Indefinite Urbanism:Airport Noise and Atmospheric Encounters in Los Angeles

Marina Peterson (bio)

Abstract

“Indefinite urbanism” is the aerial drawn into perceptibility through noise, glass resonating with aircraft noise and infrastructural edge spaces that remain as traces of a history of now inaudible sound. As the age of commercial air travel dawned in Southern California, those living around Los Angeles International Airport turned toward the sky as the roar of jet planes disrupted an otherwise pacific coastal climate. Attending to the (im)materiality of noise, I trace atmospheric encounters across the resonance of walls and the shifting sand of coastal dunes now home to an endangered species of butterfly.

Around Los Angeles International Airport, noise effects take shape as infrastructural edge spaces. What was once an upscale beach community touted for its ocean views and underground utilities is now an expanse of sandy dunes with patches of native shrubs and grasses or still lingering ice plant, the concrete of Playa del Rey’s streets and retaining walls haunted by what once was. To the north of the runways, dark green vines and shrubs explode in a wild mess within the confines of chain link fence. As the age of commercial air travel dawned in Southern California in the late 1950s, those living around what had been a bean field, an airfield, and a municipal airport that would become LAX began to hear the sounds of jet planes flying over their homes. Newly attuned to a resounding sky, they complained about the noise that interrupted the pacific climate of the southern California coast.

Noise brings the atmospheric into perceptibility, composing dynamic assemblages of matter-in-motion. Noise, thus, is “an opening” (Serres 56).¹ Drawing attention to the sky, noise itself withdraws. Falling away, it proliferates into a diversity of atmospheric forms that encompass both a physicality of the ephemeral and a logic of indeterminacy. A tendency, the atmospheric is ephemeral, indeterminate, vague, and indefinite.² Building on a now robust literature that attends to forces and attunements that bring the atmospheric into focus, I depart from its emphasis on air, addressing ways in which noise has been central to how we think and feel the atmospheric. “Substantiated” in sound, the atmospheric emerges in moments in which noise matters (Choy 128).

Informed by Spanish architect Ignasi de Solà-Morales’s concept of terrain vague, I use the term indefinite urbanism to attend to edge spaces of infrastructure as effects of the interplay between sounds from the sky and sensation. Indefinite urbanism is city as process, inconclusive, formless, “volumetric,” and “moving” (Gandolfo, Graham and Hewitt, Latham and McCormack). It is the porous boundary between that which is hard and that which is airy – the airport as port where ground meets air, the windowpane of a home vibrating with sound, its glass once silica like the dune sand that lifts with a gust of wind, sand no longer contained by the foundations of homes built near the sea, and now home to an endangered species of butterfly.³ This is an atmospheric city, a city of atmospheric encounters in which air, glass, neighborhoods, sand, photographs, people, ice plant, and butterflies are drawn together by noise.

In engaging the case of airport noise and its effects on urban form, I am less interested in the ways things cohere than in the ways they don’t – in the processes of making, in slippages, gaps, and exteriorities that also matter because of their otherness to the project at hand, in the ways something that is ephemeral, that does not last, is made to matter. This is a project of writing through “things” (as it were). Tracing noise and its atmospheric encounters, the writing stays close to emergent processes and forms, a mode of “thin description,” which, following Love, embraces “forms of analysis that do not traffic in speculation about interiority or depth” but offer an “exhaustive, fine-grained attention to phenomena” (404). “Glitching” as a method of investigation, analysis, and writing, I read documents and ethnographic encounters for textures and qualities of events, often against the grain of their intended logics. And while I attend to something of the specificity of an historical moment, I do not aspire to provide a totalizing account, but instead present episodes that fold into one another, unstable and perhaps indeterminate.

1. Emergent Materialities

First the holes in the homes had to be closed. The opening for milk delivery. The mail slot. Vents. Windows that opened to ocean air. Cracks that let in light and breeze, gaps around windows and doors. Aircraft noise drove people indoors, to spaces newly turned inward. Between 1967 and 1969, Wyle Laboratories conducted a home soundproofing pilot project around Los Angeles International Airport. The twenty houses were “typical of Southern California single-family homes” (Wyle 6); built of materials that might include plaster, wood, composition shingle, and Spanish tile, many featured “beamed ceilings and extensive glass areas.” These were modest, mostly one-story homes, with windows in every room and multiple exterior doors that ensured fluidity between indoors and out. The first homes designated for soundproofing, those in the trial study were near the coast. Breezes from the Pacific Ocean wafted through windows left open most of the year. The climate granted a sense of ease only newly disrupted by the departing jet plane, which roared and whined as it ascended, dropped glops of fuel on the ground, on the laundry hanging to dry, on the oranges ripening on a tree in the back yard.

