Conclusion: Unsound—The (Sub)Politics of Frequency 34

Sonic Warfare has attempted to bring to the foreground some of the means by which audition is policed and mobilized. Policing here denotes not merely a repressive set of exclusions or limits, but a generative distribution of sensations that identify, channel, and amplify sonic power. What is distributed are those elementary pulses or throbs of experience constitutive of an aesthetic ontology that revolves around vibrational force and the prehension of affective tonality. Affective tonality can be felt as mood, ambience, or atmosphere. As film sound designers know only too well, certain frequencies can produce an affective tonality of fear in which the body is left poised in anticipation, expectant of incoming events: every pore listens for the future. Just think of the uneasy listening of atonal or discordant sound, or the sense of dread induced by low-frequency drones.

Affective tonalities such as fear, especially when ingrained and designed into architectures of security, can become the basis for a generalized ecology, influencing everything from microgestures to economics. As such, and unlike an emotional state, affective tonality possesses, abducts, or envelops a subject rather than being possessed by one. Possession, or affective contagion, has been discussed as the short-circuiting of attention and consciousness by mnemonic processes and the sonically induced, temporary, psychoaffective vacation of the present, leaving residues of feeling resembling auditory déjà vu or déjà entendu. It is in these dyschronic episodes of time lapse that predatory capital, in preemptive mode, can insert itself, mobilizing audio viruses to hook consumers in advance for products that may not yet exist. The affective deployment of sound, we have also noted, may be more direct than the ominous tinting of atmosphere or mnemonic intervention. As we have also seen, the soft power of affective tone can be overridden by the immediate physicality of sonic violence where frequency is multiplied by amplitude into the sonic dominance of acoustic weaponry.

Sonic Warfare has therefore underlined the ways in which affective tonality in its broadest sense operates within a play of forces and that every nexus of sonic experience is immersed in a wider field of power. But not just any mode of power. By placing the discussion within the context of a mode of power-tagged preemption, a deliberate attempt has been made to align the text so that its comments do not bear just on past and present distributions of sonic sensations, but are keenly focused on futurity—the way in which the future is active virtually in and is anticipated by the present—hence, the speculative focus on the time anomaly of déjà entendu within virosonic branding, where the misleading sense of familiarity with something never experienced renders, more likely, a future disposition or affinity.

No doubt, the outline of preemptive power could leave one feeling despair that the invention of new modes of feeling is always already co-opted in advance, that control has morphed into becoming, and vice versa. With capital’s drive to incite creativity ever intensifying, the difference between cultural invention and the cynical fabrication of invention begins to blur. Taking the example of piracy, some commentators have noted how it has become just another business model. And when the most banal popular music is simultaneously mobilized as a weapon of torture, it is clear that sonic culture has reached a strange conjuncture within its deepening immersion into the environments of the military-entertainment complex. However, the impasse of despair at such apparent undecidability would imply that the new is defunct and relegated to recycling. Sonic Warfare refuses this persistent, despairing echo of postmodernism.

Countering this despair, one of the threads that runs through the book, in tension with control’s frequency modulation of affective tonality, finds in futurism’s art of war in the art of noise, and Afrofuturism’s revisions and updates, one of the most potent, if problematic, conceptualizations of the aesthetic mobilization of vibrational force. Implicit in futurism is an affective politics that goes well beyond its typecasting within music of “sounding futuristic.” What was salvaged from futurism, after discarding its dubious political affiliations and compromised linear temporality, was an aesthetic politics as a tactics of invention that suspends possibility for the sake of potential. We do not yet know what a sonic body can do. This potential was pinpointed using the concept of unsound, another name for the not yet audible. It describes the peripheries of human audition, of infrasound and ultrasound, both of which modulate the affective sensorium in ways we still do not fully comprehend. In its negative connotation, unsound aptly describes the colonization of inaudible frequencies by control. But most important, unsound also names that which is not yet audible within the normal bandwidth of hearing—new rhythms, resonances, textures, and syntheses. Most generally, then, unsound denotes sonic virtuality, the nexus of imperceptible vibration, masked due to limitations on not just the deficient physiology of the auditory system, but also the policing of the sensible enacted by groups defined by their affective affinities determined by taste, expertise, or other audiosocial predeterminations such as class, race, gender, and age. Traditionally sonic virtuality has been understood in relation to concepts such as silence and noise, with both offering, in different and sometimes conflicting, sometimes complementary ways, vehicles for thinking the aesthetic, cultural, or micropolitical potential of the audiosocial.

Together, the aesthetic politics of silence and noise has been a useful way of framing or demarcating the field of sonic power. For example, in the history of musical aesthetics, silence, from John Cage onward, has been conjoined to the virtual in that it constitutes the shadow of audition, the nonconscious background, perceivable only through absence and with only a negative possibility of entering conscious attention. Silence here is sound in potential, unactualized. Similarly, the concept of noise, from futurism onward, came to mean the potential of any sound whatsoever to disrupt and move forward musical jurisdictions as policed by generic criteria, critical border patrols, or harmonic or melodic parameters of organized sound.

Both of these aesthetic tendencies, within the remit of a politics of amplitude, are often placed in allegiance to an anticapitalist politics. In these cases, in noise pollution policy, for example, strategic resonances are recognized in local tactical interventions into the force fields of sonic ecologies. Yet the silence-noise axis has several drawbacks.

