1933: Abusing the Military-Entertainment Complex 5

Funkspiel, VHF tank radio, vocoders, Magnetophones, submarine location technologies, air war radio beams, etc., have released an abuse of army equipment that adapts ears and reaction speeds to World War n +1.
—Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999)

Isn’t it strange that in the second world war, computer technology was used to aid and abet the military-industrial complex, but by the end of our century, that technology has mutated, devolved and diversified to such a degree that Afro-American musicians, young Black British musicians can use computer technology to construct a soundtrack to the end of the industrial epoch.
—Black Audio Film Collective, The Last Angel of History, (1997)

A recurrent theme in many discussions of sonic warfare within the military-entertainment complex is that of the dissemination and repurposing of military technologies. This dimension of sonic warfare has been theorized in key yet underdeveloped notions in media theory and the history of technology that investigate modes of control by unearthing the military origins of everyday tools. Much recent theory has revolved around the role visual media and computers have had in the evolution of military command and communications infrastructures. The sonic occasionally features but is very much in the background in these discourses.

One media theorist who has made more room for a conceptualization of the intersection of the machines of war with the machines of noise is Friedrich Kittler, especially in his book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, where he controversially argued that all media are fundamentally military in nature.1 Kittler’s argument is more complex than the easily refutable notion that all media technologies are predetermined by their military origins, and the apparent determinism can be understood, in its evasion of human agency, as a provocation fired at sociological anthropocentrism. His approach, inflected by the mid-1980s affective climate of late Cold War dread, takes on a renewed currency in the epoch of post-9/11 asymmetric warfare. For Kittler, military research and development infects popular culture with a kind of technological contagion to the extent that, for him, the “entertainment industry is, in any conceivable sense of the word, an abuse of military equipment.”² He maps the trails blazed by the gramophone, recording technology, and wireless after the wars of the twentieth century, noting, for example, how after World War I, “for the simple purpose of avoiding the anarchistic abuse of military radio equipment, Germany received its entertainment network,”³ and as he argues elsewhere, broadcast radio was “just the military radio system of the First World War minus the talkback-capability”⁴ For Kittler, wars catalyze new media, driving technological development through sheer excess of energy. The contagion of military technology spreads through misuse, or reverse engineering, with knowledge acquired from espionage, accident, or experimentation.

Kittler points to three phases of military influence on media technologies, from storage to communication to ubiquitous computation. Phase 1 was initiated by the American Civil War and the development of storage devices for acoustic (gramophone), optical (film), and writing (typewriter) data. The second phase emerged around World War I and the development of electric transmission media for these data in the form of radio and television. Phase 3 began around World War II with the emergence of cybernetics and the protocomputer of the Turing machine, culminating in ubiquitous digital processing, which folds preceding modes into a metamedia. Crucially, it seems, for Kittler, while analog media were assuming the appearance of prosthetic extensions of the body, human thought was being modeled in computation and feedback machines at the same time. War therefore drives technological evolution and substitutes human subjects with automated processes.⁵ Peace becomes war by other means through the platforms of media technologies that have their own evolutionary autonomy in excess of human needs and desires.

The crucial issue here is not simply the erroneous claim that all technological media are invented by the military in periods of war,⁶ but rather how weaponry and logistic, tactical, and strategic conditions serve to catalyze and pressure convergence, reconnection, and innovation in media and that all other cultural deployments serve merely to camouflage a militarization of the minutiae of urban existence. No doubt, as Winthrop-Young argues, it would be possible to explain aspects of the origin of most of the media around which Kittler’s argument revolves in nonmilitary terms, especially with the many recent instances of entertainment media preceding military use, for example, simulation technologies developed in the field of video games that have migrated back to the military. But this misses the more fundamental argument about modern society that has been asserted since the early twentieth century by the Italian futurists, Ernst Junger, and McLuhan right up to Virilio and Kittler. For these thinkers, war has come to mean much more than battles between nation-states; rather, it expresses an ontological condition. For all of these writers, the concept of war becomes an attempt to describe a low-intensity warfare that reconstitutes the most mundane aspects of everyday existence through psychosocial torque and sensory overload.

As with Foucault and with Deleuze and Guattari, Kittler’s extended concept of war contains a certain ambiguity. While for Foucault’s concept of power as developed particularly in Discipline and Punish and Society Must Be Defended,¹ war is coextensive with the social field, a current flowing through every niche, for Deleuze and Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus, war is also an undercurrent, with its militarized instantiation only a captured subset. It is an undercurrent that attains a cosmic transversality, cutting across all strata, human or nonhu-man, with local outbreaks in every milieu, as abstract turbulence.⁸ For Kittler, the ambiguity of war pertains to the immersivity of the military-inflected, ubiquitous media environment. Each has its own response to the ubiquity of war: for Foucault, resistance; for Deleuze and Guattari, the construction of rhythmic war machines; and for Kittler, the abuse of militarized media technologies. Marking out a kind of cyberpunk politics of frequency, Kittler asserted that if “control, or as engineers say, negative feedback, is the key to power in this century, then fighting that power requires positive feedback. Create endless feedback loops until VHF or stereo, tape deck or scrambler, the whole array of world war army equipment produces wild oscillations. Play to the powers that be their own melody”⁹

While Kittler’s analysis through the prism of militarized technological evolution ensures that the abuse of hardware and software is placed at the center of a nonmilitarized sonic warfare, its technological determinism leaves underdeveloped some of his own key insights. It is therefore helpful to submerge his theory of media into a more general affective ecology in which technical machines become just another entry in the inventory of actual entities in a nexus of vibrational experience. After all, rigorous experimentation with what a sonic nexus can do means that bodies deserve as much abuse as technical media. If war saturates modern societies right down to the microphysical fabric, then it does so using an array of distributed processes of control, automation, and a both neurophysical and affective mobilization: the military-entertainment complex as a boot camp therefore, optimizing human reaction speeds, fabricating new reflexes for a postcybernetic condition. Media technologies discipline, mutate, and preempt the affective sensorium. Entertainment itself becomes part of the training. During the late Cold War, as Kittler himself noted in a wonderful yet underdeveloped aside, “Our discos are preparing our youth for a retaliatory strike.”¹⁰

Kittler’s theory can certainly be built on to assist in the construction of a theory of sonic warfare. This book, however, diverges from him and his musical inspiration. When he wrote in the mid- to late 1980s, the soundtrack to the themes of sonic warfare for him seemed to be the rock music of the 1960s and 1970s, from the Beatles to Pink Floyd, with some brief mention of more experimental sound practitioners, from Stockhausen to Laurie Anderson and William Burroughs. Twenty years later, the concept of sonic warfare developed here is soundtracked more by the electronic musics of the Black Atlantic.