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Unsound Interpellation

October 3, 2010

In reviewing the recent attempts to ground diverse sonic practices within their inaudible conditions as opposed to qualitative appearances (featuring Christoph Cox’s ‘Sonic Unconscious’ and Seth Kim-Cohen’s Non-Cochlear Sonic Art), I’m taken back to some notes taken on Steve Goodman’s Sonic Warfare. On the point of inaudible sonic influence, Goodman’s notion of ‘unsound’ maps out the extremities of audibility, focusing upon vibrations slipping into the imperceptible bandwidths of the infra and ultra-sonic. The approach taken to the sonic event is one of a functional infraesthetics, assessing its impact and affective implication within systems of somatic determination ahead of its specifically qualitative rendering, focusing less on sound itself―taken in a phenomenological sense―than on the difference that sound makes. I’m particularly sympathetic to Goodman’s notion of unsound insofar as, in accordance with this latter point, it positions Goodman’s sonic concerns beyond the audible without discarding the materiality of the sound event (which is a consequence of Kim-Cohen’s consideration of the sonic purely in terms of its “extensive explication”). In the notion of unsound we find an attempt to connect the bandwidth of audibility to that which resides beyond it in a manner that need not discard the particular or intensive force of the sonic itself.

Through outlining an ecological orientation around the ‘politics of frequency’, the emphasis placed upon frequency invites (without necessarily delivering) a more nuanced engagement with the problematics of noise that are so often limited to questions of amplitude within more conservative approaches to acoustic ecology. Goodman’s book is interesting for the invitations, openings and potentials that it identifies, more than the extent to which it develops any of its ideas in depth, reading more like a series of blog posts than an extended study. Before this turns into a book review, I should say that it is some of these openings and potentials that have brought me back to Goodman’s book this afternoon, in particular those openings into individual subjects that Goodman identifies as having been exploited by the implication of sonic affectivity within what we might refer to as the ‘repressive state apparatus’ (RSA, police, military, etc.), insofar as it operates according to violence. I’m inclined to put this in such explicitly Althusserian terms as it is on the question of ideology that I find Goodman’s argument most provocative, insofar as it is primarily concerned with ‘a model of collectivity that revolves around affective tonality and precedes ideology’ (Sonic Warfare, xx). Despite Goodman’s distancing of the ideological, it is on the extent to which his thoughts on the affectivity of unsound can be read as an opening onto ideology through sound that I feel inclined to speculate. By no stretch of the imagination am I an expert on, or even particularly knowledgable of, Althusser, but his account of a voiced interpellation creates a specific opening onto a politics of sonorities. Insofar as ideological interpellation, thought in terms of Althusser’s classic example of the individual and the police officer, can be voiced, while this example remains primarily symbolic, can we not conceive of an expanded sounding of interpellation and an ideological function of sonority that more thoroughly entails the concrete individual, defined as such through a primacy of affective capacities and a certain collective confusion.

In Goodman’s account of sonic warfare, the implication of both unsound and the audible within a broad understanding of the RSA would constitute its primary orientation towards concrete individuals, as opposed to the properly subjective (thought as synonymous with the concept of self), insofar as it operates according to a certain degree of violence, being articulated not towards a significant and symbolic politics of identity but towards a physical and affective capacity. Goodman’s politics of frequency, orientated around a primarily affective continuum, are directed towards what we might call the concrete conditions of the nonetheless concrete subject, to an individual dimension of the affective as opposed to a subjective domain of the symbolic. This concrete individual defines both a capacity and a connectivity, a being not yet set apart from others, from the world, a being confused and enmeshed. Where ideology is understood to operate primarily according to the determination of subjects according to a symbolic hailing, Goodman’s account of the implication of both a sonic virtuality and vibrational materialism within the repressive operations of the state reminds us of the persistence of a concrete individual that constitutes the conditions of the subjective, an affective capacity that remains, that is not sealed off according to the linguistic operations whereby one is ‘always already’ interpellated, according to which, from the moment of conception a symbolic identity begins to form, a symbolic determination awaiting the mass of flesh or somatic complex for which it prepares the ground or saves a place.