The politics of silence often assumes a conservative guise and promotes itself as quasi-spiritual and nostalgic for a return to a natural. As such, it is often orientalized and romanticizes tranquility unviolated by the machinations of technology, which have militarized the sonic and polluted the rural soundscape with noise, polluted art with sonification, polluted the city with industry, polluted thought with distraction, polluted attention with marketing, deafens teenagers, and so on.1 Its disposition is almost always reactionary. In a much less strong but more compelling aesthetic version, it sides with those lamenting the loss of dynamic range within the “loudness war” that currently rages concerning the overuse of compression in mastering techniques within sound engineering. Dynamic compression here, or at least its overuse, in maximizing loudness and minimizing dynamic range, is objected to as a weapon for enhancing the audio virological power of sonic capital while deadening affect in the hypercompetitive economy of attention.

The politics of noise, on the other hand, may become an excuse for relativism (one person’s noise is another’s music) or, in more militant mode, takes noise as a cultural weapon, as a shock to thought, as a shock to bourgeois complacency, as a shock to tradition, as a shock to the status quo.² The various positions that can be grouped under this heading revolve around an array of definitions of noise, from unwanted sound, to deconstructive remainder, systemic excess, void, or disturbance through to acoustic definitions based on distribution of frequency and tagged by colors—white, pink, black, and so on. Aesthetically, however, in the soundtrack to the politics of noise, its weapons often remain trapped within the claustrophobic confines of the dual (and usually white) history of rock music and avant-classical sound art. Justified by Adornian propaganda, the politics of noise may be enlisted to celebrate everything from the dreary to the monstrous, with sonic dominance narrowly construed as the overpowering taken to the point of meaningless parody—instead of a shock to thought, a provocation to boredom.

In its most convincing formulations, the negativity of the politics of noise is twisted into an engine of construction, and noise becomes a reservoir of rhythmic potential, a parasitic probe beckoning the future. Usually noise here, in a nontechnical sense, is black noise—the black noise of what Kodwo Eshun calls the futurhythmachine. It is to black noise that twentieth-century popular music owed most of its innovations. Black noise, painstakingly crafted in the context of enforced migration, depressed urbanism, and ethnic suppression, becomes a locus of affective collectivity. Feeling around in the dark, in the toxic smog of megalopian pressure, when no hope seems to exist, when no stability persists, rhythmic decisions still get made, collectives mobilized, and potential futures produced. The rhythmic breakthroughs of the electronic musics of the Black Atlantic have been countless.

What is certain is that the dialectics of silence and noise cannot contain the concept of sonic warfare developed here. Both the conceptual fetishization of noise and silence as a politics of amplitude is always arbitrary. Hence emphasis has been deliberately shifted to vibration—and therefore (micro) rhythm—as that discontinuum without which a “loud” or “quiet” sonic ecology would be inconceivable. Instead of obsessing on one or the other, it is clear that agencies of both control and enjoyment, or repressive and mobilizing forces, reserve the right to zigzag as and when it is pertinent to do so.

The problem of solely prioritizing the amplitude axis (between loudness and quietness) when considering the politics of sonic intensity is that usually it comes at the expense of a much more complex set of affective resonances distributed across the frequency spectrum. Some of these complexities have come out in our discussion of unsound, from infrasonic and ultrasonic deployments of sonic weapons through to the bass materialism of sound system cultures. In other words, to a micropolitics of amplitude must be added a micropolitics of frequency.

For sure, a more complete picture of the deployment of power within sonic ecologies would have to delve deeper into issues of political economy and language. But it is precisely the usual obsession with these two themes, within cultural theoretical attempts to politicize sound and music, and the blind spot that these dogmas have produced to date, that have made it impossible to take a properly ecological vantage point. They constitute only the tip of the iceberg. Yet for this very reason, some readers may understand sonic warfare, in its focused concern with this blind spot (and its only brief comments on economics via piracy and language via voice synthesis), as apolitical or, the preferable term, subpolitical.

Other readers may detect, particularly in the discussion of the sound system cultures of the Planet of Slums the suggestion of a latent, romantic notion of a musical multitude of the global proletariat. There is, however, a key difference between an argument about the affective mobilization and micro capitalist bootstrapping of the sound system cultures of the developing world and the internal peripheries of the core, on one hand, and the influential notion developed by Hardt and Negri in Empire,³ of an antiglobalization movement as creative multitude, on the other.

The claims made in Sonic Warfare are much less grandiose. It is one thing to find a model of affective collectivity in the aesthetic invention, sensory engineering, and economic hacking of these local and digitized musical movements; their force lies in their subpolitical, tactical, and aesthetic dimensions, as opposed to being primarily based on belief or ideology. It is another much more contentious move to make grand claims regarding the spontaneous politicality of the so-called emergent creativity of the multitude.

Where aesthetic and technological innovation, collective, affective, and economic mobilization, and social desegmentation coincide, the appropriate term for such cultures, following Deleuze and Guattari, may be sonic war machines. These sonic collectives may emerge out of turbulent, underdeveloped urban ecologies, but their bottom-up nature does not in itself constitute an index of a moral or political higher ground. Caution should be shown, for example, in celebrating the pirate economics of music cultures. Preemptive capital is now ingrained enough that, through the convoluted geometry of viral marketing, cool hunters, sonic branding, and journalism’s voracious thirst for an angle, piracy is now conceived by some as just another corporate model, a new business school rhetoric for getting ahead of the curve. It is essential, therefore, to get things in perspective. The attraction and repulsion of populations around sonic affect, and the aesthetic politics that this entails, while only the substrata out of which sociality emerges, is still a battleground. Experiments with responses to frequencies, textures, rhythms, and amplitudes render the divergence of control and becoming ever diminishing. For better and for worse, audio viruses are already everywhere, spreading across analog and digital domains. The military makes nonstandard uses of popular music, while underground music culture’s make nonstandard use of playback technologies, communications, and power infrastructures. As attention becomes the most highly prized commodity, the sonic war over affective tonality escalates. But as Deleuze would remind us, “There is no need to fear or hope, but only to ... [listen]... for new weapons.”⁴