noise: a historical ethnography of listening, masculinity, and mass media technology

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 historicalethnography of Gibraltarian mens contradictory sensitivity to the noise of massmedia and desensitization to the industrial soundscape of the state. I argue that

10 this contradiction can be historicized through close attention to the socialantagonisms embedded in the history of noise ordinances, and the ways in whichBritish colonial officials structured an idealized form of masculinity premised onthe sonic relationships between bodies and technologies. Gibraltarian menreproduce this masculine disposition, and through it colonial hierarchies, in the

15 seemingly banal practice of listening to mass media, and ignoring the soundscapeof 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 Panavia20 Tornadoes ran full thruster off the Gibraltar International Airport runway less

than a kilometre away from the roof of my apartment complex. The pressurechange caused by these two Royal Air Force fighter jets engines was not onlydeafening, but also powerful enough to cause waves to form in a nearbyswimming 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 theheart of Gibraltar, I complained as the Tornadoes repeated the exercise. Howdoes anyone live with this noise? I asked him in a moment of frustration. Myinformant, Brian, a single Gibraltarian man in his mid-thirties who bouncesaround 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 athis balcony shouting angrily at the teenagers in the street below: Turn downyour hi-fi and find something better to do than disturb my afternoon. Noise,

Cultural Studies, 2014Vol. 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 partsof 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 shipmaintenance throughout the night, the loudness of industrial and militaryproduction in short, the soundscape of the state2 is omnipresent in

40 Gibraltar. In this small, two square mile country organized around the Rock ofGibraltar, which acts as a natural amphitheatre, the soundscape of the statereverberates back into and throughout the concrete and stone architecture ofcolonial shops and apartment high-rises, layering and amplifying the soniceffects of militarism and industrialism. Yet, the primary attention of crusades

45 against noise and noise pollution, as I demonstrate throughout this essay, hasbeen against the tones of mass media.3 This juxtaposition begs the question:why does listening to mass mediated noise elicit such attention and produce callsto political action, while the soundscape of the state remains un-noticed and, insome cases, celebrated?

50 This essay historicizes the contradiction between mass media sensitivity andthe insensitivity to the soundscape of the state by analysing the emergence oflistening as a cultural technology of colonialism in the 1940s.4 In thecontemporary moment, Gibraltarian mens way of listening to noise activelyreproduces colonial gendered, racial, and class-based antagonisms between

55 Gibraltarians and Spaniards. I trace this way of listening back to the post-SecondWorld War, when English colonial administrators prepared to shape Gibraltarsmultinational labour force into a body politic of colonial subjects. Colonialadministrators, 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 andprivate and public sounds. Targeted at Gibraltarian men, thought by colonialadministrators to be ber subjects with power over feminized subjects anddomestic spaces, these noise ordinances structured a relationship betweenbodies and technology that was actively policed with material, legal

65 consequences. Simultaneously, ordinances provided Gibraltarian men with asense of taste that, if embodied, could render these upwardly mobileGibraltarian middle-class men closer to English elites and within grasp of thesymbolic 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, dialecticalrelationships between media technology, British masculinity and the reproduc-tion of colonial power. Focusing on masculinity as a site of conflict, I also breakfrom contemporary trends in media ethnography and sound studies histori-

75 ography (Wise 2000, Sterne 2003, Hirschkind 2006, Erlmann 2010), grounding

2 CULTURAL STUD I ES

genealogies of listening in archaeologies of technology and inventors,

AQ1

soundstudies have produced accounts of listening without bodies, abstractly defininglistening as a generalizable practice amongst an implicitly assumed universalprivileged subject. This approach, while revealing the plethora of western

80 philosophical negotiations indebted to an ostracized listening subject, neglectsthe social relations of force that constitute the varying social positions fromwhich specific listeners listen. Taking sound studies historiographicalintervention into occularcentric narratives as a starting point, I historicize therole of listening in colonialism via a historical ethnography focused on listeners

85 listening historically as opposed to telling this history through an account ofthe mechanical technology(s) that produce sound and/or ontologies. Byhistorical ethnography, in this essay, I am referring to the practice ofhistoricizing the social world in ways that reveal the structural homologies atthe experiential level of both historical and contemporary colonial subjects.

90 Through a historical ethnography of the somatic legacies of colonialism, thisessay resituates listening within the bodies of specifically socially locatedGibraltarian men, and within the material relations of force productive of howthey listen to their social world.5

AQ2Listening via listening about listening AQ3

95 Not surprisingly, given the visiocentric foundations of American social scientificobjectivity (Bordo 1987), studying listening historically and ethnographicallyrequires a recalibration of the entire research apparatus. Despite the emphasisplaced on intersubjective moments of participant observation, ethnographersare mostly trained to ask questions and to speak for individuals. H. Russell

100 Bernards Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology, a canonical work of biblicalproportions in the field of cultural anthropology, reflects the dimensions of thisproblem: in his chapter on participant observation, attention is given to usingthis 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 confidenceabout the meaning of data.6 The intersubjective potentialities of participantobservation and ethnography are elided by the emphasis on and anxiety aboutbeing able to speak. Historians are not much different, often ventriloquizing theghosts of the past without attempting to understand the subject positions of

110 those figures that left behind traces of their worldly perception (Startt and Sloan1989, Park and Pooley 2008). As I began to write a history of listening, I wasconfronted by these methodological limitations, along with many others thatwere based on both method and location in Gibraltar. I found solutions to thesetwo problems by transcending the false dichotomy between theory and method,

115 applying what I had discovered about the always embeddedness of listening tothe sociological apparatus itself namely, the research process.

NO ISE : A H ISTOR ICAL ETHNOGRAPHY 3

Author Query(Line No: 76) Please check and confirm if the suggested short title is correct.

Author Query(Line No: 94) Please suggest whether this term ''Method/ology'' can be changed to ''Method/methodology'' in the section heading.

Author Query(Line No: 94) Please check that the heading levels have been correctly formatted throughout.

