Class 12. December 4. Language, understanding, and meaning
Methods: forms of communication (verbal, visual, digital), coverage in mass media, collection and recording of stories and folklore.
(Friday, December 6: open for site visits, meetings, etc.)
Expert: Thomas Campanella or Jerry Krase or Leonard Bernardo
Readings or applications:
Julia Guarneri, “Building Print Community,” chap. 3 in Newsprint Metropolis: City Papers and the Making of Modern Americans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
Thomas J. Campanella, selection from Brooklyn: The Once and Future City (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, forthcoming in fall 2019).
Alfred Kazin, “The Block and Beyond,” chap. 3 in A Walker in the City (New York: Harcourt, 1951).
Colson Whitehead and Teju Cole, “Disoriented, Deracinated, Exhilarated,” and Cynthia Ozick, “The Synthetic Sublime,” chapters 13 and 14 in Walking in New York: Reflections of American Writers from Walt Whitman to Teju Cole, ed. Stephen Miller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015).
In Ngo’s “Punk in the Shadow of War,” we hear echoes of the calls for legitimacy and authenticity in mid-century US cities, following the slide of deindustrialization, white flight’s cut to the tax base, and the racialization of the urban core. Just as we explored in this semester’s inquiry into Gowanus, the proximity to poverty and its romanticization in Ngo’s study of the LA punk scene post-1975 parallels the contested neighborhood boundaries and racial tensions present in Brooklyn at the same time and into the AIDS crisis that followed (particularly on my mind as we were doing this reading, with the World Aids Day pieces like this one: https://www.villagevoice.com/2018/11/30/a-day-without-art-a-voice-writer-dies-from-aids/). As New York’s identity shifts continue, neighborhood spacial identity, race and ethnicity, and language of belonging are in flux, particularly considering an individual and community’s relationship with place and its past.
How do we understand this excavation of a romanticized past in light of the passage from Miller’s “The Synthetic Sublime” that quotes Cynthia Ozick, “More than any other metropolis of the Western world, New York disappears. It disappears and then it disappears again; or say that it metamorphoses between disappearances, so that every seventy-five years or so another city bursts out” (Miller 206). This fascination with excavating and reminiscing about the past, as also demonstrated by Miller’s comparison with Kazin and Cole’s character, Julius, who “look at New York as if he were an archaeologist” (Miller 199). What truly belongs? Or do communities simply mourn the transition out of their longest encounter with a space? “Before the World Trade Towers were built, ‘there had been a bustling network of little streets traversing this part of town…gone, too, was the old Washington Market, the active piers, the fishwives, the Christian Syrian enclave that was established there in the late 1800s…And before that? What Lenape paths lay buried beneath the rubble? The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased and rewritten.'” (Miller 199).
These readings, along with our inquiry all semester, complicate the current historical moment’s claim to legitimacy in Gowanus, and raise questions around the future of Gowanus in the face of rezoning, a defining force in this New New York.
I am at the GC library reading Radovac’s “War on Noise” and listening to the sound of police and fire truck sirens as they race across 34th street while cars are honking at traffic. I am realizing that living in New York City is the equivalent of living in an apiary, except that instead of the melodic sounds of birds, it’s a cacophony of industrialized machine-like sounds. I live above an outdoor subway station and have become accustomed to the constant noise of the trains coming in and out of the station, and the ever-so-loud “Thank you for riding the MTA” at 3am, when nobody is even in the station (why??). In a city so loud, quiet becomes a privilege and that is what is important about the history Radovac is tracing. In particular, it is interesting how La Guardia’s War on Noise campaign developed into a form of crime mapping that became a tool in future quality of life campaigns (739). Furthermore, the framing of the anti-noise campaign as an aesthetic issue served as a marker for the separate social spheres of New York’s residents – it’s a luxury to be concerned with aesthetics (744). Finally, and in my opinion most fascinatingly, in the face a growing communist Red Scare “noise laws provided police with a way to constrain and disrupt political protests in a surreptitious manner—that is, not by prohibiting them, which La Guardia was keenly aware would arouse opposition, but by restricting the use of sound as a tool of political expression” (746). As such, the war of noise became a way of curbing the first amendment rights of NY residents. Noise has also been used as an excuse to control nightlife – leaving it up to the authorities to shape what is acceptable nightlife culture.
As an avid city walker, I adored the chapters from Miller’s Walking New York. However, I only experience a city (not just NY) as disorienting and dreamlike when I am walking around in an exploratory way as opposed to walking with a mission. When I am simply trying to get from point A to point B, it’s almost like I don’t notice what is in my way. But when the goal is to wander and explore and discover, then cities (the walkable kind!) become alive in a completely different way. In 2015, I was in Istanbul for a summer internship and spent countless hours just walking the city and getting lost in its famous maze-like urban fabric. It was simply enchanting and I came to really understand the identities of each neighborhood just by walking.
Thinking about my final project for the semester, I am thinking about ways to capture or elicit responses from my potential subjects that would draw out the disorienting/dreamlike features of walking around Gowanus for a public housing resident versus a recent glass-building resident.
In the readings, it strikes me that there is a line of inquiry that is worth mining – I’m not sure about the extent that it has been.
