Showing posts with label Sonic Warfare. Show all posts

17.4.12

Of war, media and sound by Francesco Tacchini (UEL, London, 2012)

Of war, media and sound

To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill. —Sun Tzu, The Art of War

During the second half of the twentieth century a number of studies relating to the use of “non-lethal” sonic weaponry began taking place.1 Such weapons aim to control and alter the psyche, therefore the body equilibrium of an individual by using apparently nonviolent methods. Analyzed from a military perspective, the ear is an easy target: like our brain it has no protection nor can it select which sounds to hear; as a matter of fact it acts as a direct channel to our brain. If in the twenty-first century control is crucial to military and police forces at a surprising level, the use of sound as a weapon presents great advantages in terms of how a certain authority can exert it: a form of dissimulated and apparently nonviolent “white torture” that discards criticisms and confuses the public debate. In fact the fast rise of researches on the “non-lethality” topic within the military field and the continuous emergence and use of sonic weapons reflect the concern of potent authorities towards the public opinion. Nowadays the engagement of news media in war reportage is extremely high. They are perceived as a crucial element of war itself, or at least of the representation of it: the so-called “CNN factor” that is the dissemination through the media2, must be taken into account when conducting a war or, in the case of police forces, containing a demonstration, controlling a crowd, etc. It is in this frame that sonic and ultrasonic weapons are presented to the public. Since their violent effects are apparently invisible they become media-friendly: legitimate from a sociopolitical perspective, effective from a military one and justified, when questioned, because “preferable to real bombs”3.

As Steve Goodman puts it (2010, p. 5), our century began with “[...] a bang, setting the resonant frequency of fear at which the planet has been vibrating, trembling, ever since”.4 Sound itself acquired a new dimension of threat and audio signals like, for instance, Bin Laden’s audiotapes gained greater importance and played a crucial role within the hierarchy of the ecology of fear. What is a sonic warfare? Or better what are its modalities? For Goodman, it is the “deployment of sound systems in the modulation of affect, from sensations to moods to movement behaviors”.5 In other words, the production and transmission of bad vibes. Sonic warfare’s tactics are part of the everyday and its potent tools are essential for the control systems of an authority, a city, a nation.

Although only five decades have passed from the first experiments within the field, significant progresses have been achieved. At an early stage, both scientists and military researchers focused on infrasounds, in other words sub-bass frequencies that are lower than 20 Hertz. If very intense, such sound waves can vibrate along with the human body resonant frequency; that means our ear would not be able to hear them while our body would feel them, in terms of tactility or organ vibration. On the one hand, the implications of successfully employing infrasonic machines are terrifying and, particularly in the United States, triggered an “infrasonic euphoria” leading to a number of military and industrial research programs.
On the other hand, almost fifty years of studies have proven that the real influence infrasound weapons have on human body is limited to tremors, because of the difficulty of producing sub- bass frequencies that are intense enough. Much easier to target are high-frequency weapons on which military and industrial studies focused in the early twenty-first century.

Two of the most used and known technologies today are the Mosquito and the LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device).6 e latter in particular described by the builder as “hailing and warning, directed acoustic device”, but sonic weapon de facto, is used as a crowd control device, a kind of acoustic repellent: an LRAD “produces the equivalent of an instant migraine” according to its inventor, Elwood Norris.7 The circular device is formed by multiple small speakers that emit sound in phase, creating a high-frequency wave of 153 dB at one meter that can penetrate up to 3000 meters of distance.8 e risk of deafness is therefore a real one: the weapon’s operators rely on the fact that no one would consciously want to stay in the sound transmission beam, without any concern about those who might not be conscious or able to move, for instance disabled, old or injured people.

The sonic weapon is also effective on a multiplicity of levels, especially when its image is shaped and re-proposed by the media. It becomes as luminous a triumph of modern technology, legitimately dislocating protesters by firing (harmful) sound waves at a long distance, as sinister a warning for the collectivity: the clear message of the power in control is “stay home.” The crowd control becomes total, for different “crowds” are regulated, intimidated, manipulated in different space-times. The representation of power is therefore deepen by the perception of the system being in full control.

It can be argued that the relation between war machines and sound machines is a crucial one. A media theorist who sustained the argument of an interconnection between sound, media and military is Friedrich Kittler. In his Grammophon, Film, Typewriter, (1986) the German philosopher wrote that military development somehow contaminates mass popular culture with a technological contagion.9 As a result the entertainment industry uses the arsenal of the arms industry. In his view war acts as a catalyzer for new media: military technologies used as data storage devices during the American Civil War such as the gramophone, the film and the typewriter became media technologies. e same happened for the radio which was just “the military radio system of the First World War minus the talkback-capability”10 or the television, result of studies on the electric transmission of data. At last the Computer, emerging during World War II as the Turing machine, is the medium of modern society and allows an electronic transmission of data, a constant and pervasive digital processing. e conclusion is quite frightening: innovation in mass media is only driven by the technological evolution of war.

