Sonic Fiction

Holger Schulze

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501334801
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

Sonic fiction is everywhere: in conversations about vernacular culture, in music videos, sound art compositions and on record sleeves, in everyday encounters with sonic experiences and in every single piece of writing about sound. Where one can find sounds one will also detect bits of fiction. In 1998 music critic, DJ and video essayist Kodwo Eshun proposed this concept in his book "More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction". Originally, he did so in order to explicate the manifold connections between Afrofuturism and Techno, connecting them to Jazz, Breakbeat and Electronica. His argument, his narrations and his explorative language operations however inspired researchers, artists, and scholars since then. Sonic Fiction became a myth and a mantra, a keyword and a magical spell. This book provides a basic introduction to sonic fiction. In six chapters it explicates the inspirations for and the transformations of this concept; it explores applications and extrapolations in sound art and sonic theory, in musicology, epistemology, in critical and political theory. Sonic fiction is presented in this book as a heuristic for critique and activism.

1

Sonic Thinking

A Mixillogic MythScience of Mutantextures

This is a new continuum. You enter it right here and right now: a continuum of unheard terminology, of extraterrestrial locations and posthuman actors, connected through hitherto unknown threads, communicating and exchanging material carriers of information, of energy, and generativity in ways never dreamt of – with goals never thought of. A mythscience emerges here, as Eshun calls it in More Brilliant than the Sun, a new and apparently mythologically structured or grounded kind of scientific knowledge:

I like reading books about John Coltrane, when he’s sitting there studying music theory and he’s listening to music from all over the world and trying to reach this higher order. I like the universe. (Eshun 1998: 92)

These words by Nathaniel Hall a.k.a. Af Next Man Flip are cited by Eshun because they articulate a genuine epistemological desire that lies quite transversal to any established form of commodified knowledge transfer, any university giving out certificates these days, any widely acknowledged research discourse. Sonic thinking starts right here: where knowledge is not mainly gained by academic reading, by discussing, falsifying or confirming, by rejecting or redefining propositions on some object called sound. Necessarily, any sonic thinking that merits this name has to start with sonic experience and by engaging in sonic writing, studying sonic sensibilities that are submerged in this experiential realm. Sonic thinking means to ‘think with your ears’ (Auinger & Odland 2007), to ‘think with and by means of sound’ (Herzogenrath 2017: 9). For sonic thinking the percept of:

Sound is not merely yet another object for thought, taken in its limiting sense; rather, it is a demand posed to thought by that which it has yet been unable to think. (Lavender 2017: 246)

Sonic thinking therefore represents a truly ‘paradoxical ambition to think with, through and beyond sounds all at once’ (Schulze 2017: 218); it means to undertake rather ‘a study through sound than a study about sound’ (Papenburg & Schulze 2016: 1). So, does any sonic or mythscientific practice alone qualify already as a form of sonic thinking? Precisely this question was asked by its reviewers when More Brilliant than the Sun came out. Sascha Kösch, then editor of German monthly magazine De:Bug, for instance, concluded his review of the German translation of this book, Heller Als Die Sonne, with these words:

Strangely, ‘More Brilliant than the Sun’ actually functions as a long review rather than as a theory book, or as a prime example of the application of various theories, which are also circulating in music itself. (Kösch 1999; ¹ translated by Holger Schulze)

This long review, as Kösch put it twenty years ago, subsequently triggered a seemingly endless series of artefacts that are themselves again prime examples of the application of Eshun’s theoretical framework. The concept of sonic fiction is now circulating in experimental sound pieces, in music theory, in sound art, in sound studies, and even in political theory. It has proven to be a concept not mainly for scholars or students of cultural research or musicology, but even more so for journalists and music critics – Eshun’s main professions at the time of writing (e.g. Eshun 1992a, b, c, 1993a, b, 1995) – for cultural critics, for record lovers and club culture aficionados, for artists, inventors, and all sorts of thinkers and activists. This mix of all sorts of professionals and amateurs, of skilled and crafty persons who could possibly be affected and invigorated by Eshun’s writing and thinking, this mix of activities points already to the second main concept contouring sonic thinking and sonic fiction alike – aside from mythscience: the concept of the mixadelic or the mixillogic.

