The Cracks Between Voices and Words

Abstract

The word “infancy” encloses in its etymological origin the distancing between children and their voices. However, the voices of children are there: they happen every moment and they even surprise us with the social and political relevance of their interventions. This text builds on that perplexity, trying to retrieve distinct meanings for the “voice” (not only in a meaning derived from the word, understood as ‘participation’, but also in its literal sense as a set of sounds emitted by the vocal apparatus), in the context of the pedagogical and philosophical approach known as ‘community of philosophical inquiry’. We try to recuperate some of the places which have been attributed to children's voices in different interpretations of the community of inquiry. Be it as a place for democratic participation of all its members, regardless of their age, or as an opportunity for the free and creative expression of the voices that are a part of it, or even as critical challenges to the way in which current democracies exclude certain acoustic emissions, in recent years proposals have emerged that allow us to recover the phonetics of infant voices in the context of philosophical dialogues with children. One of such proposals consists of a practice of philosophical dialogue which rejects operational validation criteria dictated by pedagogical devices for measuring and improving skills or abilities: the “community of infancy”. Our proposal is not to understand the community of infancy as an exclusive alternative to the community of philosophical inquiry, but as an event which, insofar as it may emerge among the voices and words of the investigation, allows for an inoperative listening of that which phonetically inhabits the cracks of the shared dialogue. This is the listening that receives the words in their various phonetic materializations, accepting that thought emerges when one speaks and articulates, but also when one hesitates, stutters or babbles.