You are sitting calmly minding your own business. Suddenly you hear a sound. Looking around, it seems to be emanating from a source up on the wall in the corner of the room. Checking that it did not signal anything significant, you return to your business of staring intensely at the wall. Suddenly the tone sounds again, but this time, instantaneously, you feel a sharp jolt of pain pulse up from the floor. You freeze with shock, until the moment the sound, the pain, passes. What the hell? Just as you are regaining your composure, the sound starts again. Without thinking, you freeze, as if shocked again, but you eventually notice that that shooting pain is not there. What happened? You’re a rat, have been fear conditioned, and Pavlov is probably sitting around the corner.
In his book The Emotional Brain, Joseph Ledoux discusses the neuroscience of the sonic activation of fear in a manner that owes much to William James’s classic 1884 formulation, but also the behaviorism of Pavlov. In summary, Ledoux is interested in how cognitive faculties are short-circuited in the process of activation and how a conscious emotion is unnecessary in producing fear responses. Ledoux discovers through his experiments that the higher cognitive faculties of the auditory cortex do not need to be engaged for fear responses to be engaged. Rather, stimuli are routed straight from the thalamus lower down in the brain to the amygdala, which he discovered was sufficient to elicit “freezing behaviour, autonomic responses, suppression of pain, stress hormone release, and reflex potentiation.”1 While the thalamic system cannot make the qualitative distinctions that the auditory cortex can, it is much quicker. Ledoux concludes that in fact, the higher cognitive functions of the cortex merely serve as filters for decisions already made, subtracting some, complying with others. Although this is a powerful analysis, Ledoux is weaker on issues such as the transduction of fear, sounds that are in themselves painful as opposed to just being associated with pain, and also seems to have a somewhat misleading notion of the auditory channel as a frictionless relay of undisturbed information.
Nevertheless, his formulation of this Jamesian legacy of affective neuroscience is crucial. This legacy is also taken up and extrapolated in a series of essays on fear and preemption by Brian Massumi dating back to the 1990s. The fear response becomes a kind of model of temporality generalizable, to pry open the intricate relations between virtual power, affect and futurity. The body’s autonomic, behavioral, and emotional responses to ontological insecurity have always exceeded commonsense formulas, and Massumi draws from a line of affective thought that stretches from Spinoza through William James and onto Whitehead to take us elsewhere. Instead of essential instincts, we have what Spinoza called the appetites: a body’s conatus, or striving to persist in its power to affect and be affected, its potential. Whereas instinct usually denotes a closed, preprogrammed system with no room for change, appetite is future facing and always in conjunction with the body’s relation to a shifting ecology, its open-ended relationality.
The rhythm of events that an affect-centric theory maps is configured differently from that of cognitivist neuroscience and is closer, though not always identical to, the formulations of Ledoux and Damasio. For Massumi, the sonic activation of the affective sensorium produces a basic autonomic response: “As you cross a busy noonday street, your stomach turns somersaults before you consciously hear and identify the sound of screeching brakes that careens towards you.... The immediacy of visceral perception is so radical that it can said without exaggeration to precede the exteroceptive sense perception. It anticipates the translation of the sight or sound or touch perception into something recognizably associated with an identifiable object.”2 In this example of visceral perception initiated by the sound of the screeching brakes, the plunging stomach marks the incipience of the line of flight, its preacceleration.3 Here also the threat, active nonconsciously in advance, of impending doom, is backed up by the sheer metallic tonnage of the incoming vehicle. In the sense identified by William James in his psychology of fear,4 autonomically the body makes the decision to act, with the emotion and corollary conscious decision to act being merely a retrospective description of the feeling of the body’s decision.
In the ecology of fear, however, threat becomes spectral. Effect becomes autonomous from cause. Unlike earlier modes of management of the future such as deterrence, preemptive security does not prevent but rather induces the event, no longer warding off its arrival in a negative anticipation; preemption positively actualizes the future in the present, or at least the effects of events yet to come, to the extent that the cause of the effects, that is, the event, need not necessarily happen. The effects are real, a real and present danger, while the event as cause, or quasi-cause as Massumi describes it, is virtual, a real and future-past danger. That the effects are real compels security to act on the level of virtual threat, responding to the actualization and perpetuating an ecology of fear. This actualization catalyzed by preemptive security involves the production of the signs of alarm as a response to threat, producing a readiness through inducing fear. By taking action in an unpredictable environment, security inserts a minimal dose of surety, a fear that has already been secured in advance. The fear becomes autonomous and escalative, a self-fulfilling, self-effecting prophecy: “Threat triggers fear. The fear is of disruption. The fear is a disruption.”5 In this ecology, the micropolitics of sonically signaling threat attains a reenergized significance. Both operating under and percolating through the mesh of language—from radio to rumor to terror alert sirens on megalopian transport infrastructures—the sound of the alarm functions as an index of this paradoxical, self-actualizing threat. In preemptive modes, the sign of the event no longer has to wait for the anticipated event. The sound in fact beckons the event. The vibrations of the alarm literally set the affective tone, the collective mood. What is edginess, nervousness, or the jitters if not the potential of vibrations to spiral into goalless, open-ended hyperactivity?