My dialectical conceptualization of method and theory is born out offeminist 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 violenceand their material effects audible, particularly by uncovering the history of thedehistoricization of dispositions (habitus7), and recognizing that practices are theenunciation of habitus generated out of competing social positions withinvarious cultural fields. Bourdieus sociology is dialectical through and through.

125 At the analytic level, there exists a dialectic relationship between the synchronicand diachronic dimensions of symbolic violence. At the practical level, thereexists a dialectic relationship between theory and methodology, as concepts likehabitus and symbolic violence not only describe situations but also orient theresearcher 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 particulardisposition towards the research process. And finally, at the level of execution,if social scientists are to actually understand the disposition of researchinformants, there must exist a dialectical relationship in intersubjective formbetween the researcher and the researched. As Bourdieu writes of listening in

135 his collected volume on suffering under neoliberalism in the French housingprojects:

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 akind of more or less controlled imitation, to adopting the interviewees language,

140 views, feelings, and thoughts with methodical construction, founded on theknowledge of the objective conditions common to an entire social category.(Bourdieu 1999)

This last instance constitutes what I call listening about listening: cultivatingintersubjective moments when the social biographies of researcher and

145 researched empathetically resonate, enabling the researcher to listen throughthe ears of a particular Gibraltarian individual while analysing with the mind ofthe researcher.

Listening via listening about listening, then, refers to those intersubjectivemoments 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 waysGibraltarian men listen to the world as a culmination of social forces; listeningvia listening about listening means constructing and listening through amasculine Gibraltarian standpoint that is constantly negotiating social positionwithin 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 of5 years. Doing so has allowed me to situate Gibraltarian informants listeningpractices within social histories throughout this dissertation, and comment onthe perception of noise from Gibraltarian mens standpoint. From this


experience, I have learned that it is in the disjunctures between my sociological160 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 powerconstrained by the maintenance and operationalization of British colonialism.

While Bourdieu primarily draws on an intersubjective approach tounderstanding the subjectivity of contemporary participants, I have also

165 deployed this approach in thinking historically about listening. In reading thedocuments left by colonial officials, I have also tried to understand and embodythe sonic world they themselves produced. I have done so through closereadings of archival documents as hidden transcripts (Glenn 2002, Scott2008), examining documents written by historical actors for their own

170 concealed understandings of sound: we can still hear the echoes of thosesocial orders and begin to notice how people created and maintained rankedpoints of contact with their communities and nations, across divides ofethnicity, race, gender, and class (Rath 2003). Doing so has revealedthe 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 whichlistening continues to be entangled with the maintenance of empire through themaintenance of Gibraltarian men listening like British men. Listening vialistening about listening, then, acts retroactively upon the past, disclosing

180 aspects and moments of it hitherto misapprehended. The past appears in adifferent light, and hence the process whereby the past became the present alsotakes on another aspect (Lefebvre 1991) listening via listening about listeningis a pathway to a history of listeners listening historically, and allows me tounderstand the common origin of the structural homologies from wherein

185 English colonial administrators and Gibraltarian men listened to the socialworld.

In studying urban noise as a forever recursive cultural-made-legal-made-cultural category, I explored multiple files that described noise complaints andthe official and unofficial responses made by those in power. I was particularly

190 drawn to one individual, colonial postmaster H.G. Jessop, whose lettersreference noise and sound multiple times as a problem in Gibraltar. For reasonsI make more clear below, I conceptualize Jessop as an epistemic individual ofhistory: 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 differentsocial positions within the field of cultural production and perception. TracingH.G. Jessops documents and history involved engaging not simply with thearchive, but locating coroners records and an interview with his final remainingemployee whom I met by serendipitous interaction with his nephew at the

200 Gibraltar archives. In this documentary history, again, I sought to understand


the relationship between sound and bodies that went assumed in Jessops tellingof the world (Attali 1985, Corbin 1998, Smith 2001).

This methodological manoeuvre was born out of necessity as much as it wasa theoretical decision. The Gibraltar Archives exist in a state of development,

205 and were not originally intended to be a collection available to researchers. Inits current state, the archives are primarily a home to the bureaucratic files ofmeasurement, those documents that calculate the state into existence (Cohn1996, Dirks 2002). These documents, however, are organized in ways that arenot conducive to research and verge on disorganized (Archer 2006): in some

210 places, documents that span over 300 years are organized by year, in othersalphabetical order of title of the document, others by the broad title of theirproducer (e.g. Admiral). As such, the archive is both severely lacking in termsof its collections of historical recounts of quotidian life, except in few cases likethat 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 oftheoretical points that rely on a limited number of very potent documents andmemories, interviews and archival documentary.

The Gibraltarian history of noise

220No 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 theTornadoes 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 soonand the sloppy noise it brings with it.

Noise, as a cultural category, is defined as a disruptive experience in therelationship between bodies and technology. As the first of the above quotesdemonstrates, a critique of the Tornadoes was a critique of the British a

230 critique of the natural relationship between sound, bodies and the bodypolitic. In the second quote, it is important to note the racialized articulation ofsloppy and noise within the context of an annual fair critiqued by someGibraltarian 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 andunclean by virtue of having darker skin.9 Historically, this was a reference usedby English elites to refer to the darker skin of the Gibraltarian multinationallabour force, and associated with the dirtyness of urban poverty and theworking 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 asinvading immigrants. In the context of the fair, sloppy is articulated to colonial


trope that brown, Spanish men use carnivalesque events to target white womenfor sexual sport, or out of spite for white men, and as a result spread sexualdisease itself propagated through the Gibraltar Chronicles yearly report that

245 the British consulate has declared Spain as the site of the highest number ofrapes of British tourists, without ever providing actual numbers (e.g. ConcernOver Rape Cases Abroad, 19 July 2013).

