CaMP Anthropology

Tarleton Gillespie: This book is so many things, and I’m really excited that it’s out and can now be taken up in so many conversations – about the circuits of digital culture, about recommender systems and the politics of attention, about music and the evaluation of taste, about the particulars of information labor. But I want to start with a particular note you make in the introduction: “in algorithmic systems, these “cultural” details are technical details” (7). What does that mean, for you, and how does that principle guide your study of music recommender systems?

Nick Seaver: Thanks for the great question. This gets at the heart of what I’m trying to do in the book, and what I’ve argued for in most of my writing about algorithmic systems. There’s a prominent discourse out there that imagines “algorithms” as being essentially inhuman, pursuing some kind of uniquely technical, economic, or mathematical goals. Many people would suggest that this is what makes algorithms harmful to “culture”—all those antihuman logics chop culture into little bits, distort it, and feed it back to us in grotesque form. What I’ve argued is that this does not really account for how algorithms exist in practice: especially in the case of recommender systems like we see in the book, there are humans all over the place deciding how things work, choosing between different options, setting goals, and actively worrying about their cultural role. In contemporary software development, algorithms change all the time as a result of these interventions, and these interventions are shaped by all sorts of “non-technical” ideas held by people. So, as I write in the book, “the way an engineering team thinks about their work is as significant to the functioning of the system as the structure of a sorting algorithm. If we tried to look past all the people to find the algorithm, we’d miss a crucial part of how and why these systems come to work as they do” (7).

So, that idea is what motivates the rest of the book: If the cultural theorizing of engineers matters to how their algorithms function, then what’s in that cultural theorizing? The following chapters work through some of it, talking about how my interlocutors thought about listeners, genre, musical sound, their own influence on the world, and so on.

Tarleton Gillespie: Well, then I want to know what’s in the cultural theorizing of these engineers, around one concept in particular, the one you chose for the title of the book: “taste”. What do the engineers who serve up my music streams think taste is when you ask them, and what does it seem to mean to them when they implement it into their recommendation systems?

Nick Seaver: This is something I only really figured out as I was pulling together the last stages of the book. I had gone into the field with a pretty simple idea about what I was looking for: people building these systems to model taste must have some theory of taste, and that would influence what they built. Or maybe, the tools available to them would influence their theories of taste. So, for example, if you think that people like the music they like because of how it sounds, then it would make sense to build a recommender that relied on audio data; if you thought that people liked the music their friends like, then you might do something with a social network. But I never really found anything that straightforward. I asked everyone I interviewed, point blank, “Why do you think people like the music they like?” And no one really had an answer; usually, they just laughed and said something like “Who knows?”

There’s a bit about this in the book, where I realize that what’s happening isn’t really the building of a particular theory of taste into infrastructure, but an effort to produce what I describe as an open plan: a kind of infrastructure meant to facilitate growth and exploration, which tries to be rather agnostic about the reasons why a person might like what they like. But, as we’ve seen in other domains, efforts to be open always have their limits; they facilitate some actions and not others. And this openness ended up manifesting as a hugely omnivorous data collection apparatus: Who knows what signal might end up being useful? Might as well collect everything. The more open the plan, the wider the net.

Tarleton Gillespie: This open plan approach definitely resonates with other instances of data science and machine learning — visualizing the entire corpus of content or the entire collection of data points about user preferences as a vast, flat landscape to be wandered. But that doesn’t sound much like how taste works, which by definition implies discernment and evaluation, i.e. not everything, and it doesn’t sound much like recommendation, which generally is a this-not-that offer. I imagine they see themselves as building an open plan such that each listener, millions of listeners, can find a path through it that’s to their own taste. But still, that sure does downplay their agency, very much gets them out of the way. What is it that they are attempting to do with their recommender systems? Who are they imagining they’re doing it for?

Nick Seaver: There’s this tension at the heart of algorithmic recommendation: it’s predicated on the idea that you might like anything (certainly more than you realize right now), but that you won’t like everything. So recommender systems are always caught up in this paradoxical position of trying to help people “break out of their boxes” (as it’s often put) while also profiling them to figure out where they might want to go once they’re out.

