The regime of the war machine is ... that of affects, which relate to the moving body in itself, to speeds and compositions of speed among elements. ... Affects are projectiles like weapons.
—Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1988)
In a release from a U.S. Army Research Laboratory in 2001,1 two volatile crowd situations were considered:
One was a small group of people positioned at knife throwing distances, such as in a civilian prison riot.... The other situation ... was a large rioting crowd threatening troops at a stone-throwing distance ... based on first hand experiences with large riots in the Middle East, which left a sense of “thermoclines”2 in the crowd; i.e. the first few rows of people were “hot” and “dangerous,” and the back rows were “cooler” adventurers, who only became dangerous if mishandled.
The “nonlethal” sonic weapon under study was the “vortex ring generator,” designed to “target individual[s with] a series of flash, impact, and concussion pulses at frequencies near the resonance of human body parts,”3 forcing evacuation from the zone of disturbance, fighting social turbulence with air turbulence. Such tactical instances of sonic warfare draw attention to the directions in which control of volatile social groups, “far from equilibrium,” is developing through the investigation of volatile properties of material systems “far from equilibrium.” Such cases serve as a portal into the problem of turbulence and its controlled propagation through the management and intervention into the rhythmicity of urban systems,4 the modulation of the ecology of fear and its affective potential to spiral out of control. It is in the context of these basic population dynamics that sonic warfare should be understood, intervening into the affective ecology of crowds.
A precursor to this discussion can be found in Elias Canettis physics of populations in Crowds and Power. Canetti argues that the affect of fear, particularly of being touched by the unknown, forms a basic logic of population physics. It serves as an intangible force keeping individuals apart. Yet with crowd formations, this principle is reversed, and the density of bodies helps overcome the repulsive power of fear into an attractive power. This threshold of reversal results is what Canetti calls the discharge, leading to the formation of the crowd and the eradication of differences.
Packs form a more basic type of entity out of which crowds are composed. Canetti notes four kinds of pack: the hunting pack, the war pack, the lamenting pack, and the increase pack. Packs are marked by their mobility, unlike crowds, which tend to be more static. Crowds are particularly the product of the city, he argues, irrigating packs through the urban channels of streets and squares, forcing them to resonate, accumulate, and grow, with the affective geometry and architecture of the built environment activating both negative and positive feedback processes. A movement of growth can continue or be impeded, resulting in what he calls the open or closed crowds. This is a volatile dynamic and can lead to eruptions if there is a sudden transition from a closed to an open crowd—or a sudden disintegration can be a symptom of pure panic. To fend off this disintegration, the crowd needs a goal. The temporality of the goal determines whether the crowd is fast or slow in its dissipation. As an entity in formation, what crowds seem to desire is density. As density increases, the units that make up the crowd are decomposed and recomposed, with subcomponents of these units flattened out and affectively networked with the subcomponents of other units—limb by limb by limb. Canetti calls this “equality,” where a part object becomes disorganized and circuited with other part objects. The manner in which density and equality develop forces the crowd to stagnate or vibrate rhythmically5
Like Whitehead’s nexus, composed of throbs of experience, Canetti’s morphology and his notion of the “throbbing,” rhythmic crowd sketches a population on the social scale that resonates with the more abstract descriptions of the vorticist rhythmanalysis of vibration. The key dimension of any gathering of bodies, from the point of view of control or becoming, is those critical thresh- olds across which the transitory body of the crowd concresces, individuates, perishes, and enters into new modes of composition. He describes a topology of vibrating collective entities, contorted intensively by their affective temperature, and channeled extensively through the irrigation of street systems and the built environment. Such a critical threshold, for example, may mark the onset of violence, the onset of dance, or other collective rhythmic convulsions as unactu-alized potentials become kinesthetic spasms. A theory of sonic warfare is particularly fascinated by this turbulent boundary layer between dance and violence.
This analysis is developed still further by Philip Turetsky, who reads the analysis of the throbbing crowd via Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, unfolding the rhythmic syntheses of past, present, and future that such collectives undertake in the formation of a vibratory entity.6 In the case of the throbbing crowd, its vibratory nexus both dis- and reorganizes body parts and individuates them into an event with its own duration. Rhythm, for Turetsky, is both a set of relations between formed matters and an expression of a “distribution of accents marking off an abstract organisation of temporal intervals.... This rhythmic organisation combines, that is, synthesizes, the formed matters into a single body, the groups of abstract intervals into a single event, in a single assemblage in which the two become articulated together.”7 Rhythm therefore organizes heterogeneous materials in two ways. It distributes in time and simultaneously emerges out of the very differences between elements. Rhythm is abstract in the sense that it is platform independent. A composition of materials can result in almost any rhythm. In addition to the kinetic modulation of populations in motion, rhythm transforms the affective potential of the individuated entity, producing new connections between part objects, intensifying collective excitation and mood, transforming the crowd into an attractional or repulsive force in relation to outsiders. The diagram of such rhythmic populations can be termed, extending a concept of Kodwo Eshun, a rhythmachine. A rhythmachine is a synthesizer that processes a chaotic datum in its self-generation, connecting, for Turetsky, following Deleuze, successive moments into a passing present, some of which constitute the past of this present and others that generally anticipate its future. In terms of invention, the essential part of this process of synthesis, however, faces futurity in order to break with memory, habit, and the repetition of the same. The parallels with Whitehead’s description of the process of concrescence and creative advance are apparent here. Yet the confinement of a rhythmic nexus to a purely temporal phenomenon, while a common inheritance from musicology, is exactly the move that rhythmanalysis seeks to move beyond. Rhythm in fact should be understood differently, as spatial as it is temporal. Rather like Whitehead’s extensive continuum and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the refrain, space and time decompress out of a rhythmic anarchitecture. The vortical entities of the rhythmic crowd produce and destroy their own pocket of space-time. The militarized deployment of acoustic weapons therefore, as well as a sonic intervention into a turbulent zone of disturbance, is also a dynamic one: the insertion of a rhythmic component as provocation or affective projectile.