The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact. (Blanchot Reference Blanchot1986: 1)
But not even the survivor can bear witness completely, can speak his own lacuna. This means that testimony is the disjunction between two impossibilities of bearing witness; it means that language, in order to bear witness, must give way to a non-language in order to show the impossibility of bearing witness. (Agamben Reference Agamben1999: 39)
1. Introduction
In September 2010, I set off to walk the Ara River, Aragón, in the hope of conducting field research in the abandoned villages of Jánovas, Lavelilla and Lacort. These villages have become metonymic cases of a generation of destruction and terrorism endured by the Spanish during the Franco era (1939–75), and the village ruins give both a bleak and nostalgic reminder of a rich agricultural and village life that, it is popularly believed, lay at the heart of Spanish life. The villages were forcefully depopulated and destroyed in the 1960s following a proposal by the state water company to build a hydroelectric dam. In 1966, the water company, in a breach of government policy, entered the villages, rampaged through the streets, terrorised residents, and, in Jánovas, even broke down the school door pulling the teacher out by her hair while kicking the children who ran to take shelter in their devastated homes.
Discussions and disagreements between developers and the government delayed the project until, at the dawn of the new millennium and the advent of European directives concerning the environment, the proposed dam was deemed unsuitable and, in 2005, the project was terminated. The dam was never built. Since this time, the former residents have fought to reclaim their right to return to the village after four decades of living in exile. In 2008 a date was set to formally start the administrative process of the transfer to the former owners the land expropriated in 1961. My first visit to the area coincided with the ‘First Open Day’ to explore the ‘Special Plans’ for Jánovas, Lavelilla and Lacourt.Footnote 1
‘For the first time we gather to dream about our future together’, the Mayor of Attorney proclaimed in front of an audience of around 120 mainly former residents and their descendants who gathered to discuss the ‘Special Plans’ to reconstruct the three villages. The day-long discussions, scheduled in collaboration with architects and technicians, were organised into six themes, the final and most interesting theme evoking symbolic elements that were considered important for the preservation of memory. What was particularly striking about this discussion was the predominance of sonic elements – ‘sound signals’ – that were reckoned to provide strong symbols of the community. The church bells,Footnote 2 which had apparently been secretly stored away, the acequias (irrigation channels), the well, the spring, the old blacksmith and the mill, and sounds associated with each, had become dominant ‘sound romances’ and thus since became preserved in memory as ‘sound marks’ (Schafer Reference Schafer1994).
If this meeting provided the expression of a restorative nostalgia, defined by Svetlana Boym (Reference Boym2001: xii–xix, 41–55) in terms of an emphasis on nostos and the rebuilding of the lost home, then some days later when I began to meet up individually with former residents of the community in the villages themselves I was exposed to a more reflective nostalgia, defined by Boym in terms of an emphasis on algia (aching), in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance (Boym Reference Boym2001: 41). While the same sounds were evoked, the former residents’ nostalgia lingered on the ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time (Boym Reference Boym2001: 23).Footnote 3 As we talked, the sounds of wildlife streamed in and the sound of the river persisted without relief. The sound of the wind accompanied us with each step. These sounds no longer respected the inside/outside division maintained by domestic boundaries. There were no doors to shut or windows to open. No neighbours to eavesdrop on. Standing amidst the crumbling walls of residents’ former houses we struggled to silence the unruly sounds reverberating around us; nature reclaiming domestic space like the trees filling the kitchens. Turning a corner, away from my companions, I found myself hidden temporarily from the sound of the river in a shelter from the wind and listened to an anonymous rumbling silence. Gone forever, however, was the background chatter from the cafés, the tolling of church bells, the shouts and laughter of children running along the street – a fusillade of excited footsteps; the cool gurgle of the water channel over the cobbled pebbles; the metronomic hammering of the blacksmith; the music and babble on the radio and the television; the rehearsals of the banda municipal; goats, chickens, pigs, horses, dogs, cockerels; and the roaring of the first and only motor car that arrived one day in the 1960s. A section of Oliver Goldsmith's poem The Deserted Village (Reference Goldsmith1770) clearly evokes this reflective nostalgia through recollections of soundscapes:
Sweet was the sound, when oft at evening's close
Up yonder hill the village murmur rose;
There, as I passed with careless steps and slow,
The mingling notes came softened from below;
The swain responsive as the milkmaid sung,
The sober herd that lowed to meet her young;
The noisy geese that gabbled o'er the pool,
The playful children just let loose from school;
The watchdog's voice that bayed the whispering wind,
And the loud laugh that spoke the vacant mind;
These all in sweet confusion sought the shade,
And filled each pause the nightingale had made.
