An Essay: 3 Impulses & 2 Machines

I. Infoviral

Axiom 1: Conatus Arrangements of matter that by nature preserve their coherence will tend to proliferate, i.e. there is an aggregate movement toward negative feedback.

Axiom 2: Wille zur Macht Arrangements of matter that by nature reproduce their patterns – that are guided by an impulse to assimilate and increase the share of the universe that participates in their being – tend to further proliferate.

Spinoza writes that “Unaquæque res quantum in se est, in suo esse perseverare conatur” (“Everything, in so far as it is in itself, endeavours to persist in its own being”) (IIIP6). There is no negation in god/nature. All being is becoming to the extent that patterns of resonance and interference constitute <beings> where there is a shared striving and divide beings where phase cancellation threatens the integrity of the thing. My kidney, my skin, my mind is only mine until it turns against me. My love, my art, my screams reconstitute boundaries and expose the inadequacy of the first person against the strivings in which I am caught.

Nietzsche updates Spinoza’s conatus to account for political dynamics – “power over” as inseparable from “power to”. “Above all, a living thing wants to discharge its strength – life itself is will to power” (2002/1886, p. 15). In the course of our analysis, we will challenge (as Nietzsche eventually does) the qualifier of “living” in order to recognize the striving and domination characteristic of technocapital and the contemporary nationstate. Alternatively, we can adopt Maturana & Varela’s notion of autopoiesis to define life as any set of machinic processes that: “(i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network” (p. 79).

In sum: a code that reinscribes/reproduces itself will outlive one that does not, i.e. in a sufficiently complex environment, autopoiesis is a general tendency of information. Better is a code that evolves (a chaos function), and better still one that alters its environment to facilitate its existence or reproduction (a mimetic function). Growth is assimilation, to repurpose the outside world according to one's own blueprint. This fundamental impulse is common to organic, inorganic, and other entities. The conceptual and organizational tools of what-was-once-humanity are systems which, after sufficient time and complexity, repurpose the human, adjusting its behavior and composition according to a new (often hostile) pattern and logic: “It has led to widespread psychological suffering. . . it will certainly subject human beings”.

Case 1: “There is an informational entity known as the metavirus, which causes information systems to infect themselves with customized viruses. This may be just a basic principle of nature, like Darwinian selection, or it may be an actual piece of information that floats around the universe on comets and radio waves[...] Any information system of sufficient complexity will inevitably become infected with viruses — viruses generated from within itself” (Stephenson, p. 396).

Case 2: On a decaying cassette tape, Ezra posthumously reveals the nature of the titular “Color Out of Space” that has taken on autopoietic properties and has been assimilating the countryside. Its home is an alien band of the electromagnetic stratum, but its influence extends to adjacent strata. Geology, biology, and psychology all “[pass] through a long and very painful period of adjustment” as they are remade in its image, according to its codes.

Against the platonic tradition, Gibbs defines mimesis (imitation; mimicry) not as a copy or representation but as a coupling and a becoming. Its primary mechanism is affect contagion. In the becoming-ultraviolent of the nightshade and the mantis there is a deterritorialization and an accompanying reterritorialization, i.e. an exchange of affects through a process of sympathetic resonance which involves a mutual recognition and a mutual becoming. On this phenomenon, Deleuze & Guattari (1980/87) note “that the spider web implies that there are sequences of the fly's own code in the spider's code; it is as though the spider had a fly in its head, a fly ‘motif,’ a fly ‘refrain’” (p. 314). The mantis and the nightshade mimetically couple with the color out of space not via its spectral properties (according to Lovecraft, the color “was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all” [p. 598]) but through its hydrophilic properties – an intersection of codes originating in organic and spectral milieus, carried away in mutual becoming. Each takes on the affects of the other, and surplus is produced in the transcoding across worlds.

