Table Of ContentChaos Media
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Chaos Media
A Sonic Economy of Digital Space
Stephen Kennedy
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
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Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
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New York London
NY 10018 WC1B 3DP
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www.bloomsbury.com
BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published 2015
© Stephen Kennedy 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any
information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the
publishers.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on
or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by
Bloomsbury or the author.
Library of Congress Cataloging-i n-Publication Data
Kennedy, Stephen.
Chaos media : a sonic economy of digital space / by Stephen Kennedy.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-62356-706-4 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Mass media—Philosophy.
2. Digital media—Philosophy. 3. Mass media—Technological innovations.
4. Chaotic behavior in systems. I. Title.
P90.K4575 2015
302.2301—dc23
2014027508
ISBN: HB: 978-1-6235-6706-4
ePDF: 978-1-6235-6220-5
ePub: 978-1-6235-6724-8
Typeset by Refi neCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk, UK
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For Gemma, Lori, and Erin
And in memory of my brother Michael
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Contents
Preface viii
Introduction 1
1 Sonic Dimensions 25
2 Territories of Resistance 49
3 Echostate 73
4 An Invisible Exchange 107
5 Motor Cities 135
Bibliography 157
Index 167
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Preface
Th is book is about humans in digital space and how they exist in a chaotic
environment where time and space have become fractured and discontinuous.
It is about reality, and the real, the virtual, and the imagined. As such, it is a
metaphysical enquiry into where we are. Yet it does not privilege the human. It
recognizes and takes seriously the contribution of Actor Network Th eory and
the importance assigned to non- human factors in complex arrangements. In
fact, from a Foucauldian perspective, it engages with an enquiry that describes
the movement into the digital age in a manner that is mindful of Bruno Latour’s
methodology. It also recognizes the work of the speculative realists and object-
orientated philosophers in this regard. Yet it is also a book that is mindful of
acknowledging creativity, hence it owes a lot to Henri Bergson and Gaston
Bachelard and their attempts to resolve some of the lingering questions around
art and aesthetics.
Th is is a book about space, digital space. As such, it is concerned with
boundaries, thresholds and borders. It is about the inside and the outside of
space and place. Yet insofar as it recognizes the constantly changing nature of
space, time is never far from its thoughts. How we came to inhabit digital space
is an important question, and where this journey will ultimately take us is
maybe even more important, but that will have to wait for another time, as it
were.
Finally, it is a book about sound, about an analogical deployment of the
sonic as a means of accounting for the ways in which a ‘one substance
cosmology’ gives rise to specifi c events. One such event is the emergence of
digital space itself, and as a way of exploring how this came to be, and to
show how the variety of theoretical concepts on off er can be mixed into a
meaningful solution, the specifi c sounds of both Coventry and Detroit will be
triggered.
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Introduction
Th e sociological theory that the loss of the support of objectively established
religion, the dissolution of the last remnants of pre- capitalism, together with
technological and social diff erentiation or specialisation, have led to cultural
chaos is disproved every day; for culture now impresses the same stamp on
everything.
(Adorno and Horkheimer 1997: 120)
Do we now live in a period when this chaos can no longer be so easily
challenged?
We should be clear about the idea of chaos from the outset. When
Th eodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer questioned unfounded assumptions
about cultural chaos, they were challenging instrumental rationality and
the strange idea that where chaos was most visible, order and conformity
actually prevailed. Where are we today in this regard? In the 1990s warnings of
chaos, anarchy and offi cial impotence in the face of untethered technological
change were common. In actuality, such claims turned out to be no more true
than at the time of Adorno and Horkheimer’s writing. But what they meant by
chaos was something diff erent than the contemporary meaning being
employed here. Chaos is not used to describe the anarchic disarray of digital
environments but rather to try and show how patterning occurs, not as a
fi xed universal phenomenon, but as a relative continuity punctuated by
diff erence.
Political and economic forces continue to try and impose order on chaos
by paradoxically highlighting their own impotence, as will be demonstrated in
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