Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear
McGill University, Canada
Rave culture has long known of the power of sound to seduce bodies into becoming particles of a movement. Dancer and DJ become but one conduit of a feedback loop that affects the physical and the psychic. Ecstasy, fear, horror, awe and excitement, as well as melancholy, nostalgia and transcendance form the connective tissue of the event.
Focusing on the "politics of frequency", Sonic Warfare seeks to outline how the limits of sound are deployed within "vibration ontology". Goodman overviews military-state and countercultural usages alike, from audio assault weaponry for crowd control to dub audio viruses that transmit the offworld heritage of Afrofuturism. An earworm, for example, can operate as an Afrodiasporic riff of black noise that functions "as an attractor in processes of group catalysis" (157), such as the mobilization of dance; or, as a preemptive strike by hypercapital that "sets up a structure of allure for products for which you had no desire... because they do not necessarily exist yet" (186).
Tracing these parallel developments to early 20th century Futurism and its "art of noise in the art of war" Goodman dismisses the avant-garde camps of noise and silence alike, choosing (wisely) to focus on an ecology of rhythm and to argue for a complex and—perhaps essentially—incomplete philosophical inventory of vibration ontology.
As Goodman briefs in the introduction, readers looking for a detailed, historical account of sonic warfare should turn elsewhere. It is also worth noting—as Goodman himself warns of his "dense theorisation"—that readers looking for an exegesis or comparative study of the text's many philosophical sources should come prepared for neither. Prepare instead for a somewhat chaotic assemblage of theoretical trajectories that zoom in and out of zones of inquiry, from the futurhythmachines of the Black Atlantic to the bass materialism of global ghettotech. If that's an earful, listen and repeat until sedated, for Goodman has well adopted the Deleuzo-Guattarian maxim of conjoining it all with an "and".
Goodman's development of affect remains indispensible to studies of soniculture. For Goodman, affect is the vibration—the good or bad vibes—prior to organisation into organised feeling (prior to what phenomenology would call intentionality). Sonic weaponry seeks to disrupt or enhance the vibrational flux; it is capable of provoking feelings such as fear, dread or ecstasy through its good or bad vibes. Goodman details actual sonic weaponry as well as fantastical projects that have promised more than delivered. He also aligns particular electronic music genres with various sonic effects, noting in particular how bass heavy genres—such as dub—generate atmospheres of dread, quipping their bass materialism as the "subpolitical power of music to attract and congeal populations" (172). Elements of these theses were developed in Goodman's 2004 article, "Speed Tribes".
Goodman's approach, which he groups with radical empiricism, mixes the realms of the material and physiological with their often hazy effects upon subjects and cultures—the contested realm of the social sciences and cultural studies. In this respect, Goodman develops a materialist perspective for grasping the affective potential of sound, be it the marching drum of the military, sonic cannons fired on insurgent protesters, or wobbly subbass let loose on East London club-dwellers. Radical empiricism does not so much eschew cause and effect as much as it claims that effects operate autonomously of cause in an "ecology" of interrelationships (or rhythms and anticipatory echoes). Radical empiricism opens the material world to pre-conscious interpenetration by its bodies (which can be any population, as Whitehead's "actual occasion"), as well as prehensive temporality, where "Such an occasion itself starts as an effect facing its past and ends as a cause facing its future" (Whitehead, quoted in Goodman 152). In short, Goodman eschews the a priori claims of phenomenology, substituting the radical empiricism of ecology. This, of course, requires an epistemological claim concerning knowing that which is aphenomenal and asubjective to the world.
What we call sound itself is merely the human heard of the spectrum; Goodman delves beyond even the ultra, sub and infrasonic, developing philosophies of rhythmanalysis by Bachelard, Lefebvre and Whitehead (though one wishes he had spent more time with Lefebvre, who explores the political capacities of rhythmanalysis, and in general less time with Deleuze and Guattari's toolbox of usual suspects). In this respect, Goodman practices what Deleuze and Guattari call a "minor science"; he delves headfirst into claims concerning hard science and metaphysical inquiry while suspending their epistemological uncertainty, thereby granting this form of empiricism, for better or for worse, its radicalism.