During soundproofing, noise gets pushed into and away from things. When the builders seal the gaps between the window frames and the walls, they drive noise into silicone gel. When they add a turn to the ventilation duct, they send noise bouncing back where it came from. When they install a second pane of glass three inches from the existing window, they create an airspace where noise ricochets between surfaces. Concerned with the materiality of sound, acoustical engineers describe noise as a moving force, mobile and agentive. They delineate the shifting status of sound from airborne waves to material vibration as it “moves” from an airplane engine through air and into a house where it is heard in the living room, the bedroom, the kitchen. There, if it is too loud, it interferes with conversation, makes it difficult to hear the television, and is “annoying” (which might, as engineers were also calculating, prompt political engagement or an expensive lawsuit).

In a climate of change, closing windows to drown out the noise of aircraft might also have made the home feel more like a fortress, protection against an atmosphere that pressed upon its inhabitants – that made the skin crawl, the heart race, annoyance percolate into an explosive condition—protection against a sense that something was bearing down and challenging, if not threatening, a precariously maintained scene of domestic bliss. Noise newly divided inside from out, the skin of the house newly figured as fortification rather than the porous membrane it had in many ways been (Pallasmaa). Yet what emerged is not so much a divide as a continuity across differently vibrating skin that extends from the skin of the body to that of the house and beyond, to the volumetric space of the noise contour and the climate itself. There is no “between” – rather, matter is continuous, air and skin entangled in various ways despite (or as part of) efforts to control, demarcate, and condition. Drawing together ear, air, and wall, noise composes an atmospheric assemblage of emergent materialities (Latham and McCormack 707).

The skin of the house is both armor for and an extension of the body’s, its permeability and porosity not limited to windows but extended across the surfaces and depth of walls and doors, window frames and thresholds. Kapchan suggests that listening to noise is “to linger in the space of discomfort long enough to resonate with the sound knowledge being transmitted” (118). In this way, skin as “symbolic boundary between the self and the world” (Benthien 1) is formed under pressure – the pressure of the indeterminacy of matter registered by quantum physics or that of the slow onslaught of an anthropogenic atmosphere that renders a relationship between body and its milieu in newly figured entanglements of risk, a human-made monster casting the possibility of existence into doubt (Barad). Skin (of an arm or a kitchen ceiling) is a horizon of pressure and permeable – entangled with air in a dynamic of force and motion, of energy and matter. It is, as Manning puts it, “leaky.”

The materiality of walls, vents, windows, and air emerges in and through encounters with noise. Cast by acoustic engineers as distinct in relation to forms of matter, sound – the matter of noise – makes materials differently durable. A “wave” in air, sound “vibrates” the matter of the wall – stucco, shingles, gypsum – emerging again on the other side as a wave. While the “sound transmission levels” of building materials can be altered, air is treated as “empty,” its materiality not addressed in relation to the movement of sound even as air is the matter of openings in the home, and in this way the most potent conduit. Air, as a form of matter moved by the energy that is sound, is absent, an absence (different from its earlier figuration as “ether” [Connor 148-172, Trower 7]). Yet with soundproofing, as with environmental noise in general, the noise that is measured and mitigated is limited to airborne sound. Sound in and of air that is nonetheless always coming into being in relation to differently resonating sound-energies that appear to the eye as wall or windowpane or that appear to the ear.

Glass, characterized in terms of its “low attenuation,” is unique in its material properties (Wyle 5). Glass resonates with sound. This is the wine glass made to sing for a child at the end of a dinner, or extended as a wine glass “orchestra,” glasses filled with different levels of water for variations in pitch. The more water, the less air, the higher the pitch (or frequency). Air between two panes of glass has a similar effect, such that a smaller airspace resonates at a higher frequency. The resonant frequency of glass is the pitch, which, if played – or sung – loudly enough, may cause it to break. The apocryphal opera singer. With windows considered “apertures of enlightenment,” glass, “to the early modern imagination,” was “an important medium of civilization, permitting enclosure yet translucence” (Comaroff and Comaroff 290). Generally considered in terms of its properties of visuality – transparency, reflection, refraction – glass is less often discussed in terms of its acoustic qualities. The resonance of glass is suggested but not articulated by Wyle reports that recommend a three-inch gap and separate installation of each pane of glass rather than a manufactured double pane window. That glass resonates “with” sound is crucial; sound is not an external agent or object, it is only and always in and of – i.e., it is immanent.

