Clangs, bangs, structure and agency: A sensory consideration of power

• In Event: Listening to Justice, Listening to Injustice

Abstract

“I’ve been in jail ever since I was 15, so all I hear, every day, is keys. Even when I get out… all I hear is keys and I think I’m in jail.” (Cam)

Drawing on recently published work exploring the significance of sound in a local men’s prison, this paper considers how aural experience extends understanding of how power operates inside. Sounds resonate and reinforce social meanings of particular spaces. Rarely is this more potent than in prison; characterised by harsh surfaces and institutional signifiers.
Prison studies tends to focus on relational aspects of power. Here, I explore its material, sensory dimensions. Power has tastes, textures, feels, sounds, revealing additional layers to what Ben Crewe terms the “differentiated topography” of power and its pains. Space and time – the stuff of punishment – are mutually constituted. Considering the interplay between space, time and sonic experience provides a launching point from phenomenologies of sound, to a broader sense of how different levels of social experience are traversed. Sound invites us to revisit Archer’s “internal conversation” to consider anew, how structure and agency are exercised and constrained, through sensory engagement with social worlds.

Author

• Kate Zoe Herrity, University of Cambridge