Introduction: hearing like a state

Abstract

In Seeing Like a State, James Scott argues that legibility is of paramount importance for modern statecraft. The creation of an “administrative grid” for the sake of more efficient taxation and security, which included a range of bureaucratic and coercive mechanisms, turned a fictional and simplified shorthand (measurement standards, citizenship, land tenure, etc.) into reality – a reality that requires constant reassertion. For Scott, “The premodern state was, in many crucial respects, partially blind; it knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity. It lacked anything like a detailed ‘map’ of its terrain and its people. It lacked, for the most part, a measure, a metric, that would allow it to ‘translate’ what it knew into a common standard necessary for a synoptic view” (Scott 1998, 2). But how does the modern state hear? How do sounds and sound-making practices become (or fail to become) susceptible to state intervention? What are the common regulatory, disciplinary, and punishment mechanisms used in such an intervention? This special issue addresses these questions by following three threads, all of which have been mostly absent in the field of sound studies (at least in the English-speaking world). The first thread is topical: we focus on the multiple points of intersection between sound, governance and law. We do so not through general notions of “noise” and “power” but with the close analysis of specific urban spaces, legal documents, auditory communities and technologies. As each article shows, this task entails considering the specificities of the legal, scientific and bureaucratic spheres – tackling a vast number of documents that must run through certain administrative channels so that sounds can become either legitimate or illegitimate. The second thread is geographical: the articles move either outside North America and Europe (the focus of the vast majority of sound studies scholarship today) or within international affairs. Fifteen years ago, Veit Erlmann stated that “The number of accounts detailing how the West’s sounds are cast back on it is still shockingly small. Even more striking is the absence from current debates of Third World scholars interested in auditory perception” (Erlmann 2004, 4). More recently, Jonathan Sterne argued that “The West is still the epistemic center for much work in sound studies, and a truly transnational, translational, or global sound studies will need to recover or produce a proliferating set of natures and histories to work with” (Sterne 2015, 73). This special issue touches on such natures and histories while suggesting how notions of Western