That sound chills your spine. You can’t close your ears; you are defenseless. You cover the ears, but your skin is still exposed. You can’t see it coming either. Stealthily, insidiously, it wriggles its way toward you, bristling with an unfathomable potential for replication. It wants you. At least, it wants to use you. And then leave. It approaches with the croaking, crackling, chittering, seething intimacy of microbial life. It induces the sonic equivalent of déjà-vu (déjà-entendu?). You are sure that sound is familiar, but perhaps not from this lifetime. Those serrated frequencies have resonated before with some part of your body, and that anomalous recognition testifies to the acoustic memory implant folded in your body, latent, waiting to be reactivated by a future that is filtering in. What’s happening?
Exactly one year after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, a text was published in the New York Daily News announcing leaks from classified reports from the NASA Medical Research Laboratories detailing new evidence that viral diseases such as AIDS and ebola could be transmitted by visual channels.1 The idea was that exposure to microphotography of virus structures could, through a process of what was described as “dematerialization-materialization,” pass through the retina and the brain and then reemerge as a “substantial living virus,” entering a destructive relation with certain parts of the body. The fear, of course, was the potential such a powerful weapon could have in the hands of terrorists. But “if images can be virulent, can sound be virulent too?” This was the question posed by Swedish artist Leif Elggren in his “Virulent Images, Virulent Sounds,” the project that stimulated the hyperstitional newspaper article. Elggren was fascinated by the direct, immediate implication of audiovisual media on the body. The CD that accompanied the project2 was presented with eight micro-structure virographs (obviously published with a health warning) and contained eight audio recordings of highly potent viruses:3 HIV, rabies, influenza, lassa, mumps, ebola, sin nombre, and smallpox. According to the sleeve notes, these microrecordings were carried out in a government laboratory in Tripoli, Libya, and couriered to Sweden on minidisc in January 2002. Elggren’s epidemiologi-cal sonic fiction concerned the transmission of a biological virus code through the channels of media culture, an affective transmission of the abstract virus structure through digitalized ripples of sonic intensity—a transmedia vector scaling up from viral code through the microbiological to the audiovisual, only to compress into code again. Even without this fictional context of mutant DNA, the sounds were pretty creepy: a chittering yet viscous sonic mutation, a sensual mathematics, in the gaps between sound systems, vibration, skin, internal organs, auditory-tactile nerves, and memory.
As with many of Cronenberg’s films, Elggren’s Virulent Images, Virulent Sounds project resonates with the cut-up conceptechnics of William Burroughs. Elggren’s version of audio virology seems based on the infamous 1970-1971 text Electronic Revolution, his manual for the use of audiotape cut-ups in instigating crowd violence. Burroughs amusingly outlines a series of tactics: from spreading rumors in order to discredit political opponents, to using sound as a frontline practice to incite riots. Cutting in a range of incendiary clips, at a parable level of intensity to the ambient sonic environment so as not to attract the conscious attention of the crowd, Burroughs suggested that the behavior of the crowd, through a kind of mood modulation, could be steered in certain directions. “There is nothing mystical about this operation,” he stated, “recorded police whistles will draw cops. Recorded gunshots and their guns are out.”4 Burroughs goes on to ask wryly whether a virus “is perhaps simply very small units of sound and image.... Perhaps to construct a laboratory virus we would need both a camera and a sound crew and a biochemist as well.”5 Here Burroughs initiates what will become a recurrent refrain of the cyberpunk science fiction of the 1980s and 1990s: the virus as the anomalous entity trading between nature and culture, as at home in the human animal as it is in machines. As Douglas Kahn points out in Noise, Water, Meat, Burroughs’s virology implies a mnemonics, or theory of memory, that relies on ideas he repurposes from L. Ron Hubbard’s notion of the engram,6 which in turn relied on early-twentieth-century psychologist Richard Wolfgang Semon’s concept of the mneme.7 As Kahn describes it, the engram was basically
an injurious or otherwise painful moment literally recorded by the body. This recording should not be confused with memory that takes place in the brain, and it should not be assumed that a person even needs to be conscious to record an injurious experience. Instead the recording occurs anywhere in the body at the cellular level as a “definite and permanent trace left by a stimulus on the protoplasm of a tissue ... a cellular trace or recording impinged deeply into the very structure of the body itself.” These engrams contain absolutely everything and would be very much “like phonograph records or motion pictures, if these contained all perceptions of sight, sound, smell, taste, organic sensation etc.” If these engrams stay in place and are not discharged through therapeutic means, they will predispose the individual to psychosomatic illnesses ... mental disorders and always something less than complete psychophysiological sanity8
The connections, which Kahn follows from Burroughs’s word virus back through Hubbard (to Wilhelm Reich, Alfred Korzybsky, and Richard Semon), open an interesting, anti-Cartesian portal onto an audio virology, that is, the need to conceptualize memory outside merely cognitive process, at the level of the enfolding of affects into the body. However, the hardware storage model of memory, in which it is thought that memories are stored in a particular location in the body/brain, is controversial and has been consistently attacked from the early twentieth century in philosophy and psychology. Other resources must be turned to in order to construct an audio virological tool kit that can more convincingly account from sonic processes of affective contagion.
