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Blight
I would like to begin our discussion by examining the common perception of Noise (disorder) as it exists in the urban environment. To do so, I will look at noise itself as the acoustic reality of our environment, as well as graffiti and how it manifests in the surrounding discourse as “visual noise” supposedly threatening the ‘order’ and ‘harmony’ of our urban environment. The purpose of this section will be to challenge the conventional, and often conservative, conceptions of Noise (disorder) as a form of degeneration, and reevaluate the role it plays in the social and material production of space. The general perception and accepted meaning of noise as a categorically negative phenomenon has its seeds deeply rooted in a system of binaries paradigmatic of modern thought. The topic of noise pollution effectively places noise on the ‘bad’ side of a Cartesian dualism along with comparable relatives such as pollution, dirt, and disease. Lisa Goines and Louis Hagler’s 2008 article “Noise Pollution: A Modern Plague,” likens noise to a “manmade plague…from which there is virtually no escape” (Goines & Hagler 2007, 287). This treatment of noise is widespread and generally sees in it a supposed transgression of health and hygiene. However, it becomes increasingly evident in these beliefs that noise is conflated with volume, as noise control bylaws frequently cite dB(A) levels in their definitions and measures of noise pollution (Vancouver Noise Control Bylaw, Toronto Noise Control Bylaw, New York City Noise Control Bylaw). What constitutes as noise cannot be quantitatively measured, and even the municipal government of Paris “acknowledges that the line between sound and noise is fuzzy” (Smith 2021, 1). My intent is not to challenge the real and harmful effects of volume on the human body but to critically examine the underlying biases embedded in the dominant discourse surrounding noise pollution. I argue that the association of noise with pollution is linked to a view of the former as a threat to the hegemonic control and ordering of space. A Serrian reading of Noise, however, draws out an alternative perspective that succeeds a Modernist logic of reductive binaries (‘good’ vs. ‘bad’), and instead presents a relational view of noise that does not undermine its productive faculty. Serres’ understanding of Noise is two-pronged. On the one hand, it recognizes noise as an irreducible reality - white noise or ambient noise that persists ceaselessly in the environment. On the other, it considers the parasitic function of noise as interference that agitates and incites change within an existing system.
As Mary Douglas famously states, “dirt is matter out of place” (Douglas, 44). In other words, dirt is not dirt intrinsically, but dirt because it infringes on an arbitrary system of classifications. I argue that this is the very same basis on which noise pollution is founded. Noise is problematized not because of the inherent danger it poses to the health of urban dwellers, but because it threatens the integrity of an arbitrary social order maintained by the state. Despite their central argument that “[p]eople have the right to choose the nature of their acoustical environment” and that “it should not be imposed by others” (Goines & Hagler 2008, 287), Goines and Hagler’s article goes on to appeal for regulating, or rather limiting, the use of personal music players due to the dangers they potentially pose (Goines & Hagler 2008, 289). The internal contradiction of claiming the right to choose one’s acoustical environment yet simultaneously policing the use of something as individual as personal audio players highlights the latent prejudice in the terms and conditions of noise pollution. This becomes further apparent in the privileging of noises arbitrarily “considered necessary” (Goines & Hagler 2008, 288) over those that are not. According to Goines and Hagler, noises such as combustion engines, train horns, and police sirens either “serve an important societal purpose” (Goines & Hagler 2008, 288) or are unavoidable compromises that come with “time–and labor–saving devices” (Goines & Hagler 2008, 288). This is in contrast to other noises such as those coming from the radio, concerts, and public sporting events, which are apparently unnecessary, intrusive, and unhealthy (Goines & Hagler 2008, 288). Evidently, all noise is not noise - those sounds that emanate from or coordinate with the desires of Modern capitalism are heard as just such: Sounds. What is leftover then is noisy and out of place. It does not belong and was not invited; it threatens and jeopardizes the ordered system. As such, noise pollution is not so much about the reduction of noise, but the control over it and its sources.
