23

The Unheard
Tobias Ewé

Figure 23.1 The Self-Moving Substance.

Diving into Sonofluvianism

When you submerge yourself in the ocean, there’s a point where gas gives way to liquid
and water starts pouring in your ears. Crisp clarity displaced by an all-enveloping murmur.
Clear signals become muffled noise. Yet before long you realize that this new wet sensation
is not so much an exotic temporary experience as it is an entirely different milieu. The

9781501335396_txt_print.indd 443 16-11-2020 20:38:21

444 The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound

murmur is neither silent nor loud, but a different mode of existence that affords its
own set of sensual parameters. Weightless. Fast. Porous. Bass. Lithe. Abyssal. The world
changes as sensory limits are modified by a different medium of propagation. Unlike the
slow propagation of sound in air, water works at different speeds. The haptic feedback
systems of the human body awaken to a more immediate relationship with its milieu. At
first you think your ears have been plugged. Unlike earplugs that strip away undesirable
frequencies from the audible spectrum, water is not a plug, but an entirely different zone
of existence. Soon the sensation of cold, wet, and plugged ears are displaced as the aquatic
milieu becomes naturalized. Sound waves move up to four times faster in water than in
air, and as you stay under what was previously muffled now attains clarity and precision.
The slowness of air, and the mid-range frequencies evaporate and disperse into the pelagic
realm of the unheard. Aeolian sounds (sounds traveling through the air, see Kahn 2013)
become unheard sounds. Striated space gives way to smooth space until that again reaches
a point of striation. The unheard moves outside of time.
Don Ihde provides a useful anchor: “Listening begins with the ordinary, by proximately
working its way into what is as yet unheard” (Ihde 2007: 49). But what is the unheard?
By its very definition, the unheard lies beyond of the heard—and therefore outside the
immediacy of human auditory experience. Unlike the quotidian—almost automatic—
activity of hearing, unhearing is not a common activity but a liminal one. This is most
conspicuous by the fact that while sound can enter the ear and interface with the cochlea—
the spiral-shaped cavity in the inner ear—this does not mean that it is heard. The unheard
is a special category given to the sounds just out of earshot: the events that are in excess of
the heard. No matter how far we shoot our ears into the surroundings something is always
left unheard. The human sonic sensorium relates to far more than just the ear’s ability to
receive vibrational information—for instance, even the saccadic movements of eyeballs
affect hearing (Gruters et al. 2018). In fact, the unheard is not a transcendental out there
that can never be grasped due to hard-coded human biosensory or audiosocial limitations;
the unheard exists in an immanent outside that can be transformed into audible material
through the act of unhearing. Either with the right technological (ne/a)ural-enhancements,
sono-stimulants, or bodily (de)tuning. Unhearing also takes place in the realm of the non-
human where the cochlea is challenged as sound’s primary domain. Broadly speaking, the
realm of the unheard can be defined by three major components:
●
Unheard: a transcendental plane of immanence
●
Unhearing: a sensory mode of accessing the unheard
●
The Circuit of the Unheard: a sono-Marxological logic of noise-production.
What is the role of hearing related to the sound it seeks to grasp? According to sound
studies scholar Jonathan Sterne, hearing is “environmentally grounded and stretched
towards transcendence” (2015: 65). While hearing is certainly environmentally grounded,
there is nothing that tells us that it is in a transcendent relationship to sound—at least not
in any Kantian sense. If so, hearing “stretched towards transcendence” would assume that
sound lies beyond the grasp of hearing, instead of hearing being something that can be
 The Unheard 445

cognitively and technologically manipulated to accommodate the desires of the listener.