The quasi-discipline of memetics proclaims itself as a field of expertise in the study of cultural viruses. A strong neo-Cartesian undercurrent connects memetics with artificial intelligence research as manifestations of the desire to digitally simulate human thought and culture. The term meme was coined by theorist of evolution Richard Dawkins. In his most infamous text, The Selfish Gene, Dawkins constructs the term to function in relation to culture in the same way that the gene functions in relation to biology.9 As the gene is the basic informational building block of biology, the meme for Dawkins stands as the basic unit of culture: “Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.”10 Of course, Dawkins acknowledges that there are significant divergences between the process of genetic or biological transmission and that of memetic or cultural transmission. He therefore qualifies the comparison by drawing attention to the fact that genetic information is passed down the tree of genealogy; transmission is hereditary. Cultural or memetic transmission, on the other hand, is transversal, cutting across the vertical axis of the genetic flow of information, and is therefore more viral than genetic. On one level, it is all just DNA code, but what crucially distinguishes them is their orientation to futurity, their path to the future. As Dawkins points out in his essay “Viruses of the Mind,” “Legitimate host DNA is just DNA that aspires to pass into the next generation via the orthodox route of sperm or egg. ‘Outlaw’ or parasitic DNA is just DNA that looks to a quicker, less cooperative route to the future by a squeezed droplet or a smear of blood.”11
For Dawkins, the meme is not just a metaphor, of culture merely mirroring the processes of nature. Rather, he suggests, there is a deep isomorphism between certain natural and cultural processes. To be exact, the isomorphic process is replication. Memes are nongenetic pattern replicators. Dawkins, in the “Viruses” essay, points to the three characteristics of successful replicators that he terms copying fidelity, fecundity, and longevity. Copying fidelity relates to the quality of the copying process. The less degradation of the pattern after several iterations, the more successful is replication. Obviously a faster rate of copying will accelerate the replication process. Finally, the more reliable the material holding the pattern, the longer the pattern is likely to last, thereby extending its potential of abundant future replication. Dawkins focuses on computer viruses as an intermediary in connecting nature to culture, wiring together biochemical machineries to brain replicators through networked hard disk memory. As a model of informational epidemiology, computer viruses are computer programs written with the power of self-duplication, and therefore the ability to spread: in other words, they contain the instructions “duplicate me.” Dawkins, as in Elggren’s “Virulent Images, Virulent Sounds” project, emphasizes the role of memetic transduction: “Viruses aren’t limited to electronic media such as disks and data lines. On its way from one computer to another, a virus may pass through printing ink, light rays in the human lens, optic nerve impulse and finger muscle contractions.”12 Yet for Dawkins, while the brain is more susceptible to errors, it is only quantitatively less conducive to successful replication than cells or computers.13
While memetics provided some useful conceptual machinery for formulating the evolution and spread of cultural viruses, it has a number of preprogrammed limitations that curtail its contribution to an audio virology. The first problem derives from Dawkins’s insistence in differentiating science from a cultural virus. Dawkins really wants to retain the negative connotation of the “virus,” using the term specifically in relation to what he considers dangerous infections of the mind—for him, most notably, religions. Danger, for Dawkins, relates to nonscientific cultural domains. He retains a transcendent position as scientist,14 aloof from the virological field of cultural transmission. He does admit that science is itself composed of memes but not of the insidious variety. The deficiency of memetics is that the memeticist remains aloof, transcendent from the epidemio-logical field. It is almost as if Dawkins has been immunized to the very viruses he discusses.
The second, and related, problem stems from the tendency of memetics generally, and Dawkins specifically, not to differentiate rigorously enough among different types of replicators. Manuel De Landa, for example, in One Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, differentiates between an array of nongenetic replicators, a term he prefers to meme.15 Although Dawkins’s desire is that the relationship between the meme and gene be more than a metaphor, De Landa maintains that the lack of precision in the definition of replicators weakens his case. For De Landa, memes are confined to transmission by imitation (copying as a means of propagation—for example, bird song, fashions, fads), while on the other hand, there are what he describes as enforced replicators, or norms.
