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.