There is nothing transcendent about the unheard, since it is the source and being of all that
is heard. The unheard is thus immanent to hearing. Although hearing always happens from
the position of a particular subject that cannot fully grasp the unheard, that does not mean
that the unheard is transcendent and unknowable. Through an alienation of hearing known
now as unhearing, the grounding structures and machinations of the unheard begin to take
form. Unhearing itself is an amorphous concept that on the most basic level refers to the
attempt to access the unheard. Although any complete understanding of the unheard lies
beyond the scope of any human, unhearing is not in itself futile. However, it will rarely
produce the intended outcome. In actuality, unhearing thus refers to the destabilization or
deterritorialization of hearing. Unhearing is hearing gone wrong.
Of the many modes of unhearing, the aquatic has proven to be one of the most
auspicious. Underwater hearing carries with it an element of unhearing insofar as it is a
type of hearing that suppress usual modes of sonic reception. Unhearing happens when
hearing becomes unnatural to the body’s own sensorium. Plunging your head into the
water, you immediately unhear the disorientation of water and air—bubbles wash against
your eardrums and unravel your sense of balance, while the water rushing into your
ears sounds like waterfalls gushing through a drainpipe. Your eyes sting as the saltwater
pushes your eyelids back into the recesses of your eye sockets, and the water overloads
every surface and crevice on your skin with haptic feedback. In this moment, you learn to
unhear. Arid normality is suspended for a moment, only to return as you begin adjusting
to the aquatic realm.
While unhearing is not restricted to the oceanic, there is something thoroughly abyssal
to the unheard. The history of the unheard is difficult to write, since so little of it has ever
been recorded. It works in the shadows, and while we hear its effects—such as machinic
noise, chatter, crickets, music, data sonification, the din of the trading floor, infrastructure
networks, transportation, cargo ships—we can only surmise its long-term trajectory. Where
it is natural to steer away from these noisy effects, the only opportunity to write a past or
future history of the unheard is to attune to these noises as signals of an unheard trajectory.
The oceans are still relatively unexplored, and perhaps this is why a lot of research into the
unheard has started there. Since the unheard functions outside typical modes of human
hearing, the closest alternative propagation medium accessible to earthbound explorers is
water. The signals are fewer, but the fidelity is far higher.
Early sono-aquatic researchers, known as the Fluvian Cryptics (fluviocrypta), took to the
oceans with the explicit goal of divination. The Fluvian Cryptics were an ancient Greek sect
posthumously named for their water-based aberration of Heraclitus’ philosophy, who later
became known as “The Obscure.” Basing their methodology on Heraclitus’s notion of flow
and process and his philosophical paradox that one cannot step in the same river twice, the
Cryptics wanted to know the future. Their purposeful misreading of Heraclitus lead to the
belief that if the river constantly flows, one must become the river. The argument went that
since one cannot step in the same river twice, then continuously stepping in and out of the
river should create a potentially infinite number of rivers. The hope was that the creation of
446 The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound

an infinite number of futures would help the Cryptics prognosticate the future—and with
that power, control the flow of time according to their desired fate. Their theory mirrors
one of the most fundamental paradoxes of time travel, in which each jump back in time
creates a new timeline different from the one you were in. This is exactly what these sono-
aquatic researchers had discovered. Inspired by the new fashion of increasingly intricate
water clock designs—and taking Heraclitus’s aphorism quite literally—they thought that
the secret to traveling forward in time at greater speeds must have something to do with
the river itself. Where Heraclitus’s fragment takes the river’s flowing water to represent
change, these explorers wanted to become the process of change itself. To travel through
time by becoming time.
Prior to the invention of modern diving equipment, the ear was the most advanced
technology available to the time travelers of antiquity. If one is interested in hearing the
future, it would make sense to listen where sound travels fastest. Inadvertently, the sono-
aquatic researchers discovered unhearing as an active pursuit for the discipline that would
later come to be known as acoustics. Their reasoning was not without scientific merit;
through the increased speed of sound in water, the time for a sound to travel from its source
to a human ear would close the gap between sender and receiver—shortening the time it
would take to hear any event. The past is brought closer to the future, through perceptual
events such as what composer and writer François Bonnet calls sonorous reminiscence,
which happens “when a sound which we did not hear comes back to us in memory a
few moments later” (Bonnet 2016: 76). The sound is indeed registered by the perceptual
apparatus but was initially not manifested to the consciousness of the listener. Only later
does it emerge from the unheard and (re)present itself to the listener, who then hears it a
posteriori.
The relation between unhearing and the subaquatic has continued into the present,
where the unheard has become the battleground for a new field of sono-aquatic mythscience.
The unheard captures the sonic counterpart to the unknown depths of the ocean: “s-s-s-s-
s-s-s-sss-ssssssssssset your clocks to maritime K+” (Goodman 1999: n.p.).
Although entropy, and uncertainty about the future, expands at alarming rates, certain
industries and rogue Lemurians have invented ways to attune their ears to the noise of
the unheard. Around the turn of the second millennium, research into the unheard had
reached new depths through technological advancements and a proliferation of insurgent
actors using unhearing as their modus operandi. One such entity is known as Hyper-C,
described in (Goodman 1999: n.p.) as a highly secretive Afroatlantean Centience cult of
unparalleled miltancy and infiltrative sophistication. Evidence of this cult is scarce, limited
to a declassified intelligence agency report, a single 2004 blogpost, and a cryptic message
left by electronic musician and philosopher Steve Goodman in a flyer titled “Digital
Hyperstition.” These agents travel in the dark spots of the subaquatic sounds in the realm
of the unheard—just below the limits of perception and cognition. From a Galactic Bureau
of Investigations (GBI) report on new sonic insurgencies to the Galactic Federation, it is
noted that Hyper-C experienced an increase in activities around the beginning of the new
millennium. Hyper-C is described by Goodman as a “distributed network, dedicated to
‘aquatic return’ and the ‘liquidation of Babylon’” through “sonic intelligence weaponry”
 The Unheard 447