Kittler’s theory on the military nature of media adapts well to theories developed during the last century that argue the centrality of war in modern and contemporary society.11 e concept of war becomes ambiguous: it is not just a battle between factions anymore but a condition of militarization of the everyday. War is omnipresent because so is the inter- and hyper-connected militarized media environment; the only response to the ubiquity of such environment is abusing the militarized media. Paraphrasing Kittler, fighting the power which exerts control or, borrowing an engineering term, “negative feedback” necessitates the wild reappropriation of its artifacts, the remix of its media.12 By recycling and reutilizing the array of militarized technologies and practices the negative output can be reversed to an opposite, positive output.

A famous contemporary example of the practice could be KRS-One’s tune “Sound of da police”.13 The rapper from Brooklyn transferred the sound of a police siren to his beat: the alarm is as much of an echo and an allusion as a symbol to whom greater importance and new meanings have been given. Both loud noise making device and symbol of power willing to enforce control, the high-frequency sound remixed by KRS could have been the much louder one of an LRAD, but the “feedback” would still be positive.

Dealing with another medium, an example is found in Samuel L. Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. One of the central episode of this second movie of the epic trilogy is the battle of “Helm's Deep”14 fought between the Uruk-Hai and the humans lead by Aragorn. Moments before the conflict starts, the two factions are facing each others: the orcs’ army then begins hitting the ground with their spears and shields, thus creating a loud intimidating sound. e connection is easily drawn: the practice is in fact common among riot police, the special police force who are equipped and deployed to confront crowds. Before charging, riot police signal their move forward by hitting their shields with batons.
On 19th December 2010 a protest took place in Minsk against Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian leader who has been in charge for two decades. On the occasion riot police affronted the pacific crowd in a particular violent way.15

“22:30 - Out of the Government House come out a lot of riot police units with batons. There is tough resistance on the steps of the Government House. Some people are severely beaten, they lie on the ground. Riot police makes noise with shields and batons to intimidate people.”16

On 10 November 2011 thousands of Canadian student striking against education cuts in Montreal experienced the same fear when riot police started charging.

“They hit their shields with batons, producing an intimidating sound. is sound was repeated over the next several minutes, each time warning that the squad was moving forward.”17

Transferred to the equally frightening Uruk-Hai, the intimidating practice, which might be defined as negative output from a Kittlerian perspective, is reversed to a positive one.
At the dawn of the millennium the intersection of the machines of war, the machines of noise and the machines of entertainment is tight at an unprecedented level. Whether sound is employed as a weapon, or media are; whether militarized media become part of the entertainment network, or get abused by generating frequencies that echo urban and war experiences, a sonic war exists. As Deleuze (1995) would remind us, “ere is no need to fear or hope, but only to . . . [listen] . . . for new weapons.”18

NOTES
1. Altmann, J. (1999), Acoustic weapons. A prospective assessment: sources, propagation and effects of strong sound, Occasional Paper, n. 22, Cornell University Peace Study Programs.

Major Thomas, M.R. (2008), Non-lethal weaponry: a framework for future integration, Air Command and Staff College, Air University, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, p. 12-13.
McGeal C. (2005) "Sonic Boom Raids Cause Fear, Trauma," Guardian, 3 November 2005. [Online] Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/nov/03/israel (Accessed: 11 April 2012).
Goodman S. (2009) Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, Cambridge: MIT Press.
Ibid., Glossary.
Volcler J. (2012) Il suono come arma. Gli usi militari e polizieschi dell' ambiente sonoro, trans. Roberta Cristofani, Rome: DeriveApprodi.
Arkin, W.M. (2004) “The Pentagon's Secret Scream: Sonic devices that can inflict pain - or even permanent deafness - are being deployed,” Los Angeles Times, 7 March. [Online] Available at: http://articles.latimes.com/2004/mar/07/opinion/op-arkin7 (Accessed: 11 April 2012).
See the LRAD product overview, [online] available at: http://www.lradx.com/site/content/ view/15/110/ (Accessed: 11 April 2012).
Kittler, F. A. (1986) Grammophon, Film, Typewriter, Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose.

10. Ibid.
11. Goodman S. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, p. 33. 12. Kittler, Grammophon, Film, Typewriter.
13. Video and song [online] available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VRZq3J0uz4 (Accessed: 12 April 2012).
14. 10 minutes clip [online] available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvcNid87ONA (Accessed: 12 April 2012).
15. 3 minutes clip [online] available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrM8pdXeO68 (Accessed: 12 April 2012).
16. Solidarity with Belarus’ Information Office (2010) “19 December 2010. Chronology of event.” [Online] available at: http://solidarityby.eu/cat/chronology_of_events (Accessed: 12 April 2012).
17. Jutras D. (2011), Report of the Internal Investigation into the Events of November 10, 2011, Montreal, 15 December. [Online] available at: https://secureweb.mcgill.ca/dean-jutras-report/ sites/mcgill.ca.dean-jutras-report/files/investigation_report_final_version.pdf (Accessed: 12 April 2012).
18. Deleuze G. (1995) "Postscript on the societies of control," in Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press, cited in Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, p. 194.