But now the sounds of population fail,
No cheerful murmurs fluctuate in the gale,
No busy steps the grassgrown foot-way tread,
For all the bloomy flush of life is fled. (1770: 7–8)
2. From paradise absent to paradise lost
The last four lines of Goldsmith's poem audibly illustrate ‘the notion of a fall from a putative state of grace, at-homeness, unity, or community’ (LaCapra Reference LaCapra1999: 722). Thinking about the loss and traumatic experiences the former residents of Jánovas described to me, and connecting the experience of loss to recollections of soundscapes led me to LaCapra's discussion of trauma and his useful distinction between absence and loss which recapitulates the need to restore absence as a central ontological category definitive of our experience. For LaCapra, while loss refers to specific events that happened in the past, absence is transhistorical and does not belong to a community's past. In other words, absence is the lack of something that never existed. While loss can be resolved through practical action, absence is ontological; it is part of our condition that cannot be rectified but which demands to be recognised. It is when absence and loss become confused and conflated that a community seeks nostalgic pasts and utopian futures fuelled by the desire for presence.Footnote 4
The soundscapes of Jánovas were the key symbols in the narrativisation of absence, the evocation of nostos, a prior existence of at-homeness, unity or community. While the former residents of Jánovas clearly figure the foundation – the ground or basis for community based on ideals of full unity – as lost, is it possible to insist that such unity, community or consensus is always already absent and that the socio-political and artistic problem is how to deal with or present that absence as well as the differences and forms of conflict that accompany it (LaCapra Reference LaCapra1999: 1)?
Considering the Jánovas case in terms of trauma,Footnote 5 and thinking about the role of acoustic communities in terms of a response to or effect of trauma, leads to an insight into the conceptual space shared between trauma and sounds – presence/absence, corporeality/incorporeality: their indeterminate temporality and spatiality – a confusion of past and present, inside and outside. In other words, both sounds and traumas provide access to phenomena that typically elude other experiences and resist representation and discourse.Footnote 6 But can we listen to trauma?Footnote 7 How is trauma remembered or unremembered through sound and listening? Do soundscapes bear witness to trauma? Does the background noise of the present space silence the testimony of past events? Does listening, or do soundscapes, provide a response to trauma, or a space in which trauma can be presented? Crucially, here, I wish to highlight a mode of enquiry that does not treat sounds, soundscapes and listening as merely unambiguous dimensions of the real appended onto literary or oral testimonies (cf. Felman and Laub Reference Felman and Laub1992) or examples of documentary evidence, but mediums of witnessing and testimony in their own right with their own singular agency.
3. Composing Loss and Absence
Soundscapes are uncanny spaces. Writing about landscapes in his essay ‘Uncanny Landscapes’ (2005), from which this article borrows its title, Nancy evokes the uncanny (unheimlich, literally ‘unhomely’, or not belonging or familiar) to signal dispossession, a dislocation that is estranging and unsettling. He distinguishes landscape from country. Country connotes belonging while landscape suggests ‘place as the opening onto a taking place of the unknown’ (Nancy Reference Nancy2005: 59). Country is defined by presence – presence of the earth – whereas landscape, born from processes of industrialisation and urbanisation, is the removal or disappearance of presence leading to a state ‘suspended between pure absence and infinite distancing’ (Nancy Reference Nancy2005: 57).
Nancy's essay provides us with thought-provoking and often paradoxical statements that force us to rethink both questions of representation and questions of space and place. Crucially, his thinking about space and spacing is ontological, it does not refer to space as such but rather openings of being.Footnote 8 Thus to think about landscapes, soundscapes and artistic representation more generally means to think about being. It is from this perspective that I feel it is necessary to rethink soundscape composition in terms of acoustic ontology rather than acoustic ecology by arguing that, following Nancy's ontological approach in particular, a soundscape's being-in-the-world gravitates around the concepts of splitting and sharing (partage), both presupposing a relation to the outside, an exposure to exteriority rather than a logic of identity. Furthermore, Nancy's emphasis on landscape not as ‘location’ but as ‘dis-location’, ‘void of presence and giving no access to any elsewhere that is not itself’ (2005: 59) demands further consideration in terms of soundscape studies. By estranging us from a relation to the country or ecology that is dependent on perspective, soundscapes create the possibility of a taking place of sense, a localisation (as opposed to a location) which can only be understood as an opening, a ‘presentation of sense that refers to nothing but this presentation’ (2005: 58). As a withdrawal of presence what becomes present in soundscapes – what is presented in soundscapesFootnote 9 – is an ‘opening of place as a taking place of what no longer has any determinate place, that is, of what no longer corresponds to determinate figures, circumstances, or actions’ (2005: 59). Soundscape, thus, is ‘the opening of the space in which this absenting takes place. For this reason, it cannot give a presentiment of another, analogous presence that would simply be in[audible] where others were [audible]’ (2005: 60). If we acknowledge that soundscapes estrange, dislocate, render uncanny – they absent community – what is the role of sound as a medium of communication? This question forms the basis for a consideration of sound's role in the context of testimony and witnessing and the potentials for incorporating soundscape studies within the larger interdisciplinary realm of trauma studies.
