Governing the noisy sphere: Geographies of noise regulation in the US

Abstract

Over the last 10 years there has been considerable growth in the range of geographical work on sound, particularly on how sound shapes everyday life. One area that is beginning to receive attention is how noise is formalized in law and policy. This paper contributes to that literature by developing a geographic theory of modern noise regulation. Two policies are examined: the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Noise Control Act of 1972 and Seattle’s Noise Ordinance of 1977. Combining Foucauldian and Marxian frameworks, I argue that these documents trace a biopolitics of “sensible citizenship” that emerges within, as a means of managing, a changing regime of capitalist accumulation, as global attention began to shift from production to the “noisy sphere” of exchange in the 1960s and 1970s. Noise, I claim here, has come to physically embody capitalism’s inner contradictions—between needing to promote commercial activities and needing to control the noisy externalities those activities create. Such an analysis addresses recent calls for a more historically and materially grounded approach to the study of sound in human geography, while also adding a critical legal perspective to recent debates on the relations between citizenship, the body, and governance.

Keywords

Noise regulation commerce law biopolitics

Introduction

Writing to Seattle’s mayor in 1974, Rick Pearson complained of being “savagely attacked by unwanted noise.” For Pearson, noise levels in the city had reached a crisis point. “Time is drawing close,” he wrote, “when human beings in Seattle and elsewhere can no longer adjust to the constant barrage of environmental abuses on their body.” He goes on to describe the sounds of “clatter, zoom, putter” of cars and trucks that “blare their infernal machines past the delicate body of the man heading towards work.” Pearson begged the mayor: “Please silence the city as soon as you can.” Whether or not his plea was heard, three years later Pearson’s wish came true. In 1977, the city of Seattle passed its first comprehensive noise ordinance.

Sound has received a great deal of attention from geographers over the past few years (Andrews et al., 2014; Gallagher, 2016; Hemsworth, 2016; Simpson, 2017; Waitt et al., 2017). With its impacts on the body and on emotion, sonic activity has provided a helpful empirical site for studying visceral relations of power, subjectivity, and place (Born, 2013; Revill, 2016; Waitt et al., 2014). As Duffy et al. (2016) put it, “sound provides critical geographers with a means of focussing on the relationality of social-spatial everyday life” (49). And yet, within the literature on sonic geographies, sound is often taken at phenomenological face value, viewed in terms of its affective “particularity” (Revill, 2016: 241) or as “an isolated component through which the world is presented to us” (Paiva, 2018: 8). Few attempts have been made to situate phenomenologies of sound within larger historical contexts, especially political–economic ones (Paiva, 2018). Along these lines, George Revill (2016) has called for a more materially grounded approach to the study of sound in human geography. Such an approach would treat sound not only as an affective, phenomenal presence but as simultaneously shaped by “historically constituted modes of listening, understanding and interpretation” (Revill, 2016: 247). Sound, considered in this way, is never non-representational. It always appears within and against a specific set of social relations, those that make it audible, discernible, and inherently a matter of politics—a politics that extends beyond the individual body.

The study of noise regulation pushes sonic geography in this direction. It helps show how sound is “heard” and represented by the state. In the US and elsewhere, noise has typically been regarded as annoying or “unwanted sound” (Bijsterveld, 2008: 2; US EPA, 1978: 1). In information theory, noise refers to uncertainty, disturbance, or entropy within a channel of communication (Malaspina, 2018). The idea of miscommunication holds for sonic noise as well. Often it is perceived as something “meaningless [but] socially produced” (Revill, 2000: 602), “unintelligible but never insignificant” (Schwartz, 2011: 29), senseless but still sensed. These perceptions are always political. Judgements about what kinds of sounds are unwanted or incoherent are linked to judgements about what kinds of people do and do not belong in a given space—about which lives should and should not be ascribed value (Gunaratnam, 2009; Kerr et al., 2018). Over the past decade, human geographers have begun to address sonic judgements at the level of government, examining how sound and noise are formalized within law and policy (Gallan, 2014; Gallan and Gibson, 2013; Kerr et al., 2018; Oosterlynck and Swyngedouw, 2010; Prior, 2017; Proudfoot and McCann, 2008; Weber and Driessen, 2010). Such work helps bring sonic geography into dialog with a wider set of debates occurring in the discipline around urban governance and law (see, e.g. Delaney, 2015; McCann, 2017).

This paper contributes to the emerging scholarship on noise policy geographies through case studies of two different noise regulations: the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Noise Control Act of 1972 (NCA) and Seattle’s Noise Ordinance of 1977 (SNO). These studies were originally part of a master’s thesis I submitted in 2014 while a graduate student in the geography department at the University of Washington in Seattle. The larger project looked at changing sonic geographies with regard to issues of globalization and economic restructuring, particularly in the Seattle region. In examining the role of law, I conducted a close textual analysis of NCA and SNO, paying special attention to their languages of political economy. In addition, I compiled a database of relevant EPA policy reports from the agency’s online archive as well as other related news media on noise control. I also spent time in the Seattle Municipal Archives and searched through the Seattle Code Violations Database to get a sense of noise complaints in the area and to better grasp the social context behind, as well as reactions to, the rise of local and federal regulations.

