Ring me alarm and not a sound is dying
ring me alarm and not a sound is sufferin’....
Watch de sound man a-tremble
Watch de sound man a-pray
—Tenor Saw, “Ring De Alarm”
In The Ecology of Fear, Mike Davis challenges the stereotype of the futuristic, high-tech city of control as modeled on the cinematic city of Blade Runner. He refers us instead to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, set in 2024, as a model of low-tech, low-rise, sprawl urbanism closer to the reality of the planet of slums in which everyone is left to fend for themselves.1 As Davis has argued in other work, this ecology of fear converges with a mutation in the mode of control as a new cartography of danger. Transecting the nature/culture continuum, from floods to criminality, terrorism to viral outbreaks, hurricanes to plane crashes, the ecology of fear transforms urban design through increasingly preemptive logics revolving around fuzzy threats whose archetype is viral.
Davis produces a diagram to illustrate the ecology of fear. It is based on a revision of the classic sociological model of twentieth-century urban growth developed around the specific situation of Chicago, the Burgess model. To the socioeconomic determinants of income, land value, class, and race, Davis adds the affective tonality of fear into the equation. Supplementing this classical model with his own observations on Los Angeles, he notes how “security measures are reactions to urban unrest... a riot tectonics that episodically convulses and reshapes urban space.”2 In the “continuing erosion of the boundary between architecture and law enforcement,” a sonic architecture of control is also emerging, with “loudspeakers warn[ing] trespassers that they are being watched and that authorities are on their way.”3 Moreover, the “sensory systems of many of Los Angeles’s new office towers already include panopticon vision, smell, sensitivity to temperature and humidity, motion detection, and, in a few cases, hearing.”4 Vigilant control is no longer merely panoptic but pansensory
Daviss serial tales of doom have been at the forefront of tracking a seeping military urbanism that enforces segmentation and mitigates against social “promiscuity (that ‘intimacy of strangers of all classes’)” by actualizing sociological categories into modulation filters determining access via checkpoints, gated boundaries, and other means. But it is worth lingering over the addition of the fear factor into the diagram of the control city. The “fear factor” signifies both a generalized existential condition and a particular set of psychophysiological behaviors.
As a generalized condition, many have begun to argue that the virtual architecture of dread defines the affective climate of early-twenty-first-century urbanism. Conventionally construed in religious terms as an existential awe in the presence of the divine, qualitatively distinct from fear in its tremendous profundity,5 it now arguably designates the ontogenetic base of contemporary geostrategy. It is underpinned by the feeling, as a character from William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition proclaims, that “we have no future because our present is too volatile.”6 This looming feeling of uncertainty coincides in novel ways with the logic of preemptive power, producing an affective jitteriness and speculative foreclosure, the inability to think differently as control co-opts science fiction. Virilio, in his increasingly gloomy mode of address, laments the manner in which modern art appeases this climate of anxiety. In Art and Fear, for example, he continues his critique of futurism for installing both the art of war and the art of noise at the heart of modernism, leading to, in the polymedia age, the ever increasing and oversonorization of the visual. For Virilio, a sonic war has been launched on art, threatening to kill it. And this sonic war forms a microcosm, for him, of the “silencing of silence” in a loudness war of “shock and awe.” For Virilio, this antinoise lament and the politics of silence it implies, in tandem with his diatribe against speed, forms part of his consistent antifuturist polemic.7 But before concurring too swiftly with such reactionary sentiments, it is worth delving into the workings of the affective sensorium,8 inquiring how fear is induced as a sonic effect.
Virilios complaint resonates with that of Joachim Ernst-Berendt’s in his depiction of the sonic call to arms:
As soon as volume exceeds 80db, blood pressure rises. The stomach and intestine operate more slowly, the pupils become larger, and the skin gets paler—no matter whether the noise is found pleasant or disruptive, or is not even consciously perceived... . Unconsciously we always react to noise like Stone Age beings. At that time a loud noise almost always signified danger. .. . That is therefore pre-programmed, and when millions of young people hear excessively loud music they register: danger. They become alarmed. That word comes from the Italian Alarm, which in turn leads to all’arme, a call to arms. When we hear noise, we are constantly—but unconsciously—“called to arms.” We become alarmed.9
Sound is often understood as generally having a privileged role in the production and modulation of fear, activating instinctive responses, triggering an evolutionary functional nervousness.
