Breath on the windowpane: Precarious aesthetics and diegetic noise in Nick Broomfield’s Ghosts

Abstract

This article explores the various ways in which noise acts as an aesthetic marker of precarity in Nick Broomfield’s Ghosts, a documentary account of the death of 23 undocumented Chinese nationals in the United Kingdom in 2004. Taking its cue from recent work on aesthetics and the temporalities of precarity, it considers the ways in which the different forms of noise ‐ medial and informational ‐ index the ways in which the figure of the undocumented migrant labourer disturbs dominant western accounts of the aesthetic predicated on a division between production and consumption. Noise, in the form of Michel Serres’ conceptual figure of the parasite, it argues, registers the ways in which precarious labour has revealed the dependence of aesthetic categories on models of production rendered incoherent by the representation of undocumented migrant labour.