4. Soundwalking with Sebald
During extensive soundwalks through the Ara Valley, I was put in mind of the German émigré writer W.G. Sebald, whose ‘literary fiction’ incorporates essay, travelogue, biography, embedded photography, history and memoir. This hybrid form enables him to routinely address the condition of exile, the problems of memory and the lacunae of testimony. Rather than monumentalising, Sebald's literary or ethnographic fiction, through this hybridity and intertextuality, enables a different kind of memory work. The text itself, interspersed with unannotated embedded photographs which do not lend documentary evidence to the narrative but interrupt it with fragmentary visions and recollections that, like trauma itself, resist integration into present experience, becomes a site of memory in which the lacunae of testimony, as described by Agamben (Reference Agamben1999) as that which cannot be witnessed, is given literary form.
As I have commented elsewhere (Foreman Reference Foreman2010), his blurring of documentary fiction and the phantasmagorical enables him to create a sense of the uncanny and the spectral, an effect that is often consciously evoked through soundscape compositions. Rather than being driven by traditional structure such compositions, like Sebald's work, are often structured according to ‘echoes and coincidences … images and reflections, resonances and paradoxes, the shimmering interplay of memory, dream and reality’ (Catling, cited in Wylie Reference Wylie2007: 175).Footnote 10 Moreover, the use of sound recordings, like Sebald's unannotated photographs, resist textual understanding and point to an absence, a loss. Jessica Dubow (Reference Dubow2011) describes Sebald's work in terms of a ‘negative phenomenology’: ‘places that do not so much confirm loss but which “absorb and dissolve all presences into itself” [Nancy Reference Nancy2005: 58]’. While Sebald's work is a document of catastrophe – writing ‘after Auschwitz’ – the question is not whether such representation is possible, or ethical. Dubow suggests that representation is:
precisely what results when one insists on the present weight of all that is irrecoverable and anonymous, that the real force of the image has less to do with what is available to be seen in it, than with the way it insists on the fact of absence. Moreover, it is in the representation of landscape…that the force of loss is exemplary. (2011: 192)
Thus, rather than a mimetic copy, or framing of reality, soundscape compositions, by virtue of the schizophonic loss that defines recording – a splitting between an original sound and its electroacoustic reproduction in a soundscape (Schafer Reference Schafer1994) – can heighten our exposure to that which is absent from presence, they can amplify loss. For a soundscape composition to achieve this amplification loss must be the pre-condition: absence must be at the heart of the aural point of viewFootnote 11 – a structural absence that accentuates rather than recovers loss.