As these examples reiterate, noise does not have a universal meaning. Inwhat 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 aswithin a wider, post-1942 history of making Gibraltar a British colony throughlistening, I explore a colonial project organized around developing culturaltechnologies 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 tofunction in Gibraltar today, employing a privileged set of individuals marked bygender (male) at the murky interstices of racialized nationality (British) andclass (service class and capitalists) to reproduce the states social division oflabour symbolically through interpersonal relationships (Bourdieu 1979,

260 2012).10

Following the War of Spanish Succession, the Treaty of Utrecht madeGibraltar part of the British Empire. Neither a source of extensive raw materialsnor a reservoir for labour, Gibraltars value to the Empire has been as astrategic 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 throughoutthe colonys history, notably beginning in 1704 with the mythology of Gibraltarbeing found virtually empty when received by the English Spanish residentshad 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 homelandsfor financial support, was assembled to meet the labour needs of a British elite(Finlayson 1996). These families would remain in Gibraltar as labourers until1939. 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 citizensand subjects through a reorganization of the sensorium. Concerned that aGibraltarian nation had arisen from the collective experience of exile, and

280 fearful that an autonomous Gibraltarian culture would jeopardize British claimsto strategic space on the Iberian peninsula, the British state began re-fashioningGibraltarians and Gibraltar into a replica and microcosm of British society(Archer 2006), replete with normative British senses of space and sound, andnew oppressive attitudes towards women, migrants and lower working classes


285 (Peake 2012). This context helped to generate the legal regulation of noise quamass media that coercively and authoritatively constituted the social order inthe interests of elite, English men. It did so by privileging both their definitionof proper listening habits and their sense of trespass when the sonic traces of thelower 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 definitionsof noise. Gibraltars first recorded complaint under the legal designation noiseis 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 complaintmade by Mr Hassan, Barrister at law regarding a wireless playing at a very hightone probably John Balloquin Barker of Main Street. Barker was animmigrant who stayed in Gibraltar after evacuation as part of an all male labourforce. This labour force performed manual labour roles in order to reduce the

300 number of British troops needed to maintain the daily operations of theGarrison.12 Importantly, this was not the first complaint about a radio,13 butrather the earliest recorded complaint about noise filed as such. This issignificant in that police reports regarding sound often fell within the bounds ofthe interpersonal context productive of sound: shouting was charged violence,

305 drunken revelry resulted in a citation of public indecency, unnecessary carhooting was considered a traffic violation. Here, a violation categorized asnoise indicates a historical moment and social trespass where sound isseparated from its physiological source and the actions of an individual: theenforcement 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 ofprivate property and domestic separation. Noise ordinances, then, were aboutpolicing domestic technology uses, and the experience and definition of noisereflected exactly that.

Technologies of sound that transcended the domestic sphere only became315 policed once access was somewhat democratized in Gibraltar. Prior to 1935,

the ownership of wireless radios was illegal, given the possibility that spiescould use radios to intercept sensitive government information from telegraphsusing 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 includednews and entertainment.14 The licence fee, coupled with the high price ofradio AQ5s and the lack of interest in British affairs amongst the diasporic labourforce limited radio use to elite British citizens in Gibraltar. There was neither anoise 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


Author Query(Line No: 322) Please check whether this sentence ''The license fee, coupled with the high price of radio. . .'' retains intended meaning.

the cost of radios due to transformations in tube production and internationalEuropean political economy, and facilitated by an influx of higher-waged jobs,

330 resulted in rapid growth in wireless ownership among Gibraltarian menthroughout the colony. As a 1949 confidential circular signed by colonialgovernor Sir Ralph Eastwood states, radio programming from the BritishBroadcasting 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 ofsocial capital the informational sign par excellence of British masculinity forEnglish and non-English alike pushed Gibraltarian men of the rising middleclass into using wages to purchase radio equipment in order to participate in aimagined British community (Lacey 2013).16

340 It was along with this growth in radio ownership that noise complaintsbecame a regular feature of police occurrence logs in Gibraltar. ConstableMendez, for example, appears multiple times in the police occurrence logsfrom 1943 to 1947, and was by far the most engaged in the legal enforcementof noise codes up until 1955. An overwhelming majority of complaints

345 documented within the occurrence log are made by English elites regarding thewireless use of Gibraltarian working class men during evening hours. On 3January 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 thatseparated the elite homes from the crammed apartments of Gibraltarians. On25 August 1944, 2:30 am, Mendez reports having approached Joseph Pinchoand A. Adamso GBN (meaning Gibraltarian) and telling them to turn downtheir 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 AQ6following their name or by their social position (e.g. Dr or sir), but a memberof the rising Gibraltarian middle class; not English, but Gibraltarian. Thevectors in which noise complaints travelled, the very real economic and racialdivision between complainer and complained about, thus reveal more than the

360 simple creation of a cultural category for new disembodied sound productionand technology use: while complaints about shouting (antisocial ordinance), carhooting (traffic ordinance), and partying (public civility ordinances) spanned theracialized nationalist spectrum of English (white), Gibraltarian (liminal), andSpanish (brown) perpetrators, noise was primarily with few exceptions targeted

365 at the technology use of Gibraltarian men. Noise complaints and noiseordinance enforcement, then, were not about sound, but rather, discipliningand policing racially charged, class-situated technology use particularly as itwas used by a lower, uncivilized class of men.17 This is not to say that all washarmonious amongst British elites with radios. In 1949, for example, multiple

370 editorials appear complaining about the sounds emerging from mansions,


Author Query(Line No: 355) Please spell out ''ENG''.

demonstrative of the cheapening moral standards during the upheaval of war(Gibraltar Chronicle, 22 January) yet there exist no noise citations. Thus, I amsuggesting that while elites handled their discrepancies through social forms ofdiscipline, they expected the state a committee for managing the common

375 affairs of the whole bourgeoisie (Marx 1961) to handle the noise of the poorand working class.18

This raises a question about the relationship between law, enforcement, andclass. 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 theexcessive sounds of the Second World War militarism both during and after thewar. It is important to remember that some of these noise complaints filed byEnglish elites occurred at the same time that the English military was blastingtunnels in the Rock of Gibraltar, or testing munitions off the coast. Noise was

385 instead legally defined as mass media through the enforcement of noiseordinances. And, this very ambiguity of the concept allowed it to function as acultural technology for dividing and segregating racialized nationalism alongclass lines. Although noise is taken as given within the written law, sound onlybecomes 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 orpolice officer) attaches the label to a particular set of sounds in this case, massmedia. Within the legal field, structured ways of differentiating between goodand bad sound were produced through regulations like noise ordinances, anddone so through structural homologies between upper class and lower class,

395 rich and poor, English and Gibraltarian. This homologous set of structures, inturn, was applied to social struggles as a form of symbolic violence, whereinGibraltarian men are obliged to conceive of their mass media usage according tothe interpretations cultivated by the law.

