Bryce Peake

NOISE
A historical ethnography of listening,
5 masculinity and media technology in British
Gibraltar, 19402013
This essay develops a cultural materialist theory of listening through a historical
ethnography of Gibraltarian mens contradictory sensitivity to the noise of mass
media and desensitization to the industrial soundscape of the state. I argue that
10 this contradiction can be historicized through close attention to the social
antagonisms embedded in the history of noise ordinances, and the ways in which
British colonial officials structured an idealized form of masculinity premised on
the sonic relationships between bodies and technologies. Gibraltarian men
reproduce this masculine disposition, and through it colonial hierarchies, in the
15 seemingly banal practice of listening to mass media, and ignoring the soundscape
of the neoliberal, colonial state.
Keywords listening; noise; sound studies; postcolonial historiography;
somatic politics; practice theory
On a mid-July morning in 2012, I was forced to cover my ears as two Panavia
20 Tornadoes ran full thruster off the Gibraltar International Airport runway less
than a kilometre away from the roof of my apartment complex. The pressure
change caused by these two Royal Air Force fighter jets engines was not only
deafening, but also powerful enough to cause waves to form in a nearby
swimming pool, and the deck chairs nearby to rattle as though there was an
25 earthquake. Later that day, while playing jazz with an informant living in the
heart of Gibraltar, I complained as the Tornadoes repeated the exercise. How
does anyone live with this noise? I asked him in a moment of frustration. My
informant, Brian, a single Gibraltarian man in his mid-thirties who bounces
around service-industry jobs, shrugged it off.
1
You are making this too big a
30 deal, a drink will calm you down. Not an hour later, however, Brian stood at
his balcony shouting angrily at the teenagers in the street below: Turn down
your hi-fi and find something better to do than disturb my afternoon. Noise,
Cultural Studies, 2014
Vol. 00, No. 00, 128, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2014.958176
2014 Taylor & Francis
according to Brian and many other Gibraltarian men, is one of the worst parts
of living downtown. Yet, as this essay shows, not all noise is equally disturbing.
35 Ammunition testing and jet exercises starting in the morning, infrastruc-
tural construction for new and lavish private homes in the recently state-
divested upper-Rock nature areas during the afternoon, and dockyard and ship
maintenance throughout the night, the loudness of industrial and military
production in short, the soundscape of the state
2
is omnipresent in
40 Gibraltar. In this small, two square mile country organized around the Rock of
Gibraltar, which acts as a natural amphitheatre, the soundscape of the state
reverberates back into and throughout the concrete and stone architecture of
colonial shops and apartment high-rises, layering and amplifying the sonic
effects of militarism and industrialism. Yet, the primary attention of crusades
45 against noise and noise pollution, as I demonstrate throughout this essay, has
been against the tones of mass media.
3
This juxtaposition begs the question:
why does listening to mass mediated noise elicit such attention and produce calls
to political action, while the soundscape of the state remains un-noticed and, in
some cases, celebrated?
50 This essay historicizes the contradiction between mass media sensitivity and
the insensitivity to the soundscape of the state by analysing the emergence of
listening as a cultural technology of colonialism in the 1940s.
4
In the
contemporary moment, Gibraltarian mens way of listening to noise actively
reproduces colonial gendered, racial, and class-based antagonisms between
55 Gibraltarians and Spaniards. I trace this way of listening back to the post-Second
World War, when English colonial administrators prepared to shape Gibraltars
multinational labour force into a body politic of colonial subjects. Colonial
administrators, all of whom were men, and a majority of whom were English,
inscribed in colonial noise ordinances an elite, English sense of the proper
60 relationship between British qua white bodies, mass media technologies and
private and public sounds. Targeted at Gibraltarian men, thought by colonial
administrators to be ber subjects with power over feminized subjects and
domestic spaces, these noise ordinances structured a relationship between
bodies and technology that was actively policed with material, legal
65 consequences. Simultaneously, ordinances provided Gibraltarian men with a
sense of taste that, if embodied, could render these upwardly mobile
Gibraltarian middle-class men closer to English elites and within grasp of the
symbolic and economic capital of being British.
Breaking from previous studies of urban noise (Schafer 1993, Novak 2006,
70 2010, Larkin 2008, Feld 2012) by taking listening as the object of study,
I historicize noise by examining the historically contingent, dialectical
relationships between media technology, British masculinity and the reproduc-
tion of colonial power. Focusing on masculinity as a site of conflict, I also break
from contemporary trends in media ethnography and sound studies histori-
75 ography (Wise 2000, Sterne 2003, Hirschkind 2006, Erlmann 2010), grounding
2 CULTURAL STUDI ES
genealogies of listening in archaeologies of technology and inventors,
AQ1
sound
studies have produced accounts of listening without bodies, abstractly defining
listening as a generalizable practice amongst an implicitly assumed universal
privileged subject. This approach, while revealing the plethora of western
80 philosophical negotiations indebted to an ostracized listening subject, neglects
the social relations of force that constitute the varying social positions from
which specific listeners listen. Taking sound studies historiographical
intervention into occularcentric narratives as a starting point, I historicize the
role of listening in colonialism via a historical ethnography focused on listeners
85 listening historically as opposed to telling this history through an account of
the mechanical technology(s) that produce sound and/or ontologies. By
historical ethnography, in this essay, I am referring to the practice of
historicizing the social world in ways that reveal the structural homologies at
the experiential level of both historical and contemporary colonial subjects.
90 Through a historical ethnography of the somatic legacies of colonialism, this
essay resituates listening within the bodies of specifically socially located
Gibraltarian men, and within the material relations of force productive of how
they listen to their social world.
5
AQ2 Listening via listening about listening AQ3
95 Not surprisingly, given the visiocentric foundations of American social scientific
objectivity (Bordo 1987), studying listening historically and ethnographically
requires a recalibration of the entire research apparatus. Despite the emphasis
placed on intersubjective moments of participant observation, ethnographers
are mostly trained to ask questions and to speak for individuals. H. Russell
100 Bernards Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology, a canonical work of biblical
proportions in the field of cultural anthropology, reflects the dimensions of this
problem: in his chapter on participant observation, attention is given to using
this method to formulate sensible questions in the native language (p. 150),
while he argues that participant observation gives you an intuitive understand-
105 ing of whats going on in a culture, and allows you to speak with confidence
about the meaning of data.
6
The intersubjective potentialities of participant
observation and ethnography are elided by the emphasis on and anxiety about
being able to speak. Historians are not much different, often ventriloquizing the
ghosts of the past without attempting to understand the subject positions of
110 those figures that left behind traces of their worldly perception (Startt and Sloan
1989, Park and Pooley 2008). As I began to write a history of listening, I was
confronted by these methodological limitations, along with many others that
were based on both method and location in Gibraltar. I found solutions to these
two problems by transcending the false dichotomy between theory and method,
115 applying what I had discovered about the always embeddedness of listening to
the sociological apparatus itself namely, the research process.
NOI SE: A HI STORI CAL ETHNOGRAPHY 3
My dialectical conceptualization of method and theory is born out of
feminist and postcolonial iterations of practice theory (Ortner 1989, Moi 1991,
Stabile 2000, Go 2013). Developed out of the work of French sociologist Pierre
120 Bourdieu, practice theory has focused on rendering symbolic forms of violence
and their material effects audible, particularly by uncovering the history of the
dehistoricization of dispositions (habitus
7
), and recognizing that practices are the
enunciation of habitus generated out of competing social positions within
various cultural fields. Bourdieus sociology is dialectical through and through.