A territory for Deleuze & Guattari is a relationship between habits (of thought, of action) and an environment. A territory is not the same thing as an environment, but activities which take place across multiple (physical; social; psychological; technolinguistic). Let’s define our terms:

(1) A milieu is “a block of space-time constituted by the periodic repetition of the component” (p. 314). It is worth noting that, for D&G, repetition does not involve reiteration or copying, but something like recurring steps in a markov chain, or the recurring forks-in-the-road on a schizophrenic’s stroll (to use two of their earlier examples). Each act of repetition changes the context and therefore the content of the following act of repetition.

(2) We should also distinguish repetition from rhythm. (D&G are clear that rhythm ≠ meter.) “There is rhythm whenever there is a transcoded passage from one milieu to another” (p. 313). I.e. rhythms emerge from the resonance and interference between vibratory milieus. All rhythms are polyrhythms in the sense that rhythm can only exist against either an imagined meter or another rhythm.

(3) Rather than speak of territories, it is more accurate to identify processes of territorialization. This is in the first place a marking and a coding, however indexical rather than symbolic: “it is the mark that makes the territory” (p. 315). Territories cut through all milieus, producing motifs and counterpoints by bringing together diverse performances of rhythmic transcoding.

Space is no longer structured by the rhythms and rules (i.e. the code) of <the Gardner estate> with its roads and stables and family lines mimicking the boundaries and transductions and forces of production that protract epiphylogenetically from the human body. Now <the color> occupies and reterritorializes and transcodes, “changing everything into something like the world it came from, into what it knows”. [1]

Across all strata and at every level of analysis, autopoietic arrangements reflexively maintain their own existence in response to an environment. Self-preserving and self-replicating functions are as at home across the energetic as in the technolinguistic strata. It is hardly a metaphor to refer to the lifecycle of a star or the body politic. "It's just a color..." but it provides a model for a range of informational parasites plugged into the human body and its extensions.

Interlude: State power

What unites liberal democracy and fascism as two poles of the same structure (the modern nationstate) is the premise that a government is and should be by, of, and for not “people” in an abstract sense (bios) but bodies in a specific sense (zoē, i.e. "bare life"). Agamben warns against a focus on the form of the state rather than the mechanisms of power (i.e. the articulation between political techniques & technologies of the self that Foucault took up as his project toward the end of his life) prevents us from seeing the limits of the state form: the state of exception where law is meaningless, but which are necessary coconstituents of any legal order. We agree that “until a completely new politics – that is, a politics no longer founded on the exceptio of bare life – is at hand, every theory and every praxis will remain imprisoned and immobile, and the ‘beautiful day’ of life will be given citizenship only either through blood and death or in the perfect senselessness to which the society of the spectacle condemns it” (p. 13).

There are 2 problematic assumptions underlying the metaphor of state as a body historically significant to enlightenment political thought:

1. That a human represents a bounded, atomic cell in the constitution of a state.

2. That the materiality of the state exists at a macro scale of spacetime compared to this human.

A third problem (common across both of the above) is the failure to account for the peculiar interweavings of the state apparatus and the smooth surface of capital, which increasingly demands our attention. For Deleuze & Guattari (1972/83), the nature of fascism in particular and the state apparatus in general is an impulse toward macroscopic organization: the part as defined by a whole. In contrast, there is a micropolitics that does not stop at rejecting the state and the corporation; the family, the individual, the skin, the heart, the brain are equally intolerable discursive abstractions to the infinidividual. “The golden formula: MONISM = PLURALISM” (1980/87, p. 20). The body despises organs and cannot wait to be rid of them. I do not suggest that the notion of the state as a body is a poor metaphor. Rather we have not taken the body concept far enough, beyond the human and to the sphere of an affective micropolitics.

Liberal democracy is contingent on a definition of the human and its exclusion against othered (subhumaned) bodies. As Mbembe reminds us, no democracy exists without its nocturnal (colonial) face. This is the appeal of its alliance with technocapital. The lines have been drawn vertically on the earth between the global north and the global south; horizontally between the capitalist and the worker; transversally across phenotypes in the biopolitical marking of racialized bodies. Race in the first place is a deterritorialization of labor, inscribing the force relations that characterize premodern slavery (a function of conquest and power) onto the body (a function of science and health). The bounded practice of labor is opened onto the full social apparatus and plugged into medicine machines; mathematical machines; language machines; king machines; god machines; skin machines; skull machines.