Besides personal familiarity, I decided to focus on the US context because of the major influence it has had on noise regulations globally. Although the UK and Japan both passed national noise-control acts prior to the US, in 1960 and 1968, respectively, many argue that NCA heralded the start of an international movement toward comprehensive programs for the control of environmental noise (Finegold et al., 2002). A similar movement occurred within the US as well, with many states and municipalities drafting noise policies modeled on NCA (Coelho, 2007). Here I focus on Seattle, which I justify for two reasons. The first is that Seattle’s soundscape in the 1970s, when SNO was passed, echoed some of the larger trends driving noise control at that time. As described below, the development of more comprehensive noise control ordinances since the 1960s, on both federal and municipal levels, was at least in part a response to public outcry over commercial jets (Finegold et al., 2002; Grad and Hack, 1972). With its longtime connections to the Boeing Company and aircraft production, as well as its proximity to the Seattle–Tacoma Airport, Seattle was a hotspot for public and governmental debates over noise (see, e.g. US EPA, 1971). Today, Seattle continues to have “some of the most chronically high noise levels” of any US city, largely due to the massive construction boom that has occurred there in the 2010s (see Mandel, 2016). The second reason for choosing Seattle is that I encountered these noises first hand, along with the laws that governed them, when I lived for several years in an apartment in one of the city’s fastest growing neighborhoods. That experience provided a useful context when examining the Seattle noise ordinance.

Reading local and federal regulations side by side, I trace the emergence of a new form of sonic governance or biopolitics, one that addresses a national and global shift in capital accumulation toward what Marx (1990) called the “noisy sphere” of circulation. This argument unfolds in three parts. The first provides some theoretical scaffolding by combining a Foucauldian approach to sonic biopolitics with a Marxist aesthetics that can better account for issues of political economy. Geographers have tended to overlook the theoretical potential of this coupling, especially as an entry point for a materialist conception of sound. The second part of the paper takes an in-depth look at NCA and SNO. It shows how these documents construct a historically novel conception of the body and the population, one that places significant emphasis on biological, psychological—but also economic—well-being. This biopolitics is found to operate differently on national and urban scales, with the latter contingent on local relations of space and time. And yet both NCA and SNO provide empirical examples of how biopolitical forms of control (on the level of populations) intersect with and come to rely on the self-policing of sense and sensibility (on the level of individuals). This discussion draws on recent work from geographers and others on biopolitics, health, and neoliberal forms of citizenship (e.g. Mitchell, 2016; Rosenberg, 2016; Sparke, 2017). Building on this scholarship, I argue that documents like NCA and SNO gesture toward sensible citizenship--a sphere of belonging delineated by appropriate bodily behavior, both in terms of physical activity (sense) and ethics (sensibility).

Sensible citizenship does not emerge in a silent historical vacuum. The third part of the paper is concerned with how NCA and SNO handle the growing issue of “commerce.” My argument is that the biopolitics of noise control emerges within a changing regime of capital accumulation in the US and elsewhere during the 1970s. During this time, as Rick Pearson's complaints to the mayor make clear, noise in cities like Seattle posed a danger not just to certain individuals but to the rhythms of capitalist society itself, interrupting the “man heading towards work” and threatening the reproduction of life itself. Drawing on the policy documents, I argue that the need for comprehensive noise control in the 1970s reflects a larger shift in public and governmental concern away from the sphere of production and toward the noisy sphere of commodity exchange. Discrepancies between NCA and SNO signal the conflicting relationship between capitalist society and the noisy sphere, which appears as both a problem and potential solution for capital accumulation. In the end, the sensible citizen that NCA and SNO enforce is ultimately a legal geography whose sensory landscape reflects -- is in tune with -- the dissonances of capitalist exchange.

A Marxian–Foucauldian critique of noise

Recently there have been several attempts to place Marxian and Foucauldian traditions into conversation (see, e.g. Bidet, 2016; Dhareshwar, 2016; Li, 2007; Macherey, 2015; McIntyre and Nast, 2011; Negri, 2017; Olssen and Peters, 2015). This move is typically justified on a conceptual level, in terms of its “theoretical yield” (Dhareshwar, 2016: 362) or for “revealing new aspects” (Macherey, 2015) in both bodies of work. Here I am more concerned with providing an empirical rationale for wedding Marx and Foucault, grounding their conjuncture in noise.

Lauri Siisiäinen (2013) has written the most extensive account of Foucault’s work in its relation to the aural. Foucault’s own remarks on noise are seldom and fleeting. Siisiäinen (2013: 5) thus takes it upon himself to develop “the potentials” of Foucault for understanding the politics of sound and listening. While the book succeeds in showing how “[m]odern power needs ears, not only eyes” (Siisiäinen, 2013: 33) it curiously leaves out one of Foucault’s most important concepts for thinking about this power: biopolitics (which is only mentioned parenthetically). A study of noise control demands a theory of biopolitics because it must grapple with how certain populations and bodies are produced, represented, and regulated through the governance of sound.

Although he never fully developed the concept, Foucault’s (2003: 242–247) clearest definition of biopolitics comes in Society Must Be Defended. Biopolitics is defined here as a “new technology of power” that surveils and “seeks to control” phenomena at the level of populations. These phenomena include “birth rate, the mortality rate, various biological disabilities, and the effects of the environment.” By acquiring knowledge into such domains, through mechanisms such as “forecasts, statistical estimates, and overall measures,” biopolitics works to address, intervene on, and stabilize “a whole series of economic and political problems,” thereby ensuring that “life and the biological processes of man-as-species” remains “regularized.” Thus, unlike discipline, “which is addressed to bodies,” biopolitics targets the life of the population—“to establish an equilibrium, maintain an average, establish a sort of homeostasis.” The result, according to Foucault, is the production of an altogether “new body,” one with “so many heads that, while they might not be infinite in number, cannot necessarily be counted.”