Shifting back to the contemporary moment in which Brian complained400 about the Spanish youth blaring their hi-fi in the street below his apartment, we

should remember Pierre Bourdieus argument about the somatic and historicalfunction of law:

Through the frameworks it imposes upon practices, the state institutes andinculcates common symbolic forms of thought, statist forms of classifica-

405 tion the state thereby creates the conditions of an immediateorchestration of habitus that is itself the foundation of a consensus onthis set of shared self-evidences constitutive of common sense. (Bour-dieu 2000)

It was thus through the historical legal structuring of noise ordinances, and their410 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 STUD I ES

category experienced, evoked and deployed to make explicit the real andembodied distinctions between economic classes (a division that is also deeply

415 racialized; Alexander and Halpern 2000). Law, noise, has become doxa: theimmediate agreement elicited by that which appears self-evident, transparentlynormal, a realization of the norm so complete that the imposition of the normitself, as coercion, ceases to exist as such. That Gibraltarian men like Brian defineand experience noise as the product of brown, Spanish sloppies who do not

420 understand the proper use of radios and televisions is simply an embodiedtransposition of the racialized nationalistic and class structure contained in theearly noise ordinance enforcements described above.

The juxtaposition of race and class hierarchies and the material socialrelations 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 onlyprovide a partial understanding of Gibraltarian mens experience of noise. Thecomplaints of British elites were always addressed to Gibraltarian men, the solepurchasers of the radio, and often seen as a trespass against English colonial

430 officials British sense of masculinity, as evinced by the constant discourse ofgentlemans agreements, laws and behaviours in the archival record. Whilethe definition and engagement around noise may have been new to and directedtowards the multinational peasant labour force, upon historically becomingGibraltarians and hailed as quasi and/or aspirationally British, and the

435 diminishing English presence in Gibraltar, Gibraltarians adopted a long historyof English dispositions towards noise that had been around since the rise ofVictorian 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 noise440 ordinances in Gibraltar, the relationship between white elite masculine bodies,

urban sound and media and industrial technologies constitutive of a Britishstandpoint acoustemology was already engrained into the existence ofnineteenth-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 toones private property a defining trait of bourgeois men being propertyownership. In 1893, Irish socialist, playwright and music critic George BernardShaw wrote:

Let a short Act of Parliament be passed, placing all street musicians outside450 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


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 historicalmoment when middle-class professionals sought to distinguish themselves fromthe working class by mimicking the listening habits and soundscape aesthetics ofthe 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 verypoint, seeing in the structure of the social classes the basis of the systems ofclassification which structure perception of the social world and designates theobjects of aesthetic enjoyment (pp. xiixiv). Shaws particular hatred of streetorgans, which prompts his tirade, is constructed and maintained by the socially

465 dominant economic class, who use senses of proper sound to produce a socialdistance between and distinction from other classes. In Shaws case, thisdifference was between petit bourgeois professional artists and impoverishedand thus untalented street musicians. Aspiring to be ranked as industriousintellectuals separate from and above the working class, professionals like

470 Shaw were forced to establish office spaces in their homes, and in turn protectthe sonic environment surrounding that space so as to protect the aesthetics ofprofessionalism, while also distancing themselves from the streets that werethemselves acoustically rich spaces for marginalized English communities (Milesand Savage 2002, Stansell 2012). Through sound regulations reflective of the

475 aesthetic perceptions of English lawyers, professional middle-class menprotected the very silence that forced lawyers to establish offices away fromthe domestic sphere and urban centres of nineteenth-century London.

Shaws complaints were part of a long-standing protest on the part ofEnglish professionals that spanned the length of the industrial revolution. In

480 1864, for example, Charles Babbage listed 14 instruments of torture that hepredicted would cause the fall of society by rendering the middle class unable towork (Picker 2003) by which he meant middle-class men. In Gibraltar andelsewhere in the empire, the regulation of sound whether the hooting ofelites 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 oftorture. By 1944, though, the British men of Gibraltar had added a 15thinstrument of torture to the list: wireless radio.

One complaint on 8 August 1944 described the ways in which Dr Amatziwas 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 alawyer and another from a gentleman regarding the inability to concentrate ontheir own reading and listening. In all of these complaints, the language used todescribe noise is intrusion and violation. At a time when what distinguishedBritish and/or English from Gibraltarian was property ownership, the language


495 of trespass is telling of the association of noise with a lower class form ofproperty violation. Silence, for these English property owners in Gibraltar, wasa natural right purchased with their property, which they expected to bedefended by the state through legal sanctions. In contradiction to this right ofmen stood radio, with men engendering a torrent of lament over radios

500 allegedly flagrant debasement of the classical cannon and the denigration ofbourgeois listening follow[ing] in its wake (Erlmann 2010). Like domestic-bound professionals in the late nineteenth-century protecting their home officesfrom the sounds of poor musicians, English colonial officers in Gibraltar definedthemselves against the multinational labour force-turned-Gibraltarian through

505 the sonic quality of domestic lifestyle, using the legal weaponry of the noiseordinance.