Coinciding with the importance of soundwalking for soundscape composition, for Sebald, the activity of walking or travelling by train often provides the narrative impetus for his fiction. Moreover, his journeys habitually traverse desolate landscapes thus, as John Zilcosky notes, overturning the conventions of the travel paradigm through the evocation of the uncanny (Zilcosky Reference Zilcosky2004; see also Fuchs Reference Fuchs2007). His walks are not of the restorative type – romantic idealisations of being-in-the-landscape – rather, they are evocative of the logic of melancholia and, as suggested above, redolent of and dependent on loss. Contemplating the abandoned and ruined villages down in the Ara River valley below me, and hearing earwitness accounts of the old soundscape and the sound romances associated with the community, I recalled most vividly Sebald's eponymous character Austerlitz looking back on his foster father Elias's home village, Llanwddyn, which had been abandoned and submerged when the Vyrnwy dam was built in 1888. The young Austerlitz visualised himself residing with the drowned ghosts of Llanwddyn still living in the depths of the reservoir:
I imagined all the others – his parents, his brothers and sisters, his relations, their neighbours, all the other villagers – still down in the depths, sitting in their houses and walking along the road, but unable to speak and with their eyes opened far too wide … I often felt as if I too had been submerged in that dark water, and like the poor souls of Vyrnwy must keep my eyes wide open to catch a faint glimmer of light far above me, and see the reflection, broken by ripples, of the stone tower standing in such fearsome isolation on the wooded bank. (Sebald Reference Sebald2002: 74)
These places are defined more by haunting than dwelling. The convergence of place and trauma is manifested in voids, forgetting. Standing at the crumbling entrance to the old school, its blackboard still hanging on the wall, it was impossible for one of the exiled former residents to fully capture the trauma of being displaced; the disappeared sounds could be listened to only partially in her imagination, her sonic memories themselves corresponding to the visible ruins that persisted in fragmented form. As we stood and listened, a reflective nostalgia morphed into a haunting; a place of domesticity transformed into a space of estrangement. Sonic memories were not necessarily nodes of presence but gaps and absences. They began to take the shape of testimony itself. The inability to position the present soundscape with the nostalgic reflections of the soundscape and the traumatic events that took place in the school and village is illustrative not of a failure in memory, but of an intensification of the disjunctions in memory and time itself, and confirms Agamben's description of the aporetic nature of testimony (1999). Furthermore, this illustrates that sonic memories embedded in place do not always open up transformative Proustian epiphanies that seek to recover the listener's lost time; rather, they can be a sign of breakdown and dissolution of self. Resonating with Blanchot's reading of Orpheus's Gaze (Reference Blanchot1981), Sebald's work is not concerned with representing the world but rather with conceding to a vertiginous, abyssal sensation that can never be mastered or overcome. Soundwalking, then, rather than phenomenologically grounding us in place and time, re-integrating the walker-listener into his or her soundscape, can be a dislocating experience, displacing us.Footnote 12
Soundwalking in the phantom traces of others occasions the limits of visual representation. Here, soundscapes show their fecundity in documenting such spectrality and offer an aural glimpse of the remnants that resist traditional forms of representation. Writer and composer David Toop clearly evokes the spectral nature of sound in his various works. In Sinister Resonance (Reference Toop2010) he writes:
Sinister Resonance begins with the premise that sound is a haunting, a ghost, a presence whose location in space is ambiguous and whose existence in time is transitory. The intangibility of time is uncanny – a phenomenal presence both in the head, at its point of source and all around – so never entirely distinct from auditory hallucinations. The close listener is like a medium who draws out substance from that which is not entirely there. (2010: xv)
Toop discusses what I term the ‘uncanny soundscapes’ that trouble our perceived notions of domesticity and intimate topology.Footnote 13 His brief allusion to hauntology deserves more consideration. The revenant, the ghost, according to Derrida, always unsettles presence since in endlessly returning without ever arriving it is always ‘there’ without being-there. As Wylie notes, the spectral ‘may be understood as a riposte to a phenomenology of being-in-the-world’ (2007: 172) and, as Derrida writes, ‘there is no Dasein of the spectre but there is no Dasein without the uncanniness, without the strange familiarity, of some spectre’ (Derrida Reference Derrida1994: 6–7, cited in Wylie Reference Wylie2007: 172). Thus, hauntology is an irreducible condition.Footnote 14
4.1. From haptic aurality to inoperative acoustic communities
The alterity of ghosts precludes any notion of presence. Yet sound's relational dynamic is believed to connect us to the present. Sound installation is the clearest example of this. Artists working in this medium underscore, according to LaBelle, ‘the proximate and the local: found sounds mirrored back to their origin … local sound as a powerful presence affecting the human condition … [the way] sound inform[s] me of my sense of location, as an immediate and distant geography’ (LaBelle Reference LaBelle2006: 197–9). The soundscape, he continues to explain, ‘locates us within an aurality that is extremely proximate – under our feet and at our fingertips – while expanding out to engage the radically distant and far away, from birdcalls from above to winds whistling from remote horizons’ (2006: 201–2). This proximity is clearly at odds with the spectrality of uncanny soundscapes outlined above. However, through a consideration of Nancy's understanding of relationality in terms of proximity and touch we can begin to rehabilitate notions of presence deconstructed by Derrida without lapsing into the nostalgia associated with acoustic ecology. Crucially, for Nancy, presence no longer denotes presence to the self, a complete and fulfilled subject; rather, presence is exposure. Our in-common is our common exposure to each other. Thus, while traditional Heideggerian ontology thinks about space and being in terms of a centripetal movement towards centres, Nancy outlines a centrifugal movement towards exteriors, openings and spaces that open-onto. Sense – including listening – is this very opening; it is the world as it is experienced yet it does not have any ground; it resists representation. To illustrate this, it is interesting to consider transplanting Laura Marks’ notion of ‘haptic visuality’ (Reference Marks2000) – developed to illustrate the limitations of vision – to listening and argue that a ‘haptic aurality’ is nonrepresentational; it resists the relations of mastery involved in understanding and representation, and focuses instead on resonance and reverberation, qualities of exposure. By exploring the synaesthetic relations between the senses, for example listening and touching,Footnote 15 implicit in LaBelle's discussion of sound installation cited above, we can articulate a thinking of community that differs from traditional accounts of bounded or imagined communities and draws on, and departs from, the account of community developed in soundscape studies.