125 At the analytic level, there exists a dialectic relationship between the synchronic
and diachronic dimensions of symbolic violence. At the practical level, there
exists a dialectic relationship between theory and methodology, as concepts like
habitus and symbolic violence not only describe situations but also orient the
researcher to research subjects and the things they report in a particular way; in
130 other words, the concepts of theory are intended to produce a particular
disposition towards the research process. And finally, at the level of execution,
if social scientists are to actually understand the disposition of research
informants, there must exist a dialectical relationship in intersubjective form
between the researcher and the researched. As Bourdieu writes of listening in
135 his collected volume on suffering under neoliberalism in the French housing
projects:
In effect, it combines a total availability to the person being questioned,
submission to the singularity of a particular life history which can lead, by a
kind of more or less controlled imitation, to adopting the interviewees language,
140 views, feelings, and thoughts with methodical construction, founded on the
knowledge of the objective conditions common to an entire social category.
(Bourdieu 1999)
This last instance constitutes what I call listening about listening: cultivating
intersubjective moments when the social biographies of researcher and
145 researched empathetically resonate, enabling the researcher to listen through
the ears of a particular Gibraltarian individual while analysing with the mind of
the researcher.
Listening via listening about listening, then, refers to those intersubjective
moments that make it possible for me to listen to Gibraltar outside of the
150 interview in a way that is empathetic to the biographically situated ways
Gibraltarian men listen to the world as a culmination of social forces; listening
via listening about listening means constructing and listening through a
masculine Gibraltarian standpoint that is constantly negotiating social position
within colonial matrices of gender, race and class.
8
I have learned to do this
155 through 14 months of ethnographic research in Gibraltar over the course of
5 years. Doing so has allowed me to situate Gibraltarian informants listening
practices within social histories throughout this dissertation, and comment on
the perception of noise from Gibraltarian mens standpoint. From this
4 CULTURAL STUDI ES
experience, I have learned that it is in the disjunctures between my sociological
160 and analytical ear and the ears of Gibraltarian men that provide the most insight
into the ways in which listening is situated within various fields of power
constrained by the maintenance and operationalization of British colonialism.
While Bourdieu primarily draws on an intersubjective approach to
understanding the subjectivity of contemporary participants, I have also
165 deployed this approach in thinking historically about listening. In reading the
documents left by colonial officials, I have also tried to understand and embody
the sonic world they themselves produced. I have done so through close
readings of archival documents as hidden transcripts (Glenn 2002, Scott
2008), examining documents written by historical actors for their own
170 concealed understandings of sound: we can still hear the echoes of those
social orders and begin to notice how people created and maintained ranked
points of contact with their communities and nations, across divides of
ethnicity, race, gender, and class (Rath 2003). Doing so has revealed
the extent of the homologies between my research subjects and the colonial
175 officials both English and Gibraltarian that came before them. In turn,
understanding these homologies has led me to understanding the ways in which
listening continues to be entangled with the maintenance of empire through the
maintenance of Gibraltarian men listening like British men. Listening via
listening about listening, then, acts retroactively upon the past, disclosing
180 aspects and moments of it hitherto misapprehended. The past appears in a
different light, and hence the process whereby the past became the present also
takes on another aspect (Lefebvre 1991) listening via listening about listening
is a pathway to a history of listeners listening historically, and allows me to
understand the common origin of the structural homologies from wherein
185 English colonial administrators and Gibraltarian men listened to the social
world.
In studying urban noise as a forever recursive cultural-made-legal-made-
cultural category, I explored multiple files that described noise complaints and
the official and unofficial responses made by those in power. I was particularly
190 drawn to one individual, colonial postmaster H.G. Jessop, whose letters
reference noise and sound multiple times as a problem in Gibraltar. For reasons
I make more clear below, I conceptualize Jessop as an epistemic individual of
history: an individual that stands as an avatar for a particular way of being in,
knowing of, and engaging with the world (Bourdieu 1988); a personification of
195 social structures that capture the trajectory, volume, and structure of different
social positions within the field of cultural production and perception. Tracing
H.G. Jessops documents and history involved engaging not simply with the
archive, but locating coroners records and an interview with his final remaining
employee whom I met by serendipitous interaction with his nephew at the
200 Gibraltar archives. In this documentary history, again, I sought to understand
NOI SE: A HI STORI CAL ETHNOGRAPHY 5
the relationship between sound and bodies that went assumed in Jessops telling
of the world (Attali 1985, Corbin 1998, Smith 2001).
This methodological manoeuvre was born out of necessity as much as it was
a theoretical decision. The Gibraltar Archives exist in a state of development,
205 and were not originally intended to be a collection available to researchers. In
its current state, the archives are primarily a home to the bureaucratic files of
measurement, those documents that calculate the state into existence (Cohn
1996, Dirks 2002). These documents, however, are organized in ways that are
not conducive to research and verge on disorganized (Archer 2006): in some
210 places, documents that span over 300 years are organized by year, in others
alphabetical order of title of the document, others by the broad title of their
producer (e.g. Admiral). As such, the archive is both severely lacking in terms
of its collections of historical recounts of quotidian life, except in few cases like
that of Jessop, and those accounts that do existence are hidden behind the faade
215 of the impenetrable organizational chaos of the Gibraltar Government Archive.
Therefore, one limitation of the work that follows is a foregrounding of
theoretical points that rely on a limited number of very potent documents and
memories, interviews and archival documentary.
The Gibraltarian history of noise
220
No s I am not the environmentalist type of person, but [the planes]
does cause agro to a lot of people. But as [Chris] said if you go against the
Tornadoes being here, and especially now, you seem to be anti-British,
which I am not.
225 Id rather have the planes than the sodding Spanish fair which starts soon
and the sloppy noise it brings with it.
Noise, as a cultural category, is defined as a disruptive experience in the
relationship between bodies and technology. As the first of the above quotes
demonstrates, a critique of the Tornadoes was a critique of the British a
230 critique of the natural relationship between sound, bodies and the body
politic. In the second quote, it is important to note the racialized articulation of
sloppy and noise within the context of an annual fair critiqued by some
Gibraltarian men, and loved by others, for its promotion of promiscuity.
Sloppy is a local pejorative used to refer to the Spanish, whom British
235 individuals (Gibraltarians and English alike) believe to be disorganized and
unclean by virtue of having darker skin.
9
Historically, this was a reference used
by English elites to refer to the darker skin of the Gibraltarian multinational
labour force, and associated with the dirtyness of urban poverty and the
working class. It is now applied to the Spanish in much the same tenor, with the
240 added connotation that they are undeserving of social space and social care as
invading immigrants. In the context of the fair, sloppy is articulated to colonial
6 CULTURAL STUDI ES
trope that brown, Spanish men use carnivalesque events to target white women
for sexual sport, or out of spite for white men, and as a result spread sexual
disease itself propagated through the Gibraltar Chronicles yearly report that
245 the British consulate has declared Spain as the site of the highest number of
rapes of British tourists, without ever providing actual numbers (e.g. Concern
Over Rape Cases Abroad, 19 July 2013).
As these examples reiterate, noise does not have a universal meaning. In
what follows, I situate noise historically within a British auditory regime (Lacey
250 2000, 2013, Sterne 2003) that arose out of class antagonisms in Gibraltar.
Examining noise within its historical social and legal deployment, as well as
within a wider, post-1942 history of making Gibraltar a British colony through
listening, I explore a colonial project organized around developing cultural
technologies for the subjugation of men, who would then do the colonial work
255 of subjugating women. Indeed, this is the way in which colonialism continues to
function in Gibraltar today, employing a privileged set of individuals marked by
gender (male) at the murky interstices of racialized nationality (British) and
class (service class and capitalists) to reproduce the states social division of
labour symbolically through interpersonal relationships (Bourdieu 1979,
260 2012).
