Collateral Noise

Abstract

Since 1951, Navarre’s Bardenas have housed a military firing range. Instituted during General Franco’s dictatorship, the US Air Force (USAF) took control of the range in 1970, transforming it into Europe’s largest combat training ground. NATO and the Spanish Air Force continue to make use of the range today. “Collateral” is the term the USAF uses to designate the noise of firing range-related jet activities. And yet, the Bardenas range has been primarily known, felt, and suffered as noise by and within populations and terrains brought forth as collateral, in part, by that very noise. This article scrutinizes the “collateral” and the “noise” as a way to trace a relational history, accounting for USAF noise’s excesses and its embodied experience in the Bardenas during the last years of Francoism and the democratic transition, and for Bardenas noise as implicated in and forwarding larger militarized ecologies. It proposes to understand collateral noise as a materialization of and a means for militarized imperialisms’ prevarications with the sensory realm, territories, and knowledge. And it argues that collateral noise is one of the ways in which “imperial formations” become audible and do so, specifically, in the seizure of acoustic extraterritorialities and that it is at the same time a way in which these seek to secrete themselves.