Now that’s a very sympathetic picture of what recommender systems and their developers are doing. Most critics would focus on the second part: recommender systems profile you, they box you in, they limit your view of that otherwise open cultural space. It’s not too hard to find arguments that these systems are about cultivating certain kinds of desire in users—to make a streaming music catalog more valuable by getting people to listen more (to more stuff, for a longer time). And that’s not wrong, but it’s only half of the story. A lot of the book is dedicated to describing how people working on these systems navigate that tension, between facilitating exploration and modeling preference.

I think the “this-not-that” reading of recommendation makes a lot of sense in the present moment, where recommenders are really everywhere and can meaningfully shape the entirety of what you encounter on a given platform. But it’s easy to forget that not so long ago, algorithmic recommendation was this little side feature—a thing in the corner that was only ever going to be a supplement to whatever else a user was doing. In the early days of these systems, in the mid-1990s, they were quite explicitly aimed at people who were already enthusiastic about music, willing to mess with new technologies, and happy to fill out lots of ratings. But since then, music recommendation (like most other kinds of recommendation) has shifted to target less enthusiastic listeners, to encourage them to listen more. This has happened at the same time that recommender systems have started to envelop platforms, such that people can start to talk about “Facebook” or “Spotify” or “Netflix” as almost synonymous with their recommendation algorithms.

Over the last decade or so, there’s been a major shift in the power of recommendations to really exclude stuff; we like to think of these systems as being widely influential, but (if that’s true) it’s only fairly recent. At the end of the book there’s a epilogue where I interview one of the major figures from the field, and this change comes up: I don’t think many people working on recommender technology were really prepared to succeed to the degree that they have.

Tarleton Gillespie: This idea of the open plan, this sense that recommendation was a curious add-on, both fit with a sense of modesty you note in the way these designers describe their role – often using pastoral metaphors, they characterize themselves as “park rangers,” “farmers,” “gardeners,” and occasionally “bushwackers… making this overgrown musical jungle navigable.” What do you think of this modesty? Do you think they are right to diminish their role, less powerful than public worries might suggest? Or do they need to tell themselves this, because they are embodying a powerful role in the current cultural landscape?

Nick Seaver: I think this is a really important question that we can’t entirely answer from an ethnographic study of this particular group. People often ask me about the consequences of these systems for music, listening, and culture more broadly; my first somewhat negative popular review of the book focused on precisely this issue and how it’s not addressed in there! But there’s a good reason for this: the kinds of cultural consequences people are worried about are big and broad and multifarious. We need many studies, in many different domains, to start to suss them out. I think a lot of people have an intuition that these systems are obviously influential, in obvious ways—but we shouldn’t assume that the goals of engineers translate neatly into broad cultural consequences, good or bad. We’re starting to see more empirical research on things like how musicians and record labels think about making music in a world full of recommender systems, how listeners think about all the designs on their attention, and the knock-on effects of widespread personalization. And the results are really mixed! In some cases, filter bubble-like effects don’t seem to happen; in other places, musicians try to adapt their style to “the algorithm,” but can only do so through mental models that may have very little to do with what’s going on under the hood.

So I don’t want to let my interlocutors in the book off the hook, nor do I want to assume that they are supremely powerful actors. Like everyone else, they occupy positions that enable and constrain them, their plans do not always work out, and while they certainly attempt to influence others, their influence is not guaranteed. That can sound like a cop-out answer, but I’ve long worried about a style of technology critique that artificially inflates its objects so as to increase its own importance. I think it’s a mistake to figure these people as powerful men behind the curtain. That kind of move does not help us understand our situation, and it takes us away from the boring-but-important empirical work we could be doing instead.