10
Following the War of Spanish Succession, the Treaty of Utrecht made
Gibraltar part of the British Empire. Neither a source of extensive raw materials
nor a reservoir for labour, Gibraltars value to the Empire has been as a
strategic location. The British valued Gibraltar as a British space in order to
265 legitimate Englands control over parts of the Mediterranean (Archer 2006).
There is a heavy-handed attempt to construct Gibraltars Britishness throughout
the colonys history, notably beginning in 1704 with the mythology of Gibraltar
being found virtually empty when received by the English Spanish residents
had fled north into San Roque during the invasion. In their place, a
270 multinational, polyvocal diasporic peasant labour force Maltese, Genoese,
Spanish, Moroccan, Indian dependent on their respective national homelands
for financial support, was assembled to meet the labour needs of a British elite
(Finlayson 1996). These families would remain in Gibraltar as labourers until
1939. In 1939, the multinational labour force occupying Gibraltar was
275 evacuated to London and Jamaica, not to be repatriated until 1944.
Repatriation was accompanied by the introduction of state-mandated social
programmes (Gold 2012), which helped to produce British Gibraltarian citizens
and subjects through a reorganization of the sensorium. Concerned that a
Gibraltarian nation had arisen from the collective experience of exile, and
280 fearful that an autonomous Gibraltarian culture would jeopardize British claims
to strategic space on the Iberian peninsula, the British state began re-fashioning
Gibraltarians and Gibraltar into a replica and microcosm of British society
(Archer 2006), replete with normative British senses of space and sound, and
new oppressive attitudes towards women, migrants and lower working classes
NOI SE: A HI STORI CAL ETHNOGRAPHY 7
285 (Peake 2012). This context helped to generate the legal regulation of noise qua
mass media that coercively and authoritatively constituted the social order in
the interests of elite, English men. It did so by privileging both their definition
of proper listening habits and their sense of trespass when the sonic traces of the
lower class invaded their domestic space (MacKinnon 1989) a disposition that
290 embedded in the way Gibraltarian men listen today.
How constables and officers recorded early noise complaints in Gibraltar
clearly reveals the emergence of a somatic colonialism embedded in definitions
of noise. Gibraltars first recorded complaint under the legal designation noise
is dated 23 June 1941, 1:25 am.
11
Using the category noise in the police logs
295 to describe one transgression, Constable TC Benady reported a complaint
made by Mr Hassan, Barrister at law regarding a wireless playing at a very high
tone probably John Balloquin Barker of Main Street. Barker was an
immigrant who stayed in Gibraltar after evacuation as part of an all male labour
force. This labour force performed manual labour roles in order to reduce the
300 number of British troops needed to maintain the daily operations of the
Garrison.
12
Importantly, this was not the first complaint about a radio,
13
but
rather the earliest recorded complaint about noise filed as such. This is
significant in that police reports regarding sound often fell within the bounds of
the interpersonal context productive of sound: shouting was charged violence,
305 drunken revelry resulted in a citation of public indecency, unnecessary car
hooting was considered a traffic violation. Here, a violation categorized as
noise indicates a historical moment and social trespass where sound is
separated from its physiological source and the actions of an individual: the
enforcement of noise ordinances is not against a Gibraltarian man playing music
310 or having a tussle, but a man controlling a device that defies the definition of
private property and domestic separation. Noise ordinances, then, were about
policing domestic technology uses, and the experience and definition of noise
reflected exactly that.
Technologies of sound that transcended the domestic sphere only became
315 policed once access was somewhat democratized in Gibraltar. Prior to 1935,
the ownership of wireless radios was illegal, given the possibility that spies
could use radios to intercept sensitive government information from telegraphs
using the radio. After 1935, with the shift to mainly cable lines for intelligence,
Gibraltars residents were allowed to pay for a radio licence to listen to the
320 British Broadcasting Companies (1936) daily programming, which included
news and entertainment.
14
The licence fee, coupled with the high price of
radio AQ5 s and the lack of interest in British affairs amongst the diasporic labour
force limited radio use to elite British citizens in Gibraltar. There was neither a
noise ordinance nor archival evidence of the policing of mass media technology
325 uses by the states actors prior to the 1940s.
Following the post-war repatriation, Gibraltarian men were encouraged to
become interested in claiming British identities. This, coupled with a decline in
8 CULTURAL STUDI ES
the cost of radios due to transformations in tube production and international
European political economy, and facilitated by an influx of higher-waged jobs,
330 resulted in rapid growth in wireless ownership among Gibraltarian men
throughout the colony. As a 1949 confidential circular signed by colonial
governor Sir Ralph Eastwood states, radio programming from the British
Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) addressed Gibraltarians as British subjects,
which was all the more important for social progress (Box 1949/32).
15
The
335 emphasis on public awareness in the entirety of the British Empire as a form of
social capital the informational sign par excellence of British masculinity for
English and non-English alike pushed Gibraltarian men of the rising middle
class into using wages to purchase radio equipment in order to participate in a
imagined British community (Lacey 2013).
16
340 It was along with this growth in radio ownership that noise complaints
became a regular feature of police occurrence logs in Gibraltar. Constable
Mendez, for example, appears multiple times in the police occurrence logs
from 1943 to 1947, and was by far the most engaged in the legal enforcement
of noise codes up until 1955. An overwhelming majority of complaints
345 documented within the occurrence log are made by English elites regarding the
wireless use of Gibraltarian working class men during evening hours. On 3
January 1944, 2:10 am, Mendez reported having engaged with a Driver W.B.
Stocking to turn down his radio in the late hours. On 1 August 1944, 5 am,
Mendez reported having been approached by Dr Deale of Castle Road,
350 complaining about a radio located on the opposite side of the divider that
separated the elite homes from the crammed apartments of Gibraltarians. On
25 August 1944, 2:30 am, Mendez reports having approached Joseph Pincho
and A. Adamso GBN (meaning Gibraltarian) and telling them to turn down
their wireless at 10:50 pm. In each of these cases, the suspect named in citation
355 is not of the British upper class, which would be designated either by ENG AQ6
following their name or by their social position (e.g. Dr or sir), but a member
of the rising Gibraltarian middle class; not English, but Gibraltarian. The
vectors in which noise complaints travelled, the very real economic and racial
division between complainer and complained about, thus reveal more than the
360 simple creation of a cultural category for new disembodied sound production
and technology use: while complaints about shouting (antisocial ordinance), car
hooting (traffic ordinance), and partying (public civility ordinances) spanned the
racialized nationalist spectrum of English (white), Gibraltarian (liminal), and
Spanish (brown) perpetrators, noise was primarily with few exceptions targeted
365 at the technology use of Gibraltarian men. Noise complaints and noise
ordinance enforcement, then, were not about sound, but rather, disciplining
and policing racially charged, class-situated technology use particularly as it
was used by a lower, uncivilized class of men.
17
This is not to say that all was
harmonious amongst British elites with radios. In 1949, for example, multiple
370 editorials appear complaining about the sounds emerging from mansions,
NOI SE: A HI STORI CAL ETHNOGRAPHY 9
demonstrative of the cheapening moral standards during the upheaval of war
(Gibraltar Chronicle, 22 January) yet there exist no noise citations. Thus, I am
suggesting that while elites handled their discrepancies through social forms of
discipline, they expected the state a committee for managing the common
375 affairs of the whole bourgeoisie (Marx 1961) to handle the noise of the poor
and working class.