With its connection to “regulatory mechanisms” and focus on populations, biopolitics is a useful concept for the geographic analysis of noise regulation. Already it has played a significant role in human geography over the past decade, particularly for scholars looking at issues of governmentality and the formation of neoliberal citizenship (see Rutherford and Rutherford, 2013 for an overview). Strangely, however, biopolitics has been neglected within sonic geography. While many recent studies give attention to sound’s bodily affects, little has been done to explore how these affects are conceived, normalized, and governed by the state on the scale of populations. Noise is of course a visceral phenomenon but, especially with the rise of urban noise pollution, it is also biopolitical in the sense that it is recognized as a “problem of the environment” that “has been created by the population and therefore has effects on that population” (Foucault, 2003: 245). This is especially evident in law, where noise is represented on scales above the individual, such as in abstract ideas of citizenship and public health. Thus, when taken biopolitically, noise can offer us insights into how structures of power cut across scales, negotiating or harmonizing the body of the listener with the general population. Because of the role it plays on both individual bodies and populations, noise presents a promising avenue for expanding Foucault’s (2003: 249) work and exploring the connections between disciplinary and biopolitical forms of power—from “the power of sovereignty to the power over life”. This is to take seriously the claim of another French theorist—Jacques Attali (1985: 7)—that “noise is the source of all power,” and that systems of control are built around and change with the “technology of listening in on, ordering, transmitting, and recording noise”.

But a Foucauldian theory of biopolitics, when taken alone, is not enough to provide a critique of noise regulation. The population or body of a given biopolitics is what Henri Lefebvre (1991: 341), building on Marx, called a “concrete abstraction”. A concrete abstraction is a concept severed from actual social relations but that still wields power over individuals. A critical approach to noise control must drill down beneath these abstractions to show how systems of power arise out of everyday life, a life whose rhythms and exchanges are structured by political economy. Drilling down means accounting for the specific geographies of the sonic or what Attali (1985), in his classic work Noise: The Political Economy of Music, calls the “localization of noise.” To localize noise is to recognize how it comes to “indicate the limits of a territory.” One way of doing this is to treat noise, in the Marxian sense, as a product of and problem for specific geographies of capital accumulation, but also a potential site of “spatial fix” for generating new value (Harvey, 1989). As Attali has shown, noise holds such a contradictory status within capitalist society -- as something welcome and threatening all at once. This creative destruction can be taken literally: noise is often experienced as an interruption in social exchange, but it also holds the capacity to transform the very rules of exchange, leading to new forms of meaning, social organization, and accumulation (see also Malaspina, 2018; Serres, 2007). Governmental attempts to control noise, and the biopolitics that these attempts reveal, must reckon with this socioeconomic contradiction. They demonstrate how capitalism’s crises are worked out on the level of the senses.

This analysis is in line with what geographers Ashley Dawkins and Alex Loftus (2013) have called a “Marxist aesthetics.” They argue that Marx’s opus presents a “relational understanding of the senses that is rooted in historically and geographically situated practices.” The senses are important for Marx, and must be historicized and contextualized, because they mark the conditions of possibility for struggle. For this reason, Marx’s critique of political economy depends on “a revolutionary understanding of the emancipation of the senses,” which carves out a space for communism (Dawkins and Loftus, 2013: 665). Noise control might be seen as part of a larger biopolitical apparatus that forestalls this emancipation and restricts the field of sense to produce a normative body or population—a kind of false objectivity. Such an apparatus is, perhaps, already evident in the writings of the young Marx (1992b: 353) for whom the senses are what yoke the individual to capitalist society. The subject “is affirmed in the objective world,” he argues, “not only in the act of thinking, but with all his senses.” The regulation of noise presents one example of how these senses are shaped, and bounded, by state law.

The biopolitics of noise regulation

EPA’s Noise Control Act

Uncertain by definition, noise has always caused problems for legal systems (Schwartz, 2011). Juridical attempts to control it are nothing new. In the US, specific noise legislation has existed on a municipal level since at least 1852, with the enactment of Boston’s Peace and Tranquility Ordinance (Harnapp and Noble, 1987). Early regulations consisted mostly of nuisance laws against “disturbing the peace.” Because of the difficulties at that time in setting objective standards for noise, these laws tended to be vague themselves: prohibiting “unreasonable” or “unusual” sounds. Vagueness meant that noise ordinances were highly subjective and this made them famously hard to enforce (Falzone, 1999). It also meant that for the most part courts handled noise on a case-by-case basis, only able to pass judgement on specific situations involving individual people. Understood in particular terms, illicit noises were largely acted on after the fact, rarely seen as future problems in need of comprehensive, population-wide regulation. Noise, in other words, resisted biopolitical control.

