Leonardo Custódio
A Room Full of Clocks
Sometimes, when I think about multiple processes of communication in doing research, I feel as if I become claustrophobic and anguished in a room full of clocks.
One of them is set for research.
Others for the multiple collaborations I have with activists.
Others in relation to multiple demands of neoliberal academia, such as the need to popularize research, the need to create an entrepreneurial proactive presence online…
And one, the biggest one, is set for life.
In fact, they tick at the same speed, but you know how the brain works and how the body reacts. Rather than setting time, it feels as if these clocks set paces. As if the ticking gradually becomes an irritating and anguishing cacophony reminding me of the permanent risk of failure.
The research clock seems to tick slower than the others.
It reminds me about the slow work required to produce the most meaningful medium of our craft: written texts in their multiple forms (articles, books…). Writing requires reading, which in itself demands quiet moments so that we can sort through all the unclear terminologies and allow insights to grow into notes, sentences, and arguments.
The collaborative clock, however, seems to have no respect for the research clock whatsoever. As if it were entitled and demands our full attention and engagement.
This is actually perplexing: collaboration means co-work. In my case, researchers and activists building knowledge together. However, this clock operates solely on the pace of activism.
Whatever needs doing, it needs doing now.
Blog posts. Social media action. Petitions. Call-outs. Demonstrations. Support for demonstrations.
Then there is the self-promotion clock. As if it were a PR agent reminding you of the multitude of media techniques that make your work appear relevant.
As if it pushed you to show impactful results, even if you have not yet felt your research was ready for the public eye.
As if it reduced acts of solidarity and collective action into online performance.
Then, finally, there is the life clock.
It reminds me of a library full of books by authors living and dead that, when seen together, shows how the deep individual processes of knowledge production become grains of sand in the history of human knowledge.
It reminds me of all the other moments of life beyond work.
It reminds me that collaboration needs time to grow into mutual respect and trust.
It reminds me of how posts, comments, and engagements online are too ephemeral to be transformative acts of solidarity.
It reminds me that academic deadlines are not adequate parameters for us to make life choices.
It reminds me – us – to stop, take deep breaths, and regularly assess the meaning of each of these clocks as I – we – try to balance career-building actions with rest, joy, and well-being.
Ieva Gudaitytė
Home is where the radio is.
Most of my childhood was spent amongst the ticking of mechanical clocks at my grandparents’ flat. They were always in dialogue with the radio – telling each other when it was time to turn on the news or, in response, that it was time to wind the clocks up after the evening program. For a village man who spent most of his life in a radio factory building television sets, my grandpa’s relationship with the radio was one I always approached with respect. A safe and trustworthy companion through the everyday, following him in and out of the city as he travelled to work on his allotment, it never seemed to contradict his views like television did; I eventually learned not to question that.
Radio marks modernity: colonial violence and emancipation; the public entering the private; the private isolating itself from the public; sounds of empire centers juxtaposed with those of the “exotic” borderlands (Lacey 2013; Western 2023). Radio is a mark of our times, but also of the time: breakfast shows set as alarm clocks, evening news signals closing off the work day. Radio soundscapes become a part of our visceral experience of home or migration, work or play, city or country, oppression or revolution. Temporal and spatial, modernity sounds different depending on where and how we are in the world.
As we went into the world, our globalized routes started weaving into local soundscapes of new forms of resistance and historic solidarities.
Discreetly placing a little mouthpiece of an empire amongst personal memorabilia, such modernity has solidified the establishment of the private home, but also opened new ways to eavesdrop. A way to tune in to someone else’s reality. In the late Soviet period in Lithuania (and elsewhere), jamming radio stations became a common practice to overcome the state-controlled media channels and to search for a Western radio station broadcasting the latest Rolling Stones track – a secret and illegal act of rebellion against the regime. For alternative hippie youth resisting “fake” Estrada (the more melodic version of the official state-issued lies), a tampered receiver was a chance to turn away from the content broadcasted from the colonial center in Moscow (Kuklyte 2012: 129). Imagining aa free radio sounded like the world that could have been. In the intimate circle of like-minded confidants, such radio clubs were ready to take down the pompous empire by reclaiming attics, garages, and bedrooms as liberated sonic spaces.
In a symbolic – and slightly ironic – twist of history, I tune towards the East: to my online radio app to listen to friends making breakfast shows every workday morning from Riga, Budapest, Vilnius, Helsinki, Berlin. Tbilisi and Kyiv. The wall against fun has fallen; some thought that the empire went with it too. Yet I still feel part of the borderland. My radio sounds like one too: my access to home, to familiar cities and voices. As we went into the world, our globalized routes started weaving into local soundscapes of new forms of resistance and historic solidarities. Routes toward re-learning any place can be local. With the freedom to broadcast all that was supposed to be untold, came the responsibility to give it justice: instead of listening to the Rolling Stones, we are now trying to listen to each other.
Hardly a modern man, my grandpa never took on any revolutions. His private life, violently marked by history and forced migration from Belarus to Lithuania, seemed to have evaded its political dimension. Time passed with the changing voices of the broadcasters – languages, systems, political agendas – while he kept rewinding the clocks. At the end of his life and to the great frustration of my gran, he kept doing that even more, over and over and over, as if he was trying to grasp the time that was slipping out of his hands. Eventually, the radio fell silent with the passing of its most ardent listener. These days, I am more than ever aware of the sound of the ticking clocks in my grandparents’ flat. Maybe they became louder – desperate now there was nothing to respond to.
References:
DeNora, Tia. 2000. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.46-74.
Kuklyte, Biruté. 2012. “Estrada ir muzikinė saviveikla sovietų Lietuvoje aštunto ir devinto dešimtmečių sandūroje: Alternatyvių formų kūrimas ir paskutinis diktatas”. Lietuvos Istorijos Studijos 29, 127–141. https://doi.org/10.15388/LIS.2012.0.7447
Lacey, Kate. 2013. Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age. London: Polity Press.
Western, Tom. 2023. “Rhythm-Relay-Relation: Anticolonial Media Activisms in Athens”, in Postcolonial Publics: Art and Citizen Media in Europe, edited by Bolette B. Blaagaard, Sabrina Marchetti, Sandra Ponzanesi, and Shaul Bassi, pp. 26. Venice: Fondazione Università Ca’ Foscari. https://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-677-0/002
