Polite Applause: The sonic politics of ‘Clap for Carers’

Abstract

Between March and May 2020, an estimated 37 million people across the United Kingdom took part in the ‘Clap for Carers’ initiative against the backdrop of the global coronavirus pandemic. Participants stood on their doorsteps or balconies, or at their windows to clap, cheer and make other sounds, officially in praise of public health workers. The initiative was unique in British history, comparable in mass engagement only to certain instances of the ‘minute’s silence’, yet diametrically opposed in the sonic agency it appeared to permit. Drawing on interviews with participants, as well as published documentation and media reports, I ask how this sonic agency was made use of and managed, and to what ends. Charged with the emotional and political weight of the pandemic, Clap for Carers was an increasingly ambivalent phenomenon. While it might not present itself as an artistic practice, participants’ evident attention to sonic materiality justifies approaching it as such. Moreover, exploratory uses of sound and a proliferation of interpretive positions suggested it held some space for the autonomous experiences art entails. While the initiative’s narrowly defined consensus mirrored the pitfalls of some participatory art, these autonomous experiences gestured towards what Voegelin (2019) describes as an ‘echography of the inaudible’, through which a plurality of voices, actualities and political possibilities are heard. In this sense, such experiences of Clap for Carers point to sound’s distinctive capacity for (per)forming agonistic kinds of participatory practice.