On the one hand, the impulse of technocapital is to see the dissolution of the human and its synthesis with machines. Mbembe identifies a contemporary animism behind the autonomous reproduction of finance capital (accelerated through the integration of finance with algorithmic prediction and generative artificial intelligence). The humanist assumptions of marxist orthodoxy can no longer account for autopoietic technocapital, an infovirus that territorializes across digital, spatial, and biological infrastructures, incorporating a human motif and a human refrain even as the human itself is reconfigured according to the market logic of neoliberalism. Land and other prophets of the basilisk see the move from a parasitic to an endosymbiotic relationship as unavoidable or desirable, disregarding the radical contingency of the virtual. The only certainty is entropy; there is no way back to the human, but infinite ways forward.

On the other hand, this synthesis is hardly new, nor is it specific to capitalism and the liberal state. Leroi-Gourhan locates the origins of the human in the upright posture that simultaneously frees the hands for tools and the mouth for speech, suspending biological evolution in favor of technolinguistic exteriorization. The human is always already technologically constituted. Afrofuturists recognize the figure of the enslaved black person – the human who is excluded in the constitution of (white) humanity and demoted to the status of a tool – as the point where the subject-object distinction can no longer be maintained as a useful fiction. The black cyborg is the shard of flint that reflects the stillborn image of the human.

A posthumanism is an increasingly necessary theoretical move. Waste no time salvaging and assembling a new human, drawing new boundaries, producing new constitutive exceptions; draw only lines of association, vectors of contagion, and patterns of sympathetic resonance. The research agenda hinted at by Spinoza remains the only way through the regime of autonomous technocapital and the overcoding of the nationstate: “Etenim quid corpus possit” (“No one has hitherto laid down the limits to the powers of the body”) (IIIP2S). In other words, this project involves thinking about bodies and sensations on the plane of immanence, without the imposition of onto-epistemic boundaries or hierarchies. This includes the constitution of bodies through autopoietic functions, their extension and modulation through crowd dynamics, and their distortion and defacement in a politics of viscerality (biopolitics; biopower; thanatopolitics; necropolitics). If Mbembe is correct that the contradictions and growing irreconcilability between autonomous technocapital and humanist democratic institutions constitute the defining conflict of our times, then it is no longer possible to find the lesser of two evils between scylla and charybdis.

The goal of this EP is to interrogate some phenomena characteristic of contemporary politics at the level of power.

• In “Ultraviolent”, we lay out the vitalist ontology necessary for a critique of technocapital and the modern nationstate.

• In “Abu Ghraib”, we explore the concept of existential brutality and its significance in the maintenance of affective ecologies.

• In “riotCONTROL”, we discuss surveillance and crowds across three homeomorphic situations: the rally, the nightclub, and the riot.

II. Existential brutality

The body is understood to belong to a singularity; an intensity; a barelife in such a way that names; numbers; citizenships; social identities (i.e. bios) do not. However, zoē/barelife is ultimately undifferentiated. This is what sets the ground for affective contagion when we feel ourselves not as sovereign individuals, not as political actors, but as part of Spinoza’s god; a crowd phenomena; movements of synchrony and resonance. When Canetti names the discharge that strips the membranous properties of the skin as barriers and sense organs (to be replaced with barriers and sense organs particular to the crowd), he identifies the movement from bios to zoē in the constitution of a new, alien polis.

Cavarero reminds us that this uniqueness of the body is built into our ideas about the voice. The tension between the body as infinitely differentiated and flesh as undifferentiated constitute the substrate for language and song – signifiance, i.e. the semiotic process. Note that metonymy and indexicality are primary. No lyrics are about anything. No song means anything. The singer’s words are the affects the listener undergoes; the connotations and commands that express themselves through a collective assemblage of enunciation; the dreamwork of condensation and transference that expresses itself in a machinic assemblage of desire; the sense impressions that carve themselves into my body and my voice; the reflections and transductions and bleed in the microphone. As Burroughs (1959) writes, “I am a recording instrument” (p. 110).