(Goodman n.d.a) in the form of info-terrorist activities disguised as musical recordings.

Throughout the report it seems unclear to the Galactic Federation whether Hyper-C is an
organized entity, an uncoordinated group of related practices, or simply an empty memetic
replication of the name itself. It could be that Hyper-C is nothing but its own propagation.
What seems certain is that Hyper-C propagates virally and operates outside of traditional
political methods, and beyond representational or signifying regimes of the heard. GBI
places high importance on silencing Hyper-C, since the very use of its name only helps
spread the virus further. Hyper-C infects as soon as it escapes the unheard. Other tactics
employed by Hyper-C includes the unhearing of conventional senses of reality through
treating governing institutions and ideologies—such as the Galactic Federation—as mere
science fiction. To further occlude their methods, Hyper-C often sows doubt about its
own existence as well. It is for this reason that only a few signals originating directly from
Hyper-C itself have survived. According to Goodman, four key phrases that describe their
activities remain:
●
from subversion to submersion;
●
we will never surface, or the sonic minorities take to the shadows;
●
set your clocks to maritime;
●
Negative Evolution.

Following the logic of the unheard, Hyper-C is dedicated to spreading neuronic triggers
that “attack[] the organism very directly, opening up defensive membranes to an immersive
‘acoustic space’” (Goodman n.d.a). In a missive particularly reminiscent of Deleuze and
Guattari’s identification with a minor politics, Hyper-C models itself on the hunted animal
rather than the hunter. As a way to escape the conventional capitalist chronology of linear
time, Hyper-C has “developed a sophisticated counter-chronic program, involving an anti-
Gregorian Y2K positive occupation of the so-called computer-calendar” (ibid.). Labeling
the Hyper-C “aquaassassins” as a Lemurian weapon aimed at the human security system
(a shorthand for the fickle metaphysical thermostat of human reason, as instantiated by
Kant’s third critique), GBI clearly regarded them as a major threat. Yet little has been heard
about Hyper-C or the powerful Galactic Federation in the two decades since this report was
supposedly submitted. What happened to Hyper-C? Have they gone silent because they
succeeded in taking down the Federation and the Human Security System? Or perhaps
they became fully submerged into the depths of the unheard—waiting in the future, just
out of earshot?
Another signal unearthed by Steve Goodman starts with an excerpt from Sector 7.1 of
the Hyper-C tone-scientist manual titled Hydro-Demonic Polyrhythm: Operating System for
the Redesign of Sonic Reality:
33.33rpm: 2112bpm - 1056 - 528 - 264 - 132 - 66 - 33 - 16.5 - 8.25 - 4.125 - 2.0625
45rpm: 2880bpm - 1440 - 720 - 360 - 180 - 90 - 45 - 22.5 - 11.25 - 5.56 - 2.528
(Goodman 1999: 15)

