Sound and Silence

Abstract

Critics and practitioners have struggled to formulate aesthetic responses to the mismatch, invoked by the Anthropocene, between human-scale frames and deep time and planetary space. Conventional cultural forms seem too linear or simplistic to address the epoch’s ontological, ethical and political complexities. Drawing on Anahid Nersessian’s “calamity form,” this chapter assesses how effectively sound’s relays of affect, from sensation to thought, might constitute an Anthropocene aesthetic. I look at punk—a music with surprising thematic as well as aesthetic parallels to the Anthropocene. Punk’s noise will be contrasted to silence (or empty space) which, while connoting “an alternative, ecocentric reality,” also paralyzes, by signifying unfathomable geological time and potential human extinction. Analyzing Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Spellbound” and The Ruts’ “Babylon’s Burning,” I’ll deploy Greil Marcus’ notion of punk as negation not nihilism: by exposing that “the world is not as it seems” (Marcus 2001, 9) noise can trigger a response to complex social, economic and now geological forces that are, otherwise, almost impossible to articulate. In the “Capitalocene” of ecological peril created by the same consumer lifestyles that punk, too, critiqued perhaps we need, once again, the affective agency of noise to shake us out of our complacency.