Sonic Acts of Noticing

'[...] it is [...] precarity that while creating anxiety and instability for many, also enables new alliances and connections to be made.'

'Precarity is the condition of our being vulnerable to others. Unpredictable encounters transform us; we are not in control, even of ourselves. Unable to rely on a stable structure of our community, we are thrown into shifting assemblages, which remake us as well as others. We can’t rely on the status quo; everything is in flux, including our ability to survive. Thinking through precarity changes social analysis. A precarious world is a world without teleology. Indeterminacy, the unplanned nature of time, is frightening, but thinking through precarity makes it evident that indeterminacy also makes life possible.'

Following multispecies anthropologist Anna Tsing, we might foreground precarity and interdependence by conceiving of the Foodhall as an open-ended assemblage:

'Ecologists turned to assemblages to get around the fixed and sometimes bounded connotations of an ecological “community.” The question of how the various species in a species assemblage influence each other – if at all – is never settled; some thwart (or eat) each other; others work together to make things possible; still others just happen to find themselves in the same place. Assemblages are open-ended gatherings. They allow us to ask about communal effects without assuming them. They show us potential histories in the making.'

The Foodhall assemblage encopasses a building, the human and non-human actors that assemble in it, including animals and materials. As as open-ended assemblage, it is never fixed or bounded, but in a constant state of becoming.

'Patterns of unintentional coordination develop in assemblages. To notice such patterns means watching the interplay of temporal rhythms and scales in the divergent lifeways that gather.'

Sound's shifting agitations and fluctuations bind us to the dynamics, interplays and varying intensities of Foodhall’s assemblage.

Listening is a means for attunement to these complex interplays.

[Jane Bennett] reaches far and wide to encourage a sensibility tuned to the "energetics" of being in the world. A world of animations and vibrations, echoes and agitations, that embeds us within the densities and opacities to which a sonic sensibility may afford deeper engagement, for it is "through sound, through the various refrains we invent, repeat, and catch from nonhumans, [that] we receive news of the cosmic energies to which we humans are always in close, molecular proximity."

The varying rhythms of the assemblage—the diverse happenings that are staged—produce different thicknesses and conditions of sounding intensity.

'Every order is the temporary and precarious articulation of contingent practices. The frontier between the social and the political is essentially unstable and requires constant displacements and renegotiations between social agents. Things could always be otherwise and therefore every order is predicated on the exclusion of other possibilities. It is in that sense that it can be called ‘political’ since it is the expression of a particular structure of power relations. Power is constitutive of the social because the social could not exist without the power relations through which it is given shape. What is at a given moment considered as the ‘natural’ order - jointly with the ‘common sense’ which accompanies it - is the result of sedimented hegemonic practices; it is never the manifestation of a deeper objectivity exterior to the practices that bring it into being.'

(this is an anti-capitalist space, and therefore a site of resistance, yet it does not exist as a homogenous, bounded and pre-formed entity, certain of its norms, values and practices… but it is always in process, and offering the possibility to remake subjectivities)

'All too often our political desire for change is seen as separate from longings and passions that consume lots of time and energy in daily life. Particularly the realm of fantasy is often seen as completely separate from politics. Yet I think of all the time black folks (especially the underclass) spend just fantasizing what our lives would be like if there were no racism, no white supremacy. Surely our desire for radical social change is intimately linked with the desire to experience pleasure, erotic fulfilment, and a host of other passions. Then, on the flip side, there are many individuals with race, gender, and class privilege who are longing to see the kind of revolutionary change that will end domination and oppression even though their lives would be completely and utterly transformed. The shared space and feeling of “yearning” opens up the possibility of common ground where all these differences might meet and engage one another. It seemed appropriate then to speak this yearning.'

but also in shared moments of pleasure and joy, in laughter—the coming together as opening a space of possibility…

'The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.'

