Trickster’s Laughter: Resonance, Unmaking, and the Dimensions of Listening. An exploration of the trickster figure, relational listening, and sound practices in unmaking dominant systems.

Abstract

The following pages weave a web of multidisciplinary threads, attuned to the trickster as a figure of noise, vibration, and rupture—a shadowy presence that unsettles systems while revealing hidden patterns within the cracks. This work resists reductionism where possible, though it cannot fully evade it. Trickster energy lingers in the gaps, spilling over boundaries and stirring unease. It provokes cycles of destruction and renewal – nonlinear, emergent, and adaptive forms of governance rather than rigid control.

Through myth and theory—Jung’s archetypal crossings, Hillman’s descent into psyche, the daemon’s borderlands, Hyde’s mischievous invitations—the trickster’s laughter unsettles stability, nudging us toward the unresolved. But this unmaking is not confined to the psyche; it reverberates through ecological and sonic spheres. Bateson’s entangled patterns, Guattari’s inseparable ecologies, and Morton’s hyperobjects expose the frailty of constructed systems, revealing interdependencies where we assumed separations.

Listening, far from being passive, becomes a mode of unmaking—porous, relational, and resistant to enclosure. From biophony, to geophony, to anthrophony; vibrations linger— spectral and haunting. Care takes root in the afterlife of systems undone. Resonance becomes survival, a frail hum in the void, asking: What remains after breaking ceases, and how do we move within it?

This work expands these threads, exploring myth and sound as tools for dismantling hegemony, proposing unmaking as a space for radical care. Figures like Pan, the Solomonarii, and the Iele ground the discussion in the vibrational forces of myth and ecology, reflecting on the intersections of sound, listening, and transformation. Hillman’s Underworld, Simone Weil’s Decreation, Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble, and Anna Tsing’s Resilience in Capitalist Ruins converge to reimagine unmaking—not as destruction alone, but as a process of renewal.

Listening here is both an ethical stance and a participatory act, amplifying resonance in spaces of collapse while fostering a radical openness to what emerges in the slit.

This work asks: How might we listen with fragments? What futures emerge when we tune into the ruins?

I. Liminal Tensions

Fractures and Shadows

History unfolds in fragments—a shifting landscape of shards, ruptures, and unmade worlds, where memory flickers between erasure, reinvention, and return. The trickster stirs among the splinters, carving spaces where solidity dissolves and meaning slips through the cracks. Their presence is unsettling, a force of disruption woven into the fault lines of order.

Yet, the sharp edges of what has been broken remain, glinting in the light, reflecting back what we might wish to ignore. Mischief is their surface, a playful veneer stretched over deeper disturbances—unresolved tensions that hum beneath structure’s skin. Their work is not to soothe but to provoke, to agitate, to make visible what has long been buried.

Liminality is a trembling edge, where what seemed fixed crumbles and what was lost begins to reverberate. Here, resonance takes root, fragile yet insistent, like light refracted through a cracked mirror. The trickster does not only destroy; they unravel and reconfigure, shaping thresholds where dissolution meets emergence.

The Trickster’s Spin

Dreams, much like the trickster and liminal spaces, play tricks on us, rearranging our sense of reality and exposing the limits of rational thought. They are Hermes’ playground, full of both deceit and revelation. Yet the trickster is more than a mischievous player in this dreamscape; they gyrate between opposites, a paradox embodied, an amphibological meaning that is far from innocent mischief. Mischief is only the surface.

He [the trickster] is a forerunner of the saviour, and, like him, God, man, and animal at once. He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness… He is so unconscious of himself that his body is not at unity, and his two hands fight each other.” ¹

While Jung conceptualised the trickster in the realm of myth, Hillman takes this further, grounding it in the psyche’s underworld. He takes a deep but playful jab (though respectful) at Jung and Freud’s gravity—calling the trickster a mediator, a bridge that spans tandems well known: conscious and unconscious, visible and invisible. They portray the trickster not as a figure of simplicity but as a tensioned wire stretched between creator and destroyer, shadow and light, laughter and grief—all coiled in concatenation. Hillman sees the trickster as a shadow figure, representing the messy, polytheistic nature of the psyche, the uncomfortable aspects of the self that we would rather leave unacknowledged.

These are the spaces where the trickster does their work: in the hidden, the suppressed, the inconvenient, the underworld.

As Hillman writes,

“To enact the clown literalises the guide to the underworld. The comic spirit can take us there, but we are not the guide—not Harlequin, Trickster, or Hermes Psychopompos, not even a clown. The comic spirit masquerades in all things we do and say; we are each a joke and do not need to put on a white face” . ²

Hillman’s humour is evident when he reimagines Freud and Jung as “two old clowns.” Their grand theories, Hillman implies, are themselves subject to the trickster’s lens, highlighting the absurdities of their attempts to systematise the psyche’s messy, paradoxical nature. The clown, in this context, serves not just as an archetype but as a perspective—a way to embrace and explore the disorder of the psyche without succumbing to literalisation or rigidity.

To look at the shadow is to confront the pieces of ourselves we would rather deny; to follow the trickster is to walk the line between revelation and chaos. It is here, in the shadow, that the work begins—within the mess, swamp and mud, within the discomfort, within the confrontation of what we have hidden. The trickster is not just playing games; the games are a demand and a challenge to face ourselves fully, in a reflexive moment on the liquidity of the mirror, where the clown’s face might just be our own.

Friction of Simulation: The Daemon, the Doppelgänger, and the Chorus

Yet the trickster splinters into other guises, among them, the daemon. If the trickster cracks open the rules of the world with cunning and inversion, the daemon lingers in the space those ruptures make possible. A cousin, perhaps, a tonal variation rather than a departure. Where the trickster jests to provoke, the daemon listens through distortion, it tunes in.

A variation of the trickster, the daemon listens for reality’s textures, but not its truths, as they fold and unfold. It listens to the friction of surfaces rubbing against each other in an endless play of difference. It moves through a world of simulation, navigating its tensions, its moments of slippage. The daemon does not seek the real, nor does it succumb to the illusion of the hyperreal. Instead, it moves within the field of simulacra, testing its tensile limits, pressing against its unstable edges. It listens to the disentangling and reweaving of tongues, the flicker of meaning as it doubles back on itself, the dissonance of language that never quite rests in a single definition. Each syllable displaces another, a shifting resonance of what was, what could be, and what remains just out of reach.

It is a restless figure at the faultlines, neither stable nor entirely untethered. The daemon does not obliterate meaning, it exists in the space where meaning quivers, between coherence and collapse, between the original and its endless refractions. It does not inhabit the real, it senses where the real once was, or where it might still emerge, like an afterimage of something long disappeared. The daemon listens for the tonal shifts where coherence falters but potential gathers. Tracing a map, not etched into solid ground,but inscribed in the second skin that it wears and sheds, looping between presence and erasure.

In the hyperreal borderlands, resolution is a mirage. The daemon moves between unstable structures, where sound is no longer tied to a source, where the difference between signal and noise is blurred in a constant oscillation. Here, categories do not dissolve entirely, they persist as scaffolding, frameworks that both hold meaning in place and reveal its fragility. The daemon does not simply replicate these structures—it presses against them, sensing their limits, revealing the underlying resonance beneath their rigid surfaces. It is not a passive figure within the simulated field but an active force, attuned to the tensions of reality as it is constructed, mediated, and undone. The trickster, always nearby, murmurs in a voice low and cracked:

Distort. Dissolve. Disobey.

