goodman_sonicwarfare

12 Chapter 2
carefully. Not only must the extensive tendencies of “sonic war machines” be
examined—their abilities to make bodies move—but also the range of intensive
tendencies involved in the deployment of sound system technologies—their
modulation of affective tone. While the centrifugal, repulsive deployment of
sound machines (cultural, not just technical) can appear to be the preoccupation
of military and police functions, it would be futile to naively celebrate the
centripetal attractive power of the sound system. The problem of sonic warfare,
strategic, tactical, and logistical, is clearly a complex one. In many compelling
sonic cultural situations, we have a mixture of both, where, for example, sound
is so overwhelming that we feel forced to take leave, but instead, resisting that
initial gut feeling, the autonomic or involuntary reaction to take flight, we stay to
enjoy. Conversely, a sonic fascism may occupy both poles of this continuum.
To help clarify this analysis, key insights on sonic media extracted from philosophy,
fiction, cultural theory, popular music, and the intersection of science
and art will be examined against the backdrop of military urbanism in order to
identify the new sensations mobilizing an emergent generation of practitioners
and theorists. Much speculation can also be found in conspiracy theory, which
is only natural when research related to the defense industry is concerned. These
sonic fictions and urban myths can form a starting point for a more careful
philosophical investigation. For, in addition to the paranoid sensationalism that
enlivens these often spurious accounts, they remind us that the sonic (and unsonic)
body is always poised precariously in a processual disequilibrium with
the acoustic environment, and that even minute perturbations of this environment
can set in motion resonant events and generate and provoke unforeseen
cultural mutation. Moreover, if Jacques Attali is right, then in addition to the intense
perceptual encounters sound system cultures can produce through music
and noise, they may also emit transposable and prophetic diagrams of sociality,
equipped with novel armories of affects, percepts, and concepts.
As already noted, Sonic Warfare will not attempt to be comprehensive about
the full range of sound- affect conjunctions but will instead concentrate on the
strange nexus of sound and fear. If Brian Massumi was correct when he argued
in the early 1990s that fear was our overriding affective syndrome, the “inherence
in the body of the multi- causal matrix . . . recognizable as late capitalist
human existence,” 21 what critical urbanist Mike Davis has dubbed the ecology of
fear, then analysis of these sensory tactics of affective mobilization and contagion
will only become more pressing. The sonic is particularly attuned to examining
one strand of this ecology of fear: dread.