Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 2012, 120, iFirst article

Listening, Language, and Colonialism on Main Street, Gibraltar

Bryce Peake

This essay explores the ways in which listening exists as a means for the maintenance and operationalization of power in the British overseas territory of Gibraltar. On Main Street, a struggle between Spanish ways of practicing space and British ways of representing space is played out in a discourse between the soundscapes of spoken Llanito and British nationalistic parades. Utilizing ethnographic research gathered in 2009, and drawing on practice theory and semiotic approaches, I argue that an examination of how people listen on Main Street makes legible the complex power dynamics between Gibraltarians, Spanish-ness, and the British state. Keywords: Soundscape; Language; Listening; Urban Space; Colonialism; Practice The sounds of spoken language and the perception of urban space are deeply intertwined in the colonial politics articulated on Main Street, Gibraltar. Gibraltarians*whose families were forced to leave Gibraltar during World War II by the British government, and who often have familial ties to southern Spain*are often posed in a cultural conflict between British nationals and expatriates and Spanish immigrants in Gibraltar, despite the co-existence of British loyalties and Spanish mannerisms among many Gibraltarians. This conflict is often manifested through cultural politics of language use, and one means of understanding the negotiation of these cultural politics is through a study of listening. In this essay I examine the ways in which the cultural practice of listening is often used to influence specific conceptualizations and representations of space in urban Gibraltar, in such a way that reproduces colonial power relationships between Gibraltarians and the British state. I am particularly concerned with how the practice
Bryce Peake is a PhD student in Communication and Society at the School of Journalism and Communication, University of Oregon. This research was made possible through funding and support from the Gibraltar Museum, Institute for Gibraltarian Studies, and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. I would like to thank Greg Wise and the two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions, as well as Carol Stabile and Phil Scher for their insight, guidance, and criticism. Correspondence to: Bryce Peake, School of Journalism and Communication, 1787 Agate Hall, Room 124, 1275 University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403, USA. Email: bpeake@uoregon.edu.
ISSN 1479-1420 (print)/ISSN 1479-4233 (online) # 2012 National Communication Association http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2012.663094

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of listening changes language use in the face of different, sometimes antagonistic, culturally coded sounds used in the sonic territorialization of urban space, and how this reflects a symbolic process of colonizing Gibraltarian subjects and Gibraltarian spaces. Following Homi Bhabha, I ask:
How are subjects formed in-between, or in excess of, the sum of the parts of difference? How do strategies of representation or empowerment come to be formulated in the competing claims of communities where, despite shared histories of deprivation and discrimination, the exchange of values, meanings, and priorities may not always be collaborative and dialogical, but may be profoundly antagonistic, conflictual, and even incommensurable?1

This essay contributes to communication studies by closely interrogating what it means to do listening in urban spaces, and the ways in which urban space, at least sonically, is an assemblage of multiple streams of communication that are negotiated through doing listening*referred to in the pages that follow simply as listening. Listening*as one side of the communication process*is a social, political, and cultural practice of building and maintaining both worlds and identities. While my analysis takes place within the specific geopolitical context of Gibraltar, the findings resonate within the wider context of British colonialism and my theoretical and methodological tools are applicable across various national and cultural contexts. In this way, this ethnographic study of linguistic and acoustic ecology contributes international context and perspective to the analysis of urban communication. It brings to fruition a new type of bridge between sound studies and language studies within the field of communication, as well as continuing a tradition of integrating and interfacing with cultural and linguistic anthropology. Using tools from across these disciplines, I argue that listening is more than just simply hearing sounds through biological functions of the human body; it is tied to a specific cultural way of listening that is as much the result of cultural conditioning as it is socialization into specific genders, races, and nationalities. By way of listening, I am referring to the fact that sounds, and soundscapes in particular, are processes and not things.2 Through socialization and cultural conditioning, people learn what sounds are important to their landscapes, and learn to locate these out of the many simultaneous sounds that may be heard because they reflect/echo something they believe about themselves as people. Ways of listening reflect the ways in which space is sounded and aurally interacted with, which further reflects how people learn to use audible systems to make sense of, and manipulate, the soundscapes around them. The study of different ways of listening is a study of the ways in which listening is always politically charged, ; and not a neutral biological function. In this sense, listening is techne both a process of producing things in the world, and the practical knowledge that allows and accounts for that production.3 Listening is both the action and the conditions of possibility for that action; as Jonathan Sterne has argued, sounds only exist as such because we hear them.4 Drawing from ethnographic interviews collected in 2009,5 I argue that listening to the sounds of spoken English, Spanish, and Llanito*a local, Gibraltarian creole of

Listening, Language, and Colonialism on Main Street, Gibraltar

Spanish, Genoese, Hebrew, English, Maltese and Arabic*shapes how British, Spanish, and Gibraltarian peoples understand and interact with urban spaces. In turn, the choice to speak a specific language a specific way is impacted by surrounding sounds. On the one hand, the sounds of spoken English, Spanish, or Llanito are diagrammatic icons: the sounds of spoken language are heard as an acoustic image that acts as a map of a specific ethos and cultural organization of space. On the other hand, the linguistic soundscape interacts with, and is shaped by, other soundscapes and acoustic phenomena that compete for primacy in the soundscape of Main Street. Ways of listening, therefore, refers not simply to a cultural pragmatics of urban space*the understanding that contexts contribute to and affect the potential meanings of soundscapes*but, also to a cultural metapragmatics, whereby listening is not only shaped by soundscapes qua space, but also used to manipulate, control, and understand that space qua soundscape. Where multiple linguistic sounds co-exist with both one another and large amounts of mechanical, musical, and social noise, listening is a way of making particular sets of those sounds more meaningful than others, in such a way that gives meaning to the cultural space . of Main Street. This is the essence of listening as techne To understand listening in this way, I move beyond a syntagmatic understanding of sound to a paradigmatic understanding of soundscapes. In other words, I move away from an analysis that looks at soundscapes being meaningful purely in relations between sounds, and toward an analysis that examines how cultural conditioning and socialization render sounds as meaningful in particular ways. Furthermore, I emphasize that various sonic worlds constructed from these different paradigms do not exist in isolation, but are often in friction with one another. It is this friction* with an emphasis on the links among listening, subjectivity, and identity*that I will examine in the relationship between language use on Main Street and the effects of a street parade on that language use. Methodology The research in this essay was conducted in summer 2009, for approximately two months. During my time in Gibraltar, I lived in the south of the peninsula. Living there, and working with the Gibraltar Museum in the north, required me to walk the length of Main Street three to five days per week for those two months. These walks were crucial for developing rapport with many of the residents who would become my interviewees. It was also the repetition of this walk that allowed me to become hyperaware of, and test alternative ways of thinking about, the perception of sound in urban space. Over the course of my visit, I conducted 33 formal and informal interviews with a wide range of persons. Some were anonymous, as the city most often offers the opportunity for fleeting conversations about the city itself, with little tolerance for the formalities of proper introductions and interviews*as Melissa L. Caldwell has emphasized in her discussion of ideal urban ethnographic methods.6 As such, the boundary between what is formal and what is informal must be contextualized in the

