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

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.