UC Santa Cruz

On Tumult: A Political Theory of Noise makes audible the inextricable relationship between noise and power. Rather than hearing noise as merely an effect of struggles between the powerful and the powerless, this dissertation argues that noise is at the very heart of what is being struggled over, who is engaged in these struggles, and how that struggle is carried out. On Tumult examines the unruly crowd and its sound, taking seriously the original etymology of noise that posits a metonymic association between the two. Through a critical reading of three canonical theorists of noise—R. Murray Schafer, Jacques Attali, and Tricia Rose—I explore noise’s conflation with social disorder to gain a better understanding of the sono-politics of sovereign power and the forms of policing required for power’s reproduction. Protest, in its profane refusal to be silent and its ethical demand to be heard, challenges sovereign power over possession of what acoustic ecologist R. Murray Schafer called the Sacred Noise, meaning a capacity to make noise that can’t be silenced or censured. According to the political theorist Jacques Attali, this noise of civil unrest portends a radical transformation of social order that can only be constrained through a sacrificial noise, as either new musical forms or as permitted protest and limited riots, mediating the potential for revolutionary violence. Tricia Rose’s study of the discursive and social policing of rap artists and fans gives a more specific example of this process, detailing a long historical movement to contain Black noise tied to the persistent haunting fear of Black insurrection. By attuning to these thinkers and expanding upon their studies of noise, this dissertation demonstrates that sound studies’ is founded upon a convergence of aesthetics, media theory, political theology and the phenomenology of power. Ultimately, On Tumult argues for noisemaking’s capacity to materialize the radical imagination through the experience of sound crossing where bodies are otherwise constrained by borders, boundaries and bondage, showing us how those prohibitions might be further challenged, transgressed, and one day abolished.