This concept is close to earlier concepts of twentieth-century vernacular culture such as the psychedelic, funkadelic or freakadelic, also representing one possible diffraction from defined logics – be they ‘Eurologics’, ‘Afrologics’ (Lewis 1996) or alienlogics – such as cartoon logic, magic logic, meta logic like transversal, three- or many-valued logic, even close to pataphysics. Therefore a mixillogic is mixadelic insofar as it applies steps in thinking that would not be regarded adequate in scholarly logic following either antique syllogisms or contemporary rhetorics. Examples of diffracting logics are of major interest for contemporary artistic approaches of all sorts and they cannot be restricted solely to music, to installation art, concept art or theoretical reflections: they proceed mixadelically also in this respect – joyfully transgression being one characteristic trait of mixillogics. It is an ill and sick logic out of mixtures. When applying mixillogic, it might not be clear from the start what would be the outcome of this very mixadelic endeavour. A journey into sonic experiences and sonic thinking is foremost then a journey into:

MythSciences that burst the edge of improbability, incites a proliferating series of mixillogical mathemagics at once maddening and perplexing, alarming, alluring. (Eshun 1998: -004)

Maddening and perplexing, alarming, alluring quite precisely describe the common reactions to such transversal use and generative misuse of logics, bending and transforming them, adding to them, breaking and inverting them in unforeseeable ways. However, mythscience and mixillogics will at some point – according to Eshun – arrive at generating a certain kind of material traces, sonic traces maybe, that can be described with the third core concept of sonic fiction in More Brilliant than the Sun: the mutantextures made out of mythsciences and mixillogics. Mutantextures are not just mutated musical or sonic textures. Strictly following Eshun, a mutantexture results from the application of a divergent mixillogic. The emerging mutantexture – in sound or in any other artefact – is the actual and physical proof that a diffracted logic was applied. In reverse conclusion, it is very unlikely that one truly applied mixillogics if this practice only generated the same well-known and outworn textures, representing all traditional and reactionary cultural values and hierarchies. Mutantextures are the material proof of mixillogics in action and founded in mythsciences. In this first chapter on sonic fiction I will therefore explore the detailed effects and practices of these three major concepts of sonic fiction: mythscience, mixillogic, mutantextures being constituents of sonic thinking.

The MythScience of Sonic Warfare

A mythscientific history of all warfare known to operate by, through and with sound could jump back and forth between the year 1998, the year 2400, then into 403 BCE, stop by in 1677, 1738 or 1842, jump forward to 2020 and 2039 – and finally fall deep into prehistoric, even precosmic times of 13.7 billion BCE. Such a book on sonic warfare would exceed anything known in the traditional sphere of historiography: because it expands into timespans and time travels beyond any dimension accessible to humanoid aliens like you or like me and our eight to ten decades – if we’re really lucky – on this troubled planetoid. Not one humanoid alien known to me or you could actually write such a mythscientific book about this unimaginably outstretched non-history; but still, one alien that goes by the name of Steve Goodman did write precisely this book. A book that – by standards of academic writing – exceeds many of the established and tacit, scholarly conventions and assumptions of many a reader. This book by the title of Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, published by the MIT Press in the year 2010, sets in with a sensory fiction:

It’s night. You’re asleep, peacefully dreaming. Suddenly the ground begins to tremble. Slowly, the shaking escalates until you are thrown off balance, clinging desperately to any fixture to stay standing. The vibration moves up through your body, constricting your internal organs until it hits your chest and throat, making it impossible to breathe. At exactly the point of suffocation, the floor rips open beneath you, yawning into a gaping dark abyss. Screaming silently, you stumble and fall, skydiving into what looks like a bottomless pit. Then, without warning, your descent is curtailed by a hard surface. At the painful moment of impact, as if in anticipation, you awaken. But there is no relief, because at that precise split second, you experience an intense sound that shocks you to your very core. You look around but see no damage. Jumping out of bed, you run outside. Again you see no damage. What happened? The only thing that is clear is that you won’t be able to get back to sleep because you are still resonating with the encounter. (Goodman 2010: xiii)