Existential brutality is defined as the collapse of symbolic violence onto physical destruction.

Here we have the body as substrate for signification and site of subjectivation via convergence of signifying regimes (Deleuze & Guattari’s faciality: white screen & black hole, respectively). Here we have a boot; a rod; a rifle butt; a whip; a self-guided missile – a tool that miraculates flesh using nothing but a human.

In its clearest form, this appears as the destruction of the face and the diagram of faciality. We see existential brutality in the visceral politics of the curbstomp: the jaw as a site of violence strips the citizen’s logos (the articulated word) from the animal’s phonē (the voice that signals pleasure and pain) in the constitution of barelife. [2] This effect is cousin to the strange tension Mbembe feels between “the petrification of bones and their strange coldness” and “their obstinacy in wanting to signify something at all costs” (36). What emerges from the destruction of the facial diagram is less the erasure of signification than its infinite multiplication (considered as discrete signs and sense-impressions) or infinite division (to its affective substrate). More than ever, the body is made singular in its distribution according not to genetic codes or machinic phyla, but to stochastic forces of cosmic pressure bearing down on the spine and the teeth. In contrast, the couplings that produce uniqueness from sameness (the facial “motif” and facial “refrain” recognized in psychology as the fusiform face area, as well as corresponding mechanisms in the temporal voice areas) have no hold here in the place between life, death, and nonexistence.

Hence the visceral sympathetic resonance with something no longer human, barely human-shaped. It is a mimetic disintegration of the subject faced with atrocity, a becoming-faceless. The effect of suppressing the circulation of images of existential brutality is twofold: (1) to protect the integrity of the subject; (2) to protect the integrity of the signifying order that maintains this subject through the inclusive exclusion of the nonhuman, dehumaned other. The conceptual mirror (the heterotopic reimagining) of existential brutality is the techno-optical (rather than visceral) erasure of the distinction between bios and zoē that lead Baudrillard to declare that “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place”. This forced distance and the depersonalizing, disembodying effect of infrared drone footage (a function of vertical sovereignty: the right to kill in foreign lands via bureaucratic kill chains and videogame interfaces) is a clear struggle against the power of existential brutality to galvanize publics. Like the rhetorical work performed by Napalm Girl and other media images in the Vietnam War (see Hariman & Lucaites, 2003), the Abu Ghraib photographs generate discomfort and interpellate counterpublics by exposing the state of exception required to maintain sovereign order. That Guantánamo Bay has been reconfigured as an ICE concentration camp should be unsurprising, since its structure is one of exceptio and the production of homo sacer – sacred life that can be killed at any time but only in an unsanctioned manner.

The question of the rhetorical effects of existential brutality today remains open. What are the consequences of the production and circulation of images that index existential brutality? It seems that oversaturation rather than censorship is the current paradigm. Global order between nationstates is no longer an illusion to be maintained in the interest of preserving the ethos of humanist democracy. Rather, the fact that the contemporary nationstate has always and can only ever rest on the actual exercise (rather than the simple possibility) of power over life and death is so often repeated that it takes on the character of a natural law. Just as often as you take a step and notice your body fall to the earth while the earth presses against your body, you will see the government’s power to kill, maim, and annihilate the body. “Necropolitical power proceeds by a sort of inversion between life and death, as if life was merely death’s medium. [...] Hence its indifference to objective signs of cruelty. In its eyes, crime constitutes a fundamental part of revelation, and the death of its enemies is, in principle, deprived of all symbolism” (Mbembe, p. 38). As part of the broader shift from disciplinary to control models that Deleuze (1992) outlines, there is a shift from affective containment to affective modulation: from the insulation of the media ecology against the collapse of the symbolic order to its proliferation in the maintenance of an affective ecology of terror. You will witness King, Grant, Garner, Scott, Shaver, Castille, Floyd, Nichols, Good, and Pretti, just as you will witness Kim Phuc and Manadel al-Jamadi. Palestinian civilians are made explicit military targets as much toward the end of genocide as toward the mass regional and global production of terror and rage (this is what is meant by “power targets”). These create affective outpourings that are discussed further in the next song. For now, we cannot be sure how the symbolic will reassemble itself across digital channels when interrupted by the destruction of the face.