My own modest effort here is fairly constrained to documenting, as adequately as I can, how this particular group of people thought about their work at a particular moment in time. The chapter on all these gardening and farming metaphors, for instance, takes a rather contrarian angle in the discourse on data metaphors: instead of explaining how metaphors like these naturalize the work of engineers and convince a non-expert public that machine learning is all objective and organic, I try to figure out why people use these metaphors even among themselves, to try and make sense of what they’re doing. My takeaway is that pastoral metaphors usefully index a kind of bounded control, where the objects of one’s labor can be lively and surprising, despite the organizing role of the worker. This is less critical in a narrow sense, but I think it helps us to understand the appeal of these ways of thinking to their thinkers, which is part of the overall puzzle we’re living through now.

I hope this approach I take throughout the book makes it useful to folks who want to make more grounded critiques of this industry, as well as to people working in this space who may want to step back and think about some of the deep assumptions that underlie their work. Whether or not we imagine these systems as super-influential, there is a lot of work to do.

https://beekeepingintheendtimes.com/Home

Mira Guth: In the book, you write beautifully about the power of storytelling to both gather knowledge and incite action—from ethnographic stories of changing honeybee ecologies to Islamic eschatological tales that teach listeners how to live well in the face of imminent end times. Thinking about the role of stories in your book as well as your documentary—where hope and apocalypse are not mutually exclusive—what can storytelling offer us in the age of climate change?

Larisa Jašarević: Thank you, Mira, for speaking kindly of my work and for raising the question on which this book pivots. Ethnography was always about storytelling, wasn’t it? Just think back to Malinowski, Mead, or Evans-Pritchard; for all the issues that we may have with the way anthropological knowledge fit snugly with colonial projects and imperialist epistemologies, those classic monographs still yield insights and carry a charge when we re-read them nowadays, precisely because of the stories they tell. Once anthropology became more honest about and more comfortable with the fact that ours is the science of “writing culture” and ever since critical studies of modern science, such as Isabel Stenger’s Inventing Modern Science or much of Bruno Latour’s undoing of fact/fiction, storytelling has become available to us not just as a colorful way of conveying the lore of others but as a method of producing knowledge. In other words, storytelling does not just add frills but is a method of thinking through puzzles, a preferred way of teaching and sharing. Anna Tsing’s work—and, my word, what a storyteller she is!—ever since the Realm of the Diamond Queen, and for me, Friction is the insider’s guide to telling stories anthropologically, to theorizing through storytelling.

With the global environmental and climate crisis, storytelling has become all the rage among concerned scholars across the humanities, arts, and social sciences. Donna Haraway’s incitement that ‘we must tell stories” and that “stories must change” became chants at the writing riots within eco-minded scholarship that narrates our catastrophic times. Storytelling is recommended to grab attention, to compel care and action and, importantly, to recast the lots and the stakes: what in the world could we be feeling and doing if we no longer took the world we knew for granted? We are living in the ruins of our late-modern certainties. A turn to storytelling has become a way to salvage good things from our scholarly enterprise, so that robust thinking can go on as climate change frays the biosphere and overheats our undergrounds.

This book and the film I co-directed with my sister, Azra Jasarevic, draw inspiration from Islamic cosmology, metaphysics, and eschatology as well as from Bosnian Muslim lore. Now, if I started from the flat statement that as a revealed, monotheistic, Abrahamic tradition Islam has been seldom perused for its ecological and analytical insights, I’d be making an argument that is sound, provocative, but not very inviting. Let me tell you a story of two angels, instead. If you lend me an ear, you’ll hear stuff about human companion species, eco-eschatology, about near synonyms and rough translations of apocalypse, as well as about God and revelation that you may not have imagined belonging in the stiff drawer that we labeled religion and stuffed full of mothballs. Angels, it turns out, have much to do with climate change, if we broach that problem from some different grounds. The tall task has never just been to tell stories, but to earn a listening. The challenge for the storytellers is to tap into and hone the arts of listening; this is what local Sufis have taught me. Most of all, storytelling can strike a tone with listeners outside academia. I’m striving for that.

