The Politics and Policy of Noise: Motorcycles Making, Masking, and Muddling the Noise of Protest

Theorist Jacque Attali notes in his seminal essay on Noise that in 'noise can be read the codes of life, the relations among men...when it is fashioned by man with specific tools, when it invades man's time, when it becomes sound, noise is the source of purpose and power, of the dream.' Noise plays a specific role in the politics of protest. Noise moves the tolerance of audible messages through various power structures and paradigms of struggle. In this article, I argue that the noise of motorcycles, the noise of engines revving reveals a complex relationship between the state and the individual. The use of motorcycles to display affiliations, to protest status quo, and to challenge dominant ideologies is powerful, purposeful, and politically messy. In the age of Trump, we might look to alternative strategies to disrupt. In this essay, I trace the use of motorcycles in various modes of protest; I focus on how motorcycles disrupt the social, revealing the indelible charge of sensorial codes of meaning of producing noise—the productive process of drowning out voices, the turning up the volume of dissident perspectives such as how the San Francisco Dykes on Bikes established a sonic audibility in the 1970s to the recent off-duty motorcycle policemen who through using the loudness of their motorcycles protested Death penalty opponents, to the Patriot Guard Riders who mask the bullhorns of the Westboro Baptist Church protests.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC

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