18
This raises a question about the relationship between law, enforcement, and
class. Noise ordinances were defined by the English colonial administration,
opaquely, as ordinances meant to control noise. Noise, however, was
380 ambiguous as a legal term, referring neither explicitly to radios nor to the
excessive sounds of the Second World War militarism both during and after the
war. It is important to remember that some of these noise complaints filed by
English elites occurred at the same time that the English military was blasting
tunnels in the Rock of Gibraltar, or testing munitions off the coast. Noise was
385 instead legally defined as mass media through the enforcement of noise
ordinances. And, this very ambiguity of the concept allowed it to function as a
cultural technology for dividing and segregating racialized nationalism along
class lines. Although noise is taken as given within the written law, sound only
becomes noise in so far as some official enforcer defines it as such. In saying,
390 this is noise, with the implicit assumption of what is not, he (the constable or
police officer) attaches the label to a particular set of sounds in this case, mass
media. Within the legal field, structured ways of differentiating between good
and bad sound were produced through regulations like noise ordinances, and
done so through structural homologies between upper class and lower class,
395 rich and poor, English and Gibraltarian. This homologous set of structures, in
turn, was applied to social struggles as a form of symbolic violence, wherein
Gibraltarian men are obliged to conceive of their mass media usage according to
the interpretations cultivated by the law.
Shifting back to the contemporary moment in which Brian complained
400 about the Spanish youth blaring their hi-fi in the street below his apartment, we
should remember Pierre Bourdieus argument about the somatic and historical
function of law:
Through the frameworks it imposes upon practices, the state institutes and
inculcates common symbolic forms of thought, statist forms of classifica-
405 tion the state thereby creates the conditions of an immediate
orchestration of habitus that is itself the foundation of a consensus on
this set of shared self-evidences constitutive of common sense. (Bour-
dieu 2000)
It was thus through the historical legal structuring of noise ordinances, and their
410 structuring of sonic phenomena in ways homologous to racialized nationalist
class antagonisms, that noise became the disruptive, aurally mediated relation-
ship between bodies and media technologies. Simultaneously, noise became a
1 0 CULTURAL STUDI ES
category experienced, evoked and deployed to make explicit the real and
embodied distinctions between economic classes (a division that is also deeply
415 racialized; Alexander and Halpern 2000). Law, noise, has become doxa: the
immediate agreement elicited by that which appears self-evident, transparently
normal, a realization of the norm so complete that the imposition of the norm
itself, as coercion, ceases to exist as such. That Gibraltarian men like Brian define
and experience noise as the product of brown, Spanish sloppies who do not
420 understand the proper use of radios and televisions is simply an embodied
transposition of the racialized nationalistic and class structure contained in the
early noise ordinance enforcements described above.
The juxtaposition of race and class hierarchies and the material social
relations these hierarchies generate are central to the enlistment of noise as a
425 category of distinction for enforcing specific uses of technology in Gibraltar.
However, a focus on class and the intersections of race and nationality only
provide a partial understanding of Gibraltarian mens experience of noise. The
complaints of British elites were always addressed to Gibraltarian men, the sole
purchasers of the radio, and often seen as a trespass against English colonial
430 officials British sense of masculinity, as evinced by the constant discourse of
gentlemans agreements, laws and behaviours in the archival record. While
the definition and engagement around noise may have been new to and directed
towards the multinational peasant labour force, upon historically becoming
Gibraltarians and hailed as quasi and/or aspirationally British, and the
435 diminishing English presence in Gibraltar, Gibraltarians adopted a long history
of English dispositions towards noise that had been around since the rise of
Victorian England and its systems of gendered sounds and gendered trespasses.
British masculine listening and the suicide of H.G. Jessop
Before English colonial officials encoded their way of listening into noise
440 ordinances in Gibraltar, the relationship between white elite masculine bodies,
urban sound and media and industrial technologies constitutive of a British
standpoint acoustemology was already engrained into the existence of
nineteenth-century English elite and working-class men. This acoustemology,
this way of listening particular to English men aspiring towards elite status,
445 defined sound emanating and transcending the private sphere as a threat to
ones private property a defining trait of bourgeois men being property
ownership. In 1893, Irish socialist, playwright and music critic George Bernard
Shaw wrote:
Let a short Act of Parliament be passed, placing all street musicians outside
450 the protection of the law: so that any citizen may assail them with stones,
sticks, knives, pistols, or bombs without incurring any penalties except,
of course, in the case of the instrument itself being injured: for Heaven
NOI SE: A HI STORI CAL ETHNOGRAPHY 11
forbid that I should advocate any disregard for the sacredness of property,
especially in the form of industrial capital! (1893, p. 47)
455 Historian John Picker (2003) situates Shaws annoyance within a historical
moment when middle-class professionals sought to distinguish themselves from
the working class by mimicking the listening habits and soundscape aesthetics of
the English elite. Shaw was unmistakably outside of this class of individuals.
Yet, ontology, being Irish and a writer, did not preclude Shaw from embodying
460 the sonic tastes of the English elite. Pierre Bourdieu (1984) makes this very
point, seeing in the structure of the social classes the basis of the systems of
classification which structure perception of the social world and designates the
objects of aesthetic enjoyment (pp. xiixiv). Shaws particular hatred of street
organs, which prompts his tirade, is constructed and maintained by the socially
465 dominant economic class, who use senses of proper sound to produce a social
distance between and distinction from other classes. In Shaws case, this
difference was between petit bourgeois professional artists and impoverished
and thus untalented street musicians. Aspiring to be ranked as industrious
intellectuals separate from and above the working class, professionals like
470 Shaw were forced to establish office spaces in their homes, and in turn protect
the sonic environment surrounding that space so as to protect the aesthetics of
professionalism, while also distancing themselves from the streets that were
themselves acoustically rich spaces for marginalized English communities (Miles
and Savage 2002, Stansell 2012). Through sound regulations reflective of the
475 aesthetic perceptions of English lawyers, professional middle-class men
protected the very silence that forced lawyers to establish offices away from
the domestic sphere and urban centres of nineteenth-century London.
Shaws complaints were part of a long-standing protest on the part of
English professionals that spanned the length of the industrial revolution. In
480 1864, for example, Charles Babbage listed 14 instruments of torture that he
predicted would cause the fall of society by rendering the middle class unable to
work (Picker 2003) by which he meant middle-class men. In Gibraltar and
elsewhere in the empire, the regulation of sound whether the hooting of
elites automobiles, or the sound of sailors playing jazz piano that poured into
485 the street from local pubs was always an extension of these 14 instruments of
torture. By 1944, though, the British men of Gibraltar had added a 15th
instrument of torture to the list: wireless radio.
One complaint on 8 August 1944 described the ways in which Dr Amatzi
was unable to concentrate on his evening learning because of the radio in the
490 distance. The 25th of September 1944 saw two similar complaints, one from a
lawyer and another from a gentleman regarding the inability to concentrate on
their own reading and listening. In all of these complaints, the language used to
describe noise is intrusion and violation. At a time when what distinguished
British and/or English from Gibraltarian was property ownership, the language
1 2 CULTURAL STUDI ES
495 of trespass is telling of the association of noise with a lower class form of
property violation. Silence, for these English property owners in Gibraltar, was
a natural right purchased with their property, which they expected to be
defended by the state through legal sanctions. In contradiction to this right of
men stood radio, with men engendering a torrent of lament over radios
500 allegedly flagrant debasement of the classical cannon and the denigration of
bourgeois listening follow[ing] in its wake (Erlmann 2010). Like domestic-
bound professionals in the late nineteenth-century protecting their home offices
from the sounds of poor musicians, English colonial officers in Gibraltar defined
themselves against the multinational labour force-turned-Gibraltarian through
505 the sonic quality of domestic lifestyle, using the legal weaponry of the noise
ordinance.
To elaborate this point more fully, and to connect to Gibraltarian mens
adoption of a British way of listening, I turn to the life of H.G. Jessop, the
colonial postmaster during the early years of the Second World War. Jessop,
510 Maltese and Italian, became colonial postmaster on 23 January 1940, coming to
Gibraltar from Malta after the First World War according to those who knew
him (Jessops files are currently closed). Throughout his documentary presence
in letters and memos throughout the Gibraltar archives, nothing is more
prevalent than his repeated struggles with and against the noise of telegraphy. In
515 an archive focused on bureaucratic measurements of land and population, these
files are quite unique.