'Punctuated by voices that not so much articulate through a clarity of communicative speech, but rather give way to the sensuality of what it means to live and breathe in a world of entanglement and conflict…'

'[…] recognition [is] a process by which an individual might recognize themselves in a collectively produced voice. So it is the mutual recognition of our self as valuable and of others’ value to a particular community.'

organisers seek non-hierarchical relations…

'Is there any connection between the devaluation of women and the devaluation of listening? […] in what way can listening be considered a political action?
Lucia: […] we could start from the transformative power of listening. How would you define change in relation to listening?
Claudia: I would say it is the process of becoming aware of the conditions of your everyday life and being in a position where you can then act on them to change them…
Lucia: This is what feminist consciousness-raising was about…'

'[…] sound and listening are situated as the basis for capacities by which to nurture an insurrectionary sensibility – a potential found in the quiver of the eardrum, the strains of a voice, the vibrations and echoes that spirit new formations of social solidarity – and that may support an engagement with the complexities of contemporary life.'

Yet, to no longer be an agent- but rather to be the subject of saving, the result of someone else’s action

falling back on the same structures, the same hierarchies—can we move beyond them or is Foodhall 15p against a million pound problem?

'In these spaces of encounter, the dominated exhibit a public discourse that consists in saying that which the powerful would like to hear, reinforcing the appearance of their own subordination, while – silently – in a space invisible to power, there is the production of a world of clandestine knowledges (saberes) which belongs to the experience of micro-resistance and insubordination.'

'This is the force of listening, because if you take time to listen, it creates solidarity […] This is how collectives are set up, by showing solidarity and caring: by really listening and trying to understand the position of somebody else.'

'[…] exceed arenas of visibility by relating us to the unseen, the non-represented or the not-yet-apparent […]'

'That moment was important for us because the narration that was produced in that moment was also a process of going back to our own group, a sort of re-mapping of ourselves.'

'Might sound be deployed as a weapon by way of particular tonalities and collective vibrations, a listening activism, and the force of volume, to support a culture of radical care and compassion?'

Acts of care are foregrounded when listening to the new donations pot being made. Unlike the bike workshop, this hands-on activity is imbued with a knowing uselessness. But nothing sounds futile or entirely symbolic. A space for making together, through everyday social activities is created, even though it is unlikely that the pot, as an isolated object, will provide any significant difference to Foodhall’s finances.

'Unlikely publics hover unsteadily and ambiguously in the open, shaping themselves within quotidian spaces and locations often between communities, languages, and even nation-states, to form volatile coalition frameworks; that draw from resources found in collective intelligence, shared skills, popular traditions, and from the energetic knowing of the senses; that build through poor and gleaned materials a space for each other; a collective shelter, pulling into collaboration a diversity of people, friends, family; and that continually shift between different agentive positions, making do through an art of survival, trespass, and tactical pleasure—unlikely publics embody the speculative and dynamic force of the anarchic (non-)citizenry today.'

The Commons offers a way of considering spaces, communities of users, and/or ownership models beyond notions of public (state control) and private (market driven). It is used to escape the dichotomy of public versus private altogether, thereby creating openings and criteria for new ways of being-in-common. In Common Space: The City as Commons, Stavros Stavrides emphasises the need for commoning practices to continually overspill the boundaries of a community. This is important to avoid commoning practices from enclosing themselves, forming collectively privatised spaces which exclude strangers and avoid frictions caused by difference.

'Expanding commoning does not expand according to pre-existing patterns; it literally invents itself.'

Listening to day-to-day and convivial exchanges in Foodhall reveals some of the strategies which the volunteers use to keep the project open to new encounters and arrivals. You hear how the project expands through ad-hoc accommodations, discussed and figured out through 1:1 interactions in the space. Strategies can be heard which do not align with neatly pre-determined management structures or spatial frameworks (such as branches or ‘nested enterprises’) which might otherwise be used to visualise the project.

'If survival always involves others, it is also necessarily subject to the indeterminacy of self-and-other transformations. We change through collaborations both within and across species. The important stuff for life on earth happens in those transformations, not in the decision-trees of self-contained individuals. Rather than seeing only the expansion-and-conquest strategies of relentless individuals, we must look for histories that develop through contamination.'