Mutable, glass is a solid that “contains in its liquid properties the trace of its previous state and the conditions of its making” (Kalas 175). It is technically an “amorphous solid,” its chemical structure that of liquid rather than a crystalline solid, atoms and molecules not organized in a definite lattice pattern. High temperatures will change its state from solid to viscous, cold will render molten silica into something (seemingly) solid. When heated to its glass transition temperature, it is said to be in its glassy state. In glass, we find what Latham and McCormack describe as the “real force of the immaterial” (704). Like concrete, another material that moves between liquid and solid, glass “is a particular aggregate organization of process and energy,” its “technicity” emerging “from the mediation of different domains,” molded through “a series of transformative operations” (Mackenzie qtd. in Latham and McCormack 705). Composed primarily of silica, glass is material cousin to sand, whose granularity is another kind of liquid solid marking indefinite, moving margins. Capable of altering the territory of nation-states (Chua, Comaroff), sand is blown by wind into dunes – mobile, migrating formations upon which homes that had been built for their ocean views were, in 1959, suddenly under the flight path of newly noisy jet aircraft.

2. De/territorializing

After they had been purchased by the airport but not yet demolished, some of the empty homes in Playa del Rey were used for soundproofing tests; vacant, they became experiments in matter. “The project’s personnel install various types of material – such as fiberboard, gypsum board, fiberglass, thin sheets of lead, a seven-inch thickness of foam – alone and in combinations in the walls, floors, and ceilings, then take careful sound level readings to determine the effectiveness. Then the material is ripped out and another kind installed” (“Soundproofing Experiment” 16). The houses were built on concrete slabs as a measure of earthquake safety – no basements, nothing to fill in other than swimming pools, which stood empty long enough for neighborhood youth to use them as skate ramps. Foundations laid on top of shifting sands stabilized the dunes momentarily with concrete, a metaphor for noise and its unstable bases in the subjective yet generalizable nature of human perception. Though even in 1968 the Chicago Tribune reported that “Already the land around these houses, which once were surrounded by green lawns, has reverted to sand dunes,” the last houses on the dunes were not purchased by the airport until 1975 (“Soundproofing Experiment” 16). Yvette Kovary’s was one of these. Two years before, on Valentine’s Day, she wrote the airport asking about the “rumor that the Airport Security Officers will be removed in April, leaving us in a very lonely and vulnerable situation.”

Kovary, who in the 1960s spearheaded neighborhood mobilization against airport noise as chairman of the citizens’ committee in Playa del Rey, shows me photos of comparable properties that were used as evidence in her lawsuit against the airport, as grounds that her home was worth more than the airport had offered. The yellow stickers “admitted as evidence” remain. She tells me that the airplane noise wasn’t so bad, that what they wanted most was to stay in their home. I listen, as the photos ground memories of a neighborhood given form and dimension, her hand arcing to outline contours in the dunes – a hill, a bluff, a street running down to the beach. She tells me of her friends and neighbors, pointing to their houses and describing their personalities. We are looking at an aerial photograph of Playa del Rey taken from just off the coast. It has the date “5 4 59” in the upper right hand corner. Worn, now, parts of its edges have torn or fallen off, revealing the board on which it is mounted. As images prompt memories of a home and neighborhood, past seeps into present, emerging in the space-time fold that opens as her finger touches a map I had read a reference to earlier that day, in transcripts of the 1960 congressional hearings on Aircraft Noise Problems held at Inglewood’s Morningside High School – the presentation of images a hidden yet potent presence in transcripts that record words but not gestures, official statements but not the informal speech by those who are there to testify. This speech is apparent only insofar as it is pointed to by senators admonishing the audience to be quiet, to be respectful. A licensed pilot sponsored for transcontinental races, Kovary had served in SPARS, a women’s unit of the Coast Guard, during World War II. During the hearings she drew on her expertise as a pilot to provide authority to her statements and to her experience: “I hold commercial multiengine flight instructor’s ratings,” she began, before introducing herself as “chairman of the citizens’ committee in Playa del Rey” (Aircraft Noise Problems 243). She says, of the photo, “I wanted to show them where we were, and what danger we were in,” telling me, fifty-six years after the hearings, “I knew exactly what they were doing.”