To elaborate this point more fully, and to connect to Gibraltarian mensadoption of a British way of listening, I turn to the life of H.G. Jessop, thecolonial postmaster during the early years of the Second World War. Jessop,

510 Maltese and Italian, became colonial postmaster on 23 January 1940, coming toGibraltar from Malta after the First World War according to those who knewhim (Jessops files are currently closed). Throughout his documentary presencein letters and memos throughout the Gibraltar archives, nothing is moreprevalent than his repeated struggles with and against the noise of telegraphy. In

515 an archive focused on bureaucratic measurements of land and population, thesefiles are quite unique.

In 1942, Jessop committed suicide in his postmaster quarters, citing noiseas the primary motivation to ending his life. Jessops suicide occurs at anideological 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 andparticular locations of social position, rather than purely matters of personalbiography (Bourdieu 1988). The parts of Jessops biography directly affected bynoise, 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 effectsof coloniality and listening.

When Jessop arrived in Gibraltar, he was housed in the post office quarterslocated on the second floor of the post office. As of 1941, the post officebecame the home of the privatized Imperial Wireless Telegraph Company.

530 Following the remodelling necessary to host imperial wireless, the postmastersquarters were located on the second floor above the key operators, and aroundthe corner from transmitters and motors necessary to send and receivetelegraphy. This new proximity to electronic noise radically changed Jessopssense 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 in1941 regarding the noise of telegraphy:


noises inseparable from an instrument room, i.e. the wiring motor drivetransmitters and the manipulation of Morse keys. These are always a source ofdisturbance when work requiring quietude and concentration or thought has to be

540 undertaken. None familiar with telegraph practice would entertain aproposal which would place an Administrative Officials private room injuxtaposition with a noisy instrument room occupied by personnel overwhom he could exercise no control. (emphasis added)

Here, it is the sound of private machines that is noise, compromising the ideal545 conditions for conducting the labour central to an English sense of masculinity

previously examined. Meanwhile, the introduction of automobile transportationon Main Street by the British military, the blasting of new transport tunnelsthroughout the Rock of Gibraltar to enable automobile travel, the munitionstraining 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 newmegaindustrial soundscape that is notably absent in Jessops 24 intraofficedocuments complaining about noise, in addition to the final complaint he madein his suicide note.

Jessop committed suicide in his post office quarters in 1942. He was found555 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 aninterview in August 2012:

You know, Im the one who found him there, in the quarters. Thequartermaster 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 hadhappened. So, I crawled down the skylight, and opened the door for thequartermaster. He knew Jessop had killed himself. And we all knew itwasnt far. Jessop was disturbed by the constant noise of telegraphy. He

565 couldnt sleep. If it wasnt wireless telegraphy, it was wireless radio. MainStreet was a noisy place then, with a lot of restaurants getting radios andcars squawking. We found a note. Gave it a quick read before the coronershowed 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 onlyway to find some peace and quiet in this town He complained in hisnote that no one gave him the respect that an officer and gentlemandeserved. They didnt respect his home, always intruding with theirnoise 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 knowIm dead.


Perezs testimonial fills an archival gap in Jessops suicide, as Jessops militaryfiles including his suicide letter remain sealed. Between his suicide note andhis letters in the archives, Jessops complaints reveal more than just the

580 pervasiveness of noise as it was defined against sound; Jessops complaints alsopointed to the ways in which noise was framed as a compromise to privateproperty.

Yet, Jessop, like most post-war Gibraltarian men, is a distant culturalinheritor of this English standpoint acoustemology. Unlike other colleagues in

585 the colonial administration, and much like the multinational labour force thatwould become Gibraltarians, Jessop was a Mediterranean immigrant inGibraltar via the British military. Born in Italy, he arrived in Gibraltar fromMalta after the First World War.19 As a colonial official, Jessop existed in asocial 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 havegained access to the privileged symbolic and material universe of Englishofficers, most notably the power to control the soundscape of residential andwork territory. When telegraphy transcended the boundaries of the domestic

595 sphere, when it challenged Jessops sense of property ownership, it becamenoise 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 Britishstandards, non-white, Mediterranean men move into British masculinitythrough listening. Just as Jessop complains about his Spanish janitors and his

600 working-class telegraphy operators as chattering messengers, cleaners, andstaff in rooms adjacent to the colonial postmaster,20 so too do Gibraltarian mencomplain about the media habits of Spanish as noise. Jessop is an epistemicindividual in that, in order to become British, and in the process of becomingBritish, he adopts the English elite male disposition towards sound that was

605 product and productive of the sociolegal definition of noise as mass mediaviolations of private domestic property. In doing so, Jessop and Gibraltarianmen alike, attempt to collect on the social capital guaranteed to English men,while also reproducing self-damaging colonial hierarchies of race, gender andclass.

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 wasdenied both solace and a sense of British masculinity. The strategies aimed attransforming the basic dispositions into a system of aesthetic principles,

615 objective differences into elective distinctions are in fact reserved formembers of the dominant class (Bourdieu 1984). Jessops suicide occursshortly thereafter, at a moment when his sense of British masculinity quaproperty ownership was challenged by the states denial of his right to the


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 fascinatingmoment when the state loses its dominance over the soundscape of Gibraltar.Before mass media, the only mechanical and electrical sounds louder thanthunder belonged to the state. Mass media, however, democratized disruption

625 and symbolic forms of intrusion. The keys of the telegraphy industry, forJessop, were not the product of the state. Yet, from the states perspective, forwhom the privatized telegraphy industry had become a site of profit, the noiseof private radios trespassing into elite homes warranted police and governmentintervention, 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 cultivatesymbolic forms of violence such as sonic intrusion. As mass media challengedthe states monopoly (the state, again, being constituted through the affinity

635 networks of elites), the state begins to use the category of noise to separatethose forms of symbolic violence committed by individuals from its own sonicintrusions. Where English colonial officers and military personnel had beendisciplined into a reverent relationship with the industrial soundscape of warqua 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 asense that constituted the authority of English men. When Leut. Berret of theKings Regiment complains to the state in 1943 that the radio of McManuelGordon (GBN) is too loud, he reproduces not only his own social position as anEnglish 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 menthrough their sense of listening, through the legal and social policing of massmedia use under the rubric of noise, and through Gibraltarians resistance topolicing 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 itsrunway drills, intense debates around the fight jets sonic presence occurred,often with tourists and Spanish complaining about the incredible noise andGibraltarians defending their presence. Simultaneously, while this training takes

655 place, Gibraltarians protested private and commercial stereos and hi-fi in publicforums and newspapers.

