Introduction: hearing like a state

KEYWORDS:

• Sound
• noise
• governance
• state
• law

In Seeing Like a State, James Scott argues that legibility is of paramount importance for modern statecraft. The creation of an “administrative grid” for the sake of more efficient taxation and security, which included a range of bureaucratic and coercive mechanisms, turned a fictional and simplified shorthand (measurement standards, citizenship, land tenure, etc.) into reality – a reality that requires constant reassertion. For Scott, “The premodern state was, in many crucial respects, partially blind; it knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity. It lacked anything like a detailed ‘map’ of its terrain and its people. It lacked, for the most part, a measure, a metric, that would allow it to ‘translate’ what it knew into a common standard necessary for a synoptic view” (Scott 1998, 2). But how does the modern state hear? How do sounds and sound-making practices become (or fail to become) susceptible to state intervention? What are the common regulatory, disciplinary, and punishment mechanisms used in such an intervention?

This special issue addresses these questions by following three threads, all of which have been mostly absent in the field of sound studies (at least in the English-speaking world). The first thread is topical: we focus on the multiple points of intersection between sound, governance and law. We do so not through general notions of “noise” and “power” but with the close analysis of specific urban spaces, legal documents, auditory communities and technologies. As each article shows, this task entails considering the specificities of the legal, scientific and bureaucratic spheres – tackling a vast number of documents that must run through certain administrative channels so that sounds can become either legitimate or illegitimate.

The second thread is geographical: the articles move either outside North America and Europe (the focus of the vast majority of sound studies scholarship today) or within international affairs. Fifteen years ago, Veit Erlmann stated that “The number of accounts detailing how the West’s sounds are cast back on it is still shockingly small. Even more striking is the absence from current debates of Third World scholars interested in auditory perception” (Erlmann 2004, 4). More recently, Jonathan Sterne argued that “The West is still the epistemic center for much work in sound studies, and a truly transnational, translational, or global sound studies will need to recover or produce a proliferating set of natures and histories to work with” (Sterne 2015, 73). This special issue touches on such natures and histories while suggesting how notions of Western modernity continue to inform how certain sounds are experienced in Mumbai, Taipei and Rio de Janeiro. The weight of a modern aurality, often supported in the name of civility, liberalism, democracy, scientific development and social betterment, becomes particularly tangible when we extend the analysis of sound as a “technological” or “cultural” object to sound (often but not always “noise”) as a legal and politico-administrative predicament.

The third thread is methodological. The authors approach the state through ethnographic and legal analysis. The challenges of doing an ethnography of the state are considerable. In following documents across buildings, offices, desks and files, ethnographers must establish a rapport with public officials while navigating in a field of (often) tense administrative hierarchies. The ethnographies of acoustic dissent in Taiwan, India and Brazil included here show how hearing like a state resonates with spatial segregation, ownership conventions, religious ardour and music-experiencing practices. In addition, the authors contend that the close examination of official documents (norms, technical standards, laws, judicial decisions, etc.) is a crucial path for understanding how sounds move within and across the lawmaking, law enforcement and litigation spheres that constitute the governments analysed here. More often than not, sound studies scholars have approached law as a neutral and static mode of governance. As James Parker argues in his contribution to this issue, “The juridical imaginary […] is often confined to an interest in state-posited rules or international treaties, which are understood to operate relatively mechanically, as if that were the extent of legal practice or the only possible avenue of jurisprudential inquiry”.

If sound exists in a continuum between the barely unnoticeable and the unbearably loud (at times “music”, at other times “noise”), investigating how precisely the state orders this continuum into stabilised and regulated domains is crucial for understanding how the state hears. The articles in this special issue are organised within this continuum, in ascending order of sonic intensity and damage potential – from the quietest to the loudest, from the bedroom to the war zone, from the city ordinance to the international law. In following the order of sonic energy, we hope to show how, in setting in motion a range of seemingly disparate actors (loudspeakers, weaponry, bodies, buildings, state agencies, laws, sentences, sound meters, etc.), sounds can call for varying modes of state action, including nuisance laws, crime control practices and the sanctioned use of sonic violence. These actions often lead to the legal encoding of the very act of hearing. However, as each of the five articles suggests, the ontological fluidity, measurement complexity and legal instability of sound, all make it a particularly tricky problem for the state to grasp.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Leonardo Cardoso

Leonardo Cardoso is Assistant Professor and Crawley Faculty Fellow in the Department of Performance Studies at Texas A&M University. His book, Sound-Politics in São Paulo (Oxford University Press, 2019), provides an ethnographic account of noise control debates in the most populous city in the Americas. He has published in Current Anthropology, Journal of Latin American Studies, and the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music. Cardoso was a Visiting Scholar at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation at ParisTech. He was awarded the Program in Latin American Studies Fellowship at Princeton University and the Max Planck Institute Research Fellowship in Berlin. His second book, State Acoustics in Brazil, examines governance, sound, and citizenship in Brazil between the 1930s and the 2010s.