A hen's cackle has a ‘distinct, sharp-edged existence’ for John Berger, on the first page of his brief and enigmatic essay ‘Field’, which closes his 1980 book About Looking. The book collects essay from the 1960s and 1970s on topics as diverse as Don McCullin's war photography, the cartoonishness of Francis Bacon and René Magritte's predilection for figures of the impossible. In the suggestive final essay, which is unlike any of the others, the writer becomes aware of an ‘intense experience of freedom’ as the acoustic event of the hen's cackle interrupts the ‘roar’ of undifferentiated experience, the more or less congested inward reverie in which we all subsist. The essays in the present collection exist in a clearing made possible by Berger's essay. None is a direct response to it, but they are all, in ways that are more or less direct, engaged with its workings and its provocations.

‘Field’ primarily concerns visual experience: after the opening, Berger outlines a demarcated space of possibility, a field that both hosts significant events, and, as the essay progresses, becomes an event itself (a paradox Berger acknowledges). In editing this book, our concern has been to turn our attention back towards the acoustic origins of Berger's definition of the field.

At the opening of his essay, Berger attributes contradictory qualities to the experience he is describing: a silence that becomes a roar, and a ‘tiny hub of dense, silent noise’. The terms of the argument seem Cagean, both through their complication of silence and their refusal to demarcate aesthetic and everyday events: ‘I knew that in that field I could listen to all sounds, all music’. The experience that Berger is describing involves a particular framing of experience – a focusing of attention within determinate spatial and temporal parameters.

The ‘field’ is both a two-dimensional space akin to a canvas and a three-dimensional space that is open, like a stage, to ‘exits and entrances’. However, Berger promptly dismisses these analogies ‘because they invoke a cultural context which, if it has anything whatsoever to do with the experience in question, can only refer back to it rather than precede it’.