Post Codex: 1) pic Alex Webb Magnum Photos: The Invasion of Haiti 1994
2) Media-fiendly bombs
3) pic LRAD sonic weapon
4) The Israeli Defense Ministry has contracted for the production of sonic-boom stun-guns called "Thunder Generator cannons," which they hope to use in crowd-control situations
5) The Turing Machine

14.3.12

An interview with German media theorist, Friedrich Kittler, who died on 18 October. By Andreas Rosenfelder @ Welt am Sonntag on January 30, 2011.

"We only have ourselves to draw upon"

An interview with German media theorist, Friedrich Kittler, who died on 18 October. By Andreas Rosenfelder

Friedrich Kittler lives in a solidly bourgeois turn-of-the-century apartment in the Berlin district of Treptow, not far from the Soviet War Memorial. His bookshelves contain first editions of the works of Stefan George, on his desk lies a computer magazine and a book on opening chess moves, plus a stick of Benson and Hedges cigarettes which has been opened. A few lines of programming language are scribbled on a scrap of paper.

There is probably no one in Germany who more embodies the cliche of the crazy professor than this literary academic, born 1943 in Saxony, with his shock of snow white hair and his full moustache. And there are no other humanities scholars who have ventured so far into the media thicket, writing about not only gramophone, film and typewriter but also electric guitars and artillery rockets. Since last year Kittler, who completed his PhD and habilitation [conferring the right to lecture in German universities] in Freiburg and went onto become a professor in Bochum and Berlin, has been emeritus. His manuscripts, diaries and letters, which also include correspondences with big name philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, he donated to the German Literature Archive in Marbach just a few weeks ago. And hereby what has been perhaps the wildest undertaking in recent German intellectual history achieves the preliminary closure of a lifework.

Welt am Sonntag: Herr Kittler, doesn't it feel slightly creepy to be in the Marbach Archive while you are still alive? It is a dead poets' society after all.

Friedrich Kittler: I'd rather not talk about the moriturus aspect, my mortality in other words. The people in Marbach were not interested in having a complete lifework, they wanted notes and drafts. And they want the electronic stuff, when I'm gone. When I was a student, my favourite lecturer always quoted Aeschylus: Knowledge is a torch, passed on from generation to generation.

Most German professors have trouble answering just their own emails. You'd already started tinkering with your computer in the 80s. Is an edition of yourcollected hard drives on the cards?

I have tried to save the data at least. But most of the old CDs are broken now. My boxes of notes, however, are still here in the next door room. Written on a typewriter in a most orderly fashion.

What will they mean for future generations?

When I turned 33, the age of Christ, I looked at my box of notes and realised how many topics I had assembled that I still wanted to write about. But this life is not long enough. All the colours that poetry has used to describe the moon, for example, are listed on A6 orange cards. I am consoled by the thought that someone who wants to know what my unwritten books may have looked like can reconstruct this pretty well, in case I keel over all of a sudden.

You should at least be able to reach Ernst Jünger's age, whose legacy is currently on display in Marbach.

Well, let's hope so. My doctors are happier with me than I am.

You have already passed on the torch of theory. You have produced some well-known students, Norbert Bolz for example, and people even speak about "Kittler youth".

Recently in Vienna a freshly baked doctor of philosophy waltzed into my hotel room on a Sunday morning and handed me his dissertation, which was all about my habilitation thesis, "Discourse Networks 1800/1900" ("Aufschreibesysteme" - lit. systems of notation). When I met him for the first time a few years ago, he made an orderly impression, very straight. Now he looked a little dishevelled. His work, by the way, set out to demonstrate that "Discourse Networks" is all about drugs, madness and intoxication.

Is his analysis correct?

In my understanding it has always been more of a cool, classical work. But it was certainly not bourgeois. And the Freiburg Germanists, who needed 13 appraisals instead of the usual 3 to rubber-stamp the habilitation thesis, were bourgeois to the core. From the after-work theatre visits with their wives to church on Sunday.

How much intoxication is there in your theory?

It's always difficult to find the first sentence. And with "Discourse Networks" where everything was at stake, namely my profession, it was more difficult than ever. So I rolled a joint and wrote the first chapter, about Goethe's "Faust", mildly stoned. My father raised me as a demonstration child, so I'd known "Faust" by heart since a very young age and didn't have to have to refer to the text once. For the later chapters, though, I had to do plenty of reading, and that was only possible sober.

Normally pop songs at the most are written under the influence of drugs, not essays.

Some people have suggested that Hegel wrote his "Phenomenology of the Spirit" under the influence of hashish. He consumed "strong tobacco", which around 1800 was a snuff infused with cannabis. Just like babies' dummies at that time contained laudanum, opium in other words. It was only in 1903, as Thomas Pynchon noted, that cocaine was taken out of Coca Cola. Pynchon also writes drugged on the one hand and with extreme technical precision on the other.