In 1942, Jessop committed suicide in his postmaster quarters, citing noise
as the primary motivation to ending his life. Jessops suicide occurs at an
ideological intersection of gendered British ideas of private property ownership
520 and definitions of noise as sounds external to the states functioning. Jessop,
here, functions as an epistemic individual of history: his actions are instances and
particular locations of social position, rather than purely matters of personal
biography (Bourdieu 1988). The parts of Jessops biography directly affected by
noise, namely his suicide and the documentation of his struggles with the sounds
525 of his post office quarters, make legible the cultural politics and material effects
of coloniality and listening.
When Jessop arrived in Gibraltar, he was housed in the post office quarters
located on the second floor of the post office. As of 1941, the post office
became the home of the privatized Imperial Wireless Telegraph Company.
530 Following the remodelling necessary to host imperial wireless, the postmasters
quarters were located on the second floor above the key operators, and around
the corner from transmitters and motors necessary to send and receive
telegraphy. This new proximity to electronic noise radically changed Jessops
sense of private property ownership and challenged his sense of masculinity.
535 Here I cite at length a list of complaints from Jessop to the colonial secretary in
1941 regarding the noise of telegraphy:
NOI SE: A HI STORI CAL ETHNOGRAPHY 13
noises inseparable from an instrument room, i.e. the wiring motor drive
transmitters and the manipulation of Morse keys. These are always a source of
disturbance when work requiring quietude and concentration or thought has to be
540 undertaken. None familiar with telegraph practice would entertain a
proposal which would place an Administrative Officials private room in
juxtaposition with a noisy instrument room occupied by personnel over
whom he could exercise no control. (emphasis added)
Here, it is the sound of private machines that is noise, compromising the ideal
545 conditions for conducting the labour central to an English sense of masculinity
previously examined. Meanwhile, the introduction of automobile transportation
on Main Street by the British military, the blasting of new transport tunnels
throughout the Rock of Gibraltar to enable automobile travel, the munitions
training at mid-Rock conducted by various navy, air force and army platoons
550 and the armament testing of navy rigs in the bay all contributed to a new
megaindustrial soundscape that is notably absent in Jessops 24 intraoffice
documents complaining about noise, in addition to the final complaint he made
in his suicide note.
Jessop committed suicide in his post office quarters in 1942. He was found
555 by Alfred Perez, one of the few Gibraltarians left behind during the war, then a
junior clerk at the post office. Perez, 98, reflects on Jessops death in an
interview in August 2012:
You know, Im the one who found him there, in the quarters. The
quartermaster was a big guy, and couldnt get Jessops door open. So he
560 had me climb the wall to look in the skylight to see what was going on.
When I got up there, I saw him lying there with his gun. I knew what had
happened. So, I crawled down the skylight, and opened the door for the
quartermaster. He knew Jessop had killed himself. And we all knew it
wasnt far. Jessop was disturbed by the constant noise of telegraphy. He
565 couldnt sleep. If it wasnt wireless telegraphy, it was wireless radio. Main
Street was a noisy place then, with a lot of restaurants getting radios and
cars squawking. We found a note. Gave it a quick read before the coroner
showed up, and then pretended we didnt even see it. You know what?
Jessop was still complaining about that damn noise. I cant tell you what it
570 said exactly, but he did say he was tired of the noise, and this is the only
way to find some peace and quiet in this town He complained in his
note that no one gave him the respect that an officer and gentleman
deserved. They didnt respect his home, always intruding with their
noise Ive lived here for all my life, except for a quick escape to London,
575 and, you know what? He was right. When it gets quiet, Ill know
Im dead.
1 4 CULTURAL STUDI ES
Perezs testimonial fills an archival gap in Jessops suicide, as Jessops military
files including his suicide letter remain sealed. Between his suicide note and
his letters in the archives, Jessops complaints reveal more than just the
580 pervasiveness of noise as it was defined against sound; Jessops complaints also
pointed to the ways in which noise was framed as a compromise to private
property.
Yet, Jessop, like most post-war Gibraltarian men, is a distant cultural
inheritor of this English standpoint acoustemology. Unlike other colleagues in
585 the colonial administration, and much like the multinational labour force that
would become Gibraltarians, Jessop was a Mediterranean immigrant in
Gibraltar via the British military. Born in Italy, he arrived in Gibraltar from
Malta after the First World War.
19
As a colonial official, Jessop existed in a
social position that required, in the social sense, that he embody the disposition
590 structured by the field of colonial administration: that of English masculinity.
And, by adopting this form of British masculinity, he believed himself to have
gained access to the privileged symbolic and material universe of English
officers, most notably the power to control the soundscape of residential and
work territory. When telegraphy transcended the boundaries of the domestic
595 sphere, when it challenged Jessops sense of property ownership, it became
noise just as street music had for English elites during the nineteenth century.
Jessop hints at the ways in which non-English, and in essence, by British
standards, non-white, Mediterranean men move into British masculinity
through listening. Just as Jessop complains about his Spanish janitors and his
600 working-class telegraphy operators as chattering messengers, cleaners, and
staff in rooms adjacent to the colonial postmaster,
20
so too do Gibraltarian men
complain about the media habits of Spanish as noise. Jessop is an epistemic
individual in that, in order to become British, and in the process of becoming
British, he adopts the English elite male disposition towards sound that was
605 product and productive of the sociolegal definition of noise as mass media
violations of private domestic property. In doing so, Jessop and Gibraltarian
men alike, attempt to collect on the social capital guaranteed to English men,
while also reproducing self-damaging colonial hierarchies of race, gender and
class.
610 Yet, the state did not agree with Jessops declaration of telegraphy as noise,
and did not intervene on his behalf. We do not believe the sound is unbearable,
the colonial secretary writes on 17 February 1942. In this gesture, Jessop was
denied both solace and a sense of British masculinity. The strategies aimed at
transforming the basic dispositions into a system of aesthetic principles,
615 objective differences into elective distinctions are in fact reserved for
members of the dominant class (Bourdieu 1984). Jessops suicide occurs
shortly thereafter, at a moment when his sense of British masculinity qua
property ownership was challenged by the states denial of his right to the
NOI SE: A HI STORI CAL ETHNOGRAPHY 15
silence that set apart English elite domestic spaces from those of the lower,
620 working-class Mediterraneans-turned-Gibraltarians.
From a structural perspective, Jessops death occurs at a fascinating
moment when the state loses its dominance over the soundscape of Gibraltar.
Before mass media, the only mechanical and electrical sounds louder than
thunder belonged to the state. Mass media, however, democratized disruption
625 and symbolic forms of intrusion. The keys of the telegraphy industry, for
Jessop, were not the product of the state. Yet, from the states perspective, for
whom the privatized telegraphy industry had become a site of profit, the noise
of private radios trespassing into elite homes warranted police and government
intervention, the noise of the hybrid publicprivate telegraphy trespassing into a
630 colonial employees quarters did not.
This points to one of the defining characteristics of the state: Bourdieu
argues that a state is defined by its monopoly over and ability to cultivate
symbolic forms of violence such as sonic intrusion. As mass media challenged
the states monopoly (the state, again, being constituted through the affinity
635 networks of elites), the state begins to use the category of noise to separate
those forms of symbolic violence committed by individuals from its own sonic
intrusions. Where English colonial officers and military personnel had been
disciplined into a reverent relationship with the industrial soundscape of war
qua the state, giving the state a pass to enter homes sonically, the emergence of
640 radio and mass media created new frictions in the sense of private ownership a
sense that constituted the authority of English men. When Leut. Berret of the
Kings Regiment complains to the state in 1943 that the radio of McManuel
Gordon (GBN) is too loud, he reproduces not only his own social position as an
English man with a right to control his domestic soundscape, but he also
645 legitimates the states monopoly over symbolic violence qua sound versus noise.