The noise level at Ocean Village is extreme. Beyond tolerable. And Ivebeen told there is nothing the Police can do about it because they have a


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 downthere 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 forelderly residents and babies too.

665 This complaint was posted by a man living at the seaside resort of OceanVillage, located less than a half kilometre from the end of the Gibraltarianairport runway where Tornadoes had launched full thruster starting eachweekday 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 thepast five years, but they solely and aggressively focus on the mass media use of amythologized Spanish youth. RGP Seek to silence Hi-Fi Fiends (20 May 2010), Govtto 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 bymass media. In an interview in 2010, Anita, a Gibraltarian woman living abovea shop on Main Street complained, If the Spanish shouting during the day isntbad enough, at night I have to put up with the noise of 50 televisions of myneighbours, 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. Thegovernment must do something about this noise! In many ways, these concernsover noise have continued, if not been exacerbated by the rising nationalistictensions between Gibraltar and Spain following the EU collapse in 2011. AsSpain increases the frequency and weight of its claims to Gibraltar under UN

685 Decolonization Regulations, and Spaniards in San Roque and La Linea engage inpolitical acts to signify Spains claim to Gibraltar, Gibraltarians have called for agreater amount of public civility, most notably through noise control aimedexplicitly at mass media. In an interview in 2012, Anita further discussed theways that noise had compromised the quality of life in Gibraltar:

690 Spanish youth, they come across the border. They smuggle cigarettes allday- 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 drivearound our streets, to sit around our beaches, blaring that noise. We needlaws 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 theseSpanish HiFis? Theyre always here. Violating my home, the home myhusband and I paid dearly for.


Anitas relationship to the sounds of hi-fi operates on relationships betweensounds and bodies similar to those established by English colonial officers

700 through 1940s noise complaints. This relationship is non-conscious, lurking inthe habitus, the disposition that is wholly product and in part productive of classas a set of tastes and practices (Thompson 1953, Bourdieu 1984).

The ways in which Gibraltarians listen to the social world today isintimately connected to the historical definition of noise. Those practices that

705 define what is experienced as noise and what is not are mobilized, knowingly orunknowingly, to benefit those elites in whose favour noise ordinancesfunctioned during the 1940s. In this way, listening is not only contingentupon the material gender, race and class antagonisms constitutive of Britishcolonial control (Bourdieu 1976 AQ7), but also active in the reproduction of those

710 antagonisms at the contemporary moment. Listening thus defines noise in a waythat reproduces the colonial and economic power of a Gibraltarian and Britishneoliberal state. In this instance, however, a key element differentiates Anitascomplaint from the historical occurrence: no longer is it British elite mencomplaining about Gibraltarian men, but a Gibraltarian woman complaining

715 about the noise of an ambiguously gendered the Spanish. For both Gibraltarianmen and women, who adopt the British way of listening encoded in law byelite, English male officers, Spanish becomes a vehicle upon which race andclass are conflated: all Spanish in Gibraltar are by assumption poor migrantlabourers, 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 producesin Gibraltarians a British way of listening that defines noise as the site forproducing a distinction between British and not British.22 This is all to say thatthe ways in which Anita, and many Gibraltarians, listen to space is produced by

725 the nonconscious masculine disposition that arises out of distinctions of classpositioning, historically connected to the English colonial production of noiseordinances. Anita assumes a masculine disposition towards sound, much asGibraltarian men were encouraged to assume a British disposition towardssound after repatriation. Through orientations towards noise, through listening,

730 Gibraltarians make a non-conscious double move against a mythologizedSpanish: first they make a distinction between Gibraltarian and Spanish byadopting a British acoustemology wherein Britishness is sound and Spanish areequated with noise; and second they consciously adopt British attitudes towardsclass hierarchies by which the lower class the Spanish become the site from

735 whence all social ills arise. As for the working classes, Pierre Bourdieuremarks on the organization of French taste along class lines, perhaps their solefunction in the system of aesthetic positions is to serve as a foil, a negativereference point, in relation to which all aesthetics define themselves bysuccessive negations (Bourdieu 1984).


Author Query(Line No: 709) The reference ''Bourdieu, 1976'' is cited in the text but is not listed in the references list. Please either delete the in-text citation or provide full reference details following journal style.

740 The soundscape of the state continues to be notably absent in contemporaryworking-class debates and complaints about noise. In 2010, for example, therewere over 20 articles (including letters to the editors) regarding noise in thesummer months, declining as the winter months approached. It is important tonote that all of the articles nod to a common perpetrator: a fiend that is,

745 stereotypically, the Spanish. Occurring alongside these complaints, thesummer months contain multiple state-sanctioned aural phenomena: construc-tion projects typically begin in May, Infantry training in June, Air Force trainingin July, navy munitions tests in August. As the amount of sound produced bythe 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 grumblingof residents as they unknowingly project their unhappiness with the sound of thestate into the noise of the Spanish, converges to make it appear that the state isengaging with problems of noise pollution while disavowing its own

755 responsibility for noise production. Adopting a disposition towards soundthat is historically rooted, Gibraltarians unknowingly participate in this process.And it is in this occurrence that listening becomes a technology: through theracialized class antagonisms that are product and productive of noise, the state isable 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 anelephant 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 anabundance of summer noise. As Catherine MacKinnon (1989) says of thepatriarchal state, the state protects male power by appearing to prohibit itsexcesses when necessary to its normalization (p. 167). The states neutralityin the production of noise, and simultaneous vested historical interest in