Mira Guth: By foregrounding the ecological sensibilities and metaphysical insights of Islamic thought and practice, your book makes a key contribution to the field of multispecies ethnography—among many other realms of social thought—that have often avoided thinking seriously with monotheistic religion. What kinds of doors for scholarship do you see this intervention opening?

Larisa Jašarević: You said it. My book is an invitation to venture beyond multispecies relations to think seriously through the relationships between plants, human, animals, elements and God—the nonhuman that modern secular social thought is most uncomfortable with. Likewise, to entertain the idea of the cosmos that includes angels, jinn, and, indeed, the devil. Very few sources in the budding, bold scholarship on the pluriverse, cosmologies, alien and Amerindian ontologies, human-animal relations, new vitalisms and so forth, deal with revealed religion except in passing, often off-handedly if not outright dismissively. Ontologies are welcome but metaphysics (which ontologies presume, by default) are avoided. Speculation is now cool but the mere mention of Revelation comes off as deeply inconveniencing and unconvincing. Indigenous cosmologies and science-fiction are mined for the perspectives that estrange or reenchant our ties with the planet in peril but the monotheistic, Abrahamic religions are presumed to be essentially synonyms with the western anthropocentricsm at the heart of global resourcist economy. What is more, Islam is often overlooked or lumped among the Abrahamic traditions, as presumingly not much different than Christianity or Judaism. In short, right at the heart of the most conceptually expansive surge there is a closure, a hard line drawn around the revealed tradition. My writing is tapping a finger there; scholars and writers better than I will, hopefully, take a second look, find cracks in the wall, start taking it down. Repurpose the bricks to lay down a path through the thickets and gulistans our gardens and campuses may become when we stop mowing our comfort zones. Much of the eco-minded writing, if not all of it, is about nurturing hope. There’s no shortage of good advice on why we should keep hope on a battered planet. What we’re missing is faith, now that we doubt Progress, development, disenchantment, the greenness of green technologies, the politics of climate action, and so on. Mind you, the question of faith, monotheistic or otherwise, is always a question of faith in the world teeming with sacred propositions at odds with each other. What grounds our hopes? What makes them possible and viable? We’re back to metaphysical questions.

Mira Guth: It strikes me that you initially had other plans for your research before a large storm and rainy summer hit Bosnia at the beginning of your fieldwork—with devastating implications for bees and their keepers. How did you pivot your focus? How can all contemporary anthropologists stay open and attuned to the strained multispecies worlds, inevitably touched by climate change, that they and their interlocutors must now inhabit?

Larisa Jašarević: Mira, I appreciate this question so much. It’s the key question that I can only expand upon here. Initially, I intended to write about bees but not about climate change until its ecological local effects were forced upon me by a catastrophic storm and by the weird weather that bothered bees and plants and worried beekeepers long after the storm was nearly forgotten. Initially, I didn’t think I could study climate change, but over the years I’ve been rethinking the ways in which we could be attending to it. Climate change has been largely made into a technical issue that is intimidating to anyone who’s not conversant with climate science, climate biology, technologies and narratives of climate future projections, and such. Anthropologists have been cornered into studying the issue of climate change with terms such as vulnerability, resilience, or sustainability that are themselves technical and policy terms—and as such, worth engaging, indeed—but also rather narrow and uninspiring. On the contrary, there is so much that social sciences and humanities could do to step in and help us articulate questions, hear out concerns that various parties are already raising in non-technical terms. Let us find ways to discern the myriad, oblique, disseminated ways in which strange and extreme weather, deranged seasons, elemental alterations, species mismatches, bodily and sensuous registers of the unraveling atmosphere—in short, the rattle bag that is climate change—comes upon and by-and-by upturns all domains of social life. Our terms are becoming archaic (“a nice day,” “spring fashion”); our bodily experience is already archiving records of the former planet. The almanac of late modern and multispecies habits is being rewritten. That is not a technical issue. Biologists know this for a fact: idiosyncratic responses across species will be multiplying. The same goes for all species of knowledge and practice, for all are dependent on the climate in one way or another. So, yes, how do we study it?