Interpellation entails recognition, the knowledge that one is being hailed, insofar as interpellation is thought to occur by symbolic means or by voice. This is expressed in Althusser’s classic example of an instance of interpellation, wherein an individual is walking down the street and a police man shouts ‘Hey, you there!’, at which point the individual recognises that they are the subject of this calling (and, therefore, no longer just an individual), thereby establishing a symbolic and political relation with the state in the instance of its vicarious enunciation. Where interpellation establishes a relationship with the state through symbolic operations, and in this instance by way of voice, therefore entailing a sonic dimension to this calling, we can conceive of such a relation being established without a specifically symbolic significance, a hailing without voice that nonetheless remains sonorous. Goodman gives examples of this, the most obvious of which, currently springing to mind, is the use of sonic booms by the state of Israel (RSA) against Palestinians living in the Gaza strip; military jets fly low over the Gaza Strip at speeds that break the speed of sound, releasing a terrifying explosion of sound that has both a psychological and physiological impact upon the Palestinian population, being detrimental to both physical and psychological health. Here there is a definite subjection by explicitly repressive means, a subjection that does not necessarily entail a recognition, a sounding that despite its lack of significance nonetheless has an explicitly political function, forcing a relation between the subject and the state, or in this instance a subject trapped between (at least) two states. Where the individual hailed in Althusser’s example responds through recognition and identification with the calling, as well as the physical gesture of a 180 degree about-turn to face the police officer, subjection according to the violence of affects responds less with an about-turn than a static motion, a vibration or resonance, a capacity that responds to a hailing without a voice. ‘Hailed’ by a monstrous wailing, explosion or piercing emission, the sympathetic subject of an excessive vibrational affectivity is subject according to a resonance inseparable from an apparatus of capture. While this focus upon the affective entails a certain violence, especially when subject to the rhetoric of sonic warfare, it is where an emphasis is placed upon frequency ahead of amplitude, and where muzak is considered alongside experimental sonic weaponry, that sound is considered more dynamically and according to a subtle and subliminal influence.

While Goodman’s emphasis upon a politics of frequency is, according to the distinctly negative elements of his argument, more easily allied with repression than that which is explicitly ideological, one of the openings his writing creates is perhaps onto an ideological continuum that operates according to a complex confusion of the ideological and repressive, blurring the distinction between the lists detailing the constitution of RSA and ISA, more than an obvious distinction along lines of force. For Althusser the ISA and RSA are not completely distinct, each containing marginalised elements of the other. In this minimal confusion of ISA and RSA, of the concrete individual and the concrete subject, we come to settle upon a question of determination, insofar as it is understood to be implicated within a functional ideology. This becomes a question of the determination of subjects according to their individual conditions, according to that which is susceptible to force. Here I’d like to draw upon a set of somewhat uninformed and oversimplified binary relations, that of, on the one hand: RSA, individual and base (related through force), and on the other: ISA, subject and superstructure (related through the more strictly ideological and conceptual orientation). Atop this set of binary relations, I’d like to draw on the work of another Marxist I don’t know enough about, following Raymond Williams in saying that:

when we talk of ‘the base’, we are talking of a process and not a state […] We have to revalue ‘determination’ towards the setting of limits and the exerting of pressure, and away from a predicted, prefigured and controlled content […] And, crucially, we have to revalue ‘the base’ away from the notion of a fixed economic or technological abstraction, and towards the specific activities of men in real social and economic relations, containing fundamental contradictions and variations and therefore always in a state of dynamic process (Culture and Materialism, 34).

It is in these terms, yet not restricted to the actions of men (that really need to be elaborated upon in more depth … ), that we start to get a sense of the ideological situation within which Goodman’s accounts of infra and ultra sonic determination are implicated, a situation in which determniation is revalued according to an expanded base. Through a more explicit acknowledgement of this minimal confusion, engendered according to the reciprocal determination of those elements listed above as being in binary relation―in particular the indivdual and subject―rather than preceding ideology, we can perhaps read Goodman’s argument as an attempt to understand a wider bandwidth of ideological influence, as well as a confusion of the individual and subjective, taking into account more thoroughly its implication within the material forms of existence and the physical apparatus of repression. In this way the individual is more thoroughly implicated within the ideological, rather than being figured as its mute conditions. Such an opening engenders a more explicitly functional understanding ideology, according to which ideology is ‘nothing but its functioning in the material forms of existence’ (Althusser, On Ideology, 45), an understanding that could be taken to be inclusive of unsound within the operations of interpellation, in addition to explicitly vocalised sonorities.

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