Third, memetics is primarily obsessed by information and its centralization in the brain, at the expense of flows of matter and energy and distributed bodily intelligence. Its cognitivist philosophy remains ensnared in the Cartesian legacy of Western thought, leaving no room for the body, movement, and mutation. For us, memetics falls victim to the Spinozan critique of Cartesian metaphysics. Spinoza’s parallelism, his alternative to dualism, makes possible an understanding of mind-body infections in a way that takes into account flows of matter and energy as well as information. While for Descartes there are two substances, thought and extension, for Spinoza there is only one substance (also known as nature and the entity or, for Deleuze and Guattari, the plane of consistency, the Body without Organs, abstract matter, or the virtual). Spinoza’s substance has an infinite number of attributes, only two of which are accessible to the human. But rather than being separate, thought and extension for Spinoza are two aspects of the same substance. A Spinozist approach to cultural viruses would therefore have to discard such narrow cognitivist approaches to culture in favor of affective contagion.16 For Whitehead, on the other hand, discarding Spinoza’s monism in favor of multiplicity, affective contagion is marked by the potential of an actual entity to enter into the concrescence of another actual entity.
De Landa wishes to distinguish specific types of cultural genotypes or replicators (for example, memes or norms) from cultural phenotypes (interactors like enzymes that serve to actualize abstract patterns or, in language, speech acts that lead to the switching from one state to another) in order to deal with the flow of material through which nongenetic replicators spread. When the transduction potential of cultural viruses is taken seriously, the focus can no longer purely remain on the informational state of this process. Memetics, by tending to focus on the transmission of information patterns across the meme pool of brains, a cognitive network, pays insufficient attention to issues of affective contagion and the propagation of physical and mental vibration.
An audio virology, on the other hand, entails a nexus that synthesizes the flows of information, matter, and energy into a virulent rhythmic consistency. In such an assemblage, it would be impossible to conceive of the replicator in isolation, but rather embedded in an ecology, a diagram of relations to its material environment. This relation between the replicator and the sorting functions carried out by selective environmental pressure forms a blind probe into the potential mutations of an entity, not merely an informational pattern. And it is this relation, what De Landa calls a “virtual searching device,” that makes possible the transversal trajectory of cultural viruses across a range of material and energetic platforms.
Fourth, it is very hard not to construe memetics, in its dominant manifestations, as reductionist. By analyzing culture in terms of populations of unchanging idea units, little room is left for change and mutation, and no account is provided of the formation or constitution of these elementary atoms. If we probe the submemetic level, shifting the preoccupation of memetics with units onto the relations that comprise them, then these atomic components of culture reveal and are traversed by a more primary field of rhythmic vectors. The replicator would therefore become a rhythmic assemblage, an entity composed of speeds and slowness, clusters of sensation, percepts, and affects. What is depicted as a meme therefore is always already a population.
If the atomic basis of culture is to be insisted on, then it would have to be modeled on a more Leibnizian schema, such as that followed by Gabriel Tarde, or it would resonate with the way Whitehead subtracts monism from Spinozism, pushing it toward a multiplicity of quasi-monadic actual entities.17 If culture is to be formulated in computational terms as a monadology, then the base components must be able to evolve, change, and involve. The key questions become: What is enfolded within these cultural units? What submemetic populations do they conceal? Where are the networks of transmission in this story of arithmetic units? An audio virology constitutes a kind of sensual mathematics that moves past the transmission of unchanging units toward a model of the unit of replication that mutates with each copy. This orientation operates at the apex of divergence and movement—a parasitic, divergent vector that has been understood, following Lucretius, as the angle of the swerve, the clinamen. It is therefore necessary to go beyond memetics, beyond the distinction between meme and transmission network, to understand an audio virus as affective vector, where the meme is unfolded onto its outside, becoming flat with its trajectory and environment topologically. To focus in this way on the becoming other or mutation of the meme as it passes across a transductive circuit unlocks the surplus potential immanent to the unit. Difference and mutation take priority over the repetition of the same. The shift from memetic to rhythmic contagion involves conceiving of the (extended) brain, as rhythmic transducer, converting extensive movements into pulse patterns passing through neurological circuitry. Memes are material processes, not merely informational patterns but specific patterns of synaptic resonance across neural networks. The shift to rhythm leaves open the content of the replicator to divergence. The brain’s rhythmic circuitry revolves around the pulsing behavior of billions of networked neurons. These rhythms can actualize as an array of bodily movements or sensations. But again, transmitted pulse patterns are not fixed or unchanging, but rather are subject to perturbation from the quantum scale, appearing as generative noise, injecting new information to destabilize repetition.
In summary, a memetics must be supplemented in order to construct an audio virology. Memetics fails to fulfill the necessary criteria in that it neglects to account for the body, affect, and change and therefore cannot adequately analyze the sonic “softwar” strategies at work in contemporary capitalism. Elsewhere, the operating logics of sonic branding help fill out the picture a little. While this emergent field seems to run on memetic cultural software, its market-driven pragmatism leads it to loot insights from emotional neuroscience spliced with a crude behaviorist psychology. Its tactics reveal much about the viro-sonics of capital, engineering self-propagating vectors of contagious sound, unleashing a population of predatory “earworms” into the public domain.