The body, too, is no longer a fixed boundary, it becomes a vibrating membrane where the external meets the internal and neither is fully distinct. The daemon turns its longing outward, as a means of attunement not in search of authenticity but with an oscillation between self and world, between the familiar and the uncanny. It does not move through simulation as a passive echo, more it tests the limits of whatever is imposed, becoming an active resonance. This frictional listening does not reduce complexity to clarity; instead, it reveals that categories, though functional, are never absolute. The daemon that remains at the verge is neither disappearing into the simulacrum nor escaping it entirely. It is pressing into the net of its illusion, listening for the moment when the field vibrates, and something new begins to take shape.

The doppelgänger lingers around this process—a shadowed twin, an acoustic double that reverberates without fully materialising. It comes as a presence that oscillates between these positions, rather than a reflection or a distortion. Like a hologram, it is an image without origin, a spectral projection that refuses resolution. The doppelgänger speaks in a minor key, unsettled and unsettling. Its voice carries the resonance of potential: the what-if, the could-be, the recognition of oneself in the unfamiliar. It is the embodiment of the acoustic uncanny, that moment when one hears a sound and recognizes it before understanding it.

Listening to the doppelgänger requires tolerating this uncanny familiarity. It demands the capacity to hear oneself as another and to let that dissonance linger. The doppelgänger does not resolve identity; it amplifies its variety, slipping between the real and its simulation, between the original and the copy. This resonance is a composite of presence and absence, revealing that identity is not a fixed category but a dynamic of resonant encounters, a flickering between the authentic and the hyperreal. In this sense, the doppelgänger acts as a boundary and threshold, limit and opening—a mirage of subjectivity suspended between the echo and the event, never fully arriving.

Then, from the periphery, the chorus rises. The chorus, unlike the singular figures of the daemon and the doppelgänger, speaks in multiplicity. It does not necessarily harmonise in order to unify; it is more of a resonance through difference. Its polyphonic texture emerges from the distinct yet entangled voices, a simulation of collectivity that is no less real for being constructed. Each voice retains its singular timbre, yet together they generate a field of sonic entanglement —a vibratory common where individual boundaries blur without being erased.

The chorus occupies a brink between collective resonance and dissonant individuality. It reminds us that listening is a shared practice, a being-with that does not collapse difference into sameness. The trickster, always present in the cracks, delights in this multiplicity, knowing that it is in the overlap of distinct vibrations that the field of listening becomes most vivid. Like the hologram that contains the whole within its fragments, the chorus does not resolve into a singularity, it is a field dispersion of potential listening, a resonance that is both presence and illusion.

Dwelling in Contradiction

To listen to the daemon is to tolerate a weight of uncertainty. This tolerance is an undertone, a sound vibrating through the cracks of broken categories. It is survival sung softly, fiercely, trembling at the skirts of collapse. The trickster moves in its body, in its voice, in its desire. The daemon is never still, never static, its sound carries us forward, through the faultlines, into something not yet named. Listening here is an act of radical presence. It requires stepping into contradiction and staying there as an engaged participant.

Contradictory listening is to hear dissonance without resolving it, to let disparate frequencies coexist without forcing harmony. This practice of listening reveals the fragility of fixed categories. Here, the trickster’s role sharpens and becomes less provocateur and more survivor. The trickster becomes a builder of subsistence, criss-crossing fragments into a livable whole. In these liminal spaces, the trickster distances from myth and becomes an intimate force, a maker of openings. It reminds us that the trickster operates within the tension, resisting, adapting, and creating. It thrives not by resolving ambiguity but by inhabiting it fully, transmuting fracture into form, absence into resonance, and in the process, survival becomes radical becoming.

This act of survival, of listening-with contradiction, matches Jean Luc Nancy’s notion of resonance. Resonance does not belong to the emitter or the receiver; it belongs to the space between them. It is within this liminal space that listening reveals its power. The daemon, the doppelgänger, and the chorus remind us that identity, like sound, is relational and in flux. To listen, then, is to unmake the illusions of solidity and to move with the resonant, shifting currents.

Transformation Through Disruption

Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World sharpens this role, pulling the trickster from the margins and thrusting them into the heart of the structures they challenge. Hyde writes of the trickster as a living conundrum, a pulsating challenge to the boundaries we draw and the rules we unquestionably accept. Their work is to transform, tearing apart what does not work, making visible the cracks in the systems we inhabit. The trickster’s role is not entertainment, it is a raw deliberate agitation, not chaos for its own sake but destruction as a catalyst for creation.

“A trickster is less ridden by lust and hunger if his organs of appetite have been whittled away. […] So the suffering that trickster endures from his unrestrained appetites may lead to some consciousness in regard to those appetites.” ³

It is an uncomfortable truth: the trickster gives us what he knows is consuming them. They do not soothe or reassure but rather compel us to confront and imagine what might exist beyond the limitations we impose upon ourselves. And here lies our paradox.

“To end our craving we must eat the organs of craving, and craving then returns.” ⁴

Their charged presence demands a reckoning with what we take for granted, urging us to face the constructs of our frameworks and the possibilities that lie in their loss of power.

Trickster Figures and Flux

Loki’s cunning, and theft of fire reflects this duality. Disrupting divine order, it ignites human potential and creates a moment where fracture becomes transformation. The trickster’s laughter, here, refuses repair and suggests a new beginning in the gaps of his teeth.

Hermes’ boundary-crossing, as well as Jarry’s grotesque Ubu l, emerge as examples of this energy —figures who do not create stability, but instead unravel and unmask it, exposing the brittleness beneath the surface. Tricksters dismantle with irreverence, undoing the polish of stability with laughter and ink splashed across pristine pages, imploding and exploding simultaneously. They hold up mirrors to transience and shed light on the truth of what is not working. The trickster’s world is one of flux, where nothing holds fast, and every system is subject to failure.

Invitation to Transformation

Their energy is uncomfortable but necessary, a force that reveals the apparent failure’s fragility as the foundation of transformation. They unsettle, they provoke, they demand.

In their mad laughter, we hear the echoes of unmaking; in their chaos, we are blinded by the outlines of what might emerge from the sparkling shards. It is not an easy invitation, but it is an essential one. It is a call to step into the storm and face what is broken, to begin again in the spaces left behind, emerging from it changed in all chromatic varieties. They never built in the conventional sense; their work is to unmake and deconstruct, to shout into the space of fracture.

II. Biomythologies and Ecology of Patterns

Resonance into Endless Chimeric

“He is obviously a “psychologem,” an archetypal psychic structure of extreme antiquity. In his clearest manifestations he is a faithful reflection of an absolutely undifferentiated human consciousness, corresponding to a psyche that has hardly left the animal level.” ⁵

The tricksters hold hands and whistle in the forests, their rhythm sharp, brittle, dissonant. The air vibrates with whispers: cracking branches, shivering leaves, the breath of unseen creatures, the flutter of absent wings. Between these textures, Pan emerges, laughing— not a trickster in name, yet resonant with trickster energy. Pan’s ability to inspire sudden, overwhelming fear—his namesake “panic”—renders him a destabilising force. He thrives in the spaces where order falters, where the rational succumbs to the primal. His music, blown through the hollow bones of reeds, disorients as it seduces. His syrinx, born of loss, longing,and transformation, unfurls its broken melody into the porous architecture of the woods: sound bleeding into tree bark, into soil, into the pulse of those who hear. It enchants as it disorients, dragging and pulling the listener into a trance of ecstasy or dread, compelling one to confront the wildness within and the dissolution of boundaries. It tears open the seams of perception, conjuring the vertigo of porous echo of moss.