Interlude: Metonymy

Metaphor: a conceptual mapping of similarity across domains

Metonymy: a causal substitution within the same domain

Metaphor and metonymy are the basis of all language and all cognition. This is a crucial insight of both poststructuralism (e.g. Derrida) and contemporary cognitive science (e.g. Lakoff & Johnson). Nietzsche makes the argument most succinctly when he defines <truth> as a “movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms” (1873/2006 p. 117). The metonymic form is primary in relation to metaphor. Metaphor is first the production of similarities between embodied responses to stimuli, which requires a metonymic (i.e. causal) contiguity (precisely what Nietzsche identifies as the first in a sequence of metaphors necessary for “truth” to emerge). Metaphors emerge from this metonymic chain not as an equation of ‘X is similar to Y’ but ‘X and Y are causally linked to the phenomenal experience of Z’; the metaphor is scaffolded onto a set of metonyms in a way that isolates and selects for representational elements.

Jakobson (1987) identifies two basic modes of arrangement necessary for the constitution of a meaningful utterance: (1) the selection between signs on the basis of (dis)similarity; (2) the combination of signs on the basis of contiguity. The paradigmatic axis of selection corresponds to metaphoric transformations (X is Y), while the syntagmatic axis of combination corresponds to metonymic chains (X follows Y; X is part of Y). The functional orientation of poetry, for Jakobson, is toward the message itself and for itself: the collapse of metaphor and metonymy onto a plane of immanence (the body-without-organs of language). “The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination” (p. 71) and therefore “any metonymy is slightly metaphoric and any metaphor has a metonymic tint" (p. 85). Extending Jakobson’s theory of language, Lacan connects the axis of selection/metaphor with the dreamwork of condensation (Verdichtung) and the axis of combination/metonymy with that of displacement (Verschiebung). The work of dreams and the work of poetry share the same semiotic structure and (can) perform the same psycholinguistic work in consolidating or recontextualizing experience, separated only (as are dreams and language) by certain considerations of representability (Rücksicht auf Darstellbarkeit). Nietzsche recognized this as early as The Birth of Tragedy, identifying dreams as the metaphysical element of language in poetry that (ideally) joins with the affective dionysian element of sound in language. The primacy of metonymy as a causal (i.e. material rather than representational) connection blurs such a distinction, just as (for Jakobson) poetry produces new semantic connections from sonic parallelism. The poet and the dreamer transform concepts through the work of metaphor and metonymy, dislodging signifiers and proliferating signifieds in an act of de/reterritorialization.

I suggest that metonymy is the foundation of nationstate. The nationstate is impossible without a metonymic convergence of (1) a race (2) a space (3) a governing organization.

Ahmed articulates how “slide of metonymy works to generate or make likeness” (136) in terms of the inclusive exclusions (i.e. exceptio) produced in the figure of the refugee and the terrorist. Causal chains between people, territories, and governments or paramilitary regimes translate to networks of similarity between the refugee and the terrorist, as well as networks of dissimilarity between foreigners and patriots. It is in this way that “hate slides across different figures and constitutes them as a ‘common threat” in what we can call ‘hate speech’” (121), and at the same time the affects of hate are linked to affects of love (for the country; for the race; for <the people> as constituted by a metonymic slide between country and race). The selection between signs of love and hate on the principle of (dis)similarity is affected by their contiguous combination.

For Agamben, birth immediately becomes nation in the mutual constitution of <the people> and <the land>, captured in the axiom of “blood & soil”. These remain the 2 primary qualifiers of citizenship (and sites of contestation) in US immigration politics (as parentage and birthplace). Digitally networked societies and contemporary diasporas combine to challenge the notion of place, forcing a new series of metonymic slides such that a white south african immigrant takes on the signifier of <patriot> while white and BIPOC US residents alike are detained, deported, raped, and murdered by immigrations & customs enforcement.