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spatial praxis of research. Of these interviews, 15 would be considered formal, in the sense that I was able to gain a full insight into the interviewees life in a setting isolated from typical urban interactions. The remaining 18 would be classified as informal, as very little personal information outside of that pertinent to the conversation was shared. In many ways, informal interviews resembled a hybrid of small talk and verbal survey. The division between formal and informal, however, should not be taken as any indication of the length or value of the content of interviews. Some informal interviews lasted as long as an hour (riding to and from Algeciras by bus), while some formal interviews were shorter than 45 minutes.7 Furthermore, all interviews were conducted in urban spaces while participating in urban activities*riding busses, walking the market, sitting in the park*bringing in aspects of participant-observation essential to ethnography. Ethnography, as a genre of qualitative research, presents a robust set of methods for understanding the cultural practice of listening to urban soundscapes. As stated above, listening is always culturally conditioned: of all sounds audible, only specific ones are perceived as meaningful. This draws a distinction between hearing and listening. Listening is a directed, learned activity: it is a definite cultural practice. Listening requires hearing but is not simply reducible to hearing, according to Sterne.8 The purpose of ethnographic methods is to understand the embedded knowledge and embodied experiences that form the foundation for listening to space, and thus an ethnographic approach provides a wider description of soundscape as first and foremost a cultural artifact created by cultural listeners. Participantobservation similarly places the researcher in the thick of listening, allowing for an observation of listening as it is undertaken. Ethnographic methods also allow for an escape from a common problem in sound studies, in which theorists form the actual based on their own epistemological listening positions, but ignore the other ways of being in the world that render different ways of listening. I draw on distinctions between syntagmatic and paradigmatic to describe my differentiation; where syntagmatic refers to surface structures and the unfolding over linear time, and paradigmatic refers to exploring a syntagm by identifying its constituent paradigms. Whereas scholars such as Siegfried Kracauer and R. Murray Schafer analyze soundscapes syntagmatically, I argue that a full account of soundscape requires an analysis that is much more paradigmatic* analyzing the paradigmatic elements and then reconstructing the process by which the syntagm takes on meaning.9 Sound, for Kracauer and Schafer, simply unfolds over time as meaningful, waiting for the analyst to make sense of each sonic sign. By posing the analyst as the authoritative listener and thus assuming a universal subject, this approach leaves out the variability of what is heard by listeners, who may all exist in the same sonic arena, but I would argue may understand the same sonic phenomenon differently. In other words, these scholars assume that the objects (sounds) they are seeking/listening to know are already perfectly formed in the environment: sound is meaningful because it is sounded, not because it is listened to. In conceptualizing it as such, Kracauer and Schafer restrict their attention to that which has already been experienced and constructed by the researchers themselves, as

Listening, Language, and Colonialism on Main Street, Gibraltar

opposed to the process of listening undergone by the audiences who are affected by the media. Kracauer and Schafer can only describe half of the picture/soundtrack; they sound backward into the past, but not forward into the present; these theorists are concerned with what the listening subjects say (or more appropriately, what the theorists tells them) they heard, or what the subjects thought they heard, and not the subjects processes and experiences of listening. The two scholars attempt to understand what was heard, without paying attention to how listening exists in a political, historical, and cultural constellation with what else has been or will be heard. Particular to the study of urban sound, whereas Schafer analyzes soundscape as the symphony of space that unfolds over time as the urban flaneur travels through space, I am arguing that we should understand that urban space carries a multitude of soundscapes*which resist the teleology of the Western symphony* each made meaningful based on its relationship to a cultural and social memory particular to various subjects. Conceptualizing the source of soundscape to be a paradigm constructed by the listener emphasizes not just the multiplicity of soundscapes, but also the multiplicity of spaces. As Henri Lefebvre has suggested, urban space is an influx and expenditure of forms of energy*sound being (only) one form*and the constant movement of spatial possibilities.10 Urban space, all space, is a result of the social interactions that take place therein, and only so long as those social interactions occur. My analysis emphasizes and interrogates this multiplicity as a lens on how lines of force are articulated through listening practices. If spaces are themselves multiple, then soundscapes must also be multiple, and the question of urban sound studies*and this research in particular*becomes what are we to do with eliding and colliding interpretations of co-existing soundscapes? An ethnographic approach, finally, renders itself an ideal way to study listening, as it is itself built upon listening. The sounds made by interviewees are made meaningful through close analysis. Data from the interviews were analyzed using thematic analysis, in order to pull out substantial themes and sub-themes that arose out of questions regarding sound, or references made to sound. Of these themes, my collection of interviews featured a high frequency of concurrences of the sound of language and the characteristics of space. This frequency prompted the analysis that follows, using ethnographic interviews and narratives to explain the aforementioned concurrence that was referenced both explicitly and implicitly by Gibraltarians. Soundscapes and/as Poetics If soundscapes*as spatial arrangements of sound*lie more in the listener than in the sounds of spaces themselves, and such sounds gain their meaning based on the cultural positioning of the listener, and if part of what shapes cultural positions of individuals is the language that they use, then attention must be paid to the connection between soundscapes and language use. I do so in this section by exploring the ways in which language itself functions as a sonic way of characterizing