Pan’s presence is a paradox: goat-legged, earthbound, embodying the raw, untamed essence of nature’s sonic infinite. To hear Pan is to confront a sonic wound: the stable grounds of identity tremble under the weight of his frequency. He dances at the limits of human understanding, a figure of creation and destruction. His essence is a tensed blare, hypnotic and mad, compelling mortals to dance until collapsing into feverish dreams or stirring desires so intense they dissolve into mourning, crying in the end, “The great God Pan is dead!” along with the carefully constructed order of the human world. Yet the resonance persists, latent, waiting for the right surface to vibrate into. Pan disrupts the status quo not with cunning or guile, rather with the sheer force of his vitality, that resonance unsettles, transgresses, and reimagines.

Romanian mythology, too, entwines itself with this transgressive currents, enveloping an inner soundscape of chaos of both unmake and remake. From our direct encounters with the living world, mythology emerges as a way to encode the relational dynamics of nature. The Solomonarii, wizards of storms, rise as echoes of this transformative energy. Their chants spiral skyward, coaxing thunder and rain to split the air with echoes that reverberate through valleys and peaks. They, too, exist at the boundaries of control and chaos, the sacred and the profane. Their voices are a command with a flux of power that bends the natural into the mythic, coded with elemental knowledge.

These wizards, deviant in their knowledge and practice, transgress the limits of human comprehension. Their chants spiral upwards, opening fissures into the ineffable and revealing moments where sound becomes revelation—a shifting connection between the tangible and the mythical. Together, figures like Pan and the Solomonarii remind us that mythology encodes the pulse of nature’s rhythms: unpredictable, transformative, and eternally in flux. They listen to the turbulence of the world and respond with an acoustic counterforce. They inhabit a world of flux, where human pressure meets the indifference of natural rhythms.

The Pattern That Connects

Muma Pădurii, in essence the embodiment of Gaia. She is the source, the matter (Mater in Latin)—the Forest Mother that holds the woods in her breath—she creaks like brittle roots snapping under tension, her presence is the earth groaning under its weight of time. Her riddles vibrate deep in the marrow, each pause a meticulous trap. To listen to her is to feel the world’s vertigo shift—slowly, deliberately, into something unknown, an atavistic summon that distorts orientation. She embodies what Gregory Bateson calls the “pattern that connects,” a lattice of life, of signals and silences, a voice of the forest itself, revealing how meaning emerges from interconnectedness. Her soundscapes are maps of unease, drawing travellers astray, coaxing them into the labyrinthine depths of their own undoing, into the forest’s algorithmic pulse.

Trickster’s Reversal

The trickster’s unmaking does not shatter; it unsettles and reconfigures. The trickster in sound,as in myth, bends linearity into spirals. Bateson’s “ecology of patterns” speaks to the quiet dissonances that destabilise rigid structures: the fissures that disclose those threads concealed beneath polished surfaces. It emerges in the shaking that collides through systems, the cracks that expose interwoven threads beneath seemingly solid forms. Tactile acts of careful unknotting: Neither static nor fixed, the world is a network of minuscule shifting connections. To confront these patterns is to engage with ephemerality as a reality that liberates even as it wounds. To touch a sonic structure and feel its elasticity is to witness coherence falter and patterns yield to flow. Sound’s ephemeral architecture materialises in its disintegration; unmaking is an act of exposure, a confrontation with the liminal. The allure of unmaking is unmistakable: the thrilling collapse of a porcelain structure, the dismantling of an edifice long thought to be immovable. Yet this act leaves behind more than absence—it leaves echoes, haunted and incomplete, amplifying both grief and potential.

For Bateson, understanding patterns requires a shift in perception: meaning does not arise in isolation but through relationships—mind influencing environment, environment shaping society, society reflecting the mind. The “pattern that connects,” as he calls it, lives in this interaction. It is not static or linear; it flows, vibrates, and shifts, always in conversation with itself. To inhabit these patterns is to let go of the illusion of singularity, thereby embracing the relational dynamics that pulse through all things. Bateson’s ecology calls for attunement instead of mastery.

Interconnected Ecologies

The voices of Iele glint like light on water, their melodies shimmering in unending hypnotic circles. Their songs pull listeners into an aching rhythm, binding them to longing and desires left unanswered. The Iele embody a deviant energy, their sound neither gentle nor forgiving. To hear them is to lose oneself in the chimeric—where sound and silence blur in a hypnotic trance, where longing becomes loss, where resonance becomes transformation. They leave those who dare listen forever altered. These spectral sirens, neither benevolent nor malicious, embody what Guattari describes as the transversal resonance of psychic, social, and environmental ecologies. Their melodies oscillate in a suspended time, where myth and matter intersect, a sonic topology that disturbs spatial coherence, singing of longing and transcendental grief. A crisis in one realm resonates across the whole. Mental disintegration reflects social collapse. Environmental degradation reverberates in the psyche — the solastalgia (which we will arrive to later on).

Aghiuță’s whispers fleet through interstices of thought, a flicker of sound that lingers in hesitation. His mischief hums just below the doorstep of comprehension, unraveling coherence with the smallness of doubt. He moves between breaths and pauses. Păcală counters this with jagged, serrated, and sly laughter, uncontainable and sharp slices through the mind’s rigidity. He listens first—always listens—tuned to the gaps where meaning falters and silence betrays. His cleverness is sound-born, his power drawn from knowing when to wait, when to let the resonance build, and when to strike. He is a trickster in the art of listening, shaping the world through the vertiginous relationality and echoes of its own flaws.

Together, these tricksters show that sound is survival and listening is a form of radical chimeric. To listen deeply is to be dragged into the fractures where the known dissolves and embryonic fusion emerges.

Listening as Participation

Listening, in Abram’s sense, is animistic: a return to a world that listens back. He reminds us that myths and their sounds are in a dialogue with the living world, telling us that deviancy, too, is sound—a clashing spell that shakes every strapping foundation. Guattari extends this further, listening becomes a form of active engagement—a way of attending to these interconnections, of tracing the ripples that flow through the system. To listen here is not to extract or impose, it is instead a push to enter into the relational field and feel the vibrations that link one thread to another in this inexhaustible matrix. Listening becomes an act of ecological humility—an immersion into vibratory networks that resist anthropocentric domination.

Morton’s hyperobjects stretch this matrix even further. To listen to climate change, melting glaciers or shifting tectonics for example, is to engage with time scales that dwarf human temporality. The shifting digital network, the global economy—these are systems that Morton calls “massively distributed in time and space,” their scale stretching far beyond individual perception. Yet, they shape our lives deeply and invisibly. Hyperobject-listening is to dwell in disorientation, to accept that not all patterns can be grasped, that some connections remain elusive. Morton’s invitation, again, is to attune oneself to the imperceptible and to feel the presence of these vast systems without needing to contain or control them.

Bateson, Guattari, and Morton each trace a different aspect of the ecology of patterns, yet they converge in their call to listen. Listening here is not passive; it is an ever-evolving act of participation. It amplifies the relational field, drawing out the vibrations that hum through its helical systems. This kind of listening resists enclosure or fixation. It asks for attunement and not answers. It insists on the willingness to dwell in complexity and uncertainty.