This monopoly, as the next section illustrates, is embodied by Gibraltarian men
through their sense of listening, through the legal and social policing of mass
media use under the rubric of noise, and through Gibraltarians resistance to
policing the soundscape of the state in contemporary Gibraltar.
650 Historical contradiction, contemporary conjuncture
For the two and a half weeks in July that the Royal Air Force practiced its
runway drills, intense debates around the fight jets sonic presence occurred,
often with tourists and Spanish complaining about the incredible noise and
Gibraltarians defending their presence. Simultaneously, while this training takes
655 place, Gibraltarians protested private and commercial stereos and hi-fi in public
forums and newspapers.
The noise level at Ocean Village is extreme. Beyond tolerable. And Ive
been told there is nothing the Police can do about it because they have a
1 6 CULTURAL STUDI ES
permit, and it will go on until 6 am, but they will move inside at 11 pm.
660 Yes, they have a permit to have the function there, but surely there should
be some control over noise levels! The environmental agency went down
there and asked them to turn it down a bit and apparently they refused.
This is not a one-off. This will go on all summer. I feel very sorry for
elderly residents and babies too.
665 This complaint was posted by a man living at the seaside resort of Ocean
Village, located less than a half kilometre from the end of the Gibraltarian
airport runway where Tornadoes had launched full thruster starting each
weekday at 6 am. And, the complaint was made in the early afternoon hours,
while jets continued to take off and land until 5 pm.
670 A contemporary noise pollution crisis looms heavy in the headlines of the
past five years, but they solely and aggressively focus on the mass media use of a
mythologized Spanish youth. RGP Seek to silence Hi-Fi Fiends (20 May 2010), Govt
to clamp down on Ocean Village Noise Nuisance (2010), Noise Nabbers (2010)
these were the headlines the first summer during which I experienced the jet
675 takeoffs in Gibraltar. Yet, each one focuses purely on the problems caused by
mass media. In an interview in 2010, Anita, a Gibraltarian woman living above
a shop on Main Street complained, If the Spanish shouting during the day isnt
bad enough, at night I have to put up with the noise of 50 televisions of my
neighbours, the noise of the Karaoke nights throughout Main Street, and then
680 the kids listening to their hi-fi as loud as possible when they drive past. The
government must do something about this noise! In many ways, these concerns
over noise have continued, if not been exacerbated by the rising nationalistic
tensions between Gibraltar and Spain following the EU collapse in 2011. As
Spain increases the frequency and weight of its claims to Gibraltar under UN
685 Decolonization Regulations, and Spaniards in San Roque and La Linea engage in
political acts to signify Spains claim to Gibraltar, Gibraltarians have called for a
greater amount of public civility, most notably through noise control aimed
explicitly at mass media. In an interview in 2012, Anita further discussed the
ways that noise had compromised the quality of life in Gibraltar:
690 Spanish youth, they come across the border. They smuggle cigarettes all
day- back and forth. And then they have the nerve to come here at night.
To come and go to our nightclubs that just blare that bass, and drive
around our streets, to sit around our beaches, blaring that noise. We need
laws about HiFis. People complain about the jets? Theyre here to protect
695 us and you can barely notice them after a few days. What about these
Spanish HiFis? Theyre always here. Violating my home, the home my
husband and I paid dearly for.
NOI SE: A HI STORI CAL ETHNOGRAPHY 17
Anitas relationship to the sounds of hi-fi operates on relationships between
sounds and bodies similar to those established by English colonial officers
700 through 1940s noise complaints. This relationship is non-conscious, lurking in
the habitus, the disposition that is wholly product and in part productive of class
as a set of tastes and practices (Thompson 1953, Bourdieu 1984).
The ways in which Gibraltarians listen to the social world today is
intimately connected to the historical definition of noise. Those practices that
705 define what is experienced as noise and what is not are mobilized, knowingly or
unknowingly, to benefit those elites in whose favour noise ordinances
functioned during the 1940s. In this way, listening is not only contingent
upon the material gender, race and class antagonisms constitutive of British
colonial control (Bourdieu 1976 AQ7 ), but also active in the reproduction of those
710 antagonisms at the contemporary moment. Listening thus defines noise in a way
that reproduces the colonial and economic power of a Gibraltarian and British
neoliberal state. In this instance, however, a key element differentiates Anitas
complaint from the historical occurrence: no longer is it British elite men
complaining about Gibraltarian men, but a Gibraltarian woman complaining
715 about the noise of an ambiguously gendered the Spanish. For both Gibraltarian
men and women, who adopt the British way of listening encoded in law by
elite, English male officers, Spanish becomes a vehicle upon which race and
class are conflated: all Spanish in Gibraltar are by assumption poor migrant
labourers, a distinction used to confirm on Gibraltarians their status as British,
720 thereby producing a distinction between Gibraltarian and Spanish.
21
In the post-
war years, the adoption of Britishness as the primary modality of being produces
in Gibraltarians a British way of listening that defines noise as the site for
producing a distinction between British and not British.
22
This is all to say that
the ways in which Anita, and many Gibraltarians, listen to space is produced by
725 the nonconscious masculine disposition that arises out of distinctions of class
positioning, historically connected to the English colonial production of noise
ordinances. Anita assumes a masculine disposition towards sound, much as
Gibraltarian men were encouraged to assume a British disposition towards
sound after repatriation. Through orientations towards noise, through listening,
730 Gibraltarians make a non-conscious double move against a mythologized
Spanish: first they make a distinction between Gibraltarian and Spanish by
adopting a British acoustemology wherein Britishness is sound and Spanish are
equated with noise; and second they consciously adopt British attitudes towards
class hierarchies by which the lower class the Spanish become the site from
735 whence all social ills arise. As for the working classes, Pierre Bourdieu
remarks on the organization of French taste along class lines, perhaps their sole
function in the system of aesthetic positions is to serve as a foil, a negative
reference point, in relation to which all aesthetics define themselves by
successive negations (Bourdieu 1984).
1 8 CULTURAL STUDI ES
740 The soundscape of the state continues to be notably absent in contemporary
working-class debates and complaints about noise. In 2010, for example, there
were over 20 articles (including letters to the editors) regarding noise in the
summer months, declining as the winter months approached. It is important to
note that all of the articles nod to a common perpetrator: a fiend that is,
745 stereotypically, the Spanish. Occurring alongside these complaints, the
summer months contain multiple state-sanctioned aural phenomena: construc-
tion projects typically begin in May, Infantry training in June, Air Force training
in July, navy munitions tests in August. As the amount of sound produced by
the state increases, so too does the state increase pressure on noise ordinances
750 pertaining to mass media usage against a mythologized (implicitly Spanish)
Other. News coverage along with police initiatives, and perhaps the grumbling
of residents as they unknowingly project their unhappiness with the sound of the
state into the noise of the Spanish, converges to make it appear that the state is
engaging with problems of noise pollution while disavowing its own
755 responsibility for noise production. Adopting a disposition towards sound
that is historically rooted, Gibraltarians unknowingly participate in this process.
And it is in this occurrence that listening becomes a technology: through the
racialized class antagonisms that are product and productive of noise, the state is
able to re-enforce the division of labour through a symbolic, and not direct,
760 mode of control.
