Text page
On Ballard, Alienation and Abstraction Sonicwarfare
"On Ballard, Alienation and Abstraction Sonicwarfare" routes capital through finance, infrastructure, or modernity-writing to show how abstract systems rewrite historical time.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
These texts describe modernity as a field governed by capitalized abstraction, infrastructural redesign, and the pressures of finance. Historical time becomes inseparable from technical and monetary process.
They work by connecting money, architecture, infrastructure, and world-order narratives to a broader picture of runaway modernization. Finance is treated as a driver of temporal and social reformatting.
That matters because the section is trying to surface the archive's most concrete routes into abstraction. Capital becomes visible here through circuits of money, urban form, and historical reorganization.
How to read this text
Read for the material carriers of abstraction first: finance, architecture, protocol, or infrastructure. Those details keep the page from becoming a loose metaphor of speed.
Watch how the text narrates historical time under pressure from capitalized systems. That is where the section's larger stakes come into view.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
Sonicwarfare April 5, 2016 On Ballard, Alienation and Abstraction Posted by sonicwarfare under Uncategorized Comments Off I recently was interviewed about J G Ballard by Tim Noakes for Rough Trade’s new magazine, and the result got heavily edited. Here is the full unedited transcript. What is your favourite novel of Ballard’s and why does it resonate with you? – Hard question, but its probably The Drowned World.
Definition · paragraph 2
Do you foresee a future where sonic weaponry is widely used by local police teams to keep situations like the citizen revolt in High Rise under control? – Ballard’s short story The Sound Sweep was a big influence on my book, particularly 2 of his speculative conceits: the persistence of vibration, and the neuro-affects of inaudible sound (what I call unsound) The sonic world depicted in the story is one in which sounds do not dissipate as usual.
Stakes · paragraph 3
But we are now living through the emergence of a whole new strata of technological civilisation and I think musicians and artist spend their time much more productively by engaging with the new situations that digital capitalism throws up in front of us everyday.
Stakes · paragraph 3
Sure, it was the dereliction of the dying industrial age that inspired many musicians in the late 70s, 80s and 90s so on. But we are now living through the emergence of a whole new strata of technological civilisation and I think musicians and artist spend their time much more productively by engaging with the new situations that digital capitalism throws up in front of us everyday.
History · paragraph 1
Sonicwarfare April 5, 2016 On Ballard, Alienation and Abstraction Posted by sonicwarfare under Uncategorized Comments Off I recently was interviewed about J G Ballard by Tim Noakes for Rough Trade’s new magazine, and the result got heavily edited.
Appears in sections
Capital, Meltdown, and Cybernetic Modernity Primary section
Capitalist abstraction, deterritorialization, cybernetics, and the archive's account of runaway modernity.