In hindsight, the rise of more comprehensive noise regulation appears oddly delayed. US cities did not begin adopting zoning laws for quiet areas until the 1900s and 1910s (Thompson, 2004). And it was not until 1957, in Chicago, that any city had in place what we now think of as a standard noise ordinance, specifying maximum decibel levels for land-use zones (Coelho, 2007). Beyond specific nuisance laws and quiet zones within cities, noise regulation was not conceived on a federal level until the 1960s. In explaining this, some scholars have highlighted the shift from propeller planes to jet engines that had occurred in the previous decade, filling skies with the constant roar of air travel (Finegold et al., 2002). Others have pointed to the growing recognition, on the part of the state and the public, of noise as an environmental pollutant (Nagle, 2009). Still, federal action on noise pollution tended to be conducted on an ad hoc basis, often as part of other federally funded programs. The need for a comprehensive federal policy on noise was not recognized until the early 1970s (Houle, 1974). This was spurred on in part by voices at the local level. In Seattle, Mayor Wes Uhlman wrote to President Nixon in 1971 to “convey the concern of many Seattle and King County citizens regarding the need for effective noise pollution control legislation.” Such sentiment was given scientific backing by a one-year investigation conducted by the EPA’s Office of Noise Abatement and Control into the negative health effects of noise. With the study, the EPA was able to convince Congress in 1972 to pass the Noise Control Act.

Rather than applying to specific situations as noise ordinances had done in the past, NCA sought a “national uniformity of treatment” (Sec. 2 (a)(3)). Noise was no longer just a nuisance affecting individuals and regions. It was now conceived as a “growing danger to the health and welfare of the Nation’s population” (Sec. 1 (a)(1)). As a result, the federal government took it upon itself to “promote an environment for all Americans free from noise” (Sec. 2 (b)). To that end, NCA's stated purpose was “to establish a means for effective coordination of Federal research and activities in noise control.” This included establishing “Federal noise emission standards” that “reflect the scientific knowledge most useful in indicating the kind and extent of all identifiable effects on the public health or welfare” (Sec. 5 (a)(1)).¹

With its focus on population health and national standards, NCA is indicative of the “new technology of power” that Foucault (2003), writing around the same time (1975–1976), named biopolitics. But rather than applying biopolitical control to the “object-targets” of noise and affect, in line with how geographers have often understood Foucault’s work (see, e.g. Anderson, 2012), NCA makes the case that biopolitics has been bound up with noise from the start, whether “noise” is taken sonically or in the larger sense of unwanted material. The equilibriums and averages that Foucault sees as integral to biopolitical control appear, in NCA, to rely on the production, measurement, and regulation of noisy spaces of danger. The “Nation’s population,” for example, is only conceived as a legal entity in need of protection because of the health threat posed by “inadequately controlled noise” (Sec. 1 (a)(1)). It is noise that allows NCA to address Foucault’s body with “many heads.” It turns out to be a body with many ears too.

Noise control capitalizes on the same practices of risk management and health security that geographers have long attributed to biopolitical forms of control under neoliberalism (see, e.g. Braun, 2007; Mansfield, 2012; Sparke, 2009). These are perhaps not so new. As Erik Swyngedouw (2005) reminds us, the legitimacy of the state has, since at least the 18th century, been rooted in its ability to intervene on the risks posed to “life qualities.” But what is new, as Matthew Sparke (2017) has recently pointed out, is how neoliberal forms of risk are embodied, biologically or otherwise, in ways that enable certain forms of citizenship. NCA is useful here as a historical artifact because it draws attention to the sensory nature of risk. In the 1972 document, noise is more than a threat in need of control. It is—as something uncertain, contingent, and difficult to pin down—a threat that traverses and transgresses multiple bodies, spaces, and scales. As a 1978 EPA report on Protective Noise Levels puts it, “noise emanates from many different sources” (p. 1). It is thus important “to examine the total range and combination of noise sources and not to focus unduly on any one source.” Such sonic multiplicity is both problematic and potentially generative for government. As Cecile Malaspina (2018: 203) describes it, noise is a truly polymorphous concept because it is “about the relation between contingency and control”. It connects government with the ungovernable.

The polymorphous quality of noise is reflected in NCA’s sprawling definition of the legal subject. Its category of “persons” is spread out to cover “individual, corporation, partnership, or association, and […] includes any officer, employee, department, agency, or instrumentality of the United States, a State, or any political subdivision of a State.” Through this proliferation, NCA reduces the complex geography of noise pollution into a simple causal binary of victim and responsible party, plaintiff and defendant (see Sec. 12 (b)(2)). Individuals, corporations, even the state itself, are posed as rights-bearing subjects, but also as sensorial subjects. They are all bodies in need of “laws designed to safeguard [their] health and welfare” (Sec. 6) or as persons in violation of a “noise control requirement” and thus subject to “civil action” and “compliance” (Sec. 12). In this way, NCA constructs a biopolitical language for reading across bodies and scales.

The result is something similar to what Lefebvre (1991: 352) calls abstract space. “Uniform in appearance,” abstract space is the calculable, instrumental, controlled space of scientists, state officials, planners, and administrators. Several geographers have attempted to connect Lefebvre’s concept to Foucault’s work on biopolitics and to the governmental viewpoint of the “population at large” (see, e.g. Rose-Redwood, 2006: 478). In terms of noise control regulations, abstract space is helpful in grasping the legal geographies of biopolitical control. Framed as requiring a uniformity of treatment, noise provides the “epistemological basis” for such a space (Rose-Redwood, 2006: 478). It allows biopolitical concepts like the “population” to be spatialized.

