![]() I illustrate my argument with examples from Spain and North America. Yet, drawing on my own research and observations as an academic and activist over the past 9 years in Spain, I argue that these mainstream campaigns are often unaware of, or oversimplify, conceptualisations of empowerment. In particular, we explore Detektors (2010-12),īreast cancer awareness campaigns are the major strategy used by public institutions and private organizations to empower women about breast cancer. Put simply, this chapter explores the idea of listening to contemporaneity, through an engagement with signals that operate both above and below the threshold of human perception. We argue that signals not only represent but enact control structures and temporal complexity, prompting a more materialist or archaeological analysis in order to be able to hear some of the nuances of temporal complexity. But attention to these material characteristics significantly alters Attali's idea of sound as an indicator of change, since for him it indicated change at a semiotic level that required a hermeneutic approach in its analysis. As such, sound perhaps offers a unique opportunity to understand the topologies and currents of contemporaneity. 1 This is strange not only because, as Jacques Attali (1985) argued, changes in sound and music often preempt changes within visual, and indeed, political culture, but because sound and music are inherently temporal in character: made up of acoustic vibrations (and often electronic signals) that unfold dynamically, constructing and constituting important aspects of presence, while reflecting temporality in their material character. Moreover, although contemporaneity has been widely theorised around visual culture and post-conceptual art, the role of sound within this discourse is almost entirely missing. Perhaps in this way it is possible to experience contemporaneity at a range of different scales-from the microtemporal to the planetary-to register both our closeness and distance from it (Agamben 2009), and to exemplify how times come together disjunctively in the present. They operate underneath human perceptual thresholds as carriers, controllers, and codes, while also surfacing into perceptual and semiotic registers, as signs across various media-textual, visual, and, of course, sonic-all the while accessible as traces. ![]() We consider the notion of signal to be particularly appropriate in the consideration of contemporaneity, since signals are a constitutive element of contemporary infrastructures and our experience of time even if they are relatively undetectable. Genre-bending, devastating and profoundly humane, The Undying is an unmissably insightful meditation on cancer, the cancer industry and the sicknesses and glories of contemporary life.There comes a time to move beyond asking the broad question "What is con-temporaneity?" to consider more acute ways in which this question can be traced and signalled. She investigates the quackeries, casualties and ecological costs of cancer under capitalism, and dives into the long line of women writing about their own illnesses and deaths, among them Audre Lorde, Kathy Acker and Susan Sontag. In The Undying - at once her harrowing memoir of survival, and a 21st-century Illness as Metaphor - Boyer draws on sources from ancient Roman dream diarists to cancer vloggers to explore the experience of illness. ![]() For a single mother living payslip to payslip, the condition was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness. Blending memoir with critique, an award-winning poet and essayist's devastating exploration of sickness and health, cancer and the cancer industry, in the modern worldĪ week after her 41st birthday, Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. ![]()
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