Fig 1. Pointing to an aerial photo of Playa del Rey. © Marina Peterson, 2016.

Yvette’s finger, pinkish and human scale against the sepia miniaturization of the landscape, touches the spot where her house had stood, still visible in the image, not, then, simply a trace on the dunes. Her house is the very last one at the top of the hill on the southern edge of the neighborhood. The runways are in the background, surrounded by expanses of open land. As she touches her house in the photo, her finger points to the south runway, its end visible just beyond a barren field. She describes how, rather than staying in the clear zone of the runway, the planes flew directly over their homes. “I could stand in my backyard and see the nose of the plane skid across the horizon,” she says, as the pilot held the plane low rather than rising in the air. She took what she described as an intentional, dangerous, and unnecessary act personally, but left possible motivation open. Her touch tends to the memory manifest in a tattered aerial photograph – a photograph made with a technology afforded by flight, captured by a photographer pointing a camera out the door of a helicopter, with its own engine roar as it circled over the airport and its margins.

This was an era of infrastructure, of eminent domain wielded in service of freeways, stadiums, and airports. Across the region, families took the city’s money and moved, or held out and fought, the stability of homes and neighborhoods only a recent achievement bolstered by postwar incentives for homeownership and subdivision development (Avila, Cuff, Nicolaides). Later, after they had moved away, former residents told the local paper that “Living there was like living in paradise.” Families would walk to the beach after dinner, their children roaming freely across the dunes and beach. “‘It was a delightful place to live, kind of like the French Riviera,'” one man told a reporter, and a retired aerospace worker and licensed pilot concurred, “‘This whole area was a super neighborhood,’ said Hoefler. … ‘You couldn’t beat it'” (Gregor A1, A8). Women stayed home with the children, who might scream in fear at the sound of an aircraft, or race to look up in awe and excitement. Some of these women formed organizations to deal with the noise of the planes and the impending encroachment of the airport on their neighborhoods, along with the potential loss of their dream homes, built on the coast, with ocean breezes if not views. They went knocking door to door, asking for signatures to take to the airport noise group or send to the city councilperson. Even as they strove to maintain the lives they knew, there was a straining against the constraints of gender, of the household, and of labor or the lack thereof. They used their husbands’ names at first, though the men were at work all day and did not hear the noise.

While residents of neighborhoods still – though not much longer – under restrictive covenants continued their battle against airport noise, Watts, directly to the east, burned with the fires of a riot stoked by the precarity of urban inequality, of structured abandonment manifest in police violence along with subpar housing and public services. It was a heat wave, and the Situationist International wrote: “The Los Angeles rebellion is the first in history able to justify itself by the argument that there was no air conditioning during a heatwave” (7). An atmosphere of change shimmered in the air, in bodies, in city infrastructure. “Sous les pavés la plage,” under the paving stone the beach – a call to action, both literal and symbolic, the paving stone a weapon against the police during 1968 riots in Paris manifesting the potential of liberation, of transforming the pressures of the capitalist city and private property to a space of freedom. And while not revolutionary in these terms, the return of the dunes, the seeping up of the sand in all its indeterminacy, pushes against the stability of property.

Those who remained in Playa del Rey planted ice plant in an effort to halt the sand that, freed from its containment under concrete, drifted here and there, blowing onto streets and driveways and still cultivated yards when the wind was strong. Ice plant, Carpobrotus edulis, also known as “Hottentot fig,” with its shallow roots and creeping, rhizomatic form, takes hold quickly and spreads. Native to South Africa, it flourishes in Mediterranean climates. Needing little water, it blooms a brilliant lavender or pink flower, which, against the olive green field, provides a compelling burst of color. Its thick clusters cover the ground around beach front homes, providing greenery that stands out against the more subdued hues of dune ecosystems. A succulent, it can grow when just one of its three-sided segments meets ground, developing roots, taking hold, and generating fingers and branches that spread across the sand. Host to the El Segundo blue butterfly’s predators, it crowds out native species and makes the sandy soil of coastal dunes hospitable to other nonnative plants. Ice plant gives root to a desire for fixity and control. First introduced to Southern California in the early 1900s to stabilize soil along railway lines, ice plant continues to be planted extensively along freeways. This is a rhizome that territorializes rather than deterritorializes, spreading quickly and taking over areas that might be otherwise populated, especially if sparsely, as dunes habitats tend to be (Marder 135). To remove it, as I learned during a dunes restoration volunteer event, you start from the outside in, digging in with your fingers to feel beneath the shallow roots, pulling up each of its “arms” until they clump around their starting point, which, more deeply anchored, requires the use of a knife to dig around and into the cluster and free the thicker roots from the sand. We were warned to not leave a single segment lying on the ground.