Unmaking Patterns

The unmaking initiated by the trickster is never nihilistic. The trickster’s unmaking reveals these patterns by exposing their fragility. To unmake is not to destroy in isolation but to lay bare the fibre that holds a system together and confront the flexibility that sustains it. The spaces that emerge in the aftermath of unmaking carry what they sought to dismantle. The forms undone linger as shadows, their absence felt even as new possibilities begin to coalesce. To unmake is to confront history, to inhabit its cracks and ask what they might hold. What emerges from these cracks is often the deviant, the dissonant—a force that unsettles yet propels creation forward.

On Deviancy and Creation

Deviancy manifests as dissonance, a deviation from the anticipated, a pause in the sonic continuum. It occupies a dual space: a tension between soothing and provocation, between coherence and the chaos that undoes it. It is the crack through which creativity seeps, the site where imagination and pathology intertwine. Schizoid sonic states reflect this: the monotonous pulse that becomes oppressive, the sudden tonal shift that disorients spatial perception. Deviancy in sound challenges the listener’s perceptual homeostasis, forcing a reconfiguration of interpretive frameworks. It is an inherently human condition, a cyclical rhythm of transgression and transformation. One part may soothe anxieties, while the other mirrors madness in its rawest form. Psychological deviancy—delirium—emerges where knowledge evades comprehension and transgresses boundaries, where memory collapses into hallucination. The space where sustained tones and continual syntaxes blur the rims of reason.

In sound, this becomes a flux of schizoid dichotomies: a chain of vibrations, from minimal to maximal, from restraint to overwhelming immersion. The pull of sensory deprivation—of plunging into silence or continuous sound—is the deviant act of letting oneself drift. The mind, caught between the rational and the emotional, finds itself undone. I, myself, am troubled by the idea of technology overcoming feeling, rationality displacing emotion. Yet there is always a pull in the other direction: the deviant longing for intuitive sensibility, for raw and unmediated experiences.

This spiralling—inside and outside of madness—is a chimeric act, a split, a schism that mirrors the natural world. From the dual forms of gynandromorphs, containing male and female characteristics, to biomythologies that entwine human and other-than-human forms, speak to this inherent schizoid system. Deviancy becomes a form of creation, as well as an act of destruction and renewal. Longing for transformation becomes grief, and grief itself becomes the catalyst for something “new”—a process of radical becoming where the creator is always deviant. Just as the simulacrum erodes a stable sense of the real, sonic deviancy unsettles the mind’s perceptual anchoring, pushing the listener into a state where interpretation becomes fluid, unstable, and recursive.

As Kafka reminds us, “You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world… but perhaps precisely this holding back is the only suffering you might be able to avoid.” ⁶ Etel Adnan adds, “The brain wonders why the mind is constantly drifting… oozing from a soft, gelatinous mass, so thoroughly imprisoned in utter blackness.” ⁷ And perhaps it is in this blackness—this bearer of visions, this paradoxical clarity in obscurity—where the tricksters hum, where sound trembles and remakes the world, and where we spiral endlessly into the chimeric. The double in literature and psychoanalysis signals a split self, a crisis of identity, and a confrontation with the uncanny. But in the sonic realm, the double is also an aesthetic and perceptual condition: echoes, delays, layers of resonance that both affirm and displace the original. This doubling is the mechanism of simulacra, where no origin exists—only copies of copies, endlessly proliferating.

Here, the deviant act becomes one of disturbance. To embrace the schizoid nature of perception, where feeling is simultaneously present and absent, real and hyperreal, is to refuse the collapse into mere simulation. It is a rebellious act against the technological flattening of experience, a way to inhabit the chimeric, the hybrid, the space of becoming. In this way, deviancy reclaims itself in sound. It fractures the simulacrum by exposing its fissures, by allowing the listener to slip into the uncontainable, where affect is no longer a looped sign, but rather it is lived intensity. Where sound, like the trickster’s misfit laughter, escapes categorisation and spirals endlessly into its own radical possibility.

Resonance and Care in Listening

Listening becomes a way of holding these fractured-frenzied-spaces. Yet, even listening is fraught with risk. When shaped by paradigms of surveillance or domination, listening can replicate the very systems it seeks to dissolve. To unmake with care is to reimagine listening as a practice of resonance rather than a tool for mastery, a way of being-with rather than acting-upon. It is in this void left by unmaking that resonance persists. It hums quietly, insistently, a reminder of the connections that endure even in fracture. The trickster’s work amplifies this further, drawing us into the relational field, into the trembling threads that vibrate with possibility.

Questions of the Unmade

And so, we pause in the wake of unmaking to ask:

What remains after the breaking?

What emerges in the unmade?

How do we inhabit the oscillating web without imposing new structures, instead dwelling in resonance?

How might listening itself become a practice that transcends extraction, amplifies care, and holds space for the fragile balance of what remains?

III. Against the Constructs of World-Building

World-Building and Its Discontents

The impulse to shape, to create new worlds and pour cement into the flux of breath, seduces with its false promise of certainty; our dreams once again paint us the mask of clowns. The desire to build is an enchantment—a promise whispered in the voice of certainty, a gust of dust blown from ruins. To construct, is to pour the liquid into moulds, hardening the mutable into forms that claim infinity. Yet this act, so tempting in its reassurance, is fraught with peril. It does not honour life’s dynamism — rather it curates it, carving boundaries where none belong.

And yet, to build is also in our nature. It is a child at the shore, piling sand into castles only for the tide to reclaim them. This desire does not arise in a vacuum; it is neither arbitrary nor merely conditioned—it emerges from a deep-seated rhythm within life itself. Bateson reminds us that mind and nature are not separate; the patterns by which we build are the same ones that govern rivers, roots, and the complex architectures of living systems. Mary Midgley, too, warns against denying our creative impulses. She states that our need to shape is not a conceited attempt to control, it is instead a force as ancient as the universe itself. Even in destruction, there is the shadow of design.

For Aristotle, it is not just what human hands have shaped, but in fact all things that move toward an end. The acorn does not become an oak by accident but by necessity—by its final cause, its inherent motion toward form. Thomas Aquinas, extending this thought, saw in every unfolding of nature the imprint of the divine, an architecture that is revealed. To build, then, is also to partake in this unfolding, to trace its movement, to act within an order older than ourselves. Here lies the danger: where does participation end, and infliction begin?

The Risk of World-Building

Even when born from utopian longing*,* world-building often forgets the trickster’s lessons and repeats a deeper history of demands. It is a map laid over the living, a structure that names, classifies, and, in doing so, colonises. It pretends to liberate but often solidifies control, crystallising motion into stasis, plurality into singularity. Even the gentlest architecture risks becoming an enclosure; even the most well-intended cartography can overwrite the uncharted. How can one know the past without mapping the present? But can one map the unknown without claiming it?

To build is to impose, to cut and demand it into becoming a particular shape. The impulse may spring from a longing for freedom, for a horizon beyond the present, but it risks replicating the hierarchies it hopes to dissolve. A world constructed with care may still delineate, still frame what should remain open-ended. The castle of childhood, shaped by small hands in wet sand, holds no dominion—but what of the castles that endure?

Listening as Resistance

Listening resists this infliction; it does not carve a trace into the world. It attends to its resonances, to its unheard memory. Sound, in its essence, cannot be contained or fixed. It moves through space as vibration, existing as a relationship and not as an object—something that unfolds between emitter and receiver. The act of listening, then, is not a passive state but an embodied participation with the world’s oscillations. It is an attunement to the relational nature of sound, where meaning always remains in motion, just beyond reach. Meaning does not lie in the sound itself, but in the resonant interval that binds listener and environment together.