Mira Guth: In the book you mention your own practice of keeping bees. How has this experience shaped your research, relationship, and understanding of beekeeping in the end times?

Larisa Jašarević: Caring for the honeybees made it real for me; the whole of it, the end times, you know? But just as important has been the fact that I live by the honeybees, on a landslide-crumpled, precious heirloom of a piece of land. And that the apiary where I live and write is in Bosnia, the country where genocidal war shaped the landscape and inadvertently fostered ample new honey flow opportunities. I write from the place where, nowadays, extractivist, global ventures are quickly showing just how the corporate rush and grab to transition to green energy is, literally, colonizing air, water, and soil in the boondocks. And there’s been talk of new violence; the country has been on the edge ever since the war ended. At the same time, our mountaintop is a heaven for insects, birds, and plants. I keep seeing species that are new to me. Jasmine bushes are abloom. It’s the time of the year when owls are hooking up. The very air is hoarse with strigiform longing. The smaller birds must be on guard because this sort of courting between raptors is sealed by offerings of flesh. The mixed-up world we live in, here at my doorstep, jamal & jalal, lovers and raptors, all of us, caught in hail storms and jasmine perfume. Right now, it’s the swarming season for the honeybees. We’ve been having a swarm a day. Just yesterday, the strangest thing happened. A great swarm caught high up in a plum tree. Some fifty thousand bees, at least! Then it started separating across two, then three branches—bees literally walked back and forth, undecided. Twice I tried catching them in a swarm bag, standing up in the tree, and twice I failed. “I give up,” I swore loudly. Just as I turn on my heels, a cluster of bees plummeted to the grass, just like that, and instead of dispersing, stayed huddled on the ground, bee bodies pressed to each other, sticking tenaciously, wings folded back. What’s happening? I took a step closer and…. You can imagine the rest, dear Mira, this had been too long. Adhan from the local mosque was announcing the midday prayer. Putting things into perspective, and summoning me to presence.

https://www.dukeupress.edu/atmospheric-noise

Drew Kerr: Atmospheric Noise highlights multiple sensory modes involved with negotiating airport noise. On first brush, the sonic obviously invokes hearing or listening, but the shaking of walls, rattling of glass, the pressurized movement of concrete infrastructure as an aircraft passes overhead in its flight path also make hearing something perceptibly haptic and tactile. You guide us, “[p]roprioception and thermoception are coterminous with hearing: the former a state in the inner ear, the latter a sensation produced by low frequencies.” (120). Then inscribing that noise through measurement in renderings of graphic data and noise contour maps, as well as legal files and written complaints present a material visuality to hearing. Can you talk more about this movement of energy, as you frame it, and how it came into focus for you as the atmospheric, as opposed to the legal-discursive or the activist-political, for example?

Marina Peterson: There’s a lot in this question! Several strands of thought come to bear on these issues. First, I was (and am) invested in finding ways to de-objectify sound – to treat sound as immanent and processual rather than an artifact, whether in the form of a recording or a notion of soundscape that sustains a modern distinction between sound and hearing. Approaching sound as energy helps with this. In Ohio, we had a project “Energy Soundscapes” that involved listening to sounds of energy past and present, while also exploring what it means to treat sound as energy, as an immaterial form or force that is always in motion. Some of the projects can be seen/listened to here. Brian Harnetty was part of this group, and has continued to engage with the region through listening engagements. Treating listening as coterminous with other senses, especially ones like thermoception or proprioception, destabilizes a subject/object divide expressed in the differentiation between hearing and sound. With Thermoception and proprioception, there is no difference between the thing sensed and sensing.

On the other hand, I was also captivated by the materialist turn, reading Jane Bennett and others, and considering what it means to write with and through forms of matter. I experimented with this, writing about the landscape of southeast Ohio and the invisible yet palpable presence of a history of coal mining that left hills cloaking their emptiness, which became apparent as sinkholes or acid mine drainage.