Fig 2. Ice plant. © Marina Peterson, 2018.

Ice plant may have seemed to offer the possibility of holding onto the known, fixing the surface against otherwise unstoppable changes. In a letter dated September 1, 1973, Yvette Kovary explained to Mayor Tom Bradley that she had planted ice plant in the vacant lots across the street from her house “to keep some of the sand in place and from drifting across to fill our driveway,” but that much of the area looked terrible, like “the aftermath of a war – a war declared by the City of Los Angeles against its own residents and taxpayers.” Her anger seeps onto the page, her outrage framed with a biting cordiality, “Dear Sir, … Respectfully Yours.” “Unbelievable in this day of environmental concern,” the “once-lovely community” now has “rubble-strewn vacant lots” with “weeds up to eight feet in height, … smashed and unrepaired sidewalks, … sidewalks covered with sand (often to the roadway), … damaged or missing street signs, and … boarded-up houses.” A glimpse of an anthropogenic future, the neighborhood stands as a culmination of Smithson’s “ruins in reverse,” the “memory-traces of an abandoned set of futures” once more returned to rubble (Gordillo 54, 55).

3. Noisy Silence

After most of the homes had been removed, entomologists from the Natural History Museum returned to the dunes, whose wildlife had been catalogued in the decades prior to residential development. In 1973, the year the Endangered Species Act is passed, the El Segundo blue is included in The Butterflies of Southern California (Emmel and Emmel). The airport offers an annual butterfly tour to employees. We drive down the now cracked pavement of the streets that once defined a neighborhood, through the rolling hills of the dunes with their spectacular view of the ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains in the distance, crossing boulevards lined with palm trees and stopping at a street that would have continued west were it not now blocked from its route by sand and a chain link fence. The fence creates a barrier between the perpendicular intersection of this now unnamed street and the busy thoroughfare of Vista del Mar, on the other side of which lies Dockweiler State Beach. The biologist leading the tour sets up a small amplifier in the sand atop a ruin of a retaining wall, still standing though the house whose foundation it protected from the sand’s slow seep is gone. Dick Arnold uses the amplifier to broadcast his voice to the small group of women gathered around the coastal buckwheat plants, looking with great intensity as we try to spot a butterfly. We see one, but it is not the El Segundo blue. Wind touches the microphone, a plane whine passes over, becoming the white noise of engine sound, feedback from the small amplifier, “hooaaa,” laughter, “that’s a Metalmark right there,” he says. At last one is spotted, a male, “flittin’ around.” We talk to each other about the difficulty of capturing a butterfly with a camera, listening to our guide with half an ear. The flier we received as we boarded the bus has a very large, clear, and distinct image of a male El Segundo blue butterfly, blue wings with an orange border at the back of its rear wings. We are trying to spot something that is about one inch across, blue (male) or orange and brown wings with white spots (female), against the scrubby, gray and gray-green drought-afflicted coastal buckwheat plant. “There’s a female. See how it’s darker?” A male and female dart around each other and those gathered exclaim “awwws” at the arthropod romance.

Fig 3. Dunes. © Marina Peterson, 2017.

Audio Clip 1. Butterfly Count Feedback

The interspecies encounter of butterfly and human takes form within and beyond a physical encounter, the sighting of butterfly by human eyes a sensory encounter that proliferates into forms that are sensory (the touch of butterfly capture) and abstract (law, and its regulatory practices). There is something in this encounter of what Yusoff calls the “insensible,” meaning that which “alerts us to the work of sense in securing the bringing into relation, its configurations, and its a priori orientations,” even as it “highlights the conditions under which we make knowledge and the way in which these conditions are directed towards certain resolutions of entities, of arrangements, of matter that are already towards the coherency of an event, as phenomenon, as writing, as sense work” (224). The insensible is Bataille’s “formless,” or “nonknowledge,” a force between sense and nonsense, “between material and virtual, inhuman and human, organic and nonorganic, time and the untimely” (Yusoff 213). And though the butterfly-human encounter almost immediately moves into the sensible – law, science, notions of ecology, humanistic modes of planetary care, metaphor, the biopolitical subject of environmentality – something remains of the “strange, nonintuitive, insensible … remote from human comprehension or intelligibility” (Yusoff 225). The butterfly exceeds human knowledge of it, even as it is potentially at risk of extinction at human hands.