The impulse to dominate sound—to treat it as a commodity or static entity—overlooks its relational nature. Listening defies that logic. It is an act that exposes the porousness of what seems solid. To truly listen is to surrender the instinct to grasp or fix meaning. It requires stepping into the verge where resonance holds its ephemeral power, into the cliff where meaning approaches but never quite arrives. Where world-building is an act of grasping, of moulding and mastering, listening invites presence. It moves with rather than against, dissolving hierarchies and inhabiting fragility. Even if sound behaves linearly, it enfolds spherically.

Listening is not an act of construction; it is an attunement. It does not overwrite but reveals, does not claim but accompanies. To listen is to lean into those hidden symmetries, to be shaped by undertones rather than dictating their form. It demolishes the architecture of certainty and creates space for what cannot be known in advance.

If the child on the shore builds castles in delight, knowing the sea will take them back, then listening is that same gesture made with the world itself. It is a means of partaking without possessing, shaping without sealing, dwelling without enclosing. Listening becomes an act of relational humility—it invites us to stay open to what arises, to the unpredictable resonance that emerges when we engage with the world as co-participants rather than observers. This openness resists the impulse toward mastery. It recognises that sound, like the sea, cannot be grasped or pinned down. The refusal to build a world is not a refusal to dream, rather it is a refusal to dictate the form of dreaming. To listen is to remain within the unfolding, to let space be plural, to let time drift without blueprint. In listening, we do not inscribe the world; we simply become part of its resonance.

Coded vibratory perception

From a scientific perspective, listening can be understood through an overlooked discovery from the 1800s. Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is not just a passive liquid, it may be the very medium where sensory experience and consciousness converge. I came across Samuel Thomas Sömmerring’s work, which challenges the long-held belief that CSF is merely a byproduct of decay after death. Instead, he argues that this vital liquid plays an active and essential role in brain function. Far from being inert, CSF embodies the spirit, acting as the very substance through which life and individuality are expressed. By linking CSF to the endolymph of the auditory system, Sömmerring positions listening as a dynamic, deeply physical process, one that is inseparable from the essence of life and perception.

This perspective transforms listening from a mechanical function into an embodied engagement with the sound that resonates through the body and mind, shaping the way we experience and process the world. Rather than reducing hearing to a mechanical process, Sömmerring frames it as a complex interaction of biological structures and subtle dynamics, bridging sensory, cognitive, and emotional realms. Listening, then, is not just reception but an act embedded in the fundamental life force. This can be interpreted as one explanation of the intuitive.

DNA, like a crystalline vinyl spiraling with encoded memory, records and transmits information through its dynamic structural rhythm. As biologist Maxim Frank-Kamenetskii explains, DNA forms a one-dimensional aperiodic crystal, its base pairs arranged like a text, irregular yet precise. While Sömmerring’s insights remain debated, contemporary research in psychoacoustics similarly suggests that our auditory system operates as an active, dynamic interface with the environment rather than a passive receptor—a process of embodied vibrational perception.

Agential Realism: Dissolving Binaries

This biological rhythm of encoded vibrations mirrors the entangled nature of perception itself. As we move beyond the cellular to the relational, Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism invites us to reconsider the boundaries between subject and object, listener and sound. Agential realism unravels the binaries that sustain the act of world-building: subject and object, maker and made. Under Barad’s lens, these divisions dissolve, replaced by a vision of entanglement and co-constitution. In this framework, sound is not a commodity to be extracted or mastered, as in the neo-colonial impulse. It is a vibration that carries histories, exchanges, and transformations—an archive of relationality that resists commodification.

Deep listening acknowledges this entanglement, recognising sound as an interconnected field resonant with histories, environments, and futures. It is anything but discreet. Even the so-called empty ‘silence’ is revealed as a site brimming with potential, alive with the interplay of relations. To listen deeply is to encounter the world as it is—interconnected, transient, sentient, and alive.

Enclosure and the Colonial Logic

This stands in stark contrast to the colonial logic of enclosure. Without listening, it mirrors this odd reason. Power carves segmentation into space, into ownership, reducing multiplicity to dominion. The act of enclosure, whether territorial or conceptual, is one of control—a domination of the fluid by the fixed, rendering the unknown into the perfect delineation. A world built without listening risks falling into this trap, constructing a structure of surveillance, a hierarchy that walls off this unknown and polices the mutable.

The Praxis of Listening

Listening, by contrast, unsettles these walls. Meaning emerges far from isolation and through relationality—a “being-in-common” that vibrates across differences. Listening as praxis refuses the finality of definitive meanings. It thrives in the liminal, inhabiting what remains unresolved. To listen is to enter a dialogue, not to answer it. It amplifies connection rather than dominion, holding space for interaction. In this way, listening undoes the constructs of world-building, unmaking the rigid boundaries it imposes and reviving the fluid, relational dynamism that life demands.

Quantum Listening and Radical Openness

Oliveros’ Quantum Listening shows this boundary dissolving into a perceptive transcendental challenge. It moves beyond the auditory into a state of expansive awareness, attuning to absence, to the silence and gaps that shape the field of listening. To listen quantumly is to acknowledge the immanent vibration carried within the residue of its entanglements—a sound not heard but rather felt, remembered, and anticipated.
Listening, in this sense, is about surrender, a willingness to dissolve every border into the relationships that underpin air. It resists the extractive impulse that modernity places on sound; it compels us to think in fields. It is not about capturing or consuming; it is about care, a practice of attunement that respects the liquid dimensions of motion. Listening here is not passive; it is radical openness, a way of being with the world rather than against it. Under this lens, world-building falters. It is revealed as brittle, unable to hold the mercurial fields within its structures.

The Trickster’s Laughter: A Practice of Unmaking

The trickster’s laughter reverberates through these collapses, dismantling the august pretense of constructed worlds. This trickster reminds us that every aedificium will crumble, that boundaries will blur, that no scaffolding is eternal. Against this illusion of stability, listening emerges as a practice of unmaking: not to destroy - to reveal, not to impose - to invite. Listening opens a space where resonance multiplies uncoerced by rigid frames.

Listening as Revolutionary Care

Listening is not an escape from making nor a retreat from creation, it reimagines what making means and transforms the act of shaping. Every sound, every silence, and every vibration participates in this transformation—existence that resists finality. Listening, against the constructs of world-building, embraces the fragile, the transient, the relational, and the resonant.

In its refusal to impose, listening turns into an act of care. It invites us to live within flux, to resist the false comforts of framing. It asks us to inhabit the trembling, resonant field of life without seeking to enclose it. And in this act of inhabiting, listening becomes a quiet revolution and a way of being that does not demand control, instead amplifying the murmurs, whispers, and resonances that remind us that all things are always becoming.

IV. Solastalgia and Resonant Unmaking

Trickster’s Edge

The trickster lingers at the start, within the unstable zone where the familiar splinters and the unknown emerges in glitched signals. Anansi, the spider-god of narrative disruption, spins his web across these fissures, anchoring lines that stretch between stability and chaos. Coyote, with his erratic dissonant step, prowls these same faultlines, upending the linear march of meaning with sudden sharp reversals. Both figures, distinct but resonant, evoke Glenn Albrecht’s principle of solastalgia: the unsettling disorientation that occurs from the dissolution of perceptual certainties.