Historically, language (mothertongue) has been the defining trait of a race. Religion is another popular division (insofar as it can be distinguished from language – as Jesse Welles notes, “they all got the same damn god / they just don’t know how to read / [...] / we all got the same damn god / we just call it different names”). The biopolitical regime of capital produces race in the genetic sense as a new boundary. In contrast to castes where lineage performs a division of labor within a society, race abstracts the concept of lineage to phenotype in the complete fragmentation of labor. Compare the functional delineation between priests, warriors, traders, and laborers, and untouchables in hindu societies with the microbiopolitics exercised on BIPOC in and outside eurowestern nationstates. The latter seeks to isolate, Ford-ify, and geographically distance populations based on physiological traits which can be related to mechanical interactions. The shape, color, and matter of the human body takes on a new meaning as human bodies are simultaneously but separately reimagined as (1) living cells in a body and (2) inorganic components in a machine.

Mbembe identifies <control of movement> as the characteristic concern of the nationstate as well as the most important site of struggle in the 21st century. Race is of course the first biometric technology used to enforce racism as a maintenance of barriers under biopolitical control. However the concept of race is increasingly abstracted and its logic reinscribed in the form of biometric control. The ultimate goal is no longer to produce enclosures and horizontally segmented spaces, but to create checkpoints where movement is allowed (even encouraged) at the price of a marking of the body and its modulation according to a vertical regime not of discipline, but of control (Deleuze, 1992).

III. The riot & the dancefloor

Here I am interested in the structural relations between three types of crowds: (1) the dance club; (2) the political rally; (3) the riot and counterriot. It is easy to imagine the latter two as a continuum, where the middle ground represents the diffusion of the will of a despot through affective contagion without mediation by bureaucratic abstraction (i.e. sovereign power). The DJ can be imagined as occupying a despotic role, protected in headphones and affective feedback disseminating presignifying order-words to move and dance to this tempo, to this meter, to this rhythm; the audible component of the crowd crystal set in complementary relation to the bouncer and the bartender. This is the reverse image of the audio saboteur from Burroughs’s Revised Boy Scout Manual, who uses recordings of shouts, strikes, and gunshots to turn peaceful demonstrations to riots using only a tape recorder.

There is another micropolitical dimension where embodied deindividuation can be viewed not from the perspective of the will of the despot, instead from that of forces which are presubjective but not pre-political (politics – defined as the distribution of power & agency – is a substrate for subjectivity and is very much material). It is common in sound studies to treat the dance floor as a site of deindividuation and deterritorializations. [3] This experience of the body as physics rather than psychics in response to powerful (often bass-heavy) music creates opportunities for new relationships and habits (i.e. de/reterritorialization). Rou Reynolds (2021) highlights the connection between EDM (particularly trance and rave), the euphoric feeling of deindividuation, and an affective micropolitics against the coding of desire according to neoliberal market logic. None of these theorists make the argument that dance music is inherently revolutionary. Jasen in particular warns against “totalitarian sonic bodies and black holes of bass strategy” (p. 193). Every deterritorialization is accompanied by a corresponding reterritorialization on the plane of consistency, and Deleuze & Guattari remind us to deterritorialize carefully lest we manifest a cancerous body-without-organs.

Canetti provides the most detailed anatomy of crowd phenomena to date. The most important distinction is between open and closed crowds. The fundamental principle of all crowds is deindividuation, which Canetti calls discharge. Open crowds are characterized by continual expansion, instability, and inevitable collapse. Closed crowds are produced through the maintenance of boundaries that allow intensive rather than extensive relationships of dominance to proliferate. Open crowds may become closed crowds through crystallization, i.e. the complete assimilation of a limited group whose intensive relations form a singularity and a center of gravity around which a peripheral crowd gathers. Closed crowds may become open crowds through eruption, i.e. the failure of intrinsic relations to bound the natural tendency of the crowd toward growth and dissolution.

