SONIC WARFARE

by Adeena Karasick

Sonic Warfare negotiates the fraught reality of artificial intelligence and its impact on contemporary philosophy, linguistics and politics, through a language heightened in interlingual insurrection. When presence is relational and there is no fixed, locatable Truth, everything is haunted by repetition, substitutions and veiled surveillance. Within this coded communication, Sonic Warfare wryly examines the public conversation about one of the existential challenges facing humanity today.

Sonic Warfare collages together AI technology, Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of rhizomes, Kabbalah to induce self-doubt, distorted thinking, and disorientation in readers. In the way Nan Goldin draws on the metaphor of the Stendhal Syndrome (a psychosomatic condition of dizziness, confusion or even hallucinations triggered by exposure to intense beauty), Sonic Warfare emits ultra-high frequency blasts of vibratory, infrasonic, linguistic “warfare” to vertiginously reorient readers towards new socio-semantic perceptions of meaning and being.

In Karasick’s mashup of digital and worldly realisms, the visual form of the letter on the screen is fully material even though that letter is stored as binary digits with no apparent tactile presence. Sonic Warfare’s vision of technology is a conduit to humanity’s increasingly intense and problematic connection to our worlds, animate and otherwise, reminding us how every surface vibrates and internally pulses with energy. Karasick’s poetry assigns a similar job of engaging the full range of human interaction with the world through the technology of language.

Praise for Sonic Warfare

A poetry of furious philosophical energy and exquisite sonic revolt against the presiding dominations of the multitude, our bodies and our words.    
– Carla Harryman

Sonic Warfare is an implosion in a Torah factory: textual shards metamorphose into coloratura whirligigs, creating textual topiaries of mercurial revolt. The symbolic disorder is hereby warned: there are fireworks at the end of the LLM storm. Hold tight!  
– Charles Bernstein

Adeena Karasick’s Sonic Warfare reads like the explosive scrying of a digital Delphic oracle spoken by a Cassandra decoder operating with the protocols of a stuttering LLM going into spastic analytics in an excess of insight affordances. Throw in the pop-Golem conjured through Kabbalistic combinatorics and watch the protocols unravel. This is as of-the-moment hyper-poetics as any being composed today. Kind of dazzlin’… hot blasted as flesh circuitry spinning out obsessively. “Faux sure.”                             
– Johanna Drucker

Echoic of how Marcel Duchamp's “Bride” merges the mechanical and the erotic creating a fragmented geometry of intersecting lines, shapes, forms, Karasick’s techno-erotically charged Sonic Warfare delivers a symphonic masterwork, that is at once hauntingly hypnotic, potent and prescient. Electric, radiant and propulsive. Must. Read. Now.         
– Sir Frank London

Adeena Karasick offers a media-ecological and virtuosic poetic exegesis of our often trying times, exploring both the inherent slippage of the notion of ‘truth’ [and] the notion of artificiality itself to which many attribute our ‘post-truth’ condition.
– Steve Hicks

Adeena Karasick’s poetry demonstrates how desire flows through language via Kabbalistically inflected, urban, Jewish, feminist mashups. Recent books include Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings, Ærotomania: The Book of Lumenations, Massaging the Medium: 7 Pechakuchas, Checking In, and Salomé: Woman of Valor. She teaches Literature and Critical Theory at Pratt Institute. She is Poet Laureate of the Institute of General Semantics. The Adeena Karasick archive is at Simon Fraser University.