On Noise: Generators, Explosions and Silence

This is an essay about the loud, yet invisible assault of daily life in Beirut - or the noise of generators, that fills my home for 17 hours a day with monotonous roars.

Generators consist of a nuisance that quickly became part of the ordinary. With government electricity reduced to one or two hours per day, an economy of alternatives emerged. Households either have a generator subscription from a local provider, or pay the fuel fees of the building’s private generator. Local providers charge unrealistic fees per month for limited amperage, and in many areas, refuse to install meters that track consumption. They also submit residents to a predetermined and non-negotiable schedule of power, consisting of frequent cuts during the day and no electricity at night. With this, local providers, who are often politically backed, control the hours of our waking and sleeping, how much hot water we have to shower, how much heating we can afford to have in winter, or cooling in the summer. To avoid all of these restrictions, many buildings opted to install a private generator. This is a relatively new phenomenon that comes with the price of hearing the generator scream for as many hours as the building’s committee chooses to have it on. The noise of a nearby generator is something I am too familiar with, and until a couple of months ago, have perceived it as an unfortunate inconvenience. That changed on 27 June 2023, when a generator in Zoukak El Blat, in Beirut, exploded; proving that generators are not a mere inconvenience that we have no choice but to endure. They can reach a threshold and explode, collaterally damaging homes, shops, cars, and putting the lives of people at risk.

Evidently, Beirut is a noisy city and these machines are everywhere, producing power, noise, heat and toxic fumes. One needs not to be in proximity to listen carefully, and to know that the city sounds like ever-generating doom. It is filled with the staggering sound of decay that leaves no space void of its presence. There is nowhere to escape to and no guarantee that whatever exile one can find would bear the potentiality of a life not plagued with the noise of survival.

Disbelief, Knowledge and Disavowal

Between doom, escape and survival, the devastating events that we collectively and individually lived in Lebanon in the past few years are exercises in disbelief. The more unbelievable our political, social and economic events got, the more urgent it became to understand them, and to know their specificities. But what does it mean to know and to reflect? Knowledge serves different functions for subjects. For some, knowing has a tranquilizing, calming effect that restores a sense of normalcy, and decreases the intensity of a “doomsday” affect. I need to know, so that I reconcile with all of this disbelief, and go about my survival. For others, knowledge flirts with insanity. To know is to see the inside of things, things as they are, unbearable, overwhelming realizations, or more adequately, de-realizations. For both, knowledge is a method to suture ruptures in the ordinary. Its acquiescence, or lack thereof, is a tool that saturates the image of a certain end, pushing it further away, and hopefully making it disappear altogether. What comes after this? Knowing creates a space that affirms that there will always be a way to manage, to adapt, to restore balance, and to go on sporting the familiar ordinary; or as Alenka Zupancic calls it in her article Perverse Disavowal and the Rhetoric of the End (2022) “to make do with the end”. Disavowal is what occupies that space. It is our collective pushing of the snooze button countless times until the battery dies. Between wanting to acquire knowledge, or dismissing it altogether, we are caught in seemingly necessary inquiry with the counterintuitive function of foreclosing a reality. After all, what precedes knowledge is a question, and the more indisputable an answer is, the more immediately it gets buried.

Disavowal is promoted and maintained by knowledge, and it is materially tempered through infrastructure and technologies that guarantee adaptation, endurance and survival; consequently coercing the erasure of a reality of destruction and deprivation. With or without the agony of understanding how we ended up with almost no government electricity in Lebanon, we have the guarantee of a local provider lighting our homes. If that fails at some point, again due to mutating collapse permeating all areas of life, an alternative is readily available, under our buildings. Private generators increased in number and in size as the crisis exacerbated. They occupy physical, sonic and visual space; bathing the city with inevitable adaptation, where systemic failure is always met with a measure that works, for as long as it does. You can easily find a generator the size of a room right outside of your window, and it wouldn’t even be the one that is lighting your house. I talked about the daily exercises in disbelief in Beirut, the current arrangement is guaranteed to provide one with expertise in it.