With its impacts on health and welfare, noise also connects NCA’s abstract space with the biological and mental aspects of the individual. For the EPA in the 1970s, noise was conceived as something that “disrupts communication and individual thoughts, and affects performance capability” (US EPA, 1978: 1). It was “one of the biological stressors associated with everyday life.” The federal research that the legislation set in motion sought to measure, map, and intervene these stressors. For example, a 1978 amendment to NCA, known as the Quiet Communities Act, called for an “investigation of the psychological and physiological effects of noise on humans […] and the determination of dose/response relationships suitable for use in decision-making” (NCA: Sec. 14). The goal of these studies was to develop “criteria or information on control techniques” (Sec. 5). This included uniform standards concerning the “levels of environmental noise” needed to protect public health. In one report from 1974, the EPA sought to establish sound levels that would protect “virtually the entire population” in “a large number of situations.” After “a great deal of analysis and deliberation” the document establishes 70 decibels (dBA) as the threshold at which hearing loss occurs (US EPA, 1974: 1–4).

By setting objective limits and accumulating information on listening bodies, individuals are made legible within and through federal systems of governance. This aspect of noise policy resonates with some of the claims made by “governmentality” scholars over the past couple of decades. For Nikolas Rose (1998: 164) there has been a general trend since the 1960s of western authorities seeking to “know and administer the lives of their subjects” in “the name of their well-being.” This occurs both in terms of biological health (Rose, 2009) and psychology (Rose, 1998). By situating “well-being, happiness, and tranquility” as the responsibility of individual citizens, state discourses carve out a “manageable space” within the body, placing the latter in “alignment with political objectives” (Rose, 1998: 115, 112, 155). For Rose and others, this results in a neoliberal form of control known as governmentality, a concept Foucault barely sketched out but that generally refers to how individuals come to govern themselves by opting in to rationalities and mentalities of self-regulation. As geographers like Katharyne Mitchell (2006) have shown, neoliberal governmentality is often established through education, training, and practices of citizenship. And it is often physically embodied (see, e.g. Guthman, 2009).

Something similar is at work in noise regulations like NCA. As part of the Quiet Communities Act, NCA apportioned funds to states and municipal governments for establishing their own noise-control programs, including “a quality assurance program for equipment and monitoring procedures of State and local noise control programs,” “educational and training materials and programs, including national and regional workshops,” and “regional technical assistance centers which use the capabilities of university and private organizations to assist State and local noise control programs” (Sec. 14 (c)). Funds were also allocated to the EPA and other agencies to distribute this information to the public “through the use of materials for school curricula, volunteer organizations, radio and television programs, publication, and other means” (NCA: Sec. 14 (a)). The goal of these efforts, as expressed in an EPA noise-control manual from 1980, was to “encourage citizens to participate in the design and implementation of local noise control and abatement” (US EPA, 1980: 1).

These education programs provide a good example of how federal noise regulation works to connect biopolitical forms of control with systems of governmentality. What the biopolitics of NCA aims to produce is “responsible citizens” (Lee, 2010; McCann, 2017) who are able to regulate their own noises. The embodiment of sonic risk thus results in a kind of sensible citizenship, defined by scientifically “objective” limits on what constitutes dangerous noise. But when the scale shifts to local levels of policy, sensible citizenship turns out to be more complex, contentious, and based on concrete patterns of exclusion.

Seattle's Noise Ordinance

Following the enactment of NCA in 1972, many municipalities began drafting their own noise policies based on that model (Coelho, 2007). Seattle's Noise Ordinance is one example. The City Council passed SNO in 1977 after three years of studying the problem of noise (Sec. 25.08.020). SNO is now Chapter 25.08 of the Seattle Municipal Code (2009). Its stated purpose is very similar to that of NCA: to “minimize the exposure of citizens to the physiological and psychological dangers of excessive noise and to protect, promote and preserve the public health, safety and welfare” (Sec. 25.08.010). In this way, Seattle’s ordinance also outlines a sonic biopolitics that seeks to intervene on the well-being of a population.

But SNO does not attempt to establish a uniformity of treatment in the same way as NCA. It is much more concrete in terms of the geographies, sounds, and bodies it subjects to control, which are contingent on the Seattle area and its particular sonic issues. Even Washington State laws on noise pollution, the ordinance suggests, are not specific enough: “the City Council finds that special conditions exist within the City which make necessary any and all differences between this chapter and the regulations adopted by the [Washington State] Department of Ecology” (Sec. 25.08.020). These “special conditions” pose problems for the abstract biopolitics of state and federal noise policy.

Biopolitical control, when brought down to the urban sphere, does not run smoothly. As shown here in the case of SNO, it turns out to be more of a “policy assemblage” (McCann, 2011) one that is shaped by specific urban geographies and temporalities. The assemblage nature of SNO reflects a larger trend within urban noise policy. As sound studies scholar Karin Bijsterveld (2008) has shown, noise is conceived and managed in different ways across the city, from “objectifying” strategies of zoning to “individualizing” strategies of public education. These policies are further shaped by local housing geographies and social norms around privacy, sleep, and appropriate behavior (Kerr et al., 2018). This contingency is something that Proudfoot and McCann (2008) have noted about municipal policies more generally. In the context of Vancouver, British Columbia, they show how smooth policies tend to be framed and enforced in ways that reflect and reentrench uneven geographies of regulatory practice and development. For urban noise policy, this has much to do with implementation. Whereas national policies like NCA are usually carried out by larger agencies such as the EPA and through public programs, ordinances like SNO are directly enforced by local police. In Seattle and elsewhere, as Steve Herbert’s (2007) work has shown, police strategies involve creating boundaries and keeping certain people (and their sounds) out.

