1913: The Art of War in the Art of Noise 10

Cut away the future, and the present collapses, emptied of its proper content. Immediate existence requires the insertion of the future in the crannies of the present.
—Alfred N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (1993)

What is left of the futurist thought of sonic invention in an age when the military-entertainment complex cuts to the micrological core and control operates flat with becoming? Did the future get lost in the labyrinth of Web 2.0, in the rhizomatic networks of ubiquitous computation? At the turn of the twentieth century, the thermodynamic machines that were transforming the landscape, particularly the train and the automobile, obsessed futurism. At the end of the twentieth century, the model was instead the machines of cybernetics, whereby human thought and perception could be conceived of in terms of information processing. The futurist orientation to time was not so much futurological, that is, of predicting that which was to come, but rather of developing tactics to accelerate out of the tedium of the present. As Russolo laments in The Art of Noises, “Each sound carries with it a tangle of sensations, already well known and exhausted, which predispose the listener to boredom, in spite of the efforts of all musical innovators.”1

Futurism here is a frustration with the sonic present: “Our ear is not satisfied and calls for ever greater acoustical emotions.”² The art of noises for the futurists was a battle over the modern sensorium: “By selecting, coordinating, and controlling all the noises, we will enrich mankind with a new and unsuspected pleasure of the senses.”³ The futurist plight was of sensory intensification. Energized by their affective experience of World War I, they felt the possibility of enlivening the arts through the integration of their detritus. Through the deployment of noise-sound, “Our multiplied sensibility, having been conquered by futurist eyes, will finally have some futurist ears.”⁴ Despite the turgid, conservative hold on the arts with the “marvellous and tragic symphony of the noises of war,” man, for Russolo, could “still find something there at the front to amaze him. He will still find noises in which he can feel a new and unexpected emotion.”⁵ He included Marinetti’s letter from the trenches in his noise manifesto: “Violence ferocity regularity this deep bass scanning the strange shrill frantic crowds of the battle Fury breathless ears eyes nostrils open! Load! Fire! What a joy to hear to smell completely taratatata of the machine guns screaming a breathlessness under the stings.”⁶ As with his peers, the sonic experience of war for Russolo was overwhelming, rendering the inertia of both bourgeois visual art and music pathetic: “In modern warfare, mechanical and metallic, the element of sight is almost zero. The sense, significance, and the expressiveness of noise, however, are infinite.”⁷ Navigation and orientation become both synes-thetic and piloted by the poisonous embrace of the sonic encounter: “From noise, the different calibres of grenades and shrapnels can be known even before they explode.... There is no movement or activity that is not revealed by noise.... But noise, which conquers the blackest gloom and the densest fog, can betray as well as save.”⁸ The battlefield becomes a vectorial force field in which sensory experience is dominated by the trajectory of dopplering ballistic projectiles, the whistling of shells, the murmur of artillery just out of range, and the meow of shrapnel, all marking enharmonic passages from one pitch to another, performing a kind of imminent Bergsonian critique of the cinematographic error of classical music’s frozen pitches.

In Speed and Politics, and much more recently in Art and Fear, Paul Virilio attempted to go beyond futurism’s dual obsessions with noise and speed, to formulate an aesthetico-political analysis that he termed dromology. Etymo-logically, dromology comes from the Greek word dromos, meaning a race, or the pursuit of speed. Virilio’s starting point was the ancient Chinese martial dictum of Sun Tzu that speed was the essence of warfare. Sharing Walter Benjamin’s concern with the fascist aestheticization of politics, Virilio’s dromology was recurrently possessed by the ghost of Marinetti and the Italian futurist celebration of the “beauty of speed”: in a typical exaltation, Marinetti wrote that “one must persecute, lash, torture all those who sin against speed.”⁹ For Marinetti, the machines of military-industrial capital initiated the “acceleration of life to today’s rapid rhythm. Physical, intellectual and sentimental balance upon a tightrope of speed stretched between contrary attractions.”¹⁰ Virilio concluded that “futurism in fact comes from a single art—that of war and its essence, speed. Futurism provides the most accomplished vision of the dromological evolutionism of the 1920s, the measure of superspeed!”¹¹ Virilio’s melancholy apocalyptic dromology, while clearly, alongside Friedrich Kittler, key to this investigation, proves, however, too one-dimensional, as he seems, under the spell of Marinetti, overly obsessed with acceleration, fastness, and the noisy sonorization of art rather than with the broader ecology of sounds and speeds. The error of both the futurist politics of noise and the reactionary politics of silence (detectable in both Virilio and the acoustic ecology movement) is that both tend to restrict sonic intensity to the confines of a directly proportional relation to loudness or fastness instead of engaging the more complex affective profile of frequency dynamics and the polyrhythmic composition of speeds and slownesses. A rhythmana-lytic method is preferable here to the dromology of the Marinetti-Virilio axis. It would note vibratory coalescence marked by a more “complex relation between differential velocities, between deceleration and acceleration of particles” rather than the fetishization or critique of the nexus of noise and speed.¹²