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10 Beckett and unheard sound Catherine Laws The prospect of silence Beckett’s work has often been perceived as pushing towards its own obliteration, ever closer to the silencing of the voice. His ‘characters’ – though hardly that – with decaying, almost useless bodies, situated in barren environments, steadily insist that there is nothing to say and no possibility of knowledge or understanding, while (and by) fizzling on with their increasingly broken, empty, repetitive, hopeless – and often very funny – narratives of their very attempts to tell meaningful
description, shapes the way in which reported sound is understood, generating the kind of ‘mental power’ (as the Poet in Timon puts it) which allows a listener to interpret rather than simply receive sound. Phonographic sound is at once unheard and yet heard through description; unseen and yet suggested as sight. Like paint, written or spoken descriptions of sound render a scene, creating a sonic vignette. affect and the audible imaginary Having considered whether or not sound can be described in paint and print, I want now to think
; that’s a huge difference. Next, the prevalence among 15- to 24-year-olds fell compared to 2012; that is consistent with low incidence in that age group. So we at MSF were in agreement on the claim that the incidence likely fell in the years prior to 2018, and that we therefore achieved the unheard of and very ambitious goal of markedly reducing virus transmission in a place where the HIV epidemic had been most devastating. I think we can be proud of having contributed to that outcome
constitutes a tool of communication, of setting in relation with others which accompanies a process of mobilization by devices of sensitization’ through the more or less articulated speeches, the mise-en-scène, etc. ( de Sommier, 2009 : 202). While since the 2000s, the humanitarian and media drama had diminished in comparison with the stories of the 1990s, which were decried for their ‘often unheard-of display of suffering’ and their ‘indecent’ and ‘scandalous
the Chinese interior. 165 For the naval authorities, it was ‘unheard of for a commander to prejudice the safety of his ships to save two Chinese, however distinguished’, 166 and thus the MTBs left the rendezvous point before Chan Chak had arrived, forcing the one-legged Admiral to catch up overland. Concern for Chan
reflects on the production of knowledge through testimonial practices, into a comprehensive sociological lens was to acknowledge the social realm within which narratives are produced, thus reflecting on the plurality of speakers’ intents and hearers’ beliefs. 23 This said, it was not possible to analyse the conditions of speech in their full depth – accordingly, I chose to consider the reservoir of untold (unheard) stories about the Laundries as an invisible part of the ongoing ‘work of memory’ creating meaning over
Reclaiming Migration critically assesses the EU’s migration policy agenda by directly engaging the voices of Europe’s so-called migrant crisis that otherwise remain unheard: those of people on the move. It undertakes an extensive analysis of a counter-archive of testimonies co-produced with people migrating across the Mediterranean during 2015 and 2016, to document the ways in which EU policy developments both produce and perpetuate the precarity of those migrating under perilous conditions. The book shows how testimonies based on lived experiences of travelling to – and arriving in – the EU draw attention to the flawed assumptions embedded in the deterrence paradigm and policies of anti-smuggling; in protection mechanisms and asylum procedures that rely on simplistic understandings of the migratory journey; and in the EU’s self-projection as a place of human rights and humanitarianism. Yet, it also goes further to reveal how experiences of precarity, which such policies give rise to, are inseparable from claims for justice that are advanced by people on the move, who collectively provide a damning critique of the EU policy agenda. Reclaiming Migration develops a distinctive ‘anti-crisis’ approach to the analysis of migratory politics and shows how migration forms part of a broader movement that challenges the injustices of Europe’s ‘postcolonial present’. Written collectively by a team of esteemed scholars from across multiple disciplines, the book serves as an important contribution to debates in migration, border and refugee studies, as well as more widely to debates about postcolonialism and the politics of knowledge production.
Mancunians: Where do we start, where do I begin? is a portrayal of the industrial city on the cusp of irreversible change. At the turn of the century, Manchester was in upheaval. The devastation of the IRA bomb saw council leaders try to push the city into the future as gang wars repeated the violence of the past. Musicians tried to come from under Oasis's shadow, while the local population tried to push past the stereotypes. Mancunians is the story of those that didn’t fit the typecast: the musicians of colour, the football fans not into prawn sandwiches, the Mancunians who didn’t wear parkas, the frustrated police figures, the optimistic developers, the ambitious artists, the drinkers, the dealers, the drug takers and a young lad trying to negotiate his way amongst the chaos. Through a mixture of memoir and interviews with well-known Mancunians such as Guy Garvey, Badly Drawn Boy, and Stan Chow, combined with unheard voices of the population, David Scott portrays the city in a way never seen before. Mancunians: Where do we start, where do I begin? is the authentic account of Manchester at the turn of the millennium.
Chapter 6 looks at the response from the Jordan administration on Food Not Bombs’ sister organization, Homes Not Jails, which illegally housed the homeless in abandoned buildings. In interviews with people involved in both Food Not Bombs and Homes Not Jails, I was often told stories of police leniency with the squatters, something that was unheard of for Food Not Bombs’ actions. This differential treatment concerns the political nature of space and the city’s desire to hide the homeless from public view. Because the city wanted to push the homeless into private space, Homes Not Jails, by illegally housing the homeless in abandoned houses, ended up unintentionally working to help the Jordan administration achieve part of his public space goal. This chapter argues that city agencies react to autonomous political projects differently depending on whether they erupt in what the state defines as public or private space.
There is no soundtrack is a specific yet expansive study of sound tactics deployed in experimental media art today. It analyses how audio and visual elements interact and produce meaning, drawing from works by contemporary media artists ranging from Chantal Akerman, to Nam June Paik, to Tanya Tagaq. It then links these analyses to discussions on silence, voice, noise, listening, the soundscape, and other key ideas in sound studies. In making these connections, the book argues that experimental media art – avant-garde film, video art, performance, installation, and hybrid forms – produces radical and new audio-visual relationships that challenge and destabilize the visually-dominated fields of art history, contemporary art criticism, cinema and media studies, and cultural studies as well as the larger area of the human sciences. This book directly addresses what sound studies scholar Jonathan Sterne calls ‘visual hegemony’. It joins a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship that is collectively sonifying the study of culture while defying the lack of diversity within the field by focusing on practitioners from transnational and diverse backgrounds. Therefore, the media artists discussed in this book are of interest to scholars and students who are exploring aurality in related disciplines including gender and feminist studies, queer studies, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, urban studies, environmental analysis, and architecture. As such, There Is No Soundtrack makes meaningful connections between previously disconnected bodies of scholarship to build new, more complex and reverberating frameworks for the study of art, media, and sound.