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space. Doing so combines two threads in communication studies and linguistic anthropology: the first is a consideration of the soundscapes crafted by Schafer;11 and the second is a consideration of sound symbolism born out of the Prague School and Russian Formalist critiques of Saussure-ian semiotics. Emphasizing the aural aesthetics of language*the channel, to use Roman Jakobsons term12*as the principal sign, and not the messages contained therein, allows us to understand a new dimension of signs as instruments of power. Soundscape analysis has a complicated and debated analytic use. Schafer has defined the soundscape as any portion of the sonic environment regarded as a field for study. The end goal of his analysis was to discuss the ways in which urban space sonic-izes the capitalist ethos, the domination of architectural functionalism, and the primacy of economic reasoning. The echoes of commercial music, and the ` sound of traffic that inspires the muting of the world vis-a-vis personal media devices, drive people to interact with all space as commercial space; consumerism echoes from all corners. For Schafer, the sonic world is just as important as, but always contained within, the physical and visual world of consumer culture and commercial space. Tim Ingold, however, has emphasized that there is a problem with using soundscape to understand space.13 He offers a more pessimistic view of soundscape as an analytic tool in urban communication studies; he claims that an aural study is concerned with the fixivities of surface conformations rather than the fluxes of urban behavior. Ingold is critical of Schafers technique, as Schafer portrays soundscape as out there as an empirical truth regarding the nature of space, whereas Ingold is much more interested in the social construction of space itself. While I agree with Ingold that space is less about conformations than it is about experience, I do not embrace Ingolds view that soundscape is lacking as an analytic tool. Ingolds primary problem is that he still places soundscape out there, still looks at it as a phenomenon of the environment, without considering that soundscapes are themselves processes. Such a view, as we can extract from Emily Ann Thompsons history of architectural sound, is part of a discourse on sound as energy and waveforms, more so than a sign of human interaction and social involvement.14 I return to analyzing sound as a marker of human social interaction, particularly as it pertains to listening, and in doing so separate from Schafers and Ingolds connecting of sound to surfaces and architecture. Instead, I am moving to consider the relationship between sound and space through listening: examining the ways in which soundscapes have depths of their own, and soundscapes capacity to be a space constructed in and through listening. In so doing, I am arguing that the power of soundscape lies not in the use of sound, but in the disciplining of peoples to listen in particular ways, such that they will use specific ways of listening and culturally determined paradigms of sound to interact with spaces in particular ways. First and foremost, listening is about environment, space, and spatial construction. One bus rider told me on our way from Europa Point to La Fronterra:

Listening, Language, and Colonialism on Main Street, Gibraltar

As I ride the bus, I put my headphones in. I go to the beach, or out to a night in the club, all while I sit on the bus. It beats staring awkwardly at the bugger across from you. And, it makes the ride seem more timely.15

As seen in this interview, soundscape is not simply a reverberation of a surface*be it the surface of consumer culture or the surface walked on by consumers. Michael Bull suggests that we understand such instances as part of a project of constructing ideal spaces out of the non-spaces of the city; effectively using the iPod to stimulate the intimacy of the cult of the individual and filter out unwanted sensations.16 However, instead of understanding the soundscape as a two-dimensional effect of the symphony of space phenomenologically unfolding as we walk down the street (Schafer), or as a constructive object intended to render real space palpable (Bull), we must shift to thinking of soundscape as a separate space constructed out of sound that articulates the always already multiplicity of spaces. Such a notion moves in the direction of Eric Rothenbuhlers suggestion that we understand communication as ritual; that is, as supporting an alternative realm within another that carries a dialectical impact.17 I propose that we look at the spaces created by sounds, rather than the surfaces that reflect the sounds, so as to include a sense of depth in soundscapes. Soundscapes are often places in and of themselves that have an impact on what the physical space represents but are not slaves to physical space. Soundscapes foster a space where the visual politics of space are cast into a different light. This soundscape includes language as sound. Sometimes, I wonder if anyone here speaks English after dark*Todos hombre, mujer, y nin dice Llanito Y [emphasis] o Castilian, but no one seems to say hello, an informant recounted in a conversation while walking to a cafe late on a Saturday evening.18 It just sounds like I live in Spain! Given that the sound of language gives shape to space through listening, such a statement carries with it many interesting perspectives on linguistic communication and space. Of importance, however, is how spoken language*the sound*tints both the content of what is said as well as the characteristics of the space outside of it. This resonates well with the Russian formalist critique of Saussure-ian semiotics; Jakobson suggests that once language is spoken, it is not simply the materialization and mobilization of langue*parole is surrounded by an infinite number of pragmatic signs that do not simply amplify an underlying meaning carried by the vocalized signifier.19 The instant the sign is uttered, it has new significant qualities. Once it is spoken, it is no longer a symbol in the Peirce-ian sense*that is, no longer wholly arbitrary*but is referentially connected to the social position of the speaker, and by extension the space where this speech occurs (i.e., pragmatic). In Gibraltar, one need not know the syntax of No soy de Espan soy de Andaluz in order to derive some a, meaning from it by making assumptions about the person speaking and the space where they are speaking. The spoken sounds are referential of an entire spectrum of ideological relationships, not least of all a political climate and social milieu. The spoken word in this sense is merely a code for the conveyance of numerous types of semiotic events, not simply a channel for the thing said in and of itself.