But unlike Pynchon you accommodated this into a institutional/university career.

I was always fascinated by the forbidden parallel lives of German professors. The philologist Friedrich Kreuzer had an adulterous affair in 1800 with the poet Karoline von Günderrode, which ended in a scandal when his lover killed herself. Hegel fathered a illegitimate son with his lodger in Jena, whom he so despised that the unfortunate boy signed himself up with the Dutch colonial forces and died of malaria in Indonesia. There are anecdotes about the great minds of the old Federal Republic which I could recount as long as your recording device has space.

You have written essays on Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix. Have you ever made music yourself?

In my flat in Freiburg I built myself a monophonic synthesizer. My friend, the philosopher Klaus Theweleit, used to play it with one finger. I took care of all the knobs and effects.

As someone who likes tinkering with computers, you must feel at home in the hacker scene.

I've been a frequent guest at the Chaos Computer Club. This little chip here is a Soviet ROM, a Read Only Memory which you can erase through this window here, using ultraviolet light. A lady from the CCC gave it to me as a decorative pin.

Hackers love conspiracy theories.

I share their paranoia a bit. For example, it was actually Alan Turing and the British intelligence agents who built the first functioning computers. But England was so dependent on the US dollar that it signed away all its computer secrets in 1944. The existence of computers was then kept secret from the rest of the world until 1974, or at least the fact that it was computers that had cracked the Wehrmacht codes. It was strictly forbidden to talk about such things so that the same algorithms could be used against the Red Army and the KGB. Truman and Churchill decided in Cecilienhof in Postdam not to let Stalin in on this. It was claimed that General Walther of the Wehrmacht Oberkommado had leaked the secret codes. But no such person existed.

Are you interested in Facebook?

No, not remotely. It gives me the uncanny feeling that normal people have become so unimportant for those in power and business that self-presentation is the last resort. When I arrived in California for the first time and went up Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley heading for campus, I passed a playing field full of exhibitionists running about. People dressed as harlequins begging for money or smoking dope. When I then entered campus and looked at the people there, they lowered their eyes. People either seem completely depressed or they put on a huge show and telephone loudly in the train restaurant.

Have you seen "Social Network" the film about Mark Zuckerberg?

No.

Basically, Mark Zuckerberg invents Facebook because women are not interested in him.

That leads me to one of my favourite questions: the connection between post-adolescent asceticism and innovation. Men today are able to father a child at the age of 13. In my generation most of us didn't sleep with a woman until the age of 20 or 21, only then exposing ourselves to the risk of having children. In the meantime we would come up with incredible ideas. The programmer Linus Thorvalds writes in his autobiography: "I never drank beer, I never had a girlfriend, I wrote Linux." When secondary school kids are already having sex at 14, then this period of latency shrinks. What this means for the culture of the future is an open question. Will it lead to another form of fantasy? Will fantasy disappear?

Does that mean that young geniuses need to be sexually undernourished?

This is pure empiricism, I am not trying to sell any Christian morals here. I went to school in the GDR, I lived in a village in Saxony where we stayed until we escaped to the Republic. All the other boys and girls in the village had their first sex at 14 or 15. None of them went on to become Linux inventors.

You were born in 1943 and your name is Friedrich Adolf Kittler. Was Hitler your namesake?

No. My father had to apply for special permission to call me Adolf. Otherwise every fifth newborn would have had that name. I'm called Friedrich after my uncle, who was killed in the war. And Adolf after my father. He was born on the day after the Battle of Lutzen, and was named Gustav Adolf after the Swedish king. My father suffered with the name Gustav and dropped it over the course of his life. It's the same thing with me and Adolf.

Did any one ever call you Adolf?

As a child I was just called "Azzo" which must have been the nickname given to my father by a woman he'd had an affair with. It was not until 1975 that I decided to go by the name of Friedrich to avoid having to explain myself. My nearest and dearest, however, still call me "Azzo". I've got used to the name "Friedrich Kittler", but when my wife just calls me "Friedrich" I still flinch.

It almost sounds as if your even your name is a complicated code.

My God, I was given so many awful anomalies at birth. I was left handed and had to learn everything new when I started school. Before that I was writing backwards. At home we were German National but in school I had to pretend we were communists. It all felt like a curse. Once when I was a child I opened up a biography of Frederick the Great and started copying a picture of a rider on a rearing horse. My mother looked over my shoulder and asked: "Why is your horse facing right when the one in the book is facing left?" It must have been a terrible shock for me, I have a blackout about it.

Many of your generation had major conflicts with their fathers.

Everyone has these sort of conflicts at some stage but I didn't have it bad with my father. I'm his child - I can't tell you to what extent I'm his son. My father was the headmaster of a large gymnasium school in Saxony. The Russians threw him out, so he had the whole day to teach my brother and me. The teachers at the village school, who had been handpicked as staunch communists, simply couldn't compete.