Solastalgia names the ache of estrangement from what was once familiar, the sensation of home becoming unrecognisable without leaving it—a dissonance mirrored in the strange persistence of the world as it was, a hypernormalised world, even as its underlying structures shift. Here, the trickster moves within this estrangement, amplifying its presence while exposing the thin structures that hold its illusion in place. Anansi’s web is spun not to capture but to reveal: threads that shimmer, then disappear into the fluctuating currents of ecological and social transformation. Coyote, restless and unsatisfied, steps sideways through the atmospheric distortion, a signal that resists linear comprehension. In their gestures, we sense the resonant pattern of solastalgia itself: the disturbance of a sonic ecology no longer aligned with memory, the displacement of an environment whose vibrational character has been altered beyond recognition.

This dislocation is often subtle, revealing itself through traces, resonances rather than breaks. It lingers in the vibrational shift of an environment whose sonic memory no longer aligns with the present. To listen within solastalgia is to perceive these fractures, to recognise the residual echoes of a world in transition. Like the peppered moths whose wings darkened over generations in response to industrial soot, or the insects that, disoriented by air pollution, mate with the wrong species, these shifts occur gradually, their consequences unfolding in the interstices of perception.

But what remains when the process of unmaking is complete? Bonnet suggests that after perception dissolves, it is not absence that follows, but another kind of presence—a lingering vibrating remnant that is neither fully there nor entirely gone. Sound does not disappear in this posthumous vibrational field, instead it diffuses into an unlocalisable echo, an unfixed persistence that unsettles the very notion of finality. Much like the trickster’s own movements, which refuse resolution, these sonic remnants propose that dissolution is never complete, that something always reverberates beyond its own disappearance. If solastalgia is the disorientation of an environment no longer recognisable, then Bonnet’s after-death extends it to a world where even the residual traces of presence shift into something indeterminate. Listening becomes a form of sensing the instability of being itself. To listen within solastalgia is to perceive these fractures, to recognise the residual echoes of a world in transition.

I encountered this firsthand while sifting through my video archive, stumbling upon an eight year-old recording of my hand grazing the fresh spring leaves of a bush in Bucharest. The frame was modest: a hand, leaves, and the vividly colored video aesthetic. The sound is a continuous crackle of foliage accompanied by distant traffic, children playing, and loud spring birds.They conjure a peculiar stillness, a tranquility that is intimate yet unfamiliar. A gesture so instinctive, one perhaps repeated countless times in childhood, when the world was vast yet slow enough to be touched.

But within this simple scene, something was revealed. An interference in a steady signal, distorting what once was clear, a shake of disorientation surfaced with an inexplicable gap between past and present. What changed? The world, or my experience of it? The trickster—always there, always laughing—leaps between moments, dislodging the once familiar cadence of seasons, of textures. This is solastalgia on a smaller-individual-scale: the estrangement within the familiar, the uncanny ache when what once anchored us now flickers, unstable.

In the video, the leaves seemed untouched by this acceleration, their surface still responding to the simplest human curiosity. Yet perhaps even they carried the imprint of this time, a memory of slower rhythms, of a planetary breath that once unfolded with the patience of moss on stone. In brushing against the leaves, I was not merely recalling a past sensation—I was tracing, unknowingly, the outline of loss, an anticipation. A touch, both immediate and ghostly, reaching for a world that remains, yet no longer holds the same resonance.

The archive, in its quiet inertia, offers this paradox: the past becomes palpable while the present unravels into abstraction. The leaves rustle and the birds persist. Yet, the hand moves through a landscape already eroded by the quickening. What remains, if not the gesture itself? —a fleeting sensorial resistance against time’s centrifugal pull.

Listening, here, becomes an act of radical openness to this disturbance. It requires not the search for resolution but a willingness to inhabit the fracture. The trickster’s works always showing the loose of rigid boundaries. The edge of solastalgia, like the trickster’s domain, is a space of potential if one can attune themselves to its subtle, shifting signatures. This attunement resembles stepping into an auditory fog, where orientation dissolves, leaving only the relational presence of sound’s continuous unfolding. The ecological dissonance we feel in these moments is not just abstract; it is the auditory imprint of a world whose rhythms have been altered, a sonic landscape reconfigured by environmental and cultural acceleration.

Listening as Resistance

Listening, when stripped of its habitual associations with passive reception, reveals itself as an act of resistance. In the presence of solastalgia, it becomes a practice of witnessing the ecological dissonance produced by human systems of control. As E. Thompson illustrates, modernity sought to domesticate sound, aligning it with mechanical rhythms and industrial demands. This sonic order reflected a deeper epistemic project: the reduction of the world into measurable extractable components.

The trickster resists such order. Anansi’s narratives tangle linear logic; Coyote disrupts the repetition of mechanical time with erratic unpredictable interventions. Listening to these figures requires stepping outside the rhythm of productivity and into the fractured non-linear temporality of ecological change. Solastalgia, in this sense, becomes an invitation to hear differently: to attune oneself to the subtle shifts that signify environmental transformation long before they manifest as visible catastrophe.

These shifts are often registered in the infrasonic range, below the realm of conscious perception. The cracking of ice sheets, the deep tectonic groan of shifting earth masses— these sounds exist as vibrations that challenge the auditory system’s habitual orientation. Listening here demands a recalibration, a willingness to acknowledge that what we perceive as silence is often densely populated with vibratory events. This recalibration moves beyond the human-centered sensory frame, extending into the speculative practice of listening-with the Earth as a dynamic vibratory field.

In this sense, listening aligns with what E. Povinelli describes, that power structures frequently suppress the vibrational life of ecosystems by privileging extractive and commodified forms of knowing. Listening, then, becomes a mode of counter-hegemonic attention, an act that resists the colonial logic of auditory surveillance and instead attunes to the ungovernable resonances that persist beneath imposed order.

The Resonant Edge of the Future

The future announces itself through such vibrations: frequencies that unsettle the present, irregularities that destabilise predictive patterns. The trickster figures of Anansi and Coyote, in their mythic gestures, embody this temporally disjunctive quality. They do not move forward in a linear trajectory; they spiral, loop, and double back, mirroring the patterns of environmental feedback loops that complicate the simplistic narratives of ecological stability.

To listen, then, is to engage with these recursive temporalities. Solastalgia is not merely the experience of loss; it is the sonic expression of an ecological system in flux. The dissonance it produces is not a signal of defeat but a call to attend more carefully to the vibratory languages of the Earth. These languages speak in frequencies beyond human speech: in the acoustic emissions of collapsing glaciers, the low-frequency oscillations of atmospheric disturbances, the altered call patterns of species adapting to anthropogenic noise.

The trickster’s presence within this field reminds us of the limitations of predictive models. Anansi’s web vibrates unpredictably; Coyote’s path is marked by sudden inexplicable turns. Listening to solastalgia through these mythic figures teaches us to embrace the unpredictable without relinquishing attentiveness. The future of listening, in this sense, is a practice of relational awareness—a cultivation of sensitivity to the non-linear rhythms of planetary life and the resonant consequences of human intervention.

Sonic Futures and Ecological Resonance

The soundscape of the future will not adhere to familiar patterns. As climate systems shift, so too do their acoustic signatures. Listening practices must evolve to meet these changes, integrating technologies capable of capturing infrasonic and ultrasonic phenomena alongside the intuitive embodied act of listening-with. The trickster, ever adaptive, becomes a guide here: an invitation to listen beyond the dominant frequencies, to attune oneself to the peripheral and the residual.

In the trickster’s laughter, we encounter a deep refusal to finalise instead of nihilism. Solastalgia, when approached through this lens, becomes less about the loss of a stable environment and more about the emergence of a dynamic unstable relational field. The question is not how to reclaim what has been lost, but how to listen to what is becoming. The trickster reminds us that the world, like sound, is never static. To listen is to enter its unfolding, uncertain, and always in motion. This unfolding, in its ungraspable motion, becomes the site of listening’s future: an ongoing practice of attunement to the unpredictable resonances of an ever-changing world.