An orientation of care that privileges human over butterfly draws the two together in a series of encounters; yet even “the specific materiality and multiplicity of the subject” does not quite undo the preeminence of the human, does not quite yield to a sense that “the ‘human’…is not now, and never was, itself” (Wolfe 9). Rather, what is formed in these encounters is butterfly as object of human desire and care – of silence, fragility, precarity, posed against the roar of the jet. Anthropogenic charity embodied by the butterfly, and manifest in bodily encounters with plants and soil. A non-teleological form of the encounter between butterfly and human is shaped but not determined by other forms, encounters that, though not “structuring” per se, do not come out of nowhere. Something of history, of long conditioned modes of thought, endures and inscribes “meaning” into form. Metaphor and physicality draw together around the human-butterfly encounter. Care, enacted through the physicality of sight and touch, is iterated as such, hand meeting soil as volunteers plant coastal buckwheat in the dunes in order for the butterfly to live.

Inhabiting a place deemed unfit for human habitation, the butterfly undergoes complete metamorphosis on (and under) coastal buckwheat plants. Butterfly metamorphosis is Malabou’s plasticity: one form destroyed, another form emerging from the destruction. Plasticity is thus a worlding, an emergent, transformative mode of existence, “a possible line of flight” (Mawani 167). Their lifecycle spanning a year, they become butterflies between mid-June and early September, their ability to fly coinciding with the flowering of the buckwheat. Staying close to the crown of the plant amongst whose roots they have long lain in another form, the butterflies mate (Arnold 82). The females eat and lay eggs on the flowerhead – a cluster of small white and pink flowers. The eggs hatch in three to five days if not consumed by a parasitic wasp who protects the buckwheat (Raffles 69). Plants sense insects, responding chemically to caterpillars munching their leaves and releasing chemicals (whose effects are unknown) upon insect oviposition (Karban 22). Ants protect the larvae from the parasitic wasp that protects the plant. Rudi Mattoni, whose fascination with butterflies began as a child, explains the process to me, saying that the larvae are “attended by ants, which protect them from parasitoids.” These ants drink a “sweet secretion,” exuded from glands that emerge as the ant strokes the larva’s back – a seeming symbiosis of pleasure and protection in which the biopolitical subject of an endangered species is entangled in an interspecies assemblage of transformation and becoming. Ant pleasure and pupae secretion spark the imagination of biologists and butterfly aficionados. Mattoni describes the nectar as a “delicious honey solution. They get high – they love it.” And as the larvae secrete, they sing, communicating via very quiet sounds at very high frequencies, inaudible to humans, but within the realm of transducible sound (DeVries).

Others, however, shift from the titillation of ant pleasure, of peaceable communication between species, to suggest such ant-caterpillar relationships may be less equanimous. A framework of “biological market” does a different kind of work: larvae compete for the attention of fewer ants by producing more nectar, but produce less when there are many ants present. The ants, who do not need the sugary secretion, may also eat a larva that is not producing nectar, thus eliminating “the free riders from the population” (Maestripieri 214). A Science headline puts it bluntly: “Butterflies drug ants, turn them into bodyguards” (Asher). In this account, because the caterpillars need the ants but not vice versa, the caterpillars manipulate the ants with chemicals in their sweet secretion, using “nectar to drug unsuspecting ants with mind-altering chemicals.” The nectar imparts a caterpillar’s version of cruel optimism, as the ants who drink it run aggressively around the caterpillars rather than defending them from wasps and spiders. Extortion, psychological manipulation, and death tinge the desire for sweet secretion with malevolence and violence, another kind of metaphor for the transformation of dunes into neighborhoods, neighborhoods into rubble across which “invasive” species flourished, only to be removed slowly by human hands pushing sharp spades into the sand, cutting branches and roots with little knives, “restoring” an earlier ecosystem as an emblem of planetary care.

