goodman_sonicwarfare

10 Chapter 2
and cultural meaning. 15 The linguistic, textualist, and social- constructivist
perspectives that dominated cultural theory in the 1980s and 1990s are of little
use to us here. Even Attali, against the critical musicological obsession with
the meaning or signification of sound, points out that music itself “cannot be
equated with a language . . . [because it] never has a stable reference to a code
of the linguistic type.” If it must be construed as a language, then it is one that
abandons narrative; it is not myth coded in sounds instead of words, but rather
“language without meaning.” 16 Affect comes not as either a supplement or a
replacement to the preoccupations of cultural theories of representation, but
rather as an approach that inserts itself ontologically prior to such approaches,
thereby examining the very conditions of possibility for a sonic materialism and
the ethico- aesthetic paradigm it would entail.
As opposed to sound as text, the dimension explored here is that of sound as
force. Sonic warfare then, is the use of force, both seductive and violent, abstract
and physical, via a range of acoustic machines (biotechnical, social, cultural,
artistic, conceptual), to modulate the physical, affective, and libidinal dynamics
of populations, of bodies, of crowds. Before the activation of causal or semantic,
that is, cognitive listening, 17 the sonic is a phenomenon of contact and displays,
through an array of autonomic responses, a whole spectrum of affective powers.
Sound has a seductive power to caress the skin, to immerse, to sooth, beckon,
and heal, to modulate brain waves and massage the release of certain hormones
within the body. Discussion of the physiological affects of sonic weaponry has
usually centered on intensity (acoustic power), the ultrasonic or the infrasonic;
the very loud, the very high pitched, and the very low pitched. At high sound
pressure levels, the ear is directly damaged. Need we be reminded that noise,
like anything else that touches you, can be a source of both pleasure and pain
and that “beyond a certain limit, it becomes an immaterial weapon of death. The
ear, which transforms vibration into electric impulses addressed to the brain,
can be damaged, and even destroyed, when the frequency of a sound exceeds
20,000 hertz, or when its intensity exceeds 80 decibels. Diminished intellectual
capacity, accelerated respiration and heartbeat, hypertension, slowed digestion,
neurosis, altered diction: these are the consequences of excessive sound in the
environment.” 18 Curtis Roads notes that “the force of an explosion, for example,
is an intense acoustic shock wave” and calls these potent frequencies and amplitudes
“perisonic intensities (from the Latin periculus meaning ‘dangerous’).” 19
A different conception of sonic warfare is perhaps suggested, in prototype
form, by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. Such a con-