Public Acoustics by Ellen R. Welch

Explores how Ancien Régime writers theorized public communication through acoustic metaphors

The salons, cafés, theaters, and print shops of Ancien Régime France have long occupied a key place in histories of the “public sphere”—that is, a cultural arena where private individuals could discuss topics of public interest. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French writers certainly acknowledged the emerging importance of public discussion to their society and political culture. Yet when they wrote about contemporary public discourse, they typically used different words to describe it. Most often, they reached for a metaphor, referring to it as noise (bruit). What did it mean to characterize the public’s discourse in this way?

In this book, Ellen R. Welch investigates the figure of noise in Ancien Régime writing as a resource for thinking about public communication. Analyzing plays, novels, letters, essays, and chronicles, Public Acoustics explores how creative writers manipulated commonplace acoustic metaphors to reimagine the political and social force of widespread talk; the workings of informal communication networks; the ethical relationships between chattering masses and listening elites; and the psychological dynamics of these auditory social bonds. Different from traditional ideas of the public sphere, noise represents an understanding of public discussion that is less invested in its rational content than in its mobility, volume, and tone. The term also recognizes the unmanageable multiplicity of perspectives it contains. Welch’s excavation of this story of the Ancien Régime’s “noise” resonates with our present moment, and the chattering, tweeting, echo-chamber-bound publics engendered by digital media.