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Juri Lotman draws on Jakobson to suggest that codes are important for contextualizing the positionality of the interpreter.20 In particular, Lotman analyzes Jakobsons definition of poetics, which is the means by which a code is expressed. In a poem, Lotman argues, the intent is not to take words at face value as messages, but typically as metaphors through which messages of experience can be translated. In this way, poetry is not about telling people about an experience as a message; rather, its function is to construct a domain, or paradigm, for evoking an experience for interpreting messages in a specific way, through a specific code. In other words, codes are about positioning listeners to listen in a particular way. Returning to the spatializing of sound, a soundscape, as a poetics of space*in both the sense of Jakobsonian poetics and the phenomenology of architectural space developed by Gaston Bachelard21*is less a reflection of spaces surface and more a way of expressing ones experience of, in, and through the landscape through listening. It sounds like I live in Spain is less a suggestion that Gibraltar, as a social space, sounds Spanish, and more a statement about how the British colonial facades of shops are transformed into a Spanish-like space*through the sound of Llanito* to listeners who make a specific ideological connection between Llanito and Spanish. Further, speaking Llanito does not render this place Spanish based simply on syntax, ` but also by providing a code vis-a-vis sound through which this space should be interpreted. Lotman interestingly suggests that:
A text is used as code and not message when it does not add to the information we already have, but when it transforms the self-understanding of the person who has engendered the text and when it transfers already existing messages into a new system of meanings.22

The soundscape, in other words, is the paradigm through which Gibraltarians understand the spaces of urban Gibraltar. In considering the relationship between the murmurs and fragments of Llanito conversations overheard in part, the sounds of Spanish-ness do not add to the information projected by visual space, but instead create a frame through which the interpreter can take up a subject position in relation to, and for interpretation of, the physical space he or she is about to experience. In what follows, I expand on and support this idea using ethnographic data. I argue that the sound of language is a diagrammatic icon: its sound represents, by likeness, the characterization of the ethos of the space. The disorganized sound of Llanito*that is, to British English listeners*is directly connected to the disorganized spatial practices that they interpret this Spanish space to be, framing Llanito as Spanish based on phonemic similarities. Poetics of Linguistic Acoustic Ecologies
The main street . . . is a curious composition of English-looking shops with Spanish proprietors; and at any time one can see sailors of every nation . . . mingling with red-coated British soldiers, tall and solemn-looking Moors in turbans, yellow slippers, and long white burnooses, Jews from Morocco with fur caps and Zouave

Listening, Language, and Colonialism on Main Street, Gibraltar

jackets and baggy trousers, and European travelers in the monotonous costume of our modern civilization.23

In the above quote from the late nineteenth century, Charles Augustus Stoddard describes the visual impressions of Main Street, Gibraltar. A similar ethos remains on Main Street, however, much of the romanticized imagery and costumery has fallen away in the norm-regulated labor world of contemporary, capitalist Gibraltar. The diversity itself has not fallen away, but has simply moved to being signified by a variety of overlapping sonic cues*Andalucan DJs on the radio blaring from a distant car, faintly heard in market place as Indian merchants converse in Hindi, and Moroccans in Spanish and Arabic hybrids that carry an air of French pronunciation, while Spanish and English shoppers chat amongst themselves and the groups with whom they arrived in Andalucan Spanish, Llanito, and English. This juxtaposition might be understood as the Linguistic Acoustic Ecology, suggesting an inter-relationship of organisms with and within their environment. I use the metaphor of ecology to argue that the multiple linguistic sounds come to represent a particular image of Gibraltar, and shape a particular experience of space. Peter Muhlanhausler has argued that language must always be regarded as an organism in an ecology, in that it is shaped by and constantly shaping the spaces in which speakers engage with one another.24 I expand on, complicate, and critique this assertion in both this section and the one that follows. Here, the metaphor is apt for understanding the relationship between space and language, particularly in understanding language as a diagrammatic icon of space. In this section, I examine how linguistic sounds are listened to in such a way that they come to create ideological maps of space; particularly focusing on the ways the soundscape reveals shifts and struggles between British visual renderings of Gibraltarian social space and Gibraltarian (Llanito) sonic renderings of Gibraltarian social space. I do so with the recognition that the ways in which language is listened to, and the meanings that are ascribed to the sounds of language*a priori if not regardless of the syntax*represent, metapragmatically, the organization and characterizations of space. That is, simply, the sound of language exists as a sonic diagrammatic icon of visual and tactile lived space. Put more concretely, I argue that for British ways of understanding Llanito*be it through British epistemology or the British narrative framings of language and the history given to tourists*the improvisational, seemingly disorganized nature of Llanito characterizes Main Street as chaotic, which stands in opposition to the regimented and regulated space constructed through British English as it is mapped onto Main Street. The noisy shopping district surrounds Main Street, and is the primary commercial center for residents and tourists alike. On the northern-most side of Main Streets commercial space is Casemates: an antiquated aqueduct through which travelers coming south into Gibraltar walk. The area immediately after this features a wide, open plaza, lined with street cafes, restaurants, a glass-blowers museum and storefront, and the single mall in Gibraltar. Travelling south, this commercial site fades from local shops into local residences, before Main Street itself splits into two

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residential roads. The residential side of Main Street is less defined in terms of function. One knows when one is at the edge of the commercial district by feeling, and the end is dependent both on the time of day and the day of the week. As time progresses throughout the weekdays, the end of the commercial district creeps slowly northward as more and more locals settle at home, and the ethos and soundscape of southern Main Street drastically changes. The east and west sides of Main Street are bordered both by buildings and major, non-pedestrian (or at very least pedestrian-unfriendly), roadways. This non-human nature of east and west is exacerbated by the fact that Main Street is a street primarily for walking, often in the center of the road, and the few occasional vehicles are more an inconvenience for people than the other way around. During an early-morning walk, when the streets are bustling with shopkeepers shelving and trucks delivering the days stock, spoken English dominates the space. Truck drivers and shopkeepers discuss politics, street sweepers and those who commute by foot exchange short hellos and pleasantries, and the regulars of various coffee shops discuss what is ahead of them when they arrive at the office. This conversation occurs against the backdrop of British flags, English street signs, and the faint echo of British pop music from department stores. The morning often represents the British colony described in most pieces of British literature: calm, focused, and above all else, English. After the midday meal, the space becomes dominated by Llanito*pleasantries, small talk, discussions of politics and weather: all occur in the local dialect. Walking along Casemates in the afternoon and early evening, one cannot help but notice the shift in linguistic space. In fact, all informal, anonymous interviews that I conducted conformed to this transformation: early-morning interviews with local Gibraltarians occurred in English; returning to those same people at times after midday always resulted in conversations in Llanito and Castillan Spanish. This shift is documented in 34 hours of audio and video recordings taken in various parts of Main Street during my research visit. The morning begins with an emphasis on English, and slips gradually, becoming by midday a space characterized by Llanito. This shift is significant insofar as it marks a transformation in the organization of space. Early in the day, space is disciplined in a British ethos of proper laborers, which dialectically acts on and is constructed by residents of Gibraltar in a way that renders them British subjects; as exhaustion of British-ness takes hold, the space transforms as the Gibraltarians do. This fatigue from performing British-ness is not unheard of in other realms. As one heritage official discussed in an interview about her work on an oral history project:
In interviews about the history of Gib, people started by talking in articulate English, and then slowly slipped into our Spanish. At first, I think theyre performing for the camera, and then, once theyre talking about their history and going back, they become themselves. I think its an act of British-ness. Thats not to say that Spanish is bad. . . . British is, were taught, more proper and progressive, and Spanish is less reformed and for conversations with your friends. Oral history