Generators situate themselves as an essential aspect of a new reality that shuts out deprivation and promotes an aesthetic of “making do”. They are an infrastructure of disavowal: a readily accessible technology that conceals the devastating inside of things allowing life to go on. Knowing all that we know about a crisis that has been cradled into dormancy for decades, and that has been unfolding since 2019, we can see that the lights are still on, no questions asked, and with all the guarantees in the world. The end(s) of everything, witnessed and felt, on the 4th of August 2020, or on the 8th of August 2020 during the protests a few days after the explosion, or with the gas queues in the summer of 2021, or the Tleil explosion in Akkar that same summer, or the full dollarization of goods and services in the beginning of this year, or the immense amount of air and noise pollution in Beirut, put everyone in an endless state of disbelief that is difficult to articulate. There is an inability to employ words that describe what happened and what continues to take place, what quickly gets erased with the urgency to move on, an urgency to look at the lights in our rooms and believe that they are on, with no space left to believe anything else.

But noise is there

In the classical conception of disavowal, the main idea is that we know so that we go on pretending not to, and as a society, we continue being part of whatever spectacle capital arranges for us. But something seems to be missing, as this description assumes that disavowal is impenetrable and unshakable. Is it possible to have aspects of reality that cannot be disavowed by subjects? In the grand scheme of things, everything continues as if nothing ever happened, by virtue of foreclosure and enjoyment in it. However, I do hear the noise of the generator against my bedroom involuntarily for 17 hours a day. In those 17 hours, life goes on, but it also doesn’t, revealing a dichotomy in the way disavowal operates. On the social level, it creates an aesthetic of silence. One that aims to create infinity, abundance, endurance and resilience, constantly working to contain the discontent and neurosis of subjects as a result of the malfunctions inside them and in their surroundings. What disavowal cannot do is conceal its being, as its infrastructure cannot itself be disavowed. Its very material existence, in the form of noisy generators residing amongst us, cannot be muted. In the introduction of his book Annihilating Noise, Paul Hegarty writes that “noise was there before we heard it or wrote about it”. The noise of generators is there, heard or unheard, analyzed or left alone to inconvenience and threaten. It perpetuates as evidence that cannot be ignored. We know too much now that we hear too much. Amidst a loud festival of silence and resilience, we are here putting our fingers on a fragment of the real, as we are involuntarily bombarded with its excessive sound, whose vibrations create regular interruptions in the ideal that life goes on one way or another. Disavowal is therefore not unidimensional nor unidirectional and in its functioning, works across two opposing currents, one that affirms an image by concealing what is under it, and one engaged in libidinally protesting what is under that image. This dialectic is similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of sonic war machines, which are technologies that manifest violently, without having intentional violence as a primary objective. With rhythmic consistency, they create zones of sound deployment with two opposing ends: one has the objective of attracting bodies towards its source, in a process of intensification of collective sensation; and the other aims to repulse, dissolving collective energy and individualizing the movement of bodies. Sonic war machines therefore are defined by these two coexisting gravitations, pushing away and pulling towards through sonic force in a dynamism that reveals characteristic strategies of control in contemporary capitalism. I want to suggest that generators are sonic war machines, designed with an objective separate from the production of violent sound. With palpable contact with bodies, generators’ push away and pulling towards leave the body in a catatonic state, agape and compromised. The current that attracts subjects towards it, escalating sensation and making it impossible to compute anything else, works in a process similar to disavowal unable to disavow itself: stimulus becoming sensed so intensely it becomes one with the subject, inseparable from it, causing a disruption in the enjoyment of pretending not know or what I have called previously “the aesthetic of silence”. In the opposite direction, lies the current that pushes bodies away from it with the objective of dismissing collective discontent and promoting a unified mode of enjoyment that is constructed on the very image of silence. 

In a collapsing capitalist economy such as Lebanon’s, generators have settled in our visual, auditory and olfactory landscape as a violent and inevitable necessity, devising a political economy that cannot be disavowed into silence. With their essence rooted in control, as they dictate when the lights are on and when they are off, they compel subjects to enjoy what appears to them as the actual end of everything. The end that is a“good” end, the one where all unfortunate events have stopped happening and life has resumed; all the while, knowing too well that the noise is there and it lingers within a latency that has the enormous capacity to arbitrarily explode at any moment.