13.7 Billion B.C.: The Ontology of Vibrational Force 15

That humming background sound is ancient—the ringing of a huge bell. Exploding into a mass of intensely hot matter, pulsing out vast sound waves, contracting and expanding the matter, heating where compressed, cooling where it was less dense. This descending tone parallels the heat death of the universe, connecting all the discrete atoms into a vibrational wave. This cosmic background radiation is the echo of the big bang.

Outlining the affective micropolitics of sonic warfare demands a specifically tuned methodology. Drawing from philosophy, cultural studies, physics, biology, fiction, and military and musical history, an ontology of vibrational force can be pieced together that traverses disciplines.1 An ontology of vibrational force delves below a philosophy of sound and the physics of acoustics toward the basic processes of entities affecting other entities. Sound is merely a thin slice, the vibrations audible to humans or animals. Such an orientation therefore should be differentiated from a phenomenology of sonic effects centered on the perceptions of a human subject, as a ready-made, interiorized human center of being and feeling. While an ontology of vibrational force exceeds a philosophy of sound, it can assume the temporary guise of a sonic philosophy, a sonic intervention into thought, deploying concepts that resonate strongest with sound/ noise/music culture, and inserting them at weak spots in the history of Western philosophy, chinks in its character armor where its dualism has been bruised, its ocularcentrism blinded.

The theoretical objective here resonates with Kodwo Eshun in More Brilliant Than the Sun when he objects to cultural studies approaches in which “theory always comes to Music’s rescue. The organization of sound interpreted historically, politically, socially. Like a headmaster, theory teaches today’s music a thing or 2 about life. It subdues music’s ambition, reins it in, restores it to its proper place.”² Instead, if they are not already, we place theory under the dominion of sonic affect, encouraging a conceptual mutation. Sound comes to the rescue of thought rather than the inverse, forcing it to vibrate, loosening up its organized or petrified body. As Eshun prophetically wrote at the end of the twentieth century, “Far from needing theory’s help, music today is already more conceptual than at any point this century, pregnant with thought probes waiting to be activated, switched on, misused.”³

An ontology of vibrational force objects to a number of theoretical orientations. First, the linguistic imperialism that subordinates the sonic to semiotic registers is rejected for forcing sonic media to merely communicate meaning, losing sight of the more fundamental expressions of their material potential as vibrational surfaces, or oscillators.

Despite being endlessly inspired by intensive confrontation with bass frequencies, neither should an ontology of vibrational force be misconceived as either a naive physicalism in which all vibrational affect can be reduced scientifically Such a reductionist materialism that merely reduces the sonic to a quantifiable objectivity is inadequate in that it neglects incorporeal affects. A concern for elementary vibrations must go beyond their quantification in physics into primary frequencies. On the other hand, the phenomenological anthropocen-trism of almost all musical and sonic analysis, obsessed with individualized, subjective feeling, denigrates the vibrational nexus at the altar of human audition, thereby neglecting the agency distributed around a vibrational encounter and ignoring the nonhuman participants of the nexus of experience.

Rather, it is a concern for potential vibration and the abstract rhythmic relation of oscillation, which is key. What is prioritized here is the in-between of oscillation, the vibration of vibration, the virtuality of the tremble. Vibrations always exceed the actual entities that emit them. Vibrating entities are always entities out of phase with themselves. A vibratory nexus exceeds and precedes the distinction between subject and object, constituting a mesh of relation in which discreet entities prehend each other’s vibrations. Not just amodal, this vibrational anarchitecture, it will be suggested, produces the very division between subjective and objective, time and space.

If this ontology of vibrational force can help construct a conception of a politics of frequency, then it must go beyond the opposition between a celebration of the jouissance of sonic physicality and the semiotic significance of its symbolic composition or content. But enough negative definitions.

If affect describes the ability of one entity to change another from a distance, then here the mode of affection will be understood as vibrational. In The Ethics, Spinoza describes an ecology of movements and rest, speeds and slownesses, and the potential of entities to affect and be affected.⁴ This ecology will be constructed as a vectorial field of “affectiles” (affect + projectile), or what William James refers to as pulsed vectors of feeling. As an initiation of a politics of frequency, it resonates with the ballistics of the battlefield as acoustic force field described by the futurists. This vectorial field of sonic affectiles is aerodynamic, but it can also be illuminated by rhythmic models of liquid instability that constitute a kind of abstract vorticism.

This vibrational ontology begins with some simple premises. If we subtract human perception, everything moves. Anything static is so only at the level of perceptibility. At the molecular or quantum level, everything is in motion, is vibrating. Equally, objecthood, that which gives an entity duration in time, makes it endure, is an event irrelevant of human perception. All that is required is that an entity be felt as an object by another entity. All entities are potential media that can feel or whose vibrations can be felt by other entities. This is a realism, albeit a weird, agitated, and nervous one. An ontology of vibrational force forms the backdrop to the affective agency of sound systems (the sonic nexus), their vibrational ontology (rhythmanalysis), and their modes of contagious propagation (audio virology). In its primary amodality and secondary affinity to the sonic, a discussion of vibrational ecologies also helps counter ocu-larcentric (modeled on vision as dominant sensory modality) conceptions of cyberspace, contributing to a notion of virtual space that cuts across analog and digital domains.

This ontology is concerned primarily with the texturhythms of matter, the patterned physicality of a musical beat or pulse, sometimes imperceptible, sometimes, as cymatics shows, in some sensitive media, such as water or sand, visible. While it can be approached from an array of directions, the ontology of vibrational force will be explored here by three disciplinary detours: philosophy, physics, and the aesthetics of digital sound. In each, the stakes are fundamental. Philosophically, the question of vibrational rhythm shoots right to the core of an ontology of things and processes and the status of (dis) continuities between them. In physics, the status of the rhythms of change, the oscillation between movement and rest, plays out in the volatile, far-from-equilibrium zones of turbulent dynamics. While the modeling of turbulence has become the computational engineering problem par excellence for control, within the domain of digital sound design, the generation of microsonic turbulence by the manipulation of molecular rhythms accessible only through the mesh of the digital has become a key aesthetic and textural concern. Each of these fields will be mined to construct a transdisciplinary foundation to the concept of sonic warfare and its deployments of vibrational force.