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becomes less a formal endeavor and more of a personal one. We stop being interviewed and interviewer, and become Gibraltarians.25

This quote demonstrates not only the existence of performance exhaustion, but also the close relationship between language and Gibraltarian identity. As both the interviewee and interviewer move to speaking Llanito, they stop being the formal categories of interviewed and interviewer, and become Gibraltarians. What I am arguing, in terms of urban space, is that this performance of Gibraltarians also has deep effects on the social construction of space. Just as the interview comes with its own social norms and regulations, so does the practice of space. Gibraltarians are taught, through a variety of mediums, that public urban space requires a type of reform that can only be obtained through British-ness, and signified by English.26 In other words, Gibraltarians are taught to listen to language in particular ways, and to make spaces meaningful based on that social conditioning of listening. They are socialized to think that English, as the symbol par excellence of British-ness, is an icon of the ideal and civilized Gibraltarian. As the day wears on, just as the interview wears on, Gibraltarians become exhausted performing this British-ness. So too do the spaces that are constituted and characterized by language use, and language sounds begin to shift. The shift to Llanito as the day moves on*the shift to a sonic sign system that occurs in the space of British colonial architecture*marks a reconfiguration of the British sounding space of British architecture on Main Street: Llanito, with its improvised nature, stands in direct opposition to the organization and ruledrivenness of English, so too does the uninhibited nature of space characterized by Llanito stand in opposition to the hyper-organized nature of space created by English. Llanito, as it was put by a heritage official,
is really improvised*the switching between English and Spanish is more flowing than static, although there are some informal rules. But everything is flexible for the case of making your point. We might use Spanish sayings and, instead of using an English noun, well just use the Spanish one.27

What is important, ideologically, is not whether all spoken Llanito, or Spanish for that matter, is improvised, but rather that it is framed as such; the sound of Llanito, then, is listened to as disorganized. As one tourist put it, British-ness means organizations, no? Everything British is on the straight and narrow. And Spanish [Llanito] is messy, and unorganized.28 Concerns with the ideology of space and the image of Gibraltar are tied into this very structure, which is drawn through listening. The shift between English and Llanito, then, is both a lingui-cization and spatialization of the conflict between the British and Gibraltarians regarding the British-ness and Spanish-ness of Gibraltarians, highlighting the ways in which this debate is also structured between the British nature of space and the Spanish nature of space by way of how people may imagine space based on how they listen. In Llanito, there is a negation of the British reform and a subjugation of British-ness. Language becomes a space where colonialism becomes undone, and possibly reversed. This is potentially a problem for British notions, and British-Gibraltarians

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notions, of what (and who) Gibraltarians are, can be, and look like. As Martin Reisigl and Ruth Wodak suggest, Llanito is problematic because linguistic devices are employed to construct national sameness . . . on the one hand and differences from other national collectives on the other.29 Llanito allows Gibraltarians to imagine themselves as a buffer between Spanish and British, as something autonomous yet between both, something dangerous to both the colonizing power and the previous owner of the colonized space. Llanito offers a soundscape that can be listened to in such a way that renders urban Gibraltar as Spanish to the uninformed, and a soundscape that signifies not British to Gibraltarians. Llanito offers the trialectic*the escape from dialecticism*between Spanish and British depending on who is doing the listening. Main Street becomes something not British, and something that may or may not be Spanish. As a group of Spanish tourists noted, Later in the day, especially at night, everyone is speaking Spanish. It stops being a tour of British colonialism and becomes a [sic] Andalucan hangout in a 30 British theme park. This escape, however, is only temporary. The sounds of language float into the air and mingle with their surroundings. They are part of the wider media ecology, the media being the sounds and images present in space, and the ecology being the structure, content, and impact of the environment on those sounds and the space simultaneously. While Llanito structures the space as something beyond British-ness, and impacts peoples perceptions in the ways discussed above, other sounds are deployed to influence and inculcate British-ness. Parading Toward a More Complex Linguistic Ecology Muhlanhauslers understanding, while useful for describing the relationship between language and space, is too simplistic; the complete metaphor of ecology must include notions of competition, invasion, and succession. This section fills out this metaphor by describing the relationship between the sounds of language and the sounds of a street parade. The sounds of language, acting within the wider acoustic ecology, is characterized by a competition between the metapragmatic ideation of British-ness embedded in English and Spanish-ness embedded in Llanito, one being seen as invading the territory of the other, and both engaged in repetitive successions of one another throughout various days and times. Within this more voluptuous metaphor, the notion that listening is techne becomes most realized: as people listen to Main Street, they culturally code the space with the ideological notions with which they have learned to associate sounds, and in so doing structure a paradigm in which some sounds*by virtue of their meaningful-ness*stand out amongst all the possible acoustic phenomena that are being heard. With this in mind, I argue that the Saturday morning changing of the guard parade uses the sounds of a field drum and shouts to re-organize the soundscape poetics*that is, the poetic paradigm*through which sound-interpreters think of themselves. This is an aspect, and extension, of what Schafer refers to as sound imperialism,31 whereby the ideological power of a

