The state of public discourse is certainly a topic of current interest and debate. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas (who died just this past March at the age of 96) developed the idea of the "public sphere"—that is, the cultural arena where private individuals come together to discuss topics of public interest and a develop a sense of "public opinion." Tracing its origins to the salons, cafés, theaters, and print shops of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, Habermas described the ideal version of this public sphere as promoting rational discussion among well-informed, literate individuals. Although there have been many critiques and refinements of his portrait of the early modern public sphere over the years, his image of it continues to loom large in the public imagination, perhaps especially whenever commentators opine about the noisier, fragmented kinds of discussion that prevail in the contemporary media landscape. In a late work on the public sphere in the digital age, Habermas himself lamented the "desolate cacophony" of our communication culture. It's a common refrain, and certainly understandable. Who among us hasn't felt overwhelmed or overstimulated by the rush of information and misinformation coming at us, or the sometimes-vitriolic tone of public discussion?

In this context, I think it's helpful to remember that the ideal of reasoned debate might not correspond with what public discourse truly sounded like in the Old Regime, and that in fact individuals in that earlier era also experienced their communication landscape as noisy. More important, I think it's interesting to note that, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, noise metaphors did not always carry a clear value judgment. In using this language, writers homed in on certain qualities of public talk that could be considered negative, positive, or neutral: It was going to be confusing, heterogeneous, perhaps unintelligible. It would be impossible to trace to a single, authoritative source. It was going to move through the air like a force of nature. The acoustic model for thinking about these characteristics of public communication offered a concrete framework for writers who imagined how they could influence the flow of noise or simply properly listen to it. Whereas the "public sphere" paradigm establishes a normative ideal for public discourse, often by limiting who is allowed to participate in it and what forms of speech count as legitimate, sonic metaphors encourage us to think about public communication in less restrictive terms. It becomes less about policing speech, more about attending to the ethics of listening and constantly renegotiating the politics of listenability.

I don't believe that history has lessons for the present, necessarily, but I do think that specific histories can offer us examples of completely different ways of framing human experience which in turn have the potential to jolt us out of certain assumptions or habits of thought that dominate in our contemporary culture.