Walking-With and Listening-With: Embodied Practices of Care

Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of embodied perception anchors the practices of listening-with and walking-with in physical and relational engagement. These apparent abstract gestures are reminders that perception is not purely mental; the body plays an integral role in how we experience and relate to the world.

Listening-with is not just hearing; it is an attunement that transcends static thinking, attunning us to the voices of others - human and non-human alike. Through listening-with, we lean into grief, into the ache of what has been unmade, recognising it as an opportunity to reimagine and renew. Walking-with is an embodied acknowledgment of presence, relational engagement with the environment. It deepens this engagement, anchoring it in the physical act of moving through the world.

Together, these practices transform solastalgia from a paralysing grief into an active process of renewal. They teach us and offer a way to navigate environmental loss and existential fractures with an openness to transformation, fostering a sense of interdependence and fluid relationality.

Resonance and Haunting: The Afterlife of Unmaking

JL Nancy’s notion of resonance provides a lens for understanding the interconnectedness of existence. Resonance is not just an acoustic phenomenon; it is an ontological state of being with, where vibrations reverberate across time and space, drawing us into relationality. The destruction of systems and structures result in these silent echoes, reverberations that linger and demand engagement. Resonance, in this sense, is dynamic—a collective hum that persists, shaping how we understand and inhabit the world.

Derrida’s concept of hauntings further illuminates the afterlife of unmaking. Acts of destruction do not conclude with finality; they leave spectral traces that challenge the present, demanding that we reckon with what remains unfinished. These traces, these ghosts of unmaking, refuse to be silenced. They press into the future, disrupting certainty and provoking transformation. David Bohm’s reflections on thought complement this perspective. He argues that true thinking requires breaking free from conditioned reflexes, creating space for new possibilities. In this process, the echoes of the past are reconfigured and not repeated, opening pathways for transformation.

Decreation as Listening and Care: The Politics of Unmaking

Weil’s notion of decreation is an invitation to “unmake” the self—not through annihilation, but by withdrawing from systems of domination and the ego’s grasp on the world. It is the process of making space: for others, for multiplicity, for the unknown. To love purely, Weil argues, is to “consent to distance,” recognising the fine line between intimacy and separation. Then love is not about possession or control, but about granting autonomy to what we cherish.

Listening, then, becomes a political and ethical act. To truly listen is to consent to distance, allowing what is heard to remain distinct while engaging with it deeply. This resonates with ecological interdependence: care and attentiveness must honor the autonomy of the living world while acknowledging our interconnectedness.

Ecology and the Politics of Unmaking

Weil’s thoughts on decreation align with an ecological ethos: the dismantling of human-centred systems of control to restore balance. In ecology, unmaking could mean dismantling extractive practices that prioritise profit over planetary health. We must ensure that the tools we use to unmake do not replicate the logics of dominance and control, against using the same mechanisms of oppression to dismantle oppressive systems. This requires a listening that is non-invasive and non-imposing, a listening that respects the agency of ecosystems, species, and voices outside our own.

Care is central to this process. Care is the act of attentiveness and humility, the refusal to dominate. It is about allowing ecosystems and communities to define their own terms of existence. Decreation, then, is an unmaking that resists erasure; it seeks,without obliteration, to foster space for renewal, complexity, and relationality.

Listening as Decreation

Listening is a form of decreation when it involves silencing the noise of our assumptions and ego to make room for the voices of others. This can be extended to ecological listening: tuning into the rhythms, flows, and voices of the natural world. Ecological listening refuses to impose human narratives onto non-human systems, instead allowing these systems to articulate their own presence. It is an act of care because it prioritises the autonomy and vitality of what is listened to.

Yet, in the contemporary condition, listening is increasingly mediated by forces of automation, surveillance, and extractive infrastructures. To listen today is to recognise that sound itself has become a site of control, monitored by AI, archived by corporate networks, reduced to data points that can be categorised and commodified. This raises a critical question: can listening-as-decreation resist these mechanisms? Or does it risk being absorbed into systems of capture? If decreation is about unmaking the structures of control, then how do we distinguish between listening that opens space for relation and one that merely reorganises power?

Decreation-as-care becomes the politics of unmaking that reimagines relationality. What would it mean to love the world without trying to control it? To adore the distance between ourselves and the ecosystems we depend on? To dissolve the systems that perpetuate harm while ensuring that new systems of care and reciprocity emerge in their place?

The Role of Art in Decreation

Art, especially sound art, can enact this politics of unmaking. Sound has the power to unfix hierarchies and destabilise systems of meaning, creating openings for new forms of understanding. Many theories of listening assume a human-centered, anthropocentric framework: humans listening to nature, humans tuning into ecological rhythms, humans making space for the non-human. But this still reinforces an anthropocentric model of attention, where the act of listening remains a human privilege. How does the non-human world listen back?

Contemporary research in bioacoustics and soundscape ecology challenges this assumption. Scientists studying mycorrhizal networks suggest that fungi communicate through electrical signals, a form of subterranean signaling that resembles rudimentary language. Marine biologists have found that coral reefs, previously assumed to be silent, emit subtle crackling sounds that attract fish larvae, shaping the renewal of ecosystems. These forms of resonance —inaudible to human ears yet essential to ecological function—propose that listening is not merely an act of human cognition but a property of entangled life itself.

Similarly, in quantum acoustics, physicists have found that sound waves can influence matter at a subatomic level, an indication that vibration is fundamental to reality itself. Rather than framing listening as reception, it can be understood as participation in a field of entanglements, where sound does not signify but vibrates, circulates, and transforms. Listening should be thought of as something that exists across multispecies networks—sonic ecologies in which trees, bodies of water, animal calls, and atmospheric disturbances participate in fields of resonance and response. To listen, then, is not simply to receive sound —it is to be part of the material world’s entanglements of vibration, memory, and presence. The challenge, then, is not only to listen but to listen without the compulsion to translate into a comprehended meaning.

In practice, this might mean creating soundscapes that amplify the voices of ecosystems, or engaging in collaborative processes that emphasise care, attention, and reciprocity. Art can model decreation by unmaking traditional forms and hierarchies, making room for multiplicity and relationality. This reframes decreation: not dissolving meaning into silence, but as simply

making space for the multiplicity of rhythms, voices, and frequencies that operate beyond human control. In this way, listening becomes an act of care—not in the sense of preservation or protection, but rather in the sense of being-with, without the need to grasp.

Listening-as-decreation unsettles fixed structures of meaning, dissolving the authority of singular narratives and opening a polyphonic field where multiple perspectives resonate. Ratherp than reinforcing hierarchies of control, listening becomes an act of relational unmaking —an invitation to attune without imposing, to engage without enclosing.

Hannah Arendt reminds us that power does not emerge from imposition, it emerges only through collective presence and action. Similarly, listening is not an assertion but an opening, not a command but an offering. Decreation asks to hold space for others without grasping, to love the world without reducing it to ownership, to let difference exist without demanding resolution.