I went to Los Angeles with a project on infrastructure that connected the city to the ocean, and was in the archive (at the Huntington Library) looking at material on building storm drains and channeling the LA River. Concrete, though a fascinating material form that shifts from viscosity to solidity with the aid of water, was nonetheless hard to get to move, especially in its hardened form. I found files on airport noise and thought they might be useful for teaching (I was wary of doing a sound project, in part because of my reservations about reifying sound). The first files I read were letters from residents around LAX to County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, appealing to him to do something about the noise. He took their complaints to Washington, finding that airspace jurisdiction was an unsettled domain. This was the hook for me: noise activating air (through airspace law), both coming into being in a dynamic relationality on the move. Air came into focus as a material form that pushed back on new materialisms insofar in its immateriality. Now there is a lot of work on air and atmosphere, but at the time (2013-14) there wasn’t much, so it felt like an exciting area of investigation. Atmosphere came after air, which explains my emphasis on the aerial rather than the affective. However, what I was also interested in was a logic of air or the atmospheric – as something immaterial that is also indeterminate or difficult to pin down. Atmospheric became an expansive way of describing how noise moves and works on and with air, buildings, bodies, and the city. My approach remains rooted in the ethnographic, especially in the fact that airport noise is for the most part curtailed to airborne sound within the range of human audibility.

Drew Kerr: I originally picked up your book coming with my own questions about affective atmospheres, but in your ethnographic world of sonic atmospheres, I quickly was (productively) redirected toward “acoustic sensation, knowledge, and imagination,” (7) as you quote from Steven Feld’s (1996) work. The interplay of these various elements grappling with the matter of noise around the Los Angeles airport reminded me, perhaps a little afield, of Constatine Nakassis’s (2015) proposition that linguistic anthropology is not the study of “language,” per se, but language’s entanglement with other semiotic modalities, particularly intervening in understanding (or at least unpacking) indexical processes. Though you’re not directly engaging that literature, through the course of the book I was convinced of the opening, the possibilities noise provides as a medium. Can you set the scene of how “acoustic sensation, discourse, technology, law, and urban infrastructure” (7) take shape with/through noise?

Marina Peterson: I tend to return to Lefebvre’s spatial triad to account for the simultaneity of what he calls representations of space, representational space, and spatial practice. Though in Atmospheric Noise I describe noise as “A material-discursive ‘monster,’ a ‘quasi object,’ an ‘unformed object’ or ‘hybrid’” (8), formulations developed especially in STS by scholars such as Donna Haraway, Michelle Murphy and Stefan Helmreich. Katie Stewart describes this as “registers” in her essay “Road Registers.” The list you offer (“acoustic sensation, discourse, technology, law, and urban infrastructure” (7)) are some of the ethnographic domains in which noise emerges as an acoustic object as it were, that is given a designation as noise and made meaningful in ways that exceed it as such. In this way, even as noise is always coming into being, it also becomes a way of knowing (in Feld’s terms) – with knowing at once bodily and epistemological. I wouldn’t call noise a medium, as to me that suggests a stability that it doesn’t have; it’s not background, or something in or through which things are formed, instead, it is always emergent even as it does work.

Drew Kerr: I’m also thinking with the enmeshed relationality between metrics, machines, and bodies — the measuring devices that inscribe sonic signatures, human bodies that perceive sound and its effects, sound as that which touches, and sound that is noise, an annoyance. You suggest at a later moment in the book a “continuity across differently vibrating matter that extends from the skin of the body to that of the house and beyond” (131), which I take to poignantly describe this enmeshment. The continuity strikes me as a dense, yet porous bodily materiality (or perhaps material embodiment?), that acutely draws our attention to conversations about im/mediation. Would you say more about your methodologies to encounter this assemblage and its emergence? And, if I might selfishly extend, how might you anticipate such methods contributing to conversations around mediation (what we might frame under semiotics)? 