Listening, Language, and Colonialism on Main Street, Gibraltar 13

specific spectrum of sounds is sufficient to dominate*or re-dominate as will be the case described here*the soundscape of Main Street. British ideologues and officials use the sound of the drum to fight against the invasion of what they see as Spanish cultural order, through countering the Spanish soundscape and the linguistic ecology of Llanito. Juxtaposing the parade with the ways in which language stands in a metapragmatic relationship to space reveals that the parade is part of what Michel Foucault called the explicit programmes . . . calculated, reasoned prescriptions in terms of which institutions are meant to be reorganized, spaces arranged, behaviors regulated.32 The re-enactment parades recode the space of Main Street as British, re-others street performers sounds and Llanito speakers as something other than British, and reminds Gibraltarians of their British-ness. The confluence of memory, place, sound, and power add up to a sound imperialism intent on constructing a counter space, or what Edward Said has described as imaginative geographies*geographical spaces that more accurately reflect the fantasies and preoccupations of those in power than the spaces inhabitants.33 On my first Saturday in Gibraltar, I was walking down Main Street with Passo, a researcher from Spain doing archaeological work on the Rock of Gibraltar. We were commenting on the large number of British and American tourists who seemed to appear on Main Street on the weekends. It was an interesting combination of languages, as Gibraltarians separated themselves from tourists, and even commented on the appearances of certain tourists, by speaking in Spanish and Llanito. Those Spanish tourists who braved the crowds of the English-speaking mass often bonded with Gibraltarians, as they quipped back and forth about the many retired sightseers who wandered like lazy, if not drunken, sheep and goats. It seemed as if most, although certainly not all, Gibraltarians distanced themselves from the British visitors linguistically. Meeting up with George, a Gibraltarian friend of Passos, we sat on a park bench and discussed my research in Spanish. As I was describing my interest in sound as a type of architecture that intersects with visual architecture, there was a faint sound of a field drum coming from down the street. Curious, Passo and I stood up and went over to look for the sound down the road. George shouted in English, Youre going to love this . . .34 George was referring to the Gibraltar Re-enactment Societys weekly parade through the Main Street district, which featured a re-enactment of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century changing of the guard. This includes both the visual display of the English guard, as well as the aural display of British-ness through shouts of God Bless the Queen and the echo of the drum announcing the approach of the British colors. As my Gibraltarian friend George remarked in English after the band had passed, its a reminder and celebration that we are proudly British.35 Main Street was crowded with tourists and locals alike, and the children were just as excited each weekend as the tourists seeing the parade for the first time. As in all informal gatherings amongst Gibraltarians, Llanito was the primary mode of speaking before the parade. The crowd became large, but was contained to the sidewalk, a rare occasion on Main Street. People were lined down alleyways

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attempting to become part of the event, as the charisma of a parade drew them near. Importantly, not all could necessarily see the event*but all could hear, and were affected by, it. The sonic reverberations of the parade, such as the beat of the field drum, take part in the identity struggle already occurring in the sonic semiosphere. The sound of the parade*the shouting of patriotic slogans in English, the field drum, the commands of the field officer in clear, articulate English*coupled with the visual display of British-ness in the architecture and the authoritative appearance ` of the state vis-a-vis soldiers, functioned to re-establish British-ness as the true face of this space. Where, as described in the previous section, the use of Llanito allows for a liminal construction of space between British-ness and Spanish-ness, the parade*as a technology of the state*declaratively attempted to stabilize the space as British. While I take the radical position that the various sounds of the parade reposition the hearer and the space, the effect the event as a whole has on the soundscape is undeniable. The parade contains a dialectically connected modus operandi: 1) it removes the space constructed by Spanish sounds* linguistic, musical, or otherwise*from the foreground of the landscape; and 2) it reminds Gibraltarians of their status as (loyal, dissident, or not) British citizens who act civilized (by speaking the reformed language of the public space). Put differently*and inserted into the theoretical model presented at the beginning of this essay*the parade, as a state-supported, and indeed state-driven, function, constructs a counter-poetics that comes to override the earlier sonic code of space established by speaking Llanito, through which space is regimented as ambiguously Spanish. Thus, the state exercises its power over the soundscape in order to regain control over and emphasize the British-ness of the space and the British-ness of those subjects within that space. Doing so in turn reconfigures the paradigm of sounds that are taken to be important, which require a particular sonic negotiation, which*for Gibraltarians*occurs in English, adding to the sonic reconfiguration. There are two things that must be analyzed distinctly in the context of the parade. The first is the proposition that the sound is used to reconfigure the poetics of, and regain the claim over, space. The second is the argument that this poetic also changes the Gibraltarians observing both the space and the parade. Both , require a conceptualization of listening as techne and have effects on the listening subjects and their relationships to space, while acting as a conduit of colonial power over space. In subsequent research on pre- and post-parade Main Street, tourists from both Spain and abroad noted that the area had had the feeling of a quaint Spanish town wrapped in British cliches before the parade. However, following the parade, the space was regimented differently. Tourists came to understand the place as being a British space that housed Spanish and Andalucan characteristics, but was nonetheless purely British. In an informal, unstructured interview both before and after a parade, a tourist from the United States stated:

Listening, Language, and Colonialism on Main Street, Gibraltar 15

Like I told you, at first I wasnt sure if it was Spain in Britain, or Britain in Spain, but you can definitely tell now that its British with a little Spanish inside of it. Who else would have a redcoat march in 90 degree weather?!36

As a German tourist suggested, The Spanish-ness, the Arabic music, it all seems out of place now. At first, I was very confused about how to understand Gibraltar, but it certainly is British; I see it now.37 For tourists, the parade provided an authoritative poetics through which they could understand the true national heritage of Gibraltar as a nation state. But the altering of poetics extends beyond framing how non-Gibraltarians interpreted the space: so too did Gibraltarians language-use change. Before the parade, one can listen to field recordings and hear a predominance of Andaluz and Llanito spoken in the landscape*which creates an ambiguous linguistic ecology and linguistically crafted soundscape. After the parade, however, the sound of language changes. English phonemes dominate the space, and the Spanish sounds heard by tourists*imagined or otherwise*fade into the background. As one British tourist suggested:
The loudness of the parade was a lot different than the polite, British sounding streets that followed it. I didnt pay attention to anything before hand, and maybe it was loud, but afterwards it reminded me more of London than it had.38