Resonant Unmaking: Toward Renewal

Resonant unmaking transforms destruction into an opening for care, renewal, and collective possibility. To walk-with and listen-with is to acknowledge the sonic residues of loss, the afterlives of sound that persist beyond their origin, weaving grief and loss in the wake of environmental devastation. Solastalgia, in this context, is not an end, a terminus of despair. It is an active threshold, a passage through which new configurations emerge. Studies on acoustic ecology in post-industrial landscapes—such as the rewilding of Chernobyl’s forests —show how sonic environments regenerate despite human absence. Similarly, the emerging field of archival bioacoustics explores how historical sound recordings may offer insights into ecosystemic memory, capturing the ghost acoustics of extinct or altered soundscapes that can inform contemporary conservation efforts.

Sound carries the imprints of its past, resonances that hold the potential for new ways of being. In sound art, listening amplifies interconnections, allowing destruction to become a site for renewal. By engaging with the resonances of what has been unmade, we create pathways for solidarity and care, in respect to life’s spin. Through this resonant unmaking, destruction becomes a space where connection tendrils emerge. It is here, in these shimmering shards and echoes of unmaking, that the possibility of renewal resides.

V. Resonant Future

The future, as is the present, is not fixed. It is a space of possibility, constantly shifting and evolving. The act of unmaking, when approached with care and intention, opens up the potential for new ways of living and relating to one another. Resonant futures are not built through imposed rigid structures. Embracing imperfection and fragility can create spaces of belonging where relational practices such as listening become central to our collective existence.

Staying with the Trouble: Walking and Being-With

Haraway provides a conceptual shift in how we think about unmaking, urging us to engage with the world’s difficulties in a relational and non-exploitative way. Haraway speaks of staying with the trouble as a practice of walking-with, of inhabiting the relational field—not as an act of domination but as a shared generative process of care. In this framework, unmaking is a practice of relational care and an active engagement with the discomfort of destruction that recognises it as a space for renewal. Care, here, is about being-with rather than fixing or resolving*,* existing alongside the trouble that shapes the world we live in.

If Spinoza provides an affirmative model of relational transformation, Adorno reminds us that not all relations are equal, and not all forms of care are free from ideological entrapment. His Negative Dialectics resists synthesis, refusing to resolve contradictions too hastily. Haraway’s notion of staying with the trouble shares in this Adornian skepticism—unmaking, rather than progressing toward an endpoint, lingers in the unresolved, in the discomfort of contradiction that resists premature reconciliation. Where Spinoza sees relationality as a site of increasing power and understanding, Adorno warns of its potential co-option by historical and structural forces. The world we remain with is never neutral, it is shaped by forces that must be critically interrogated, lest care itself become an instrument of complicity.

Thus, unmaking is neither a simple affirmation of relationality nor a pure negation of existing structures. It is rather a practice of remaining-with, of persisting in the midst of complexity without defaulting to escapism or false closure. It holds more than a seek to transcend or fix but to inhabit, to listen, to endure. Spinoza teaches us that transformation is inevitable, Adorno warns us that it is never innocent, and Haraway calls us to engage with it responsively as not just a resolution, but an ongoing ethical and material negotiation with the world.

The Mushroom’s Promise: Life in the Ruins

If Haraway asks us to stay with the trouble, Anna Tsing shifts our gaze to the margins, to the nonhuman agents, to the mushrooms sprouting from devastation, weaving networks of resilience within the destruction of industrial capitalism. These fungi are far from being symbols of untouched purity. They are a form of living from the undone, the agents of ecological recovery in a devastated landscape. This reveals how unmaking—the destruction of capitalist industrial systems—can lead to unexpected forms of resilience and regeneration in the face of ecocide.

Mushrooms, in Tsing’s telling, do not grow in untouched spaces or wait for ideal conditions. They grow in the ruins of the old world, emerging from the wreckage of industrial capitalism. This, for Tsing, is the key insight: unmaking does not result in nothingness, rather in the emergence of new unforeseen forms of existence. In this way, unmaking becomes an act of opening up possibilities, alternative modes of life, where human and nonhuman relations can flourish in radically different ways.

Precarity and Potential: Failure’s Resonance

Failure, like unmaking, is inevitable. But failure, as is twisted, has possibility when all fragments to dust. Anna Tsing frames precarity as a condition for interdependence rather than despair, offering a hopeful vision for relational listening as a communal practice.

Relational listening dissolves hierarchies, inviting us to inhabit the vibrational field as co-creators rather than observers. Practices like walking-with and listening-with amplify resonance, creating spaces where care and connection flourish, they become the net through which human and nonhuman lives entwine. These practices offer a counterpoint to the extractive systems that dominate our present, instead proposing a communal praxis rooted in interdependence. In sound, this resonant future is embodied through practices that prioritise relationality over control.

Resonant Futures: Sound as Ecology

Sound, in this vision, becomes an ecology that carries traces of the past and future prospects. Listening-with becomes a way of being in the world, a practice that fosters deep connections between people and the environments they inhabit. These practices invite us to reconsider the role of sound as part of a larger ecology of relations and not as an isolated phenomenon. Through listening, we reconnect with the world, embracing its transience and uncertainty, thereby creating spaces where collective action and care can flourish.

VI. The Resonance Of Time

The trickster’s laughter moves in waves, elastic and restless, never settling in one place but stretching through surfaces, bending in and out of reach. To listen is to step into this motion as a body inside a field of relations, where sound is not contained but always shifting, folding, and dispersing.

Time too is more a vibration than a line, expanding and contracting within frames that do not hold. Machamer and Turnbull dismantle the notion of an absolute clock, showing how time does not exist in itself but rather emerges through movement, through relativity, through the encounter between one thing and another. A second is never just a second; it is stretched by speed, distorted by gravity, thickened by attention. Sound works in the same way. It does not simply occur, it is shaped by the air, by the surface that absorbs it, by the ear that receives it. What is heard is not what was made, it is what remains after time and space have altered it.

To listen is to meet time in its instability. It is an engagement with duration, an attunement to what lingers and what vanishes. Bonnet writes of resonance as something unfinished, an event held open by its own disappearance. A sound never belongs to one moment; it is already reaching away from itself before it can be named. The ear, then, does not hear in the present, it hears the echo of what has just passed, the trace of a vibration that still moves forward even as it fades.

Solastalgia is the ache of listening to time fall out of rhythm with memory. The experience of an environment that still looks familiar but no longer sounds the same. The trickster moves through estrangement, pressing against the false continuity of the world, revealing where time frays at the edges. Listening, in this space, is not about locating what has been lost but staying with what is still shifting. It does not grasp, it follows.

The trickster does not return things to order. It moves with the scattering of sound, the way it travels beyond its source, dissolves into silence, then re-emerges elsewhere. Listening is the act of staying inside this movement, inside the slippages of time and resonance, inside the shifting relations that refuse to hold still.

Nothing here resolves. There is no arrival, no stable ground. To listen is to let go of the need for containment, to exist with what is in flux, with what extends beyond the frame of perception. Time moves like this—wavering, slipping, folding back on itself. Sound does too. The trickster’s laughter reminds us that neither time or sound can be held. They can only be met where they are, perpetually in motion.

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Footnotes

1. Carl Jung, C.W. Vol. 9.1: On The Psychology of the Trickster Figure ↩
2. James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, p.179–80 ↩
3. Hyde, Lewis. Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998, p. 32. ↩
4. ibid. ↩
5. Carl Jung, C.W. Vol. 9.1: On The Psychology of the Trickster Figure ↩
6. Kafka, Franz. The Zürau Aphorisms. Translated by Michael Hofmann. New York: Schocken Books, 2006 ↩
7. Adnan, Etel. Sea and Fog. p.32, Callicoon, NY: Nightboat Books, 2012. ↩