This intensified viscerality of power requires an analysis operating on the pre-individual plane of affect, in the turbulent boundary layer between subjective experience and the world, where virtual threats have real effects. Such modes of control modulation operate impersonally. A veneer of cognitive processing and phenomenological subjective agency therefore only conceals power’s real pressure points. As Massumi forcefully argues, preemptive power addresses “bodies from the dispositional angle of their affectivity, instead of addressing subjects from the positional angle of their ideations, shunt [ing] government function away from the mediations of adherence or belief and toward direct activation.”6 It signals, he continues, a mode of governmentality that can “possess” an individual through the emission of sign-acts. The human actor triggering an alarm merely plays a catalytic role, enveloped in a self-effecting networked agency. In such a capillary network, the sonic security nexus is subject of the event, and the induced collective fear is object. Such a network effects bodily actions as a by-product of affective activation.
In Massumi’s theory, which is the most sophisticated synthesis of such approaches, the affective tonality of the fearful encounter precedes its bifurcation into subject and object. In the onset of the event, the body-environment acts as one, with an immediate continuity of the extensive movement of the body and the intensive affect of fear. The vector of the event, in its unfolding, passes down the line of flight, pulling the environment into its slipstream. The event bifurcates. The action ceases, its movement dissipated. The vortical blur of fearful movement congeals into the stasis of segmented, objective space, scanned for potential weapons or to retrospectively attribute causes to effects. What happened? Meanwhile the affect continues to unravel further, becoming distinct, finally as a feeling of fear. The fearful feeling that animated the whole unfolding becomes the feeling of fear: from experience being imminent to the fearful event, to the fear as emotional content of the experience. As the event unfolds, it is interiorized and domesticated and passes from the nonphenomenal to the phenomenal. The continuous, qualitative, intensive vector of affective tonality is chopped up into comparable, relative, numbered magnitudes (more or less frightened). In parallel, then, as affect becomes emotion, sensation becomes perception and movement finds pause. The fearful feeling becomes a feeling of fear. The noisy feeling becomes a feeling of noise. Sensing becomes hearing. A movement of the body becomes a movement of thought becomes a movement of the body—a whole rhythmanalysis of the affective sensorium under sonic activation—the body as transducer of affective tonality, sensing as the qualification of affective tone, and perception as the quantification of affective tone. The conscious classification of an affective pitch or vector of feeling into attributable sounds is preempted by amodality, therefore preceding the designation of a sensation to a specific exteroceptive sensory channel. In this sense, the sonic encounter does most of its affective work before cognitive appropriation by the sense of audition.
Bearing in mind the affective disjunction between causes and effects of fear, Virilio is way too quick to condemn the sonorization of art for complicity with “shock and awe,” for appeasing and reinforcing the ecology of fear. While the ecology of fear is a virtual factory for the production of existential anxiety, the exorcism of this dread, through its preemptive production, has been a central objective of affective hackers. In the late twentieth century, urban machine musics in their sonic sciences of affective contagion have preoccupied themselves with generating soundtracks to sonically enact the demise of Babylon, mutating the early-twentieth-century concerns of audio futurism (war, noise, speed and sensation) into the construction of ephemeral, mutant, sonic war machines. As Kodwo Eshun has described it, music in a condition of sonic dominance often thrives on the scrambling of instinctual responses: “Your fear-flight thresholds are screaming, it’s like your whole body’s turned into this giant series of alarm bells, like your organs want to run away from you. It’s like your leg wants to head north and your arms want to head south, and your feet want to take off somewhere else. It’s like your entire body would like to vacate. Basically, you want to go AWOL, from yourself. But you can’t, so you stay and enjoy it.”7
The mechanics of film sound design are also revealing. In the cinematic experience, the frisson that acute fear produces—the sensation of chills, waves of shivers up and down the spine, goose bumps and hairs standing on end (piloerection)—is actively pursued. The interplay of fear and threat is evoked by narrative tactics of tension such as suspense, a gradual buildup through delaying the arrival of the event whose occurrence resolves the tension, and surprise, working on the effect of the unexpected, the unforeseen, a shock. Film sound modulates affect by tapping into and rewiring the line of attack, the line of flight, and the line of fright. The mechanics of the aesthetization of fear within music and sound design already gives clues to some tactics for channeling the negative energies of the ecology of fear, confiscating them from the architectures of security. Neither Virilio’s lament on the sonification of art nor Mike Davis’s total dystopias leave much room for such deployments. While sonic mood modulation becomes another dimension of the ambiences of control, it would be foolish to ignore the complex affects of the ecology of fear for the sake of a too hasty politics of silence. At 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.