You've always been interested in the topic of learning, of literacy.

We have no other sources. We only have ourselves to draw upon.

Do you have children yourself?

No, but I married for the second time in 1994. My wife has recently done a magnificent job of looking after me during various bouts of illness. I was the cook in this marriage when we met. Now she cooks for me. Unfortunately since an operation on my digestive tract last year I have a terrible lack of appetite.

Much of your work has been about war and the media and even rock music as a byproduct of the war.

I'm still very much a child of the Second World War. My older half brother was a radar electrical engineer in the war, my uncle bled to death in a Russian prisoner convoy. My father was enlisted in 1914 as a bog-standard infantry man and in 1917 he was a lance corporal and military geologist. Obviously he was measuring out trenches instead of dying in them. In the Second World War, as a major in France, he was put to work assessing which bridges could be crossed by which German tanks.

You've have never had a weapon in your hand yourself?

No. My brother Wolf is a lieutenant in the Reserve Army with the communication units, and extremely proud of it. They wanted to conscript me in the third semester but it was not allowed.

Where does your keen interest in the V2, the Nazi "wonder weapon" come from?

As a child I always spent the summer holidays on Usedom. There I used to stumble across traces of bombs from the port of Peenemünde, which no one in the GDR was allowed to discuss. Later, in California, I read Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" and the scales fell from my eyes. On Usedom everything was covered in asphalt after the end of the war, despite all the British bombs. Even the smallest woodland track was fitted out for V2 transport. This screams out at any not completely blind ten-year-old: What's the mystery here?

You have never expressed an opinion on war, never written an anti-war theory.

At my one and only five-minute meeting with Jürgen Habermas, it was in Amsterdam, he took me aside and reproached me, saying my historical analyses were okay, but I had never showed any commitment to a cause.

In 1968 when the students in Freiburg were demonstrating against Vietnam, you brandished a sign with the Heidegger solution: "Being and Time". A conscious distancing?

Yes. As a child you cannot imaging how fascinated I was by Napoleon.

Are you also involved in the current, so-called "new wars"?

One of my PhD students is a lieutenant colonel in the Luftwaffe, acting commander of a squadron. He has flown Tornado jets, and now he's training people to fly the Eurofighter. At the end of May he's off to Afghanistan, and we have to get his doctoral viva out of the way beforehand. The man advocates agenuine warrior ethic. He says that the Bundeswehr officers have huge respect for the Taliban commanders and vice versa. This applies in part to the US army, but only in part. Because although the US army obeys the laws of war, the Special Forces come in at night and kill women and children.

What's your officer writing his PhD thesis about?

About the fact that it makes no sense to plan a war on a computer and to wage it like a computer game. In situ decisions cannot be simulated.

Does he want to return to a time when there were no computers?

He wants to return to Clausewitz and Prussian assignment tactics. These work on initiative. The commander outlines the objective and the soldiers find the means. In the US army, by contrast, it's all about drilling soldiers into slavish obedience. This is also described by the Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld: a WWII Wehrmacht soldier was ten times stronger in terms of fighting abilities than an American.

So war has nothing to do with V2 missiles and cipher machines?

It's about courage, if you can call it that. And the "Discourse Networks" were probably also an act of courage, I fear.

Recently you've moved your focus away from war and turned to the opposite pole, love.

I don't want to talk about love at the moment. I was not always so courageous there.

What interests you about love?

What interested me about love? The orgasm. When you see nothing but the whites of your partner's eyes, then you are gone yourself. "All men, in the vertiginous moment of coitus, are the same man," Borges once wrote.

Can theorists love?

My first marriage, which was sworn on life and death, shattered on my anarchistic research, and my habilitation problems. I was at Stanford then, with a ten-hour time difference, and my wife must have found out that a number of people in Freiburg thought I was nuts. When I came back, she had moved out. I was cock of the roost among young female seminarists but that was no consolation for a lost woman. All the happily married fathers among my friends say: They have the children, I have the books.

As a student in Freibug you travelled to Strasbourg to hear the famous psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan talk. Did you ever undergo analysis yourself?

Yes, of a completely run-of-the-mill kind with a charming psychiatrist who was much more interested in my ideas than my nicotine addiction or sexual tribulations. I believe he analysed away my writer's block. We were all in a bit of a state back then, because of the hashish for one thing. Once in Hamburg I had a horror trip, it came after we'd been drinking some very bad Portuguese wine. My wife thought I was briefly psychotic which is why I took to the couch of a nice old man who was very like my father. He was extremely talented at interpreting Grimms' fairytales and would always turn them on their head. He said that the evil step-parents are actually good and are trying to save the children from the family mire. The children should go into the woods, they can't sit around at home for ever. And you, Herr Kittler?

Isn't the allure of psychoanalysis all about fabricating literature on the couch?

Yes, and perhaps I have also done some of that today.

*

This interview originally appeared in Welt am Sonntag on January 30, 2011.