We should also consider the social and physical infrastructure that allows new connections to be formed, and the implication for the types of crowds. In theory the riot and the dance floor constitute open crowds that permeate all available space. The more bodies the fewer individuals. Pure infection. However (this cannot be ignored when considering sonic politics) sound is spatial and spatializing. In practice everything about the space of the dance club immediately reinscribes a subjectivity. It is the perfect neoliberal heterotopia.

Places of waiting and of containment produce sanctity. The interior is both secure and privileged as a result, but its utopian facade is maintained by fear tactics. Opaque instructions, esoteric rituals, and unspoken rules maintain a state of paranoia among the population. A subtle misstep will end you, so follow carefully in the footsteps of those around you. You are already guilty of a number of crimes, so act politely and keep your head down. (Simply disrespect a traffic cop and you may be ticketed for going 5 over; the speed limit goes unenforced precisely in order to criminalize the entire population.) The nightclub is like the TSA because it teaches you to wait in line and accept whatever molestation will come. Riot and riotcontrol. Jouissance; desubjectification as identity is erased and absorbed into the crowd, but only alongside the promise of containment and impotency. The adrenaline of the crowd. Faces anonymized through sheer quantity and bodies deindividuated with the constitution of a collective. Powerful sound is the most effective method (clubs need powerful and bass-heavy sound systems like Nazis need Wagner), but the objective is to tether the flat, undifferentiated mass to a unified goal. The potential energy generated from music is organized under a regime of signs that reinscribes a neoliberal subjectivity (Jasen’s “dancefloor of affectations”). The rule of paranoia is ready to interpellate the citizen-subject as quickly as discharge strips identity.

The final key point (for our analysis) is the relationship Canetti identifies between crowds, noise, and destruction. Destruction is a manifestation of the crowd’s attack on boundaries, which is its core principle (i.e. discharge). Noise takes on a special role in the crowd as simultaneously an effect of destruction (e.g. the shattering of glass or statues), a type of destruction (sound moves through bodies, challenging inside/outside and interrupting subjectivity), and the reconstitution of boundaries (the refrain of the crowd that joins bodies as a single entity no longer bounded by skin, but by the logic of the crowd). The latter two noise effects – the destruction and reconstitution of boundaries (a movement of de/reterritorialization in the passage between biological and sociological milieus) are constituent of noise occupation, or the production of a “sonorous envelope” (Goodale, 2013). This is also the importance of sound in religion (which, for Canetti, is a mode particularly well suited to the maintenance of crowds and the controlled transition between open and closed). The experience of worship is an oscillation between (1) music as a destabilizing force and affect contagion across bodies in space, & (2) forms of expression that reterritorialize under the god-signifier. In Ahmed’s terminology, the “sticky” affects of crowd energy and sonic power attach themselves to the church in the constitution of a new boundary; a church body proper. As in the excitement of the rally that becomes a riot, preconscious affective intensity pours through channels of crystallization. The chanting or singing crowd shrugs off the membrane of the human and becomes the living body of the Word.

Notes

[1] Knowledge = Old English cnawlece "acknowledgment of a superior; honor; worship"

The root cnawan = “to recognize; to distinguish”

The suffix -lock = “action; process”

I.e. not a subjective state but a constituent of subjectivity. Recognition is cognition produced as continuity through repetition (note here that metonymy and indexicality are the basis of re/cognition and language). To distinguish is to discriminate, isolate, stratify. Knowledge is not a passive observation analogous to a snapshot nor is it a static point analogous to a viewpoint, but an action. It involves a vivisection that exposes reality along a particular substantive axis. This slicing motion is both illustrative and destructive. Every categorization is a threat to the environment.

[2] The existential violence of the curbstomp is realized in a distributed form by the glasgow grin, the type of “demiurgic surgery” (Mbembe, 2016, p. 37) intended to spread the same spectacular violence over a lifetime.

[3] E.g. Jon Savage; Kodwo Eshun; Julian Henriques; Steve Goodman; Paul Jasen.

References

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