The arbitrary distinctions that differentiate noise from sound and vice versa are paralleled in the visual sphere of the cityscape. In 1982, Kelling and Wilson introduced to the field of criminology the influential "Broken Windows" theory, a thesis that hypothesizes a causal correlation between the increase in crime rate and the degree of visual unkemptness of a given arena (Kelling & Wilson 1982, 3-4). Such a hypothesis attributes the production and upkeep of social order to the visual sphere, flattening the myriad complexities of lived reality that influence the cause of crime. Visual disorder seemingly threatens the order of the city's vista, which supposedly "leads to the breakdown of community controls" (Kelling & Wilson 1982, 4) in a ripple effect. However, what characterizes ‘visual disorder’ is left unclear. Kurt Iveson details the “diffusion of several military technologies into everyday urban systems and space” (Iveson 2010, 119) to combat and wage war on graffiti. Barbed wire, CCTV, and particle sensors are taken from their wartime origins and recontextualized in the urban environment (Iveson 2010, 119-121) as violent manifestations of the hostility harbored towards graffiti by the state. Evidently, graffiti is regarded as a threat to visual order. But what about its material existence differentiates graffiti from commissioned murals or street art that are ostensibly seen as harmless? As Douglas notes, “[t]here is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder” (Douglas, 2). Chapter 485 of the Toronto Municipal Code underlines such dubious lines between vandalism and street art, citing the latter to be "[m]arkings made or affixed to property that are approved by the property owner or occupant" (Toronto Municipal Code 2011, 485-1), and furthermore presupposing that such marks "aesthetically enhance the surface they cover and the general surroundings, having regard to the community character and standards" (Toronto Municipal Code 2011, 485-1). In this, we deduce two conclusions: first, contrary to the viewpoint of "Broken Windows," visual markings and inscriptions made on the surfaces of buildings may indeed 'aesthetically enhance' the surroundings (as apparently street art does), and second, what it means to 'aesthetically enhance' the surroundings is unclear, as are the terms of the so-called 'community character and standards' it supposedly aligns with. What settles these definitions, then, is left to the sole discretion of the property owners who authorize the inscriptions, producing a paradox in which the visual commons of the built environment are curated by a small and privileged subset of the community. Visual disorder has nothing to do with the perception of unkemptness, despite what Kelling and Wilson would like to suggest, and is instead concerned with enforcing echelons of authority and ownership over the built environment.
To expand on the dilemma of street art and graffiti (vandalism), Scott Burnham describes the 2005 Sony ad campaign (Figure 1) undertaken as a part of the launch of the new Playstation PSP device, which consisted of spraypainted motifs on the surfaces of various buildings throughout the city (Burnham 2024, 193). This event expands on our discussion of graffiti, order, and disorder, further illustrating how the war on graffiti is not so much a war about unkemptness, but a war about ownership and maintaining control over who gets to produce meaning in the city. Perversely, the campaign appropriates the visual language of graffiti and repurposes it for commercial use by purchasing the legal rights to mark up the surfaces of those buildings (Burnham 2024, 193). Shortly after, the campaign was met with widespread backlash by various graffiti and street artists in the city, protesting that they were "advertisements copying the street style" (Burnham 2024, 193). The city's permittance of a campaign that replicates, for all intents and purposes, the aesthetics, motifs, and stylistic elements found in traditional graffiti contradicts its pathologization of graffiti as a sign of urban blight, once again emphasizing that what is paramount in the battle against Noise is the preservation of hegemonic ownership over the public sphere. Commissioned murals bypass all assumptions about visual disorder insofar as they do not threaten the Order of authority. In fact, they fundamentally reinforce Order, complying with the hand of authority and repeating the notion that "what is deemed to be art/culture or indeed crime and deviance is what is designated, framed or contextualised as such by those with the means and power to delineate and 'place' them" (Zienleniec 2017, 3). In other words, corporations, property owners, city officials, etc. still decide what should be written and what is not.
Furthermore, by supposing a direct connection between visual disorder and crime rate, “Broken Windows” constructs a moral ideology that frames the former as emblematic of ‘evil’ and should be purged swiftly in the interests of civil ‘goodness.’ Dirty walls are impure, Noisy, and evil while clean walls are pure, Silent, and good. Marie Thompson discovers a similar ideology present in her critique of Canadian composer and writer R. Murray Schafer’s ‘acoustic ecology.’ Schafer’s ideology of sound in his book The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World underlines a politics that privileges silence over noise, positioning them respectively with the rural and the urban (Thompson 2014, 136). The hi-fi and lo-fi soundscapes Schafer depicts in The Soundscape highlight this stance. In reference to the high and low of high fidelity audio, the superior hi-fi soundscape is silent and, attributed to the pastoral and natural landscapes of the lost past. Low levels of ambient noise in the rural landscape allow one to separate and hear individual sounds more clearly as opposed to the chaotic and turbulent lo-fi soundscapes of the city (Schafer, 43). Thompson recognizes in Schafer’s thinking a throughline that ties the silent to the tranquil, the tranquil to the natural, and the natural to the good (Thompson 2014, 136). As such, she identifies “an overarching, ideological and moral division between a pure and positive silence and an impure and negative noise” (Thompson 2014, 148). By relating itself to ‘goodness,’ the clean and pure walls Kelling and Wilson seek and the transcendental purity of Schafer’s silence articulate a moral logic within which the elimination of Noise (evil) “is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organise the environment” (Douglas, 2). In doing so, they mythologize an image of Silence, an abstract and homogenous space where all difference is crushed. Certainly, Silence is also Lefebvre’s abstract space, which “tends towards homogeneity, towards the elimination of existing differences or peculiarities” (Lefebvre, 52). Serres’ illustrates this with an anecdote in which Descartes is compared to a man who burns his house to the ground to eliminate the rats that live in the attic (Serres 1982, 12). The man cannot sleep with the noise of rats - parasites, running amok in his attic, so he flattens the house and banishes it to Hell in an attempt to purge all noise, all disorder. However, if, for Lefebvre a differential space of heterogeneity always lies latent in abstract space (Lefebvre, 52), true Silence, for Serres, does not exist - there is always Noise (Serres 1982, 78).