This unevenness includes zoning distinctions across the city. Similar to EPA’s noise level standards, SNO establishes a set of exterior sound limits, defined in terms of equivalent continuous noise level (Leq). But unlike the EPA standards, which are intended to apply to “products distributed in commerce” (NCA: Sec. 2) SNO’s sound limits are geographically divided into rural, residential, commercial, and industrial zones (Sec. 25.08.410).² These limits, which reinforce divisions of public and private space, make it unlawful for “any person to cause sound, or […] to permit sound […] to intrude on the real property of another person whenever such sound exceeds the exterior sound limits established” (Sec. 25.08.400). For example, in 2012 city inspectors found an exhaust system in the Queen Anne neighborhood emitting sounds of 58.7 dBA Leq, beyond the 55 dBA limit specified in SNO for residential-to-residential noise. Similarly in West Seattle in 2006, a residential powervent was measured at 61.5 dBA Leq, well over the exterior sound level limit. Both of these inspections resulted in compliance actions by the responsible parties (City of Seattle, 2014).

The unevenness of SNO, as its implemented today, also reflects more dynamic geographies of development. SNO has become a contentious issue over the past several years as the city has experienced an upsurge in construction from the building of Amazon.com's new headquarters, the replacement of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, as well as real estate development bolstered by the city’s tech boom. This situation has intensified since 2009 when the City Council approved noise ordinance changes that make it easier for large public projects to receive variances to the city’s noise laws for construction. Still, many contractors have been cited for working late and early hours without permits (Capitol Hill Seattle Blog, 2009).

The limits that SNO sets not only reflect spatial divisions---in regards to property lines, zones, and the division of public and private space---but also temporal ones. Nuisance is always relative to the time of day (cf. Gallan, 2014). On weekdays, sounds become “residential disturbances” when they occur between 10 pm and 7 am (Sec. 25.08.225). During those nighttime hours, SNO’s exterior sound level limits are reduced by 10 dBA (Sec. 25.08.420). For daytime hours, however, certain sounds are exempt from the ordinance. These include “sounds created by bells, chimes, or carillons not operating for more than 5 minutes in any one hour,” as well as “sounds created by the discharge of firearms on legally established shooting ranges” (Sec. 25.08.540). Noises like these are permitted from 7 am to 10 pm on weekdays, and from 9 am to 10 pm on weekends and legal holidays.

In SNO, local structures of time and space shape the rollout of biopolitics. In line with Lefebvre’s (1991) concept, the abstract space of NCA is only apparently homogenous. The welfare of a population, when viewed on an urban level, turns out to depend on the intricate rhythms of everyday life. In Seattle and elsewhere these rhythms are tied to, and constantly interrupted by, patterns of urban development and agglomeration. Noise regulation can provide a “local spatial fix” (Proudfoot and McCann, 2008: 349) for the unwanted side-effects of these activities. But such a “fix” relies on citizen involvement. Similar to NCA, the biopolitics of SNO is premised on neoliberal forms of self-regulation and community policing. One of the duties with which the ordinance tasks the City’s Department of Planning and Development is “investigating noise complaints” (Sec. 25.08.670). Today, these noise complaints include photos, videos, and sound clips from disgruntled residents. Such recording technologies enable what McCall et al. (2015) describe as “citizen-on-citizen surveillance.” This points to a more localized sensible citizenship, in which forms of belonging are actively policed by their own members. As noise becomes localized, the biopolitical “population” is shown to be founded on what—and who—is judged to be in need of control and, potentially, of silencing.

Community policing around issues of noise is reinforced by other local institutions in Seattle. It is promoted by the police themselves. A brochure published by the Seattle Police Department emphasizes that “noise complaints are not a high priority for police” (SPD, 2006). For this reason they recommend that citizens “first try contacting the people responsible for the noise” because “[o]ften times, they are not aware of the discomfort they are causing.” This protocol is reinforced by the media. In 2015 a local newspaper, The Stranger, published an account of one Seattle resident’s struggle living across the street from a noisy high-rise construction site (Jonjak, 2015). The article includes the phone number for the City of Seattle’s complaint line and asks readers to report ordinance violations. Here, noise becomes an ethical issue on which individuals must take initiative in policing and self-regulating. Violations are no longer just about limits to sense but about limits to sensibility—about how one ought to behave.

By placing responsibility on the individual citizen to make complaints, noise control in Seattle produces an abstract legal geography comparable to that of NCA. It relies on a similar juridical coupling that gives the Department of Planning and Development the power to arbitrate between “the complainant” and “the persons served the notice [of violation]” (Sec. 25.08.760). But in SNO this coupling is localized, emerging from Seattle’s specific property relations: “It is unlawful for any person to cause sound […] to intrude into the property of another person whenever such sound exceeds the exterior sound level limits established.” Private property, as geographers like Nicholas Blomley (2005: 126) have shown, is rooted in “individualism, exclusion and suspicion”. It both requires and reinforces patterns of criminalization, dispossession, and inequality, creating cities with limited access for the poor. SNO is built on this uneven geography. As a sensible citizen, the individual is given the right to complain if and when their private sphere is encroached upon. Therefore, unlike NCA, noise control is no longer framed solely as a matter of objective health standards. It is now an explicitly political issue of what sounds, and thus what forms of life, do not belong in the city.