Barry Truax (Reference Truax2001) maintains that the acoustic community can emerge from acoustic information alone, thus isolating acoustic communities as distinct entities rather than as particular characteristics of pre-existing communities.
The acoustic community may be defined as any soundscape in which acoustic information plays a pervasive role in the lives of the inhabitants (no matter how the commonality of such people is understood). Therefore, the boundary of the community is arbitrary and may be as small as a room of people, a home or building, or as large as an urban community, a broadcast area, or any other system of electroacoustic communication. In short, it is any system within which acoustic information is exchanged. (2001: 66)
Truax then proceeds to outline the general characteristics of acoustic communities. Sounds define the community spatially and temporally, as well as socially and culturally. An acoustic community is defined by various types of sounds that have special roles in the environment that contribute to its definition – sound signals – which communicate information. Furthermore, these sound signals establish the acoustic boundaries of communities and, as such, are shared. As Truax notes ‘nearly any definition of community will include some element of a shared commonality’ (2001: 67) since ‘sound signals … bind the community together and contribute to its character’ (2001: 69; emphasis added). My ethnographic account from the Ara Valley would seem to support this view of acoustic communities but, in light of the spectral presence of the sound signals and the difficulties of testifying through listening, and in consideration of the ontological process of soundscape recording and listening as splitting and sharing (partage) – an exposure – the notion of shared commonality emphasised by Truax warrants closer scrutiny.
It is through a deconstruction of a shared commonality that Nancy develops his theory of an inoperative community. Echoing LaCapra, familiar notions of community, he argues, are based on a logic of nostalgia, something lost that we seek to regain and reconstitute. That which is lost, according to this logic, ‘is always a matter of a lost age in which community was woven of tight, harmonious, and infrangible bonds’ (Nancy Reference Nancy1991: 9). For Nancy, however, community is the sharing of our common finitude, our mutual inability to have a substantive identity. Thus, through an understanding of acoustic ontology as an exposure to alterity, an act of sharing in which we are exposed to one another, we can understand, or articulate, this ‘inoperative’ community, through soundscape composition. To be in-common requires a necessary keeping-of-distance, but at the heart of both listening and soundscape composition lies a more profound and nuanced ‘separation-in-contact’, a partage, a compearance (comparution), illustrated most clearly and provocatively by the image of listening itself.
For Nancy, to be listening is ‘always to be on the edge of meaning, or in an edgy meaning of extremity, and as if the sound were precisely nothing else than this edge, this fringe, this margin’ (2007: 7). Immediately with this statement we are plunged into Nancy's ontology, from which we can develop a theory of acoustic ontology: ‘listening … can and must appear to us not as a metaphor for access to self, but as the reality of this access, a reality consequently indissociably “mine” and “other”, “singular” and “plural”, as much as it is “material” and “spiritual” and “signifying” and “a-signifying”‘ (2007: 12). This understanding of listening as something that is at once directed towards the subject and separate from it, outside of it, distant from it, calls into question the phenomenological subject and its intentionality typically associated with listening (cf. Idhe Reference Idhe2007) and cultivates instead a ‘resonant subject’. Through the model of methexis – participation, sharing, contagion – listening provides a nonrepresentational alternative to the mimetic associations with the visual. This participation opens the experience of listening to an ontological space that constitutes the subject: an acoustic ontology. Furthermore, communities are formed through this methexis which, it appears to me, unworks the notion of communal bonds, and emphasises instead the resonance in-between singularities. Sound is not the object, it is the movement, the relation, always different from itself. To listen, ‘literally to stretch the ear’, is an expression, Nancy points out, that ‘evokes a singular mobility’ (2007: 5), a singularity which unworks the totalising, unified communion of community and, instead, maintains the absence of communion that is characteristic of community.