Serres writes: "What passes might be a message but parasites (static) prevent it from being heard, and sometimes, from being sent" (Serres 1982, 11). A clean wall is a message; a clean wall is never really clean inasmuch as it is always polluted with signage, logos, and adverts. In Le Mal Propre, Serres interestingly remarks: “to pollute is to appropriate, mark a territory as one’s own, or make it uninhabitable by anybody else” (Serres in Connor, hardsoft 14). Therefore the ‘clean’ wall is only clean as it is an expression of private ownership or state authority over the public domain, broadcasted in its legal or commercial signage. Correspondingly, graffiti is dirty; it is Noise, an interference, a jamming of that message. In this we can gather the productive capability of Noise - graffiti invades the wall, transmitting its own signal. In doing so, the invasive signal disturbs and alters the original signal, generating a new signal altogether. If the intended message was an expression of “privatization of collective resources” (Zienleniec 2017, 11), the altered message echoes a sentiment “that the city is the shared property of its inhabitants, rather than a collection of discrete zones” (Burnham 2024, 191). By polluting the wall, graffiti temporarily reappropriates ownership over its facilities and allows its surface "to represent more than merely the interests of capital, finance or institutional power" (Zienleniec 2017, 4). Noise agitates and disturbs at the same time it carries a signal through a channel. In this way, graffiti demonstrates how Noise generates by assuming the role of both inter-ference and inter-mediation. This is not to uphold the abilities of graffiti on a utopian pedestal as a kind of revolutionary and emancipatory practice - there exists an expanse of literature that highlights its limitations as a subculture that is predominantly male (Macdonald 2001), or one that is increasingly distorted and adopted by neoliberal ideology in the 21st century (Matthew 2019). Rather, my purpose here is to recognize in graffiti an instance archetypical of how Noise can behave as a productive force that generates meanings alternative to the status quo through disruption. Graffiti is only Noise for as long as it “provokes a difference, a disequilibrium” (Serres 1982, 182). Noise is always an interference. That is to say, if Noise fails to interfere, it was never Noise to begin with. A legally authorized mural is an appropriation of graffiti writing “made into a spatial commodity” (Andron 2023, 58) that bypasses criminalization and folds back into commercial and capitalist ideals of state ownership, order, and control. It no longer jams the intended signal, no, it becomes part of the intention itself, waiting to be jammed by other Noises.
There are no simple equilibriums for Serres, they are always relative, dynamic, and internally nested (Howles 2024, 15). Every Sound, every equilibrium, or every instance of order is unstable and relative to the disequilibrium it is born out of. Meaning emerges out of difference because of the relations it produces. Thus, pure, Platonic Silence attempts to control and regulate the circulation of meaning by smoothing away all Noise and all difference. In the context of urban space and its soundscapes, Silence effectively strips away its life force by muting that which constitutes it in the first place. Again, Noise is both an interference and the medium, or more precisely, it interferes as the medium. It acts as the milieu, the irreducible material makeup of the environment itself. Serres writes: “The town makes the noise, but the noise makes the town” (Serres 1982, 14). The incessant attempt at regulating those noises deemed ‘unnecessary’ as advanced by Goines and Hagler or the romanticization of the clean, undifferentiated hi-fi soundscape found in the natural landscapes of the past as suggested by Schafer is done so at the willful loss of the city’s essence. Pascal Amphoux describes what he calls the ‘sound signature’ of a place: “a sound or a set of sounds which sign the place or the time and confirm in some way their “authenticity”” (Amphoux 1993, 389 - emphasis original). One set of sounds signifies the identity of a place (or its essence) precisely on the grounds that it is different from another set of sounds derived from a different place. In this sense, difference quite literally makes the place itself. Indeed, noise pollution discourse does not argue for the complete nullification of all noise in the environment, but rather specific noises, as is similarly Schafer’s intention. However, this is precisely the logic of reduction that aims to produce an abstract, homogenized space in the end. In other words, it is not an erasure of all noise itself, but Noise - difference and disorder. Serres equates this to the end of all being, writing “order and flat repetition are in the vicinity of death” (Serres 1982, 127). Much like the war on graffiti is about reinforcing the institution of private control over the production and expression of meaning in the public sphere, noise pollution bylaws attempt to sonically order the acoustic landscape such that only sounds servile to the capitalist needs of the state should and can be heard. As Thompson argues, “recognising noises as productive is not the same as saying that noise is positive” (Thompson 2012, 27). I caution bringing in examples illustrating the ‘positive effects’ of noise to our discussion at the risk of inverting, yet reinforcing the same moral and aesthetic dualism that condemns such noise in the first place. My intent is not to proclaim that those noises problematized and deemed unnecessary by the state are all ‘good’ or beneficial to the urban environment. Instead, using Serres’ understanding of Noise I contend for an alternative perspective on its role in the urban environment that circumvents a Modernist logic reading of the world through bifurcations of order/disorder, pure/impure, and good/bad.