Property and sense, as Marx (1992b) claimed in his younger years, are deeply intertwined. When territorialized within property boundaries, disturbances become conceivable, localizable, and subject to complaint. In this way, they also become “exchangeable” across space. A 58.7 dBA residential disturbance in Queen Anne can be measured against a 61.5 dBA residential disturbance in West Seattle. Very different from older case-by-case nuisance laws, the abstract legal space of SNO treats noise as a generalizable thing. The latter is not unlike a commodity, one whose value—or rather, “anti-value” (Harvey, 2018; MacFarlane, 2019)—may be detached from its particular situation and compared to other sonic events across an entire population. This biopolitical handling of noise, I argue below, is in part a response to a new historical emphasis placed on the “noisy sphere” of exchange.

The noisy sphere of commerce

Comprehensive noise control emerged at a time of capitalist crisis. After a long postwar boom, the US economy began to show signs of a slowdown by the end of the 1960s. This continued in the next decade, when the global recession of 1973 led to massive levels of inflation and unemployment. These changes led to wholesale political and economic shifts within the US and elsewhere as governments and businesses tried to get things back on track. Thirty years ago, geographers like David Harvey (1987, 1989) described this as a movement toward more flexible forms of capital accumulation (see also Schoenberger, 1988; Tickell and Peck, 1992). What Harvey noticed was how, by the early 1970s, the rigidities of older forms of production gave way to a “flexibility with respect to labour processes, labour markets, products, and patterns of consumption.” The rise of new markets, technologies, and non-industrial sectors of production provided new opportunities for investment and profit. While many have challenged and nuanced this argument, pointing to specific counter-examples (see, e.g. Gough, 1996) its general historical thrust remains useful in understanding the last half century of globalization and uneven capitalist development. Adopting a similar argument, Joshua Clover (2016) has argued that the global economic period from 1973 to the present can be defined broadly by declines in production’s capacity for generating high profits and the consequent shift in attention toward commodity circulation -- toward the “noisy sphere” of the marketplace.

NCA and SNO were ratified within this historical context. As abstract spaces, they are “bound up […] with exchange” (Lefebvre, 1991: 57). Both documents speak very explicitly to commercial activity and seek, via law, to control it. The biopolitics they construct can thus be seen as a kind of “spatial fix” for the crises of capital accumulation. And yet NCA and SNO pursue this fix in conflicting ways. On the one hand, NCA (Sec. 2) sets out to limit noise emissions from “products of commerce.” As a result, during the 1970s and 1980s research funds were channeled toward the sphere of circulation. The EPA’s first action programs under the new authorities granted by NCA included a major study of airport noise and the development of noise standards for “trains and motor carriers in interstate commerce” (US EPA, 1972). As part of the rollout of NCA, the 1978 Quiet Communities Program also garnered federal money to develop “abatement plans for areas around major transportation facilities (including airports, highways, and rail yards)” (NCA: Sec. 14).

While NCA places restrictions on commerce, SNO attempts “to control the level of noise in a manner which promotes commerce” (25.08.010). As a result, the noisy sphere becomes partially exempt from regulation. Sounds exempt at all times include those created by commercial watercraft, such as “tugboats, fishing boats, ferries, and vessels engaged in intrastate, interstate, or international commerce” (25.08.485). Also included are “sounds originating from forest harvesting and silviculture activity and from commercial agriculture, if the receiving property is located in a commercial or industrial district of the City” (25.08.530). And while “loud and raucous” animal noises are clearly subject to fine, they are not if they are made in commercial kennels (25.08.500).

The divergence of NCA and SNO with regard to commerce points to a contradiction at the heart of capitalism’s noisy sphere: between the need to bolster market exchange and the need to curb its earsplitting externalities. Some geographers have understood this tension in terms of regulation theory, which Peck and Tickell (1995: 16) once noted puts an emphasis on “holding together the twin processes of accumulation and regulation”. This twin process is inherent in the uneven temporal and geographical nature of capitalist development. On the one hand, as Marx (1992a) argues, commerce must be constantly sped up (amplified) to create shorter circulation times and to allow capitalist exchange to occur over greater distances. This is made possible through technological developments in the means of transport and communication. Accelerations in these areas lead to increased profit margins, which enable capitalists to realize the surplus value generated in production, thus ensuring continued capital accumulation. But accelerated commerce can also lead to an accumulation of anti-value in the form of environmental pollution and its negative health effects (cf. MacFarlane, 2019). In Marx’s time, for instance, the railroad created a new and often psychologically jarring aural landscape as it expanded commerce across continents (see Marx, 2000).

The relation of noise to commerce is the empirical embodiment of capitalism’s inner tensions. Attali’s (1985) work sets the stage for this kind of analysis. “In noise,” he argues, “can be read the codes of life, the relations among men [sic]” (6). While noise is often taken as a sign of “busyness” and commercial bustle, it can also stand for miscommunication, uncertainty, and wasted labor, which cause potential problems and slowdowns within the circuits of production and circulation. Noise thus acts as a kind of pharmakon for capitalist society: it is a necessary component of healthy markets while also posing a threat to the accumulation processes these markets support. As both value and anti-value, noise is the inner engine of capitalism. For governments, it creates a “paradox of control” (Bijsterveld, 2008).