770 protecting the property rights of elite men, functions much to the same extentin the production of economic capital without blame. RGP nabs HiFi Fiends is astory about a proactive government trying to better the lives of Gibraltarians byreducing the loud sounds of stereos in cars; Govt to clamp down on Ocean VillageNoise 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 buildingand sale of private properties on recently de-accessioned parts of the Rock ofGibraltar? 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 definitionof noise pollution, serve to produce greater amounts of wealth for English elites


and a new European investor culture. Simultaneously, in all of the noisepoliced through noise ordinance enforcement, legal and social action against

785 noise is defined as the protection of quality of life against a vaguely andabstractly defined Spanish intruder, one who, at the end of the day, requiresstate intervention in the name of British values and rights. In short, preservingthe 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 andexperiential category serves the same function, albeit in historically differentways, in the 2010s as it did in the 1940s.

Conclusion

Jacques Attali (1985) describes the history of sound as a succession of orders795 (in other words, differences) done violence by noises (in other words, the

calling into question of differences) that are prophetic because they create neworders, unstable, and changing (p. 19). For English colonial administrators andBritish Gibraltarian politicians, noise challenges the social order, and thus, asAttali 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 inGibraltar, where Gibraltarian mens experience of noise is indicative of ahistorical way of listening that is bound up in juxtaposed gender, racial, andclass antagonisms, themselves historically overdetermined by Gibraltars historyof 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 thecomponents of subjectivity manage the empires interest after the colonialadministrators have long left.

How Gibraltarians understand and define noise is product of a post-Second810 World War system of colonial legal institutions that defined noise as only the

disembodied voices of mass media and technology, particularly through law andlaw enforcement engineered in the interest of English officers and elite. Morebroadly, however, I have tried to argue that noise is indicative of a dispositiontowards particular sounds, bodies and technologies a way of listening

815 organized by social antagonisms. While Gibraltarian men experience noisethrough a cultural codex of experience shaped by scientific knowledge andtechnological discourses, it is done so through a legal structure emergent fromthe 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 theSecond World War. This legal structure, by defining noise as mass media, andgenerating a homologous way of listening, abdicates the state of responsibilitiesfor noise pollution; it is in this sense that the British way of listening to noise is


productive of colonial relations. Noise thus functions as a site whereby825 Gibraltarians reproduce gendered colonial relations of force conducive to state

control, while the state uses these material relations of force to dodge noiseregulations and more quickly generate economic capital for British investors.

This cultural materialist approach to listening forces scholars to account forthe 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 dominanthistoriography uses concrete histories of technologies to anchor abstractionsabout disembodied listening? Left to be answered are questions regarding whoselistening? To what? How? With what sociopolitical consequences? Thesequestions point to a necessary historiographical shift towards my attempt to

835 write histories of [historical] listeners listening historically a task that can belocated in some popular music studies (e.g. Stoever-Ackerman 2010), butotherwise absent in the dominant canons of sound studies. Given concerns thatsound studies has become too parochial, or in need of dewesternizing, or atvery least must become aware of its own colonial footprint, this cultural

840 materialist approach means paying attention to the ways that the flows andfrictions of media imperialism are embedded in mechanic and embodied culturaltechnologies differently across social strata; it means constructing newgenealogies and producing new histories wherein listening and technologyevolve alongside and through, and not outside or beyond, colonialism.

845 Acknowledgements

This research was made possible by a Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowshipfrom the Social Science Research Council, material and intellectual support from theGibraltar Museum and Institute for Gibraltarian Studies, and travel/research grantsfrom the University of Oregon, School of Journalism & Communication and Center for

850 the Study of Women in Society. The project has grown substantially because ofcollaborations in both SSRCs Mediated Futures seminar and the Sawyer Seminar inSound Studies. I am grateful to Carol Stabile and the editors and reviewers, who haveprovided substantial feedback in developing the piece.

Notes

855 1 In line with ethnographic research ethics and Institutional Review Boardprotocol, the names of interview subjects within this essay are replaced bypseudonyms. Names found in archival documents whether in reference oras author remain the same.

2 The soundscape of the state, at this historical junction, marks a bleeding860 between the sounds of the state as it was traditionally theorized, and a new


neoliberal state marked by state-contracted industries serving the interests ofwealthy, private individuals. That is, in the neoliberal moment, thesoundscape of the state, and the soundscape of privatized and/or divestedindustry are indistinguishable to many Gibraltarians.

865 3 Online forums during the 2012 Jet tests reflects this contradiction: To thejets, responses range from I barely notice them anymore people just look forcomplaining (sic) to Shows our bond/unity with UK and makes me feel soproud :) safe home lads :) and As long as they piss off the Spanish, they canfly over all year long !!! (sic). In contrast, responses to the sounds of mass

870 media are best captured by newspaper article and editorial headlines: RGPSeeks 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 waysin which Gibraltarian men embody a hypersensitivity to mass media qua

875 noise, and a deafness to the state. Indeed, R. Murray Schafer often refers tourban citizens lack of response to the ill effects of industrial noise as a socialdeafness, which he defines later on as a failure of humanity. And CharlesHirschkind argues in his ethnography of listening in Egypt that theinterpretive grid fundamentalism provides deafens us to some of the

880 ways that the contemporary struggles of pious Muslims speak to our ownmoral and political conundrums (p. 108). But such metaphors come at aprice: they equate deaf experience as a failure of intersubjectivity, as ifindividuals with a spectrum of listening capabilities are incapable of love orpolitics. In short, it dehumanizes individuals that live with deafness. In

885 Gibraltar, using the metaphor of deafness takes on an even weightierhistorical legacy, with the state exiling young D/deaf women to the UK forschooling, and ushering young D/deaf boys into the industrial labour force in which they were known for their ability to make it through sustainedexposure 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 verycolonial structure that I attempt to critique. My future research will beexamining the history of deaf coloniality in the Mediterranean, and the waysin which British, Italian, and French colonial legacies have effected thedistribution of assistive technologies and programmes in the Mediterranean.

