Chapter 7
Steve Goodman
THE ONTOLOGY OF VIBRATIONAL FORCE
That humming background sound is ancient—the ringing of a huge
bell. Exploding into a mass of intensely hot matter, pulsing out vast
sound waves, contracting and expanding the matter, heating where
compressed, cooling where it was less dense. This descending tone
parallels the heat death of the universe, connecting all the discrete atoms
into a vibrational wave. This cosmic background radiation is the echo of
the big bang.
O
UTLINING THE AFFECTIVE MICROPOLITICS of sonic warfare
demands a specifically tuned methodology. Drawing from philosophy, cultural
studies, physics, biology, fiction, and military and musical history, an ontology of
vibrational force can be pieced together that traverses disciplines.1 An ontology of
vibrational force delves below a philosophy of sound and the physics of acoustics
toward the basic processes of entities affecting other entities. Sound is merely a thin
slice, the vibrations audible to humans or animals. Such an orientation therefore
should be differentiated from a phenomenology of sonic effects centered on the
perceptions of a human subject, as a ready-made, interiorized human center of being
and feeling. While an ontology of vibrational force exceeds a philosophy of sound, it
can assume the temporary guise of a sonic philosophy, a sonic intervention into
thought, deploying concepts that resonate strongest with sound/noise/music culture,
and inserting them at weak spots in the history of Western philosophy, chinks in its
character armor where its dualism has been bruised, its ocularcentrism blinded.
The theoretical objective here resonates with Kodwo Eshun in More Brilliant Than
the Sun when he objects to cultural studies approaches in which “theory always comes
to Music’s rescue. The organization of sound interpreted historically, politically,
socially. Like a headmaster, theory teaches today’s music a thing or two about life. It
subdues music’s ambition, reins it in, restores it to its proper place.”2 Instead, if they
are not already, we place theory under the dominion of sonic affect, encouraging a
conceptual mutation. Sound comes to the rescue of thought rather than the inverse,
forcing it to vibrate, loosening up its organized or petrified body. As Eshun
prophetically wrote at the end of the twentieth century, “Far from needing theory’s
help, music today is already more conceptual than at any point this century, pregnant
with thought probes waiting to be activated, switched on, misused.”3
T H E O NTO L O GY O F V I B R AT I O N A L F O R C E
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An ontology of vibrational force objects to a number of theoretical orientations.
First, the linguistic imperialism that subordinates the sonic to semiotic registers is
rejected for forcing sonic media to merely communicate meaning, losing sight of
the more fundamental expressions of their material potential as vibrational surfaces,
or oscillators.
Despite being endlessly inspired by intensive confrontation with bass frequencies,
neither should an ontology of vibrational force be misconceived as either a naive
physicalism in which all vibrational affect can be reduced scientifically. Such a
reductionist materialism that merely reduces the sonic to a quantifiable objectivity is
inadequate in that it neglects incorporeal affects. A concern for elementary vibrations
must go beyond their quantification in physics into primary frequencies. On the other
hand, the phenomenological anthropocentrism of almost all musical and sonic
analysis, obsessed with individualized, subjective feeling, denigrates the vibrational
nexus at the altar of human audition, thereby neglecting the agency distributed
around a vibrational encounter and ignoring the nonhuman participants of the nexus
of experience.
Rather, it is a concern for potential vibration and the abstract rhythmic relation
of oscillation, which is key. What is prioritized here is the in-between of oscillation,
the vibration of vibration, the virtuality of the tremble. Vibrations always exceed
the actual entities that emit them. Vibrating entities are always entities out of phase
with themselves. A vibratory nexus exceeds and precedes the distinction between
subject and object, constituting a mesh of relation in which discreet entities prehend
each other’s vibrations. Not just amodal, this vibrational anarchitecture, it will
be suggested, produces the very division between subjective and objective, time
and space.
If this ontology of vibrational force can help construct a conception of a politics
of frequency, then it must go beyond the opposition between a celebration of
the jouissance of sonic physicality and the semiotic significance of its symbolic
composition or content. But enough negative definitions.
If affect describes the ability of one entity to change another from a distance, then
here the mode of affection will be understood as vibrational. In The Ethics, Spinoza
describes an ecology of movements and rest, speeds and slownesses, and the potential
of entities to affect and be affected.4 This ecology will be constructed as a vectorial
field of “affectiles” (affect + projectile), or what William James refers to as pulsed
vectors of feeling. As an initiation of a politics of frequency, it resonates with the
ballistics of the battlefield as acoustic force field described by the futurists. This
vectorial field of sonic affectiles is aerodynamic, but it can also be illuminated by
rhythmic models of liquid instability that constitute a kind of abstract vorticism.
This vibrational ontology begins with some simple premises. If we subtract
human perception, everything moves. Anything static is so only at the level of
perceptibility. At the molecular or quantum level, everything is in motion, is vibrating.
Equally, objecthood, that which gives an entity duration in time, makes it endure, is
an event irrelevant of human perception. All that is required is that an entity be felt as
an object by another entity. All entities are potential media that can feel or whose
vibrations can be felt by other entities. This is a realism, albeit a weird, agitated, and
nervous one. An ontology of vibrational force forms the backdrop to the affective
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ST E V E G O O D M A N
agency of sound systems (the sonic nexus), their vibrational ontology (rhythmanalysis),
and their modes of contagious propagation (audio virology). In its primary amodality
and secondary affinity to the sonic, a discussion of vibrational ecologies also helps
counter ocularcentric (modeled on vision as dominant sensory modality) conceptions
of cyberspace, contributing to a notion of virtual space that cuts across analog and
digital domains.
This ontology is concerned primarily with the texturhythms of matter, the
patterned physicality of a musical beat or pulse, sometimes imperceptible, sometimes,
as cymatics shows, in some sensitive media, such as water or sand, visible. While it
can be approached from an array of directions, the ontology of vibrational force will
be explored here by three disciplinary detours: philosophy, physics, and the aesthetics
of digital sound. In each, the stakes are fundamental. Philosophically, the question of
vibrational rhythm shoots right to the core of an ontology of things and processes and
the status of (dis)continuities between them. In physics, the status of the rhythms of
change, the oscillation between movement and rest, plays out in the volatile, farfrom-equilibrium zones of turbulent dynamics.While the modeling of turbulence has
become the computational engineering problem par excellence for control, within
the domain of digital sound design, the generation of microsonic turbulence by the
manipulation of molecular rhythms accessible only through the mesh of the digital has
become a key aesthetic and textural concern. Each of these fields will be mined to
construct a transdisciplinary foundation to the concept of sonic warfare and its
deployments of vibrational force.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
It attempts to retain the exactness of concepts while leaving them vulnerable, open enough
to resonate in unpredictable fashion outside of their home discipline. As Brian Massumi has
argued, such an approach, for example, forces cultural studies to become vulnerable to the
effects of scientific concepts, compelling change to the degree that culture is (as if it ever
was not) subject to the forces of nature. He calls such a method, following Deleuze and
Guattari, machinic materialism. Machinic designates not a technological fetishism but rather a
preoccupation with rhythmic relation, process, connection, and trade. But it is also inflected
by Baruch Spinoza’s ethology, Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy, and William
James’s pragmatist radical empiricism.
Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun (London: Quartet, 1998), p. 4.
Ibid., p. 3.
B. Spinoza, The Ethics (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1992).