5. Conclusion: working ‘with traces of traces of traces’Footnote 16
Returning, finally, to the question concerning the possibility of ‘listening to trauma’ presented above, I would like to make the connection between acoustic ontology as that which precipitates a certain haptic aurality, a non-representational sensory relation between singular bodies, and what Jenckes describes as ‘myopic witnessing’ – ‘an act that has the potential to disturb the oppositions between light and dark, presence and absence, centre and margin’ (Reference Jenckes2010: 1–2) – which, rather than centring the subject, reflects the process of ‘becoming-other-than-itself’ through absences and distances.Footnote 17 Sound resonates in-between bodies, connecting them but not necessarily binding them; maintaining their singularity. Furthermore, soundscape compositions present the very ontological structure of being-with. Sense is a singular multiplicity that is each time expressed anew in a singularly multiple way. It is precisely the artistic presentation of this sense that enables a response to traumatic events such as the forced exile and displacement of the residents of Jánovas, Lacort and Lavelilla, in a way that does not monumentalise and thus reproduce a common identity, and captures, through sound and listening, what we have in common: the wound, the opening, the trauma. Not referring to location and thus not reinserting us into place, or even evoking place, soundscapes estrange us from place and expose us to something else, an opening, a spacing. Furthermore, by understanding acoustic communities in terms of spacings rather than bounded groups, soundscape work can respond, in a manner similar to the work of Sebald, itself an act of ‘myopic witnessing’, with compositions and recordings that foreground interruption and the incomplete. To put it differently: when considering ruins and sites of trauma in which ‘place’ has become detached, rather than representing the intimate domesticity of phenomenological spaces that characterise Heideggerian and Bachelardian accounts, and rather than understanding acoustic communities according to immanent strategies of exchange and fusion, by acknowledging that soundscape compositions can approximate both the spatiality of ruins, the fragmentation of memory, and the aporias of testimony, we recognise the incompleteness of being-together – characterised by the sharing and splitting that, as I have illustrated, define listening and recording respectively – which is itself a retreat from communion. In such spaces we are working ‘with traces of traces of traces’.
Thus Schafer's denunciation of recording technology – ‘it is unnatural to be intimate at a distance’ (1994: 89) – and the sense of dislocation and loss that this ‘schizophonic’ splitting occasions, turns out to be the negative condition that enables us to approach testimony through sound. Finally, then, it is worth considering a correspondence or symmetry between the material ruins of space, the ruined traumatised subject characteristic of both Sebald's work and Agamben's account,Footnote 18 and the ruins or unworking engendered by listening and recording with regards to shared commonality. In each case, a sense of being grounded in place in the present is interrupted by fragmentation and exposure: each is characterised by a ‘myopic witnessing’. Caruth's work on trauma (Reference Caruth1996) confirms this myopia.Footnote 19 Our ‘unclaimed experience’, Caruth's definition of trauma, predominates over the recovery of lost time since the paradox, or lacunae, at the core of testimony is that ‘the survivors [bear] witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to’ (Agamben Reference Agamben1999: 13). Rather than attempting to grasp the whole of the traumatic situation, composing inoperative acoustic communities nevertheless reflects its character as something that is impossible to experience and communicate. It is only through absence that testimony can be made, not through direct representation or an indexicality that provides evidence and ‘proves’ the horrors endured; and it is through this absence that art and performance ‘after’ trauma becomes possible and necessary.Footnote 20 Testimony only guarantees via its ‘unarchivability, its exteriority with respect to the archive [in order that] it escapes both memory and forgetting’ (Agamben Reference Agamben1999: 158). It is in these openings, which are both fragmentary and impossible, that we can explore the gaps that resist full presence between reality and the referent and let in the ghosts, spectres and revenants that disrupt the presence of our present. The unworlding activity of these ghosts bring to mind the sharing and inseparability of Blanchot's ‘two slopes of literature’ (Reference Blanchot1982) – presence and absence – and Charlotte Delbo's (Reference Delbo1995) account of Auschwitz split, and shared or exposed, between the explicable and the inexplicable, between the drowned and the saved.Footnote 21 Keeping in mind Agamben's observation that ‘[n]either the poem nor the song can intervene to save impossible testimony; on the contrary, it is testimony, if anything, that founds the possibility of the poem’ (1999: 36; emphasis added), we can begin to think about the extent to which soundscape composition is, itself, the presentation of such an ontology of splitting and sharing and, as such, is the presentation of an impossible communication; it is, itself, testimony.