It is a nightmarish account, full of personal, all-too intimate sensibilities – usually not appropriate to unfold in academic writing. The sensible and poetic writing in this excerpt, unravelling a situated entanglement, it enters rather laconically the assumed immaculate clarity of an academic argument. Consequentially, this unsettling narration of an intense sensory experience gets demarcated from the rest of the text by a typographic marker: by italics. Surely, the publisher, the author or the commissioning editor, they all hoped that this typographic decision pushes this seductive narration a wee bit more into the distance from the reader; after all, it should maybe not contaminate the sacred realm of the argument too much. However, Goodman develops his argument consistently through exactly such a series of narrations and reflections, of such imagined and largely fictional scenarios (grounded, though, most of the time in historical research). The whole book is, substantially, a sequence of poetic scenarios and epistemic imaginations that escort and provoke the individual steps in the author’s argument. Goodman outlines the layered and intertwined structure of his book as follows:

The book is neither merely an evolutionary or historical analysis of acoustic weaponry, nor primarily a critical- aesthetic statement on the use of sonic warfare as a metaphor within contemporary music culture.… Ultimately, Sonic Warfare is concerned with the production, transmission,and mutation of affective tonality. (Goodman 2010: xv)

His concern with affective tonality, though, is actualized in a twofold way: in the object of his reflections – ‘Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear’ as it says in the subtitle – and in the way he proceeds in his reflections, the μέθοδος or method: a series of fictions affected by sonics; a sonic fiction. Goodman begins his first chapter with a reference to John Akomfrah’s video essay The Last Angel of History (1996), a major audiovisual attractor for any reflection upon sonic fiction. In Goodman’s study, though, sonic fiction is never discussed explicitly. However, he exemplifies, he executes, and he excels in it. Under the headline ‘What is sonic warfare?’ the author makes an effort to define his subject of writing:

Finally, the sonic forms a portal into the invisible, resonant pressures that impress on emergent cyberspaces with all of their problematics, from virtuality to piracy. With increased online bandwidth, sound has attained a more central role in the polymedia environment of contemporary culture, unleashing unpredictable technoeconomic transformations resonating throughout global music culture. Sonic Warfare therefore also offers some insights into the economy of attention of contemporary capitalism. (Goodman 2010: 13)

The sonic forms a portal into the invisible, resonant pressures that impress on emergent cyberspaces with all of their problematics: this sentence leaves the ancient and often deserted edifices of academic writing and their strictly propositional language behind, chuckling cunningly. Goodman slams the door – and jumps onto Eshun’s vessel. His bold, poetic and suggestive, imaginative claim (‘into the invisible, resonant pressures’) on the effects (‘forms a portal’) of a certain theoretical concept (‘the sonic’) is not founded on definitions of this concept, the effects and this claim. A conventional scholastic argument would require this, at least. Instead, by leaving all definitions to the imagination of its readers, this writing style proceeds poetically, narratively, maybe aphoristically. It sketches, suggests, it expands on an already imagined scenario in the mind of its author – and then elaborates even more on the repercussions and consequences this imagined scenario might have (‘pressures that impress on emergent cyberspaces with all of their problematics’). This writing is fictional and it is poetic. It is imaginative and suggestive, it is essayistic to a degree that its scarce non-essayistic portions become almost irrelevant. Goodman does not argue and then support his argument with empirical or historical examples, in order to finally interpret all of them to arrive at a desired conclusion. Goodman begins nevertheless with a statement in the form of an argument – but he jumps then right off as soon as possible into the narrative space of suggestive storytelling and poetic invention. He is narrating poetic concepts, he interweaves aphoristic reflections into the meshwork of selected propositional particles to in the end compose his mythscience of sonic warfare.

