Sonic Mutualism (SM)

Sound migrates. It stubbornly crosses enclosed and semi-enclosed property demarcations where it meets a social world of listeners who have been culturally trained to understand certain sounds as intrusive noise and others as permissible or welcome. How do we manage complex, overlapping and often conflicting desires and expectations regarding sound and public space? Especially when sonic social life, which possesses the potential to figuratively and literally rattle the architectures of control, defies normative barriers between public and private life. How we perceive and navigate such dynamics is inherently political. Without centering strong interpersonal relationships based on proximity and community, a general sonic antagonism can easily transform into a life-threatening event when police or individuals acting as state-proxies use the farce of quality of life to justify racialized sonic fears and class-based expectations of criminality. The cultural idea of noise reveals how intensely our ability to deal with social conflict is reduced to the narrow outcomes of state-sanctioned mediation or the violence of informal state proxies who internalize state authority. The often dire consequences of our inability to mediate conflicting sonic desires and expectations foregrounds the need for negotiating the various feelings we may have about the sounds of the city. Sonic mutualism prioritizes social relations over property relations, while making space for antagonisms that do not defer to state mediation.

A central question for sonic mutualism is, what should we do when we hear sounds that we don’t like? This developing protocol seeks to address the question of how to interrupt internalized biases that arise when encountering sonic antagonisms:
1.) Refuse the cultural notion of silence
2.) Reserve judgement
3.) Disobey your internalized cop
4.) Allow yourself to experience curiosity
5.) Allow yourself to feel discomfort
6.) Tune your ear to the cultural history around you
7.) Exercise the capacity to hold difference
8.) Learn who your neighbors are and get invited to the party.

There is nothing noisier than the party you are not invited to.

Sonic Ruling Order (SRO)

In the production and imposition of state legal fictions, sovereignty tends to refer to a nation’s authority over its so-called jurisdiction. However, critiques of settler colonialism allow us to challenge the power of the state by reflecting on pre-settler sovereignty as the immutable power of Indigenous people to determine and affirm collective community. While the former pivots on an axis of control and property, the latter is oriented toward relationality. Antithetical to neoliberal emphasis on individual agency, sovereignty “is realized by a people, not one person,” Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang note. At the same time, a people is neither a uniform collective nor a group of discrete individuals, but is intersubjective. Considering the shared and co-constituted making of a people foregrounds the importance of negotiating emergent uses of public space. For us, sonic sovereignty refers, in part, to the audible tension between competing and concurring assertions over territory, whether they are state oriented or realized by a people. Sonic sovereignty includes practices that have been formally addressed by law, as well as those that are outside of – or not yet criminalized by – the law. The collectively understood sonics of the underclasses affirm community through the social construction of diverse affective and aesthetic spaces of shared cultural knowledge, resisting authoritarian modes of social policing. Speaking about sonic public life in Washington D.C., Allie Martin says, “When you have these big protests and you have these big go-gos in the street, for a moment, for a day, for an hour, those are Black neighborhoods regardless of who owns the buildings on every corner.” Such practices call into question the state’s singular authority to define and redefine sensorial expectations within its so-called jurisdiction.