That said, Goodman footnotes the moment where his radical empiricism and Graham Harman's speculative realism depart, noting his adherence to Whitehead's theories of relation over Harman's insistence on the rigorous conception of the discrete object (ch. 17). Yet speculative realism holds intriguing consequences for Goodman's ontology of vibration. Could discrete objects mark a particular phase of Whitehead's eternal object? Here I'll dive into one particular argument to give a sense of what is at stake in the thesis of vibration ontology.
Goodman does not note if his adoption of the eternal object—which ingresses from pure potential into the real potential of the actual as it vibrates out-of-phase with itself (whew)—departs or concords with Alain Badiou's Neo-Platonism. This becomes all the more significant when Goodman talks of Whitehead's "actual occasions"—which are bodies in the general sense—being able to select eternal objects, which is how affective encounters between "discrete actual entities" occur (98). Not only does a shadow of the discrete return, drawing attention to how radical empiricism shadows speculative realism, but Goodman often writes as if a rhythmic power underpins vibration ontology (he treats audio viruses, or earworms, in a similar fashion, granting them an undefined agency he nearly denies human subjects (149)). In this respect, his adoption of the eternal object approaches a quasi-idealism, or a transcendentalism he elsewhere seeks to avoid. Goodman's radical empiricism, not surprisingly given its theoretical ground, dances around the question of Spinoza's God, i.e., the Eternal Vibrator.
This problem can be recast in terms of politics. While Goodman critiques Bachelard for seeking equilibrium between counterrhythms (107), he nonetheless accepts Philip Turetsky's account of rhythmic synthesis that forms matter into a single body (111). What is the difference between the two? Well, for one, it is one of politics, or as Goodman sees it, the micropolitics of frequency. Goodman conceives of the "ontological ground" as fundamentally turbulent, a rhythmic anarchitecture which:
. . . does not dictate the orientation of such a micropolitics; it does not lay down a set of generalizable laws but rather throws up a series of engineering problems. As such, any micropolitics derivable from this base can be only tactical rather than strategic—a war without aims concerned more with disposition and potential movement than ideology, although certainly susceptible to abduction (107).
The problem is, of course, with alien abduction. The other always swoops in, alien, capitalist, totalitarian or otherwise viral, an earworm "takeover of the body by an exterior entity" (150) that overcodes tactical movement with strategy, setting up a violent mechanism of control over heterogeneous rhythms, and ultimately, of the "actual occasion" that is the self. Like Deleuze and Guattari's war machine, the tactical micropolitics of frequency or turbulence remain fundamentally inculpable. Of course, we have hit upon the ideology of this position, which is its first generalizable law. Its second generalizable law is already expressed above: being concerned with disposition and potential movement precisely is the ideogram of the micropolitics of frequency, its unification or expressed ideology as the perceived good, pre-abduction, of rhythmic anarchitecture. Elsewhere Goodman writes that "A theory of sonic warfare is particularly fascinated by this turbulent boundary layer between dance and violence" (111).
What I understand Goodman as trying to argue is that while vibrational control techniques such as sonic weaponry (from dub viruses to military means) seek to control the crowd by unifying it through resonance, thereby dictating it to move as one, at the ontological level its rhythm remains turbulent and nonunified. One can also see dance as a similar assemblage, where the soundsystem unifies differentiated bodies into what Kodwo Eshun called a "futurhythmachine". Thus, unification is not, in itself, a bad thing, but can be wrought for different ends—say that of the military state, on the one channel, or that of jouissance, such as rave culture, on the other. That we are talking of ends and means suggests strategy, however, rather than tactics. This argument is a strong one, and smartly counters Adorno's well-worn conservative moralisms against mass dancing and jazz music, or Benjamin's aestheticization of politics, as somehow fundamentally fascist, questioning whether "aesthetics need be sacrificed at the altar of a political cause" (175).