The parade drastically reconfigures Main Street using national symbols*both visual and sonic. But, with the importance and authority of the state behind it, the soundscape of British-ness provides a new poetics through which the sociality of space becomes expressed, and that poetics is in English. Gibraltarians, looking to express themselves as such and their relationship to urban space in general and Main Street in particular, utilize the dominant code to express this relationship. The parade provides a paradigm through which to do so. Gibraltarians themselves are not conscious of this change, until of course asked about it*and even then, some deny any shift whatsoever. For many Gibraltarians, the parade is a source of pride. Its not that I shouldnt speak Llanito or Spanish, but that I want to pay my respect to Britain, whom we are a part of, regardless of how removed.39 The shift to English is, in this sense, the result of a re-kindled political loyalty and/or awareness. For other Gibraltarians, they just didnt realize it. [They] dont think its significant. [They] just speak English afterwards. [They] dont really pay attention to how [theyre] speaking, just that [theyre] communicating.40 The unconscious-ness of this switch, however, should not be taken as a sign that there is not a structural shift occurring in the soundscape. Pierre Bourdieu, in his analysis of the Kabyle house, tells us that symbolic classifications of space being male or female remain un-articulatable, as informants are unable to produce [them] spontaneously because they take them for granted.41 The significance of the parade lies in the various government ministries and political groups consciousness about how Gibraltar is perceived, and its importance as a political tool.42 These groups have managed to create an unequivocal ideology of space on Main Street through advertising and indeed facilitating this exercise.43

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By extension, on purpose or not, they have also utilized the event to reconfigure the space of Main Street. The soundscape of British-ness encourages a new linguistic ecology dominated by English, and the sound of English (as sound) means organization*among other things*and the space is interpreted as English.44 While causation and correlation are different things, the correlation between these two things, and the processual order in which they occur, raises important questions about the relationship between language, soundscape, and landscape. Where beforehand, substantial numbers of people discussed the ambiguity of the space in regards to the Spanish sounds and English architecture, the parade provides a sonic poetics through which the space is regimented as purely English. Not only does the space sound English, but it is also enacted as English: take the comments regarding the way the space has transfigured into London, for example. London stands as an entirely opposite topography*physically and sonically*than Gibraltar comes close to representing. However, the pattern of comparisons to something organized, to the extent of one English tourist describing Main Street as a possible Mediterranean setting for a Dickens novel, seems to evoke the fact that both the language and the ethos of space of Main Street changed simultaneously. Quieter and more polite, as the interviewee described the sound of [language on] Main Street, has more to do with prosody, the sound of language, than it does semantics. This is what I meant by the two modus operandi of the event being dialectically constituted: in washing away the not British from the soundscape (to apply a twodimensional analogy to the three-dimensional Spanish soundscape that has attached itself to the space), the sonic display of British-ness in the parade alters the poetics of space; thereby disciplining Gibraltarians into thinking of themselves as British, and thus changing their own linguistically constructed soundscape, which removes the non-British-ness from the soundscape heard by tourists. The second operation is more from the perspective of tourists, for whom the parade acts as a disclaimer of performance45 that announces, we here are all British, and all coming performances are of British-ness. It is through this that the past*the British past, written by those with power*sets the code through which Gibraltarians perform and construct themselves as subjects, and through which tourists focus on the British-ness of a space located at the southern tip of Spain. This is a vivid illustration of how, intentionally or not, soundscapes work as a disciplining force, and sound imperialism functions as a colonial tool. However, focusing on sounds tells only half of the story; they are, after all, not intrinsically meaningful. Sound imperialism is only such if it takes hold of the listeners and reconfigures how they imagine themselves through their imaginings of space. In the changing of the guard parade on Main Street, the sonic symbols of patriotism impact the act of listening in such a way that Gibraltarians begin to listen to the space utilizing the paradigm of British-ness, which in turn changes how they linguistically engage with and socially construct space. Listening, then, becomes a cultural practice strategically mobilized by the state to reproduce colonial power relations.

Listening, Language, and Colonialism on Main Street, Gibraltar 17

Conclusion I have argued that the cultural practice of listening is often used to influence specific conceptualizations and representations of space in urban Gibraltar in such a way that it reproduces colonial power relationships between Gibraltarians and the British state. In the frictions between the British-ness and Spanish-ness of Gibraltarians, Main Street is a site where listening is used as a means to reproduce the strategies by which power is maintained and operationalized. Just as sounds are not such until they are heard, so too is listening only possible when sounds are present; the dialectic between sound and listening is essential for . understanding the ways in which listening is techne The sounds of space present a poetics through which space is socially expressed, and that poetics operates as a paradigm in which people understand some sounds to be meaningful in specific ways, and others to fade away as simply quotidian noise. Linguistically, the sound of Spanish-ness presents a poetics counter to the reform and proper-ness of British subjectivity, and thusly presents a Main Street that subverts the authority of the British state. In the case of spoken Llanito, there is a metapragmatic shaping of the environment: just as Llanito represents a less strict linguistic structure than English, so does it also represent and create a less structured social space. The British parade is meant to counter this, and use metapragmatics in an attempt to reconfigure Main Street as a British space. Soundscapes are cultural spaces that are intimately connected with the perception of visible, tactile space through listening. Listening reveals that the ideological understanding of spaces built into visible architecture is always fluid: the practice of listening*framed by a particular cultural way of listening*often comes to override the ethos imposed by the seeming permanence and impermeability of the visual. In this way, Gibraltarians speak into existence the spaces in which they speak; the codes they use*Llanito, Spanish, or English*both simultaneously construct spaces in particular ways, while being intimately affected by and tied to other noises within the soundscape. It is the sound of language that shapes the pragmatics that come to shape Gibraltarians own speech, action, and experience in and of space, all of which in turn constitute the self that Gibraltarians believe themselves to be. The soundscape, through listening, is thus a space where the question who can we be and still be Gibraltarian? is politically imagined, re-imagined, and practiced through listening and sound. Such an understanding forces scholars to become aware of not only the relationship between sound and space, or sound and perception of space, but also the relationship among sound, space, and language use*all of which are intimately tied to the construction and performance of self. Urban communication scholars have argued that the city is an assemblage of multiple communication streams, and I am concluding that, in terms of sound, the effect of these streams are not simply on individuals, but they also affect the production of space, through the effecting of other sonic streams of communication. Thus, we must envision the soundscape as a political space where urban residents creatively listen to spatial sounds in the

