Listening to Noise

Abstract

My landlord’s family has owned the Victorian house where I rent an apartment since the 19th century. Shortly after I moved in, he showed me a painting of a female relative in her fainting room. In the painting, she wears a cream-colored dress and rests on her couch. A small table sits next to it and holds a dainty glass of liqueur. Today, that fainting room is my home office. I often think of her while working, imagining her hiding from her family, quietly drinking in the room in which I write this essay. I’ve done the same for much of this past year, forcibly at first, after COVID-19 brought much of the world to a standstill. Over time, my office became a haven, not only because I have two teenage daughters stuck at home with me but also because it offers shelter from the rancorous noise that characterizes much of contemporary politics. The solitude and quiet of this small room doesn’t mean I’ve retreated from the world. Instead, it has provided a space for me to learn how to listen to it more closely. This lesson on listening was inspired by audio recordings amassed from eight years of ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico City. During that time, I studied dozens of small rooms called anexos (“annexes”), low-cost residential treatment centers for addiction.1 Anexos are run by and for the informal working poor and are usually one or two small rooms in size. They tend to be located within multifamily or tenement apartments and are thus enmeshed in a larger social environment. Dozens of people are held inside an anexo, most of whom are in their teens and early 20s. They’re forcibly taken there, usually by their mothers, not because they have drug problems per se but because they are vulnerable to the deadly criminal violence that surrounds the drug war. In this sense, an anexo is a kind of haven, although by no means does it offer solitude or quiet. On the contrary, anexos are places overflowing with people and noise. The simultaneous merging of my quiet office with the sonorous recordings of the anexo I was listening to evoked unanticipated feelings. My body vibrated with the anexo’s roaring soundscape, which in turn inspired a desire to listen in a way that brought into focus different sounds without reinforcing the idea that they were static or isolatable from each other. This orientation to listening has urgency for living with the volatility of the present. “Noise is what defines the social,” Michel Serres writes.2 This short essay asks what kind of social is possible when the noise that characterizes it feels deafening.