Marina Peterson: I’m aiming to approach the material in a nonrepresentational way, staying close to the thing itself, which might be the physicality of sound or something like semiotics. I describe this as the “viscerality of abstraction” in Chapter 2, engaging with haptic qualities of graphs and metrics. I don’t want to deny the semiotic work they do, but I approach them in a way akin to Rabinow’s assertion that “representations are social facts.” This is also a way of pushing against an understanding of such forms as mediating, which places them between one thing and another. On the other hand, I don’t want to reify experience, which centers a human subject. That said, methodologically my approach is to read documents for haptic moments, with, as you suggested, a continuity of embodiment across forms of matter, which might be bodies, buildings, sound or air, all of which is emergent and in relation. This kind of discussion comes out strongly in acoustic engineering reports, or the way acoustic engineers talk about their work. It’s what Stengers calls the “meso” – “a site of invention” that “affirms its copresence with a milieu” (https://www.inflexions.org/n3_stengershtml.html). I call this a glitch methodology, insofar as I’m drawing out something from the material – principally an attention to the physicality of sound and atmosphere – that isn’t necessarily the intended or expressed meaning.

Drew Kerr: To turn us in another direction, I’m curious to hear more about attunement. The book draws out a tension between audiovisual technologies that render specific measurements of airport noise into general soundscapes, and the individual subjective and collective experiences of noise. There are aerial attunements by microphones, people’s ears and bodies, while simultaneously there are social attunements between people talking as they’re drowned out by plane noise, new existential and legal attunements of annoyance, and commercial economic attunements by farmers navigating their chickens frightened to death. The murmurs and echoes of noise resonate quite deeply. How does attunement disperse from moments of experiencing noise into a public ear? Or perhaps to ask this differently: Can you help us grasp the scales across which attunement and the atmospheric transect in your writing and the worlds of your interlocutors?

Marina Peterson: Attunement is a minor gesture, a turning toward something, whether sound or heat or person. It is a mode of relationality that is ordinary and usually unremarkable. In my article “Sensory Attunements: Working With the Past in the Little Cities of Black Diamonds” I write that “Attunement is an orienting toward, a feeling-ness that does not necessarily have specific content and is generally nondiscursive.” Heat is an important mode of attunement, felt, and discussed in the way that weather is, just part of the ordinary. But that turning toward another to say “it’s hot” is also a moment of relationality, between people who are also experiencing atmospheric effects of coal mining, the history of that region materialized in present and future climates. I brought this sense of attunement to Atmospheric Noise, paying attention to those minor gestural moments that get registered as experience in congressional hearings, but are doing relational work between family members and neighbors, or between residents around the airport and politicians and ultimately federal legislation. This is also part of the atmospheric quality of aircraft noise, which shifts the interpersonal aspect of noise as nuisance to a more distributed or dispersed – and multiscalar – register. Making claims against aircraft noise shifts from the specific noisemaker to law, metricization, airspace jurisdiction, and so on.

Drew Kerr: A final, striking element of the book is your style of writing. Whether through the present tense, layering narratives and parallel events, your own self-reflections in the ethnography, and a curious experiment with glitching, the writing yields an account richly present and animate. This is a powerful rejoinder to the dilemma of capturing the viscerality and fleeting nature of noise often cited by your interlocutors, the court proceedings, sound engineers, and yourself. Can you recount for us the motivations and arrival to this style of writing, and especially how the idea of glitching formed into its own method for you?

Marina Peterson: Thank you for the kind words. A project of writing through things emerged from my engagement with new materialism, nonrepresentational theory, and the landscape of southeast Ohio. I wanted to really push the idea of writing theory through the world. Katie Stewart does this. Of course, we select ethnographic material that is relevant for a framing. But to make the framing intrinsic to the account of a place or thing or encounter brings another kind of intention and attention. It requires staying close to the thing rather than generalizing or skating across the surface.

Glitching is a way of reading against the grain of intended meanings. It’s partly a way of articulating how my approach to science and engineering differs from much (not all) STS. But it also foregrounds the possibility of reading against the grain of dominant (Eurocentric, modern, and so on) modes of knowledge production more broadly.