895 5 My concern is not, however, with media effects as it has been narrowlydefined by the quantitative paradigms of communication studies, but ratherwith 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 throughcommunication (Couldry and Hepp 2013).

6 In the best of colonialist traditions, Bernards research manual readsnot unlike the ethnographic manual of the US Militarys Human Terrains


Project. [Participant Observation] involves establishing rapport in a new905 community; learning to act so that people go about their business as usual

when you show up; and removing yourself everyday from cultural immersionso you can intellectualize what youve learned, put it into perspective, andwrite 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 ourreports more convincing. While Bernards book remains the standard in thefield of anthropology, I would advocate its full abandonment if culturalanthropology 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 representationsthat can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing aconscious 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, meaningthat the ways in which I listen to urban space unreflectively is not howGibraltarians listen to urban space.

925 9 As Ian Jack wrote in 1988, To judge by their names, many if not mostGibraltarians are as Spanish as any man or woman from Cadiz or Seville. Andyet they mock Spain. Echoing the tabloid xenophobia of the mother country(dago and wop), they call Spaniards slops and sloppies. Every weekendthey 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 theRock next weekend, Lus (Buford 1988, Murder, Granta).

10 According to Julian Go, and despite popular criticism by scholars like EdwardSaid, Bourdieu had developed a theory of colonialism in tandem with thepractice 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 arelationship of domination structured as a caste system a racialsegregation that made colonial society Manichean in form The functionof 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 basisfor the colonial order: the relation, backed by force, which allows for thedominant caste to keep the dominated caste in a position of economicinferiority (p. 146). Bourdieu extends this critique in later work to address

945 masculinity amongst the dominated caste of the colonized, showing the ways


Author Query(Line No: 941) The reference ''Bourdieu, 1961'' is cited in the text but is not listed in the references list. Please either delete the in-text citation or provide full reference details following journal style.

in which patriarchy itself functions as a field of relations within transformingeconomic contexts (Bourdieu 2001).

11 Readers should recognize that the police occurrence logs only contain theinformation reported by constables, and/or that potential other incidents were

950 not recorded. Yet, this occurrence is significant in that it is the first deploymentof the category of noise as a legal designation for an antisocial behaviour.

12 The degree to which essential civilian labour participation was volunteeredor coerced is hotly debated amongst Gibraltarians and historians alike.

13 Throughout, I use wireless and radio interchangeably wireless was the955 historically specific term of the time, tied to the history of telegraphy.

14 BBC was funded through licence fees. In Gibraltar, this allowed thegovernment to monitor who owned what radios. The colonial administratoralso set the fee: numerous documents exist with individuals complainingabout 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 theproduction of a British middle class dictated that Gibraltarian women remainas unpaid domestic labourers, making their access to wireless radio dependent

965 on a paternal and/or romantic connection to working Gibraltarian men. Itwas not uncommon, however, for Gibraltarian men to purchase separatewireless systems for various rooms with the male listening space defined asthe parlour, the female space the kitchen.

17 Schizophonia has been used to describe sound that does not come directly970 from its source (Schafer 1990). Like deafness, this is an able-ist metaphor

whereby all evil in the world is projected upon non-normative functioningbodies. At the same time, however, I wish to avoid the Deleuzian trap ofglorifying schizophonia as a liberating formation, as well as proposingdeafness as a pathway to liberation the historical violence perpetrated by

975 the British state against the individuals with intellectual and hearingimpairments is enough to suggest that such an assertion would beinsubstantially materialist.

18 Popular critique of the state ala Foucault argues for conceptualizing the stateas a non-totality, a contingently linked assemblage of institutions which have

980 emerged over time in ad hoc response to political and social pressures acollocation of often incompatible and conflicting institutions and apparatuses(Thomas 1998) from which ideology (if one dares to call it that) springsforth. Speaking empirically and historically about Gibraltar, the notion of acontingent and reactive disciplinary regime simply are not true in a context

985 where the same families have controlled government positions for the pastseven decades. Instead, I conceptualize the state as Raymond Williams(1973), in which the state is a regulative, determining the forms and ends ofinstitutions such that they reproduce the social structure of the state within


the state. This is not unlike Webers definition, borrowing from Bolshevic990 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 thatknew him, military stories in which he was included, etc.

995 20 Jessop complains in a letter on 16 April 1941, writing: (1) The ColonialPostmaster has no control over the Cable Companys staff; passage ways areblocked with cycles; noise from chattering messengers, cleaners and staff inroom adjacent to Colonial Postmasters; (2) Corridor outside colonialPostmasters room is a passage to the Cable Companys lavatory; (3) noises

1000 inseparable from an instrument room, i.e. the whirring of motor driventransmitters and the manipulation of morse keys. These are always a sourceof disturbance when work requiring quietude and concentration of thoughthas to be undertaken. None familiar with telegraph practice would entertain aproposal which would place an Administrative Officials private room in

1005 juxtaposition with a noisy instrument room occupied by personnel overwhom he could exercise no control. The partition between the roomsexcludes 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 WhiteEuropean status and not Britishness is the measure of privilege.Gibraltarians, typically descendent from Mediterranean families, are oftenoutside 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, hisresearch uses historical and ethnographic methods to examine the ways in whichemerging technologies establish and transform standpoint epistemologies. He is

1020 currently finishing a manuscript that explores the roles that post-World War IIEnglish colonial scientists and administrators played in producing a Britishstandpoint acoustemology in Gibraltar.

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AbstractListening via listening about listeningThe Gibraltarian history of noise

British masculine listening and the suicide of H.G. JessopHistorical contradiction, contemporary conjunctureConclusionAcknowledgementsNotesNotes on ContributorsReferences

noise: a historical ethnography of listening, masculinity, and mass media technology

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