Ant-butterfly relations do not adhere to a logical intentionality, whether it’s cast in terms of a rationality of market relations or in terms of the physical pleasure of interspecies touch and intoxication. The latter, which suggests an “affective ecology shaped by pleasure, play, and experimental propositions” (Hustak and Myers 78), is nonetheless as much an anthropocentric projection as the former. And, while extortion and manipulation more readily serve a neo-Darwinian model of evolution, both accounts of the ant-butterfly dynamic draw together a physicality of sensation with an anthropocentric interpretation of its meaning – as an interspecies insect relationship folds into a human-insect entanglement. Missing are the ways in which the relationship is “a reciprocal capture,” an “‘intra-active’ phenomenon” of “creative involution,” Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation that “amplifies relations constituted through affinity” (Hustak and Myers 97). There is a possibility of formlessness presented by the butterfly-ant encounter, an insensibility that has the potential to undermine humanism by pulling “these relations into a strange territory” of pleasurable pain (Yusoff 225), of purposeless consumption of an other, of drunken ants wobbling around an oozing larva. Ant stroking caterpillar secreting sweet nectar drunk by ant protecting caterpillar is a becoming “in which the discernibility of points disappears” (Deleuze and Guattari qtd. in Hustak and Myers 97). The airport looms large. Though the butterfly may not “hear” the planes, people who spent years working on dunes restoration attribute their hearing loss to the jet noise. As another sensing species, with antennae and legs and wings that experience differences in atmospheric conditions, the butterfly too must be moved by the aerial vibration of the sound of a departing plane.

In an encounter of insect and city, noise effects shape a space of “noisy silence” (Königstein), literally and metaphorically, materially and conceptually – airplanes making their loudest, most “annoying” sound while a caterpillar sings softly to an ant. Ambiguous and ambivalent, this is a space of metamorphosis, transduction, plasticity, and becoming, with species transformation shifting human aspirations, federal protection of endangered species superseding municipal laws, butterflies trumping a golf course, an anthropocentric environmentalism at odds with itself settling into an uneasy truce about land use that, despite its seeming “emptiness,” is anything but (McDonogh 5). This is a space of indefinite urbanism, where noise from the sky transformed a then growing city, and sound is still sensed in its affective reverberations for those whose homes once stood there and by pupae waiting to become butterflies.

Tracing noise, I arrive at butterflies – delicate, winged, darting about in flight, coasting on wind currents or perching on coastal buckwheat, gently opening and closing their wings, difficult to spot and little documented, they are atmospheric. Dwelling with them, attending to qualities and matterings, to assemblages and encounters across species and forms of matter, becomes a stilled moment in the proliferation of atmospheric phenomena composed by noise. Like noise, the butterflies evade and escape immediacy, control, and management, exceeding even the domain of “noise.” Echoing Thrift, they expose “a whole new frontier of inhuman endeavor … the construction of new matterings” (22). The El Segundo blue butterflies compose a volumetric city of another scale. Not a miniature representation of human flight, theirs is a world-making venture that, like noise, draws things together and to which humans sensorially attune, turning away from planes whose “noise” interrupts speech and turning toward butterfly flight.

Footnotes

1. Insofar as noise is made, whether as sound or in its designation, it is emergent, approachable principally as an ethnographic concern. Always coming into being, noise is necessarily immanent; intrinsic, or inherent to its instantiations in human/nonhuman assemblages of machine, air, body, or building, it provides a way of exploring sound as such. Hence, unlike others, I do not posit a definition of noise (see Attali, Goodman, Hainge, Hegarty, Hendy, Keizer, Novak, Schwartz, and Thompson).

2. There is currently burgeoning attention to the atmosphere across a range of disciplines; see, for instance, Adey, Böhme’s “Acoustic Atmospheres” and “The Atmosphere of a City,” Choy, Choy and Zee, Connor, Eisenlohr, Ingold, Martin, McCormack, Sloterdijk, Spahr, and Stewart).

3. While there are numerous studies of the interior spaces of airports, few address the exterior of this infrastructural behemoth, or its relationship to its locale. Notable examples include Friedman’s “Fear of Flying,” a master’s thesis on noise at LAX (copies of which can be found in the library at LAX’s Flight Path Museum); Hailey’s Airport, with its plotline of a community protest against noise; and Schaberg’s The End of Airports, in which he describes his own experience working in all zones of the airport. Others that address the airport in relation to mobility, security, and architecture include Adey, Augé, Cwerner et al., Gordon, Law, Manaugh, and Pascoe.

Works Cited

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