Andreas Rosenfelder is the deputy head of the culture pages of the "Welt" and "Welt am Sonntag".

Translation: lp §§ Pic: Soviet War Memorial

Read more on Sign and sight website

20.2.12

Matthew Fuller: An interview with Steve Goodman on “Sonic Warfare” (January 2010)

Image taken from Sonic Warfare blog

Matthew Fuller
An interview with Steve Goodman on “Sonic Warfare”

Beat Blasted Planet

Steve Goodman is author of “Sonic Warfare, sound, affect and the ecology of fear”, a book just published by MIT Press. Tracing the politics of sound in ways that develop some of the arguments made in certain branches of Industrial Music and in the darker waves of Techno and Jungle, Sonic Warfare proposes a vivid and demanding cosmology of sound in the present day, written in a style that mixes reflections on music, philosophy, technology, dance, media, politics in a way that is both speculative and in the thick of it.
Aside from writing Steve produces and DJs under the name Kode9 and runs the Hyperdub label http://www.hyperdub.net/

This interview was carried out via email here and there in the closing weeks of 2009.

Q: You set up dread as one of the key vectors in contemporary cultures of sound, whether this is in relation to the military use of weapons like the Curdler, used in Vietnam, or in Grime and Dubstep. What does dread do and how does it differ from, say, terror?

A: I find dread such an interesting vector because it describes one way that the affective tone of fear can be swept up in a regime of power, a regime that operates ambiently, modulating mood in the background and preempting the way in which the future unfolds. Terror is much more spectacular or sudden, whereas the way I understand dread it is more a continuous, existential environment, an ecology of fear that active or reactive forces can tap into like hacking into an electricity network and siphoning off power. So some of the military examples I give are examples of ‘soft’ power, non-lethal weaponry etc. that intervene into collective perception to change the way people feel by deploying ‘bad vibes’ as a weapon. And what do ‘bad vibes’ do – they make you take the future as a threat, as ominous, as dreaded.

Within music, it can operate in a number of ways. In the book, I touch briefly on the kind of ambience produced by overwhelming, suffocating bass. But more generally, I was interested in how ‘dread-full’ urban environments generate music cultures that take this affect, of anxiety or uncertainty about the future, and by distilling it in sound, make it aesthetically productive as opposed to existentially immobilizing. It’s clearly not the only way popular music works emotionally, but it’s an interesting one that brings the nexus of depressed urbanism and aesthetic innovation to the fore. Its a kind of affective realism that has got nothing to do with what is musically expressed representing an exterior world, but rather an affective tone that resonates, intervenes and transforms an environment. Different musics do this differently, and grime and dubstep are two versions of this process, as were reggae, jungle, hip hop etc. I suppose part of it is the ritualization of aggression, depression and desire into an aesthetic mode.

Q: A clear emphasis in the book is on tracking a real materialist politics of sound, this is a big difference to the run of the mill cultural studies approach which looks for signification, of sounds to be like something or to be about something. How does sound itself create politics?

A: Sound, as I describe in the book at least, creates politics primarily by activating space-times and forging or dispersing collectivity. This is a question of affective resonance. The scale which the book is primarily interested in is the vibrational. How does a deployment of audible or inaudible vibration attract or repel a population? Under what conditions do vibrations that cause discomfort or pain or unease switch from activating flight to activating enjoyment? Under what conditions do enjoyable vibrations become toxic? How do vibrations change objects and their activity within a space? So the book is trying to open up this terrain of a politics of frequency which I think tends to be neglected by the cultural studies of music, with its obsessions with music as text, music as sexual pleasure, music as identity etc. or by the phenomenology of sound, of listening. The book tries to install a notion of the vibrational infrastructure underneath these other concerns.

Q: The US Military seems to figure strongly in your account, with Vietnam, Noriega’s Panama, Waco all featuring. Is this something to do with the relative ease of access to information on US military operations, do they have a particular track record of interest and expertise in it, or are there other forces and histories that we should also be aware of?

A: As two of the most technologically sophisticated militaries, the US and Israeli armies do feature prominently in the book. This is partly due to a reasonable access to information on their operations and the fact they are obviously pretty regularly in the media spotlight, so to speak. But there are certainly instances from European military deployments. I think the key thing is really the way recent technological developments in sound systems resonate with a climate in which the use of non-lethal weapons (and invisible weapons) for the control of crowds are en vogue.

Q: What are we to make of the pop classics being played in the entrance to Brixton Tube?

A: I walk to Brixton so haven’t heard that for a while, but no doubt it is some kind of blunt attempt at affect engineering.

Q: You mention the ‘Mosquito’ device that aims to clear teenagers from urban spaces by releasing an unbearable high-pitch noise, one that is indiscernable to adults, it’s interesting to note that this ‘supra-audible’ sound is now being used for ringtones, useful in classrooms for instance
(http://www.freemosquitoringtones.org/teen-buzz/teens-treated-like-pests-fight-back/). Are there any other examples of such reversals in sonic warfare?

