The (Dis)Locative Effect of Noise: Globalisation, Disorientation and Noise in Marc Isaacs’ Lift

Abstract

This essay considers how thinking about noise can help us explore the relationship between disorientation and globalisation. It introduces the idea of the (dis)locative function of noise as a concept that enables the investigation of everyday disorientation. Such disorientation is encountered not as a loss of bearings arising from some catastrophic event, but as the background condition of living in worlds characterised both by increased connectivity and disconnectivity, mobility and immobility. It analyses the dislocative effect of noise in Lift (2001), an early film by British documentary maker Marc Isaacs. Attention to this function of noise, it shows, can provide us with a nuanced understanding of the ways in which everyday disorientation constitutes the condition of inhabiting and negotiating the spaces of communication associated with globalisation. In particular, the dislocative effect of noise can help us in encounters with places that seem to have become unfamiliar, and aid us in thinking through one of the problems associated with such places: the problem of hospitality without ownership.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

[1] The block, now demolished, was in the E1 area of East London.

[2] Lefebvre's model of space can be traced back to just this scene – the lift of a tower block. For as he writes in the opening pages of The Production of Space, his idea of spatial practices were defined by ‘the extreme but significant case of the daily life of a tenant in a government-subsidi[s]ed high rise housing project’ (Lefebvre 1991: 38), which Lukas Stanek traces back to debates in the French Left in the early 1960s about why workers preferred the quintessentially petit-bourgeois free-standing villa to the ideologically correct collective housing provided by the state. The answer proposed is that the villa allowed the dweller to master the habitat and develop a set of practices impossible in the rigid layout of the collective estates (Stanek 2011: 83).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Niall Martin

Niall Martin teaches Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. His main research is on the relationship between globalisation and noise. His monograph, Iain Sinclair: Noise, Neoliberalism and the Matter of London, drawing on this research, was recently published by Bloomsbury.