Through this definition of noise, the state abdicates itself of any
responsibility for the crises of noise pollution in Gibraltar. If there is an
elephant in the environmental room regarding conditions of noise pollution,
then it is with the state whose repeated infrastructural projects for making
765 Gibraltar more attractive to large investors and wealthy vacationers produce an
abundance of summer noise. As Catherine MacKinnon (1989) says of the
patriarchal state, the state protects male power by appearing to prohibit its
excesses when necessary to its normalization (p. 167). The states neutrality
in the production of noise, and simultaneous vested historical interest in
770 protecting the property rights of elite men, functions much to the same extent
in the production of economic capital without blame. RGP nabs HiFi Fiends is a
story about a proactive government trying to better the lives of Gibraltarians by
reducing the loud sounds of stereos in cars; Govt to clamp down on Ocean Village
Noise Nuisance describes the state as concerned with how the late night
775 thumping of dance club bass is detrimental to the sleep health of Gibraltarians:
but, what of the new electrical power plants being built to support the building
and sale of private properties on recently de-accessioned parts of the Rock of
Gibraltar? What of the noise produced by the construction of a new, joint-
Spanish international airport that will drastically increase the tourism capital of
780 Gibraltar? The infrastructural projects that go uncritiqued by Gibraltarians,
because of the disposition towards a historically and socially particular definition
of noise pollution, serve to produce greater amounts of wealth for English elites
NOI SE: A HI STORI CAL ETHNOGRAPHY 19
and a new European investor culture. Simultaneously, in all of the noise
policed through noise ordinance enforcement, legal and social action against
785 noise is defined as the protection of quality of life against a vaguely and
abstractly defined Spanish intruder, one who, at the end of the day, requires
state intervention in the name of British values and rights. In short, preserving
the quality of life from noise becomes the legitimization of British sovereignty,
from which European and English elites benefit (Buck-Morss 2002) and through
790 which the soundscape of the state is pardoned. Noise as dialectic legal and
experiential category serves the same function, albeit in historically different
ways, in the 2010s as it did in the 1940s.
Conclusion
Jacques Attali (1985) describes the history of sound as a succession of orders
795 (in other words, differences) done violence by noises (in other words, the
calling into question of differences) that are prophetic because they create new
orders, unstable, and changing (p. 19). For English colonial administrators and
British Gibraltarian politicians, noise challenges the social order, and thus, as
Attali notes, the state seeks to control noise, silence it, or make it so ever-
800 present as to be banal. This essay attempts to provincialize Attalis claim in
Gibraltar, where Gibraltarian mens experience of noise is indicative of a
historical way of listening that is bound up in juxtaposed gender, racial, and
class antagonisms, themselves historically overdetermined by Gibraltars history
of colonialism. I use listening and noise, then, to reveal what Walter Mignolo
805 (2000) has called colonialisms most damaging and enduring effect: coloniality,
or the organization of practice, sensorium and epistemology such that the
components of subjectivity manage the empires interest after the colonial
administrators have long left.
How Gibraltarians understand and define noise is product of a post-Second
810 World War system of colonial legal institutions that defined noise as only the
disembodied voices of mass media and technology, particularly through law and
law enforcement engineered in the interest of English officers and elite. More
broadly, however, I have tried to argue that noise is indicative of a disposition
towards particular sounds, bodies and technologies a way of listening
815 organized by social antagonisms. While Gibraltarian men experience noise
through a cultural codex of experience shaped by scientific knowledge and
technological discourses, it is done so through a legal structure emergent from
the organization of the relationship between sounds and working class
Orientalized bodies also central in the definition and negotiation of British
820 colonial masculinity amongst English and Gibraltarians alike following the
Second World War. This legal structure, by defining noise as mass media, and
generating a homologous way of listening, abdicates the state of responsibilities
for noise pollution; it is in this sense that the British way of listening to noise is
2 0 CULTURAL STUDI ES
productive of colonial relations. Noise thus functions as a site whereby
825 Gibraltarians reproduce gendered colonial relations of force conducive to state
control, while the state uses these material relations of force to dodge noise
regulations and more quickly generate economic capital for British investors.
This cultural materialist approach to listening forces scholars to account for
the abstractions deployed in the process of historicizing. How is it possible to
830 get a full sense of the multiplicity of listening practices when the dominant
historiography uses concrete histories of technologies to anchor abstractions
about disembodied listening? Left to be answered are questions regarding whose
listening? To what? How? With what sociopolitical consequences? These
questions point to a necessary historiographical shift towards my attempt to
835 write histories of [historical] listeners listening historically a task that can be
located in some popular music studies (e.g. Stoever-Ackerman 2010), but
otherwise absent in the dominant canons of sound studies. Given concerns that
sound studies has become too parochial, or in need of dewesternizing, or at
very least must become aware of its own colonial footprint, this cultural
840 materialist approach means paying attention to the ways that the flows and
frictions of media imperialism are embedded in mechanic and embodied cultural
technologies differently across social strata; it means constructing new
genealogies and producing new histories wherein listening and technology
evolve alongside and through, and not outside or beyond, colonialism.
845 Acknowledgements
This research was made possible by a Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship
from the Social Science Research Council, material and intellectual support from the
Gibraltar Museum and Institute for Gibraltarian Studies, and travel/research grants
from the University of Oregon, School of Journalism & Communication and Center for
850 the Study of Women in Society. The project has grown substantially because of
collaborations in both SSRCs Mediated Futures seminar and the Sawyer Seminar in
Sound Studies. I am grateful to Carol Stabile and the editors and reviewers, who have
provided substantial feedback in developing the piece.
Notes
855 1 In line with ethnographic research ethics and Institutional Review Board
protocol, the names of interview subjects within this essay are replaced by
pseudonyms. Names found in archival documents whether in reference or
as author remain the same.
2 The soundscape of the state, at this historical junction, marks a bleeding
860 between the sounds of the state as it was traditionally theorized, and a new
NOI SE: A HI STORI CAL ETHNOGRAPHY 21
neoliberal state marked by state-contracted industries serving the interests of
wealthy, private individuals. That is, in the neoliberal moment, the
soundscape of the state, and the soundscape of privatized and/or divested
industry are indistinguishable to many Gibraltarians.
865 3 Online forums during the 2012 Jet tests reflects this contradiction: To the
jets, responses range from I barely notice them anymore people just look for
complaining (sic) to Shows our bond/unity with UK and makes me feel so
proud :) safe home lads :) and As long as they piss off the Spanish, they can
fly over all year long !!! (sic). In contrast, responses to the sounds of mass
870 media are best captured by newspaper article and editorial headlines: RGP
Seeks to Silence Hi-fi Fiends, Heavy Bass Makes Antisocial Atmosphere,
Karaoke: Live Music or Live Nuisance?
4 It was suggested that the metaphor of deafness be used here, as in the ways
in which Gibraltarian men embody a hypersensitivity to mass media qua
875 noise, and a deafness to the state. Indeed, R. Murray Schafer often refers to
urban citizens lack of response to the ill effects of industrial noise as a social
deafness, which he defines later on as a failure of humanity. And Charles
Hirschkind argues in his ethnography of listening in Egypt that the
interpretive grid fundamentalism provides deafens us to some of the
880 ways that the contemporary struggles of pious Muslims speak to our own
moral and political conundrums (p. 108). But such metaphors come at a
price: they equate deaf experience as a failure of intersubjectivity, as if
individuals with a spectrum of listening capabilities are incapable of love or
politics. In short, it dehumanizes individuals that live with deafness. In
885 Gibraltar, using the metaphor of deafness takes on an even weightier
historical legacy, with the state exiling young D/deaf women to the UK for
schooling, and ushering young D/deaf boys into the industrial labour force
in which they were known for their ability to make it through sustained
exposure to loud noises, despite their reports of pain and suffering. Thus, the
890 use of the socially deaf metaphor here would make me complicit in the very
colonial structure that I attempt to critique. My future research will be
examining the history of deaf coloniality in the Mediterranean, and the ways
in which British, Italian, and French colonial legacies have effected the
distribution of assistive technologies and programmes in the Mediterranean.