A: That’s why this is such an interesting area. Its not simply a matter of opposing military scientific research, but rather detaching, reversing and disseminating the processes that resulted from the research, just like how fashion reclaimed disruptive pattern material (camouflage) for the civilian world. The history of electronic music is littered with the abuse of, or at least symbiosis with, military machines for popular culture, from the radio, to the vocoder, to magnetic tape and so on. Certainly, some of the directional audio technologies at the heart of the Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRAD) used by the US in Iraq are commonly used in public spaces, from malls to museums etc. But the Mosquito example is key as they took what was being used as a weapon against them, an irritant to individualize them, to make them disperse, and turned it into a secret communication system.

Alarm sounds have this ambiguity – they must be, by definition noticeable, but the very fact that they operate primarily nonconsciously, i.e. their frequencies literally get on your nerves before you register the sound cognitively, means that they offer a potential for a very direct and immediate mode of contact. That’s why alarming, excitational frequencies like sirens and gunshots are so popular in the history of electronic music.

One of the musical configurations your propose in the book is ‘global ghettotech’. this is related to a figure you’re worked with for quite some time at Hyperdub, the maps of sounds moving between africa, the americas, the UK, and caribean. Global ghettotech draws in some way on Paul Gilroy’s image of the Black Atlantic, but working through synthetic musics such as crunk, dancehall, funk, hip hop, miami bass, reggaeton, grime and so on, proposes a new network based on sound. It seems this network is important
for the idea of the synthetic, the event of the party and a kind of hedonistic dark futurism. I think this really proposes a new figure of music and how it shapes different places on the planet and links them. How do you see global ghettotech developing? – and what would be its playlist?

That’s not my proposition or concept as such but is a tag put forward by DJ/bloggers/critics such as Wayne Marshall and DJ Rupture (other bloggers such as Woebot suggested the name Shanty House) to go beyond the essentialist, and generally lame concept of World Music, and attempt to capture some of the emergent patterns of sound system culture within the urban centers of the Black Atlantic and beyond. In my book, I am partly interested in exploring what a musical war machine might look like (in relation to Deleuze & Guattari’s concept of the nomadic war machine) in contrast to a sonic military machine. I suggest three possible interrelated but distinct versions of what a musical war machine might look like – they all involve, to varying degrees, some kind of simultaneously aesthetic, techno-social and economic (particularly piracy) decoding and destratification and a certain power of vibrational/rhythmic/tonal/vocal/economic mobilization. In differing ways, each one taps into a kind of popular avant gardism. These three versions relate to Afrofuturism (particularly as conceived by Kodwo Eshun), the hardcore continuum (UK tradition of electronic dance music, so named by journalist Simon Reynolds) and global ghettotech (which is almost like connecting together every country’s distinct version of the ‘hardcore continuum’, a term coined by blogger/ethnomusicologist Wayne Marshall that also resonates with the ideas of dj/musician/blogger dj/rupture ). Part of the problem of sonic war machines is how they are always doomed to be temporary, or whether ‘doomed’ is exactly the wrong way round, and if they have anything going for them at all as a model generalizable into non-musical realms, it is their apparent transitory nature, but actual sustainability through mutation and innovation.

Q: You trace the project of Rhythmanalysis from Dos Santos, through Bachelard to Henri Lefebvre, and claim that it comes to something of a dead end, in that it either emphasises continuity or discontinuity, flows or breaks as the basic units of rhythm. To get round this problem of either the beat or the break acting as a basic compositional unit, you propose a reading of Alfred North Whitehead’s work, using the idea of a rippling ‘extensive continuum’, of stable coherent patterns vibrating in, through and amongst each other and through patches of incoherency as forming a spatiotemporality of different kinds of thickness and intensity, offering that sonic warfare works directly at this scale of reality. This is a very compelling figure, but in its emphasis rather towards holism, how well can it make an account of discontinuities, or alternately, isn’t there a risk of working a politics of sound through an image of the composition of the universe in that it may tends to work against artificiality?

A: This whole section of the book revolves around me trying to unpack some of Deleuze & Guattari’s complex ideas about rhythm, particularly in A Thousand Plateaus in ‘On the Refrain’. Now, many thinkers have emphasized the Bergsonian current that runs through Deleuze’s thought. Of course it is there, but not in an uncomplicated way. At the beginning of ‘On the Refrain’ they refer to an essay of Bachelard’s entitled ‘Rhythmanalysis’, which in fact was a chapter in his quite anti-Bergsonian book the Dialectic of Duration in which he kind of argues for a discontinuous Bergsonism. So I’m trying to retain an emphasis on discontinuity, on breaks, on cuts that tend to get sacrificed in more phenomenological or analog fetishist Bergsonisms. But at the same time I found Bachelardian rhythmanalysis too obsessed by equilibrium, symmetries and hierarchy. (This is an example where philosophy can learn how to think better from currents in music than from itself) The question for me is not about naturalizing politics or capitalism or working against artificiality (that’s the last thing I’d want to do), but rather following processes through analog and digital realms without subordinating one to the fetishism of the other.

