Bulging Spheres
To Claudia, Almira’s footsteps are noisy. The sound becomes noise through Claudia’s way of listening; noise, in this sense, is inherently relational and – as Salomé Voegelin remarks – exists by virtue of the listener’s body and never in its absence (2010: 48, 65). “Tiny sounds,” like “a downstairs neighbor’s quiet but persistent bass beat,” Voegelin writes, can colonize the listening and make it obsessive and exclusive. Noise need not be loud, but it “has to be exclusive,” and she vividly describes how soft, compulsive tones can take hold of the body of the listener, seizing her attention and excluding all other sensorial possibilities (Voegelin 2010: 43-44, 47).
Claudia’s accounts of how sounds from her upstairs neighbors affect her body resonate with Voegelin’s descriptions: how her apartment “starts to shrink” as her neighbor’s sounds deprive her of “the enjoyment of [her] own environment” (Voegelin 2010: 44). For Claudia, her bedroom becomes unpleasant when colonized by Almira’s steps. Indeed, the sound of these footsteps pushes against the boundaries of Claudia’s personal sphere. One could visualize this as the sounds pushing down and creating bulges in Claudia’s bedroom ceiling that hang there, making the room unavailable to her. Voegelin describes the spatiality of noise (in the context of art works of a very large volume) as the way it excludes all other sounds by “creating in sound a bubble against sounds” (Voegelin 2010: 43). In the image I propose, the sounds of Almira’s footsteps are part of her sphere, but they interfere with Claudia’s sphere when such a bubble – or bulge – pushes aside other sounds and, ultimately, other activities.
Etymologically, the Latin term relatio (from which ‘relation’ came into English via Old French) was a noun indicating motion, giving relation a dynamic quality that is exemplified by the verb to relate. Interestingly, medieval philosophers used the phrase relatio ad aliquid to indicate a directionality inherent within one entity (Strathern 2020: 4-5). This perspective leads our attention to the dynamic and directional aspect of a relation. The relation between Claudia and Almira is also the relation between each of their domestic-personal spheres, and its dynamic is shaped by how they influence and shape each other.
A typical characterization of a relation would be to consider it a contact or connection between two subjects. For example, anthropologist Morten Nielsen (2010: 400) describes the relation between self and other as a distance characterized by its two extremities, inviting a visualization of the relationship as a linear connection similar to typical depictions of kinship in genealogical trees. Such a linear connection, however, leaves little space for the multifaceted sensory engagement at play when subjects relate to their surroundings, especially when the domestic-personal sphere is involved.
Architect Juhani Pallasmaa explores the sensory relations between subjects and the built environment. He cites an example given by Richard Lang on how a football player understands where the goal is situated in the field in a way that is lived rather than known. For Pallasmaa this image describes well how the human body relates to the built environment through processes that internalize space and knowledge. These engagements merge with personal memories and imaginings in ways that sometimes allow people to experience resonance and even rootedness within built environments (Pallasmaa 2012: 22, 71-72). Resonance and rootedness indicate an expansive and non-linear way of relating, which aligns well with Ahmed’s notion of the home inhabiting its occupant.
Almira’s footsteps, as mentioned above, make Claudia’s heart palpitate. Returning to its etymology, the term palpitate comes from the Latin palpare, meaning “to touch,” which again allows us to visualize Almira’s domestic-personal sphere expanding beyond the physical borders of her apartment and reaching into Claudia’s, deforming the borders of Claudia’s domestic-personal sphere. Over time, as Almira has lived in different homes, her expectations of the space of the home have changed and been reshaped according to the different social and cultural contexts in which she has found herself. Since moving in above Claudia, she has stopped shuffling her feet – something she had not really noticed until she suddenly found herself in a situation where this was no longer necessary. With Anders as intermediary, her sonic relationship with Claudia also made her aware – for the first time in her life – of the sounds she makes just by moving around. When Almira attempts to avoid moving in ways that will trigger Claudia, this could be visualized as an attempt to pull back the “bulge” into her own space, to prevent it from interfering with Claudia’s private sphere. Although both Almira and Claudia wish the boundary between their homes was more solid, it is actually permeable and moveable in a way that allows for the image of Claudia’s bulging bedroom ceiling and Almira’s attempts to pull the bulge back into her own space. Despite strong Scandinavian notions of the interior of the home as a personal sphere within which inhabitants shape their own distinct subjectivity, thanks to the separation of these spheres, the sonic relationship between Almira and Claudia traverses these domestic and subjective boundaries. In other words, although Almira and Claudia are reluctant participants in this relationship, they are simultaneously produced and shaped through their domestic-personal spheres.