There is a certain homomorphism and, indeed, entanglement between noise, viral and bacterial agents, gaseous, water-borne, and other forms of “pollution.” All are both diffusive and often large-scale. All provoke grassroots demands for temporal and socio-spatial regulation that is often similarly diffuse and scaled. Those demands and that regulation, in all cases, has often subtle and dissembling, but also conscious and obvious relations with race, ethnicity, and class. Those demands and that regulation is often hyper-local, but relies in profound ways on the global march of science and high modernist social engineering ambitions.
What this suggests is that the regulation of pollution, thus conceived, is not only available to the sort of Foucauldian and all-too-ideographic micro-political studies that I’ve seen a lot of. It also has all the elements of a pretty standard comparative politics: the social forces and institutions of race, ethnicity, class, and the state put in play with the movement of world-historical time. I have not really seen that and, if I do, I imagine that it would have to be something like a comparative urban politics, given that this sort of pollution regulation is so often localized and relative to population densities.
So, by brief example, just as the Lung Block is being defined and a form of New York City segregation is taking shape, Port Elizabeth’s unironically named Stranger’s Location is experiencing an outbreak of bubonic plague and, under the impetus of the resulting so-called “sanitation syndrome” South African segregation is taking shape. New York City’s major relocation initiatives, it seems often discursively rooted in notions of pollution, occur either side of World War II, coterminously with South African apartheid. A systematic comparison along these lines, placing pollution centrally, may provide the groundwork for a comparative politics of pollution and environment.
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It should be noted that Alli and Rebecca have written some beautiful prose.
As an aside and further to Rebecca’s metaphor: if the sirens of police and fire trucks are cacophonous mechanical birds, then I’ve often thought that Sub-Saharan Africa’s functional substitute is the hadeda ibis, an abominable urban-dwelling fowl-of-the-air that is identically vexatious to the senses and best expounded upon, at an appropriately high volume, videographically: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsUkZjXd8xI
Thank you, Ryan!
As for literature about noise as pollution, I’ve come across some research in the fields on urban sustainability. But I think it’s only recent that noise has become lumped into the world of pollution and its adjacent policies. Hope this is helpful!
Lilian Radovac’s piece on the “war on noise” delivers what is now one of my favorite political slogans: “New York City[,] not only a good place to live in but also a good place to sleep in.”
The mapping of noise – what she describes as the precondition to making noise controllable – reminds me of the way police now use noise cues to track violence. A few years ago, the NYPD adopted a system called ShotSpotter to detect, locate, and analyze the sounds of gunshots through microphones all over the city. While post-Ferguson police reform efforts are rhetorically focused on accountability and, in New York City, community policing, technology is developing so police have tools, including audio data, to predict future crime. Such tools are in danger of reproducing current disproportionate policing of black and brown communities, as existing data documents the existing arrest patterns.
This dynamic takes Radovac’s point about isolating noise as an object and further mutates it into real-time data that you can only see on the screen; you cannot hear every gunshot across the city over the course of a month in one sitting. While gunshots could be wholly understood as a sound indicating something bad, other indicators are less clear.
For example, I have a neighbor across the street in an affordable housing building owned by the Fifth Avenue Committee who, throughout the fall, when his window no longer had A/C but it wasn’t too cold to keep it open, played the radio from speakers facing outside on his window sill. Sometimes it was annoying (see: napping, commercial breaks), but it also put something enjoyable into the air. There’s plenty of construction and industrial noise in the area, and at night it gets empty and silent. To fill the autumn air with mostly New York-based hip hop put something else between me and my neighbor strangers. But if he lived a block up onto Warren Street, with beautiful private homes and a small set of condos, I don’t know if he’d get away with blasting the music like that.
A last, very different, local example (I love this sound piece a lot!) is the steel bands in Crown Heights and Flatbush. They’ve been practicing every day of August in preparation for the big competition, Panorama, on the weekend of the West Indian Day Parade. There’s this one woman who has made it her life’s mission to kill the bands in the name of quiet. She is failing, deeply. The police and the bands have been working out a tenuous equilibrium for the last few years, that sometimes breaks. But they actually once arrested the woman who complains. Here’s a link if you’re curious: https://gothamist.com/news/the-steel-drum-grinch-of-crown-heights-is-back-on-the-scene
Radovac’s article is persuasive on the notion of sound’s social construction as noise, that there is a rather overt elitist political exercise behind the conceptualisation of certain sounds (and not other sounds – “music”) as a worthy object for juridical-administrative discipline. But I am concerned that the article, in noting the politics against political sounds (free speech protests, demonstrations, etc.), is perhaps overly dismissive of concerns sound/noise has a physiological-mental effect (and clearly differently felt by different persons). There is also a political dimension – the often disparate impact borne by less privileged communities and areas; it shouldn’t be surprising to note that poorer, marginalized communities of color is a favored site for illicit “dumping” of excess sound/noise as it is for other potentially harmful or disagreeable “substances”.
I also found Fiona Ngo’s essay on the LA punk scene’s origins in/around places where SE Asian refugees settled troubling for not noting something that someone who is an Asian American Studies scholar should have
highlighted, particularly given the backdrop of anti war/pro-Vietcong sentiments. The (first wave of) refugees fleeing from Vietnam – the so-called “boat people” – were mostly ethnic Chinese that the victorious Vietnamese communist forces targeted as foreigners/capitalists/pro-American etc. once the Americans left. Not surprisingly they settled in/around Chinatowns when they arrived as refugees in the US! To characterize the punk’s mid-recognition of their neighbors as romanticizing is but a first step.
PS thanks for the link to the South’s African birds!