Paper short abstract:

In 1946 United States Supreme Court case The United States versus Causby, affective responses of humans and chickens anchor an atmospheric composed of sense, law, and air. The atmospheric emerges in "substantiations" of noise, moments in which noise matters.

Paper long abstract:

Noise from the sky experienced almost a century ago continues to provide a basis for airspace territoriality. The 1946 United States Supreme Court case The United States versus Causby provides the basis for airspace property rights below the "public highway" designated by the Air Commerce Act of 1926. Causby, a North Carolina chicken farmer, charged that the sounds of military jets taking off over his coops had caused his chickens to take fright and die. Affective responses of humans and chickens anchor an atmospheric composed of sense, law, and air. As something that is always coming into being, noise is necessarily immanent, providing, thus, a way of exploring sound as such. With nothing outside its matter-immanence, sound is not instrumentalizable, containable, or objectifiable. In this way, listening can be approached as similar to senses of touch, proprioception, and thermoception - senses that do not distinguish between sense and that which is sensed. Listening, thus, is affective, an energetic entanglement across forms of matter or a mode of (bringing into being) an "intensity of relations" (Deleuze). Listening as affect casts sensation and affect as coextensive, with an emphasis on the physicality of intensities, a concrete poetics of encounter in which affect is embodied and the sensory is relational. The atmospheric emerges in "substantiations" of noise, moments in which noise matters. Like noise, the atmospheric is not "out there," either physically or conceptually; rather, it is present, pervasive, and immanent, it imbues, becomes, and permeates, it is perceived, sensed, and felt.