This writing style raises all the questions that recently have been and still are being discussed in the more advanced areas of humanities: how is it possible to integrate individual imagination and personal sensibility into research? What status of evidence could research of this kind then reasonably claim? What consequences would research of this sort have in the academic discourse? Doesn’t it simply abolish all notions of objectivity, truth, of evidence or of insight? The analytical approach by Franz Koppe, introduced earlier in this book (cf. the previous chapter ‘What is Sonic Fiction?’), though, lends us here a more precise set of terminology to understand what authors and researchers such as Steve Goodman are actually doing when writing this way. One might then ask: what need, what desire is articulated when academic language transgresses into fictional and poetic writing? It is, apparently, a materially affected writing that Goodman performs here – I’d even say: a sonic writing (Kapchan 2017, Schulze 2019b). Even more so, when he on the one hand explicates the current state of research in neighbouring research fields (e.g. spatialized sound reproduction, hyperdirected sound, weaponizing acoustic phenomena) – and on the other hand dives deeply into more speculative and imaginative forms of reflecting, arguing, connecting and even inventing future and past scenarios. Research in the technical and natural sciences on sound is his launch pad to project him to numerous concepts of cultural theory (e.g. by Friedrich Kittler, Henri Lefebvre, Jacques Attali or Paul Virilio), further on to artistic creations in literature, music and performance art (by J.G. Ballard, Public Enemy, William S. Burroughs, Underground Resistance) and lets him finally enter into even more daring areas of mythscience, he calls a ‘black science’ (Goodman 2010: 18). At this point, the concept of mythscience – aside from being an expansion of research conventions – obtains a truly generative if not explosive power (cf. Jasen 2016: 14): in Goodman’s mythscience some highly idiosyncratic and almost pataphysical approaches from artistic and aesthetic theories cover the same ground and are discussed with the same earnestness as any other empirical research and then-recent developments in the engineering sciences. Research is expanded into imagination, into idiosyncratic sensibilities, and into predictive approaches.

At this point, considering the afrodiasporic origin of sonic fiction, it surely is no accident that Goodman speaks of this mythscience as black science. The whole discontinuum of political, social, artistic and revolutionary denotations and associations that such a naming carries, leads on the one side to a diffracting form of aurality: a black aurality (discussed in Chapter 3 of this book) – and on the other side it also implies a differing form of scholarship, including and embodying forms of resistance: an ultrablack non-musicology (discussed in Chapter 6). The alternate histories, boldly presented by Eshun or Goodman, are then, to say the least, also inspired by a desire to transcend the traditional linearity of historiography: the linearities and atomistic arguments of white science or vanilla science. These white historiographic narrations (White 1973) indulge primarily in eschatological developments of progress, superiority, ascent and bonhomie and are legitimated allegedly by continued dynasties of researchers and the royal houses of academic institutions. Eshun and Goodman, however, write their own diffracting, historically grounded but rather idiosyncratic ‘MythSciences that burst the edge of improbability’ (Eshun 1998: -004). Alternate mythsciences ‘incite[s] a proliferating series of mixillogical mathemagics’ (Eshun 1998: -004). One of these mathemagics is then Goodman’s concept of holosonic control:

Holosonic control operates through the nexus of directional ultrasound, sonic branding, viral marketing, and preemptive power.… It appears therefore that a major axis of sonic cultural warfare in the twenty-first century relates to the tension between the subbass materialism of music cultures and holosonic control, suggesting an invisible but escalating micropolitics of frequency that merits more attention and experimentation…. The micropolitics of frequency points toward the waves and particles that abduct consumers immersed in both the transensory and nonsens...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Extradition: What Is Sonic Fiction?
• 1 Sonic Thinking: A Mixillogic MythScience of Mutantextures
• 2 Social Progress: Sensibilities of the Implex
• 3 Black Aurality: Alien Sonic Nontologies
• 4 Sensory Epistemologies: Syrrhesis and Sensibility
• 5 Acid Communism: A Haunted Utopia of Sound
• 6 NON: Ultrablack Resistance
• Inconclusion: Six Heuristics for Critique and Activism
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Imprint