Yet, there is a strict problem here: the potential to be unified is evidently inherent to rhythm. More than potential, it is an incorporated possibility before the fact; it is de jure. One could argue just as well that rhythm is fundamentally unified, which is to say one, and that turbulence is an expression of mode. Again, this is Spinoza's problem, of the monadic substance of God expressed in the many. It haunts Goodman's text throughout, significantly with the undefined agency of the audio virus or earworm and the supposedly uncontaminated and interiorized body it penetrates by communicating the instruction "record me!" (150). A more ecological sense of interior/exterior would be of use here, of the earworm within that would whisper the effects of consciousness, suggesting the always already incorporation of alterity. In short, to the question: What concept of memory is compatible with the illogic of affect, the virtuality of the past and the active immanence of futurity in the present? One could reply, différance, insofar as Derrida speaks of an absolute past, force, and the technics of the sign—the trace—before the re-marking of intentionality. And/or the logic of the supplement, otherwise known as incorporation, of that which is extraneous but necessary (that which is added after to make the thing whole from the start). Derrida's work on Husserl could bridge the divide to Deleuze and forms the unthought (or unsound) to Goodman's investigations.
The political question of unified rhythm is raised by Lefebvre, as well as Deleuze and Guattari, the latter whom grasp the State as the superposition of waves, a wave that cancels itself out (see van Veen 2010: 183). Superposed waves become a flat line that masks their turbulence, posing an entire problematic of perception, as well as form/content, ecological or otherwise, within rhythmanalysis. To this end, in the Production of Space, Lefebvre even cautions against overstating the parallelism between hydrodynamics and theory (184). Of course, Goodman adequately argues a radical empiricism that claims all as rhythmic; it is a materialist theory of rhythm through-and-through that charts sociopolitical effects from the axioms of vibration ontology.
Which is to say the critical objection to Goodman remains here. Utilising vibrational ontology to script (or prescript) the political will of populations—or rather rendering viral such will, and "mapping" populations as preconscious rhythmic assemblages—dovetails neatly with 20th century second-order cybernetics as well as hypercapitalist (and fascist) strategy. Unquestionably, such strategies—strategies as they serve political endgames—are powerful. Goodman demonstrates how they work in the world. Yet they also do not work so well; no population has yet been adequately controlled (or so we perceive...). And undoubtedly this is also Goodman's point: that turbulence is a priori, that turbulence remains, in short, as a "subpolitics", as it cannot be prescripted, even as resistance (175). It could be "abducted" in any direction. And in this sense, I agree with Goodman, for his rhythmanalysis leaves us with a population (and a universe) that is without content, much like Paolo Virno's conception of the multitude, or Lefebvre analysis of the urban as form. Yet, the alien, as all the sci-fi nightmares of horrific innards warn us, is always within. Abduction occurs from within this same ontos; we abduct ourselves, unknowingly, aliens to ourselves.
Which leaves the question hanging: what is this uncanniness of the alien, its strange eternal return as the virus of our becoming? In short there is always an untimely question to the absolute claims of radical empiricism. Whereas the virus remains, the material strategies of its dissemination do not; they mutate and change with the technics of history. For a materialist ontology of vibration, is it not, by its own admission, a tactic and not strategy, a viral thought to the metaphysics of eternal ontology?
The telescoping rhythm of shifting in and out of this increasingly complex and at times bizarre inventory of sonic weapons, inventions and theories touches upon the wildstyle. At times one wishes Goodman would pitch down the rhythm and pause, downsampling more time to his soundbytes.
In a particularly captivating passage, Goodman fast-forwards a discussion between William Burroughs and Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page on the potential of infrasonics; shifts to industrial band and performance artists Throbbing Gristle and their "infrasonic emitters"; and skips on to discuss The KLF's "audio weapons system" as borrowed by techno duo Panasonic (now Pan Sonic). All this on page 24. As Goodman makes clear on several occasions, "a brief overview will have to suffice" (17).
Yet the overview can be stimulating and a scrappy shot of wake-up. Goodman emphasizes the potential of sound, writing how "At the very least, the transduction of bad vibes into something more constructive suggests the need to probe more deeply into affective tonality and the vibrations of the environment" (73). Most ravers would agree.
Goodman, S. 2004. "Speed Tribes: Netwar, Affective Hacking and the Audio-Social". In Cultural Hacking: Kunst des Strategischen Handelns, ed. Franz Liebl and Thomas Düllo, 139–55. Vienna: Springer.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell.
van Veen, tobias c. 2010. "Cities of Rhythm and Revolution". In Circulation and the City: Essays on Mobility and Urban Culture, ed. Alexandra Boutros and Will Straw), 155–192. Montréal: McGill-Queens UP.