on what is modern in men

European modernity’s fateful entanglement with the noisy roar of the public domain and its bifurcation of the public and the private domains has a number of striking consequences for the sonic component of its new social order in which subjects are held in an oscillating state of withdrawal and return: the first consequence is that music in particular comes to represent a site of possibility in which ‘ecstatic’ contemplation (being possessed by music, or lost in a kind of interiorised listening) bears witness to the edges (the ‘limits’ and ‘scope’) of the social; the second is that sound more broadly is aligned with control, especially with an intensification of the processes by which the boundary between private and public spaces is policed; the third is that sound and noise enter into the dance of power in which subjects are interpellated not merely as subjects of the Euclidean visible domain, but as creatures of the sonic domain, as nascent acousmêtres of the new soundscapes of urban Europe; the fourth is that the noise-to-signal ratio of urban Europe begins to shift, very slowly (almost imperceptibly), towards an ever higher value in which that which is extraneous to the quiet act of communication gets louder and louder. In this shifting sonic terrain, community comes to stand also for a certain set of relations in sound, for a certain commitment to quietude, stillness and plenitude, setting in motion modernity’s pastoral demand in its first ‘modern’ (pre-industrial) incarnation. Communities participating in the new socialisation of sound, especially court communities, enact ritualised engagements of sound such that the logics of allegiance, duty, honour and order could be brought into being and performed as if spontaneous, as if given freely, preordained in the hearts of men.