895 5 My concern is not, however, with media effects as it has been narrowly
defined by the quantitative paradigms of communication studies, but rather
with the consequences of mediatization: how the communicative construc-
tion of reality is manifested within certain media processes and how, in turn,
specific features of certain media have a contextualized consequence for the
900 overall process whereby sociocultural reality is constructed in and through
communication (Couldry and Hepp 2013).
6 In the best of colonialist traditions, Bernards research manual reads
not unlike the ethnographic manual of the US Militarys Human Terrains
2 2 CULTURAL STUDI ES
Project. [Participant Observation] involves establishing rapport in a new
905 community; learning to act so that people go about their business as usual
when you show up; and removing yourself everyday from cultural immersion
so you can intellectualize what youve learned, put it into perspective, and
write about it convincingly (p. 148). Rapport, and interpersonal relation-
ships in the field more generally, is a form of symbolic capital to be traded
910 for greater amounts of selectively available intelligence that will make our
reports more convincing. While Bernards book remains the standard in the
field of anthropology, I would advocate its full abandonment if cultural
anthropology continues to aspire to redressing its colonial legacies
(Bernard 1988).
915 7 For Bourdieu, habitus refers to systems of durable, transposable disposi-
tions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures,
that is as principles which generate and organize practices and representations
that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a
conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in
920 order to attain them (Bourdieu 1990).
8 Listening about listening also means recognizing the cultural nature of
listening as a practice rooted in embodied historical consciousness, meaning
that the ways in which I listen to urban space unreflectively is not how
Gibraltarians listen to urban space.
925 9 As Ian Jack wrote in 1988, To judge by their names, many if not most
Gibraltarians are as Spanish as any man or woman from Cadiz or Seville. And
yet they mock Spain. Echoing the tabloid xenophobia of the mother country
(dago and wop), they call Spaniards slops and sloppies. Every weekend
they drive out to the resorts of the Costa del Sol and then come home to
930 complain. Too many slops on the beach today, Conchita. Lets stay on the
Rock next weekend, Lus (Buford 1988, Murder, Granta).
10 According to Julian Go, and despite popular criticism by scholars like Edward
Said, Bourdieu had developed a theory of colonialism in tandem with the
practice theoretical approach. For Bourdieu, colonialism was a racialized
935 system of domination, backed by force, which restructures social relations
(Go 2013, p. 1). Further, Bourdieu himself suggest that colonialism is a
relationship of domination structured as a caste system a racial
segregation that made colonial society Manichean in form The function
of racism is none other than to provide a rationalization of the existing
940 state of affairs so as to make it appear to be lawfully instituted order
(Bourdieu 1961 AQ8 , p. 120, 132134). He continues later on that, the true basis
for the colonial order: the relation, backed by force, which allows for the
dominant caste to keep the dominated caste in a position of economic
inferiority (p. 146). Bourdieu extends this critique in later work to address
945 masculinity amongst the dominated caste of the colonized, showing the ways
NOI SE: A HI STORI CAL ETHNOGRAPHY 23
in which patriarchy itself functions as a field of relations within transforming
economic contexts (Bourdieu 2001).
11 Readers should recognize that the police occurrence logs only contain the
information reported by constables, and/or that potential other incidents were
950 not recorded. Yet, this occurrence is significant in that it is the first deployment
of the category of noise as a legal designation for an antisocial behaviour.
12 The degree to which essential civilian labour participation was volunteered
or coerced is hotly debated amongst Gibraltarians and historians alike.
13 Throughout, I use wireless and radio interchangeably wireless was the
955 historically specific term of the time, tied to the history of telegraphy.
14 BBC was funded through licence fees. In Gibraltar, this allowed the
government to monitor who owned what radios. The colonial administrator
also set the fee: numerous documents exist with individuals complaining
about the licencing fees being too high or outdated.
960 15 Circular, 1949, Floor 1, Year Files 32/1949, Gibraltar Government Archives.
16 Radio ownership, however, was not egalitarian: post-war concerns over the
proper place of British women (in opposition to Spanish women) and the
production of a British middle class dictated that Gibraltarian women remain
as unpaid domestic labourers, making their access to wireless radio dependent
965 on a paternal and/or romantic connection to working Gibraltarian men. It
was not uncommon, however, for Gibraltarian men to purchase separate
wireless systems for various rooms with the male listening space defined as
the parlour, the female space the kitchen.
17 Schizophonia has been used to describe sound that does not come directly
970 from its source (Schafer 1990). Like deafness, this is an able-ist metaphor
whereby all evil in the world is projected upon non-normative functioning
bodies. At the same time, however, I wish to avoid the Deleuzian trap of
glorifying schizophonia as a liberating formation, as well as proposing
deafness as a pathway to liberation the historical violence perpetrated by
975 the British state against the individuals with intellectual and hearing
impairments is enough to suggest that such an assertion would be
insubstantially materialist.
18 Popular critique of the state ala Foucault argues for conceptualizing the state
as a non-totality, a contingently linked assemblage of institutions which have
980 emerged over time in ad hoc response to political and social pressures a
collocation of often incompatible and conflicting institutions and apparatuses
(Thomas 1998) from which ideology (if one dares to call it that) springs
forth. Speaking empirically and historically about Gibraltar, the notion of a
contingent and reactive disciplinary regime simply are not true in a context
985 where the same families have controlled government positions for the past
seven decades. Instead, I conceptualize the state as Raymond Williams
(1973), in which the state is a regulative, determining the forms and ends of
institutions such that they reproduce the social structure of the state within
2 4 CULTURAL STUDI ES
the state. This is not unlike Webers definition, borrowing from Bolshevic
990 critiques of the state, which suggests, Without the use of violence, there
would be no state.
19 Again, given that some of his record is sealed, Jessops biography must be
pieced together from various sources: personal recounts by the people that
knew him, military stories in which he was included, etc.
995 20 Jessop complains in a letter on 16 April 1941, writing: (1) The Colonial
Postmaster has no control over the Cable Companys staff; passage ways are
blocked with cycles; noise from chattering messengers, cleaners and staff in
room adjacent to Colonial Postmasters; (2) Corridor outside colonial
Postmasters room is a passage to the Cable Companys lavatory; (3) noises
1000 inseparable from an instrument room, i.e. the whirring of motor driven
transmitters and the manipulation of morse keys. These are always a source
of disturbance when work requiring quietude and concentration of thought
has to be undertaken. None familiar with telegraph practice would entertain a
proposal which would place an Administrative Officials private room in
1005 juxtaposition with a noisy instrument room occupied by personnel over
whom he could exercise no control. The partition between the rooms
excludes no sound.
21 Walter Mignolo (2005 AQ9 ) calls this the enunciative function of coloniality.
22 Interestingly, this occurs all while British and European elites complain about
1010 the noise of Gibraltarians. For Gibraltarians, British/Spanish is a dichotomy,
while for elites there is more of an ambiguous spectrum in which White
European status and not Britishness is the measure of privilege.
Gibraltarians, typically descendent from Mediterranean families, are often
outside of Euro white, and equated with noisy Spaniards.
1015 Notes on Contributors AQ10
Bryce Peake is a PhD Candidate in Media Studies at the University of Oregon.
Trained at the intersections of cultural anthropology and media history, his
research uses historical and ethnographic methods to examine the ways in which
emerging technologies establish and transform standpoint epistemologies. He is
1020 currently finishing a manuscript that explores the roles that post-World War II
English colonial scientists and administrators played in producing a British
standpoint acoustemology in Gibraltar.
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