The power of sound to instill dread was well known to the heavily outnumbered Maroons, the tribal nation turned guerrilla fighters who claimed a number of astounding victories in their asymmetric conflict with the English colonialists in Jamaica during the late eighteenth century. The abeng, a fashioned cow horn, had two uses: by slave holders to call the slaves to the cane fields and a “traditional form of communication among the communities, warning them and sending messages across difficult terrain.”10 The Maroons used the abeng in tandem with their other special techniques—drum communication, the ambush, and camouflage—in order to outwit the British: “They embedded themselves in leaves and vines and melted into the surrounding bushes. The British repeatedly walked into clearings where their surroundings would suddenly come alive and close in on them.”11 The abeng, as a system of communication, produced signals “reproducing the pitch and rhythmic patterns of a fairly small vocabulary of Twi words, from their mother language, in most cases called Kromantin (Maroon spelling) after the Ghanaian port from which many slave ancestors were shipped.”12 Sentries stationed outside the villages would use the different pitches to communicate the British approach, the extent of the weapons they carried, and their path. But the abeng also had another affective function: to scare the British with its “hideous and terrible” dislocated tones, sometimes managing to repel the invaders with sound itself. Gradually, as the British learned to assign a cause to its shrieking, high-pitched sound, their terror of Maroon ambush only intensified.
The viscerality of film and media generally, and sound specifically, is certainly a common perception, if somewhat lazily and undertheorized.13 Low-frequency infrasonic tones are also said to be especially effective in the arousal of fear or anxiety and “bad vibes.” In 2002, the brutal French film Irreversible, directed by Gaspar Noe, was released, loaded with ultragraphic sexual violence and a disorienting temporality to ensure maximum effect. In addition to the intense viscerality of the visuality of the film, its sonic dimension magnified the nauseous tone. The director stated in an interview that the music for the film was augmented with infrasound, particularly the sound effects used by police to quell riots by inducing slight nausea: “We added 27 Hz of infrasound.... You can’t hear it, but it makes you shake. In a good theatre with a subwoofer, you may be more scared by the sound than by what’s happening on the screen. A lot of people can take the images, but not the sound. Those reactions are physical.”14 Infrasound is inaudible yet felt, and this can frustrate perceptual compulsions to allocate a cause to the sound. Abstract sensations cause anxiety due to the very absence of an object or cause. Without either, the imagination produces one, which can more frightening than the reality.
While the ability to interpret sounds and attribute likely causes to them is learned culturally so as to instruct on the particular danger to each species, it is also argued that this is built on top of an evolutionary hard-wired instinct to respond appropriately, for the sake of survival, to any threat indicated by sound. To prolong survival, it is claimed, the body has developed three basic affects in response to fear: the fight, flight, and freeze responses. These three affects travel down three lines: the line of attack, the line of flight, and the line of fright. Conflict, escape, and immobility. Some commentators have drawn our attention to the contrasting behavior of young humans—how for children, fear comes through the ears rather the eyes. Even as adults, the effects of noise, strange tones, and powerful amplitudes in intensifying terror are facts taken for granted. Take the siren, for example. Invented by Seeback in the nineteenth century, “The siren broadcasts distress. It is a centrifugal sound designed to scatter people in its path”15 by pulsing waves of nonlinguistic command to disperse a population. A siren obviously signifies alarm, but more interestingly here, its very modulation of frequency produces a state of alert that can undermine and override cognition. Burglar alarms, ring tones, alarm clock, fire alarms: a whole directly affective asignifying semiotics of emergency, a call to action, the inducement of a state of readiness, initiating a kind of technical antiphony. Wake up! Run! Beware! Respond! Act!
In evolutionary terms, it is taken for granted that the imperatives of the survival of the organism demarcate the primary function of the auditory system. Second-wave cyberneticist Heinz Foerster suggested that the auditory system is served by biological means “to infer from the sounds that are perceived the sources that produced these sounds. When the sources are identified, more clues relating to the state and kind of its environment are available to an organism, and in a few tenths of a second it may swing from a state of utter tranquility into one of a dozen or two modes of behaviour ... depending on what is implied by the presence of a particular source.”16
The story here, the directionality of its chain of events, is a common one that persists into contemporary cognitivist neuroscience: sound—cognitive classification of sound to attribute external source and internal subjective emotion, movement, or activation of the body in response to the emotion. However, this model rests on certain problematic presuppositions regarding the relation between mind and body and their activation, between feeling and emotion. The point of departure for an affective analysis is the disjunction between stimulus and response, cause and effect. If affect operates across the nature-culture continuum, problematizing the difference between what is preprogrammed into the body and what are learned responses, then what is meant by an instinctual response to sound? How are so-called instinctual responses sometimes short-circuited in the intensification of joy? And what happens when there is a more complex, nonlinear array of sensorienvironmental conditions at work, when effects become autonomous from causes, when sounds evacuate their source, when fear becomes self-producing?