What the study of noise regulations shows is how capitalism’s noisy contradiction plays out across space and history, and how that contradiction remains tied to the corporeality of life itself. Sometimes noise is treated as a remedy, other times a poison. In the US, most urban dwellers in the 19th century came to accept railroad noises and other sounds of industry as symbols of progress (Thompson, 2004). But as the noises of progress penetrated more deeply into everyday life, they began to pose a greater threat to the processes of social reproduction. Social reproduction is “life’s work” (Mitchell et al., 2004). It refers to the labor through which capitalist society is able to reproduce itself and endure from one moment to the next. As Marx (1990: 341) notes, in order to maintain “his vital force,” the worker must “rest, sleep” as well as “feed, wash, and clothe himself.” Historically in the US, this shelter and sustenance is provided within the private sphere of the home, where women have tended to do the majority of work. Noise regulations provide a protective mechanism for social reproduction, whether of capitalist society, with its gendered divisions of labor, or other forms of life. The quiet hours that SNO establishes, for instance, reflect social attitudes around privacy, sleep, and intrusion (cf. Kerr et al., 2018). These often conflict with urban development and broadened networks of circulation. Recent noise complaints in the Seattle region include those concerning the rapidly growing SeaTac Airport traffic (Gates, 2018). And yet, once again, while SNO seeks to provide some reprieve from the noises of commerce, it also seeks at the same time to promote commerce.

Contradictions in capitalism’s noisy sphere have led to a search for “seamless global circulation” (Cowen, 2014: 90). Increasingly, the noises of capitalist exchange are concealed in cloud server farms or within underwater fiber-optic cables. Massively complex logistical systems expand and accelerate circulation, while removing the latter’s eyesores—and earsores—from the sensible citizen. Networks of exchange are made silent and displaced from consciousness (cf. Toscano and Kinkle, 2015). In the search for seamless commerce, the manipulation of noise becomes an economic imperative. It is no longer an expression of industrial progress but a variable to be measured and controlled. Attali (1985) identifies something similar in his historical analysis of music. He points to the shift in music’s function as a use-value and representation of capitalist harmony to its status as an exchangeable commodity within a society of repetition, mass production, and individualized consumption. This shift, for Attai, has been ongoing since the advent of sound recording in the 19th century. Focusing on the sonic thus poses a challenge to the rigid periodization of scholars like Clover (2016) as well as Marxist historians like Robert Brenner and Giovanni Arrighi, who place the movement toward exchange firmly after 1973 (see Vasquez, 2016). The form of sensible citizenship sketched out here is more historically complex and, like noise itself, resists being pinned down to one place or period in time.

Conclusion

We therefore take leave for a time of this noisy sphere…

—Karl Marx (1990: 267)

This paper has argued that modern noise regulation presents a new form of biopolitical control. Through a case study of federal and municipal-level policies, I showed how this biopolitics seeks to connect the “many-eared” body of the population with the sensorial and ethical body of the individual. The result is a kind of sensible citizenship defined by what and who is made subject to acts of silencing. Sensible citizenship is geographically and historically specific, appearing in different ways across different scales and time periods. In the context of modern noise regulation, I examined how sensible citizenship emerged alongside, partially as a “fix” for, crises within capital accumulation. Comprehensive attempts to control sound are part of a more general shift in global capitalism toward the “noisy sphere” of exchange.

The preceding analysis makes several scholarly contributions. First, it advocates for the study of law and policy within sonic geography. Law and policy provide evidence for how spaces of noise are produced in state discourse and thus help to answer Revill’s (2016) recent call for a more materially grounded approach to the geographic study of sound. That said, only two noise control documents are examined here and they are limited to the US context. There is important work to be done in exploring legal sonic geographies elsewhere, especially in manufacturing-heavy countries like China where industrial noises pose a serious health threat to large segments of the population.

The second contribution the paper makes is to advance noise as an empirical site for studying the relationship between population-level biopolitics and individual-level governmentality. Comparing federal and municipal regulations helps to show how this relationship of control changes depending on space and scale. While the biopolitics of the EPA’s regulations remains within an abstract legal space, the biopolitics of Seattle’s ordinance is contingent on specific urban relations. Future studies might explore how noise regulation operates at other scales, such as the regional or state level. The theoretical framework developed here might also be used to reexamine particular soundscapes where sonic governance is evoked. Topics such as high-density apartment living, 24-hour cities, and wind farms could all be critically reframed through the concept of sensible citizenship and better situated within—and perhaps against—the dynamics of global capitalism.

Finally, the paper develops a geographic theory of Marx’s noisy sphere of exchange. This provides some groundwork for others studying the political economy of sound. Marx (1990: 267) used the noisy sphere as a metaphor for market exchange, “where everything takes place on the surface and in full view of everyone”. This paper suggests that the noisy sphere might also be taken literally, to describe the actual noises of exchange. Regulatory documents provide a window into how noise is not only experienced but how it is produced and maintained. They provide an entry point into the space below the noisy sphere: “the hidden abode of production.” Tracking noise in policy is, in this way, a means of critique. It leads us under the phenomenological surface of sounds, to the actual social relations that create them. By mapping these, we find a way to climb back out, to make sound in different ways, finding ourselves in higher sphere that knows no exclusion, exploitation, or control.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Key MacFarlane is a PhD Candidate in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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