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generation of a spatial praxis: listening is where the power relations among inhabitants, states, and cultures*whether antagonistic or affiliative*are produced performatively. Notes
[1] [2] Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 2. Placing the locus of sound in the listener comes from a long history of media perception scholarship that, arguably, starts with Jonathan Crary. Using the camera obscura as representative of the whole of visual experience, Crary states: The corporeal subjectivity of the observer, which was a priori excluded from the camera obscura, suddenly becomes the site on which an observer is possible. The human body . . . generates the spectrum of another color, and thus becomes the active producer of optical experience. See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer, October 45 (Summer 1988): 335. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962). Jonathan Sterne, Hello! in The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 130. All names of participants have been changed, and exact ethnographic locale left ambiguous as required by human subjects protocol. Melissa L. Caldwell, Moscow Encounters: Ethnography in a Global Urban Village, in Urban Life: Readings in the Anthropology of the City, ed. George Gmelch, Robert V. Kemper, and Walter P. Zinner, 5th ed. (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2010), 5571. Traditionally, in anthropology and other ethnographic-based disciplines, a greater amount of value has been assumed of formal interviews, whereas informal interviews have been seen as lesser or supporting data. Further, differences in length have been inscribed in the difference between formal and informal, which is not necessarily the case in terms of urban informal interviews. In an urban space, such as Main Street, Gibraltar, informal interviews more closely approximate the performed subjectivity of urban dwellers, travelers, and inhabitants, and can occur over longer periods of time*say a bus ride*than would typically be considered standard. Methodologically, then, informal interviews provide a better source of information in urban settings. Sterne, Hello! 19. Siegfried Kracauer, Dialogue and Sound, in Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 10231; and R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Turning of the World (1997; repr., Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1993). Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (New York: Continuum, 2004). Schafer, The Soundscape. Roman Jakobson, Sign and System of Language: A Reassessment of Saussures Doctrine, Poetics Today 2, no. 1a (1980): 338. Tim Ingold, Against Soundscape, in Autumn Leaves: Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice, ed. Agnus Carlyle (Paris: Double Entendre, 2007), 103. Emily Ann Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 19001933 (Boston: MIT Press). Conversation with a bus rider, August 8, 2009. Michael Bull, Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience (New York: Routledge, 2007).

[3] [4] [5] [6]

[7]

[8] [9]

[10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16]

Listening, Language, and Colonialism on Main Street, Gibraltar 19

[17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] Eric W. Rothenbuhler, Ritual Communication: From Everyday Conversation to Mediated Ceremony (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998). Conversation with an informant, August 29, 2009. Jakobson, Sign and System of Language. Juri Lotman, Universe of Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994). Lotman, Universe of Mind, 30. Charles Augustus Stoddard, Spanish Cities, with Glimpses of Gibraltar and Tangier (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1892), 189. Peter Muhlanhausler, Linguistic Ecology: Language Change and Linguistic Imperialism in the Pacic Region (New York: Routledge, 1996). Interview with a heritage ofcial, August 11, 2009. Edward G. Archer, in a history of Gibraltar, discusses the ways English was the instructional language of infrastructurally run education in order to craft a particular type of civility. Edward G. Archer, Gibraltar, Identity, and Empire (New York: Routledge, 2006). Interview with a heritage ofcial, August 14, 2009. Conversation with a tourist, August 22, 2009. Martin Reisigl and Ruth Wodak, Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism (London: Routledge, 2001), 43. Conversation with Spanish tourists, August 24, 2009. Schafer, The Soundscape, 77. Michel Foucault, Questions of Method, in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality; with Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault, ed. Graham Burchell, Collin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 88. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). George, August 8, 2009. Pierre Bourdieu, Algeria 1960: The Disenchantment of the World*The Sense of Honour*The Kabyle House, or the World Reversed, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 134. Conversation with a tourist from the United States, August 24, 2009. Conversation with a German tourist, August 24, 2009. Conversation with a British tourist, August 29, 2009. Conversation with a Gibraltarian, September 1, 2009, original spoken emphasis. Conversation with a Gibraltarian, September 5, 2009. Bourdieu, Algeria 1960, 25. Although the event is not an ofcial government function, we must be aware that it takes much collaboration for such an undertaking to be approved, encouraged, and facilitated. This is by no means intended to pass a type of moral judgment on institutions or people. Ideology is often taken with negative connotations; however, I use the term in its most neutral possible sense, recognizing the fact that there is never an absence of ideology within any form of cultural production. Sacvan Berkovitch has suggested that where ideology was established as us vs. them, we shift to an inclusive perspective such as what we do. In the broad sense which I use the term . . . ideology is the system of interlinked ideas, symbols, and beliefs by which a culture*any culture*seeks to justify and perpetuate itself; the web of rhetorical, ritual, and assumption through which society coerces, persuades, and coheres. See Sacvan Berkovitch, The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History, Critical Inquiry 12, no. 4 (1986): 635. In this section, I am making a distinction between British and English*whereas on some occasions Gibraltarians will claim themselves as British, their notion of this is expanded and

[27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32]

[33] [34] [35]

[36] [37] [38] [39] [40] [41] [42] [43]

[44]

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hybridized to include the unique Gibraltarian position between Spanish and English. English, on the other hand, denotes a restricted denition that is closely associated with whiteness and proper English sounds. Richard Bauman, Disclaimers of Performance, in Responsibility and Evidence in Oral Discourse, ed. Jane Hill and Judith Irvine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 18296.

[45]