So for me at least, the cursory amount of Whitehead that I had read seemed to go somewhere else that both deviated from Bergsonian continuity (which seems in part responsible for D&Gs emphasis in ‘On the Refrain’ on rhythm being something that lies between the beats) and on the other hand the Bachelardian emphasis on moments or instants. Personally, I’m not sure I have the philosophical resources nor inclination to adjudicate between Bergson or Bachelard, but Whitehead seemed to be doing something quite distinct in the way he brought together the separate, distinct entities that compose reality (what he called actual occasions) and the processes through which they interrelate, change, perish and so on. In a couple of essays, both myself and Luciana Parisi have found this Whiteheadian concept of the ‘extensive continuum’ a useful way to re-formulate the Deleuzian/Bergsonian concept of the virtual at the same time as sidestepping the en vogue (at least within music criticism) Derridian notion of hauntology by other means, because we have both been more interested in futurity that merely pastness.

Q: You account of audio branding is very suggestive, in that it brings in a way in which desire, or different kinds of feelings, of excitement or enjoyment, are apparently manipulated by the audio fragrance of a brand. You link this to an idea of time, in which the future in worked on by ‘activating the future in the present’, how does this work?

A: Firstly, I’m interested in the auditory equivalent of deja vu, what I call deja entendu, the already heard, and the weird feeling of time anomaly you get when you hear a familiar sound to which you can’t fully attribute causality or that in fact you could never have heard before. So what happens in the split second when it feels like the sound is familiar. In that split second, the sound seems to resonate with the past (as a vague memory) but is simultaneously coming from the future (i.e. something new you haven’t experienced before). Its a weird feeling, which kind of freezes you or suspends consciousness briefly (Bergson talks about deja vu as something which enduces the feeling of being automated) as you get, to use Kodwo Eshun’s phrase, abducted by audio, abducted into a parallel world. So what I’m interested in in the book is to think through how capitalism inserts itself into these minute slices of time by setting up contagious webs of affective resonance (as well as the more commonly discussed associative chains) to attract consumers towards different kinds of behaviour. Its really just part of trying to understand how sonic branding has spliced 2 techniques of affective control: jingles (in which earworms are attached to specific products) and a kind of perpetual Muzak (producing an immersive mode of sonic architecture or brand ambiences). Brands now have an affective tone in addition to a look and feel. So the question I speculate about is how this mode of sonic capital functions alongside consumer profiling, directional audio systems and algorithmic music to produce a pre-emptive, predatory sonic capital that virally hooks you with vague and illusionary familiarity while purporting to offer up something new.

Q: Recently, some musicians were protesting a bit that their music shouldn’t be used as the sound track for desensitising and disorienting Guantanamo Bay prisoners. (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28144557/ns/entertainment-music/) What do you make of such protests?

A: Nothing surprising there I suppose as those musicians who are ideologically opposed to the war don’t want their music used in such situations, while others think they are helping the ‘war on terror’. What is more interesting to me is this strange reversibility between music made for enjoyment but used as torture, or on the other hand, the non-standard usage of sounds of war to excite people in a musical context. It’s a situation of mutual abuse that constitutes the sonic dimensions of the military-entertainment complex and confounds a crude behaviorist approach to the relationship between sound and the body. Sometimes I’ve been criticized as a behaviorist for drawing attention to the physiological responses of frequencies etc. as opposed to its cultural discourses, but there is a big difference between behaviorist science that seeks direct relations of cause and effect between stimuli and responses on the one hand, and on the other, theories of affect which are interested precisely in the disjunction between cause and effect, finding instead a potential in between which can be seized upon aesthetically in unpredictable ways.

Juliette Volcler - Il suono come arma. L’uso militare e poliziesco dello spazio acustico (Derive e Approdi, It, Marzo 2012)

Il suono come arma

Juliette Volcler

L’uso militare e poliziesco dello spazio acustico

E' possibile usare il suono come un’arma? Stando a ciò che è accaduto sul piano militare e poliziesco negli ultimi vent’anni, la risposta è sì. Dai bombardamenti di rock compiuti dall’esercito americano in Iraq all’heavy metal a tutto volume usato come strumento di tortura a Guantanamo, la funzione del suono per usi militari e di ordine pubblico è sempre più importante. Rap, metal e persino canzoni per bambini diventano armi utilizzabili a scopo repressivo, segnale della continuità tra industria del divertimento e industria militare.
Questo libro è una genealogia delle armi acustiche per come si sono sviluppate nel corso del XX secolo, tanto nella loro progettualità riuscita quanto in quella fallita. Ma, soprattutto, vuole essere l’occasione per pensare a come sottrarre lo spazio sonoro dall’inesorabile appropriazione commerciale e securitaria.

Juliette Volcler vive e lavora a Parigi come giornalista radiofonica presso due testate indipendenti.