UC Berkeley

Listening Genres: The Circulation of Psychoanalysis in Everyday Interactions in Buenos Aires, Argentina

By

Xochiquetzal Marsilli-Vargas

Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Charles L. Briggs, Chair

This dissertation proposes the concept of listening genres as frameworks of relevance that surface at the moment of reception and orient the apprehension of sound. At the intersection of linguistic and psychological anthropology, sound studies, and Argentine cultural history, it argues that sound reception, far from being neutral and automatic, always involves a particular type of ideological and practice intervention. The listener, by focusing through a particular frame, creates a context, or more precisely a contextual configuration of reception that provides a unique interpretative lens. The argument is that through listening, sound images produce different contexts depending on the particular way in which an individual listens. Social actors, thus, listen both pragmatically and intentionally. Hearers listen with a purpose, they look for (directed) meanings, and the outcome of their interpretation transforms various social dimensions.

To exemplify how listening genres are produced and reproduced, this dissertation explores psychoanalytic listening as a genre in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Based on ethnographic work conducted in a variety of social settings, it explains how and why psychoanalysis occupies an important position in Argentina, one that symbolically structures other fields and many discursive arenas. We can find psychoanalysis outside the clinical setting, in newspapers, TV and radio shows, sports, and casual conversations, among other forms. By contributing to the ongoing discussion about why psychoanalysis is so prevalent in Argentina, this dissertation proposes the idea that psychoanalytic listening as a genre has become a social fact. It has gone beyond the clinical setting, creating links to citizenship, civil society, and the state, as well as with national culture in general. This dissertation demonstrates that personal identities, conceptions of citizenship, and constructions of the political in Buenos Aires, are rooted less in the performativity associated with speaking than in particularly forms of listening based on psychoanalysis. This listening is social, produced by a collectivity of individuals, and performed in all sorts of interactions surpassing class, age, and gender classifications.