These two rows of numbers marked by the two usual speeds (measured in revolutions
per minute) of the 12” and 10” vinyl discs demarcate the rhythmic frequency continuum
448 The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound

from which Hyper-C clusters its productions. The two conspicuously italicized numerical
values—132 bpm and 180 bpm (beats per minute)—are particularly important, as 180 is
the appropriately titled kode9 plateau of continuous variation (also known as the upper
speeds of drum & bass and jungle), whereas 132 bpm is the optimal speed for micro-break
demonic two-step (or UK garage; Goodman 1999: 15). Although each row maps a different
rhythmic trajectory, there is a syzygetic relationship between the two. Slowed down to 33.33
rpm, each of the bpm values in the 45 rpm row almost result in the number of its 33.33
rpm equivalent . Drawing material connections between
the musical genres of jungle and demonic two-step, Goodman shows the phase-shift
technology employed by the aquaassassins in Hyper-C. Not only do these beats per minute
reveal tempo intervals for counter-chronic warfare, they also show the pulsating nature of
any given frequency. As rhythms speed up, the beats create the illusion of a continuous tone
with a particular pitch (as evident at the edge of Goodman’s scale, around 2112/2880 bpm).
Rhythm becomes pure tone. Striated space accelerates into smooth space. Through their
complexity, rhythms can be encoded with information that submerges below the threshold
of human perception as they speed up into a melodic pitch. Pure tones thus leave room for
extra encoding through the combination of high-frequency rhythms into a melody of their
own. By speeding up the rhythms of demonic two-step, covert messages can be hidden in
the unheard, only to be unlocked later through complex modes of unhearing. Goodman’s
scale is a guide to the most fertile frequencies for the transmission of coded messages
through the unheard—a practice also known as steganophony.

Unsound Cavitation: Self-Destructing the

Medium of Propagation
More recent experiments with steganophony and unhearing have attempted to influence
the very medium of sound’s propagation as a way to intercept covert messages. Research
into microfluidics, X-ray lasers, and fluid dynamics at the US Department of Energy’s SLAC
National Accelerator Laboratory resonates with the spurious findings of the GBI. The team
of researchers led by Dr. Gabriel Blaj from SLAC and Stanford University and Dr. Claudiu
Stan from Rutgers University Newark used the laboratory’s X-ray laser to blast tiny jets
of water with short and powerful femtosecond X-ray laser pulses. When these pulses
came into contact with the water it vaporized the water around it, and created shockwaves
traveling up the jet of water. The shockwave reportedly “created copies of itself, which
formed a ‘shockwave train’ that altered between high and low pressures” (Sundermier 2019:
n.p.). The endless replication of shockwaves is simply the latest instantiation of the research
into aquatic propagation as a mode of time travel started over two millennia ago by the
Fluvian Cryptics. Where the Cryptics attempted to become one with the flow of the river
through infinite replication, the research at SLAC suggests that cavitation might be the
most effective way of creating an underwater self-replicating mechanism. Auto-productive
 The Unheard 449

shockwaves create a chain of cavitation, which can be used to both disrupt messages, as
well as compress covert information into implosive granules. Is this evidence of the return
of Hyper-C?
Beyond a certain threshold, the intensity of the subaquatic sound breaks the water
apart into vapor-filled bubbles, causing the water to boil. This threshold was determined
to be just above the 270 dB mark, suggesting not only water’s sonic boiling point, but also
the limit of how loud subaquatic sound can get underwater before the “wave destroys
its own propagation medium” (Blaj et al. 2019: n.p.). While the Galactic Federation
might see this as a prime opportunity for innovations in the field of sonic warfare—
using vibratory shockwave propagation and ultrafast ionization with pinpoint precision
to boil the aquaassassins—Hyper-C already used a primitive version of this technology
to intercept covert messages and disrupt their intended path by overloading their very
medium. Overloading sound’s propagation medium through cavitation is a cunning tactic,
and as composer and ‘pataphysician eldritch Priest argues, “what better way to capture
an adversary’s reserves than to listen to everything, all the time, everywhere and at once?
Leave no sound unheard, or better still, no sound unthought” (Priest 2018: 142). As will
soon become clear, the logic of the unheard has a tendency to reproduce noise and amplify
sounds.
Where silence in its ideal state is the complete absence of sound, the unheard is the
absence of the heard that is also virtual. Silence is the absolute zero of vibration—a cold
dark realm that defies the very categories of coldness and darkness. Like the absolute
zero of temperature, silence exists, but no human who attempts to hear it makes it out
alive. The unheard has a similar effect, albeit defined by entropic excess. Where this
vibrational understanding of silence is defined by an absolute void of entropy, the unheard
is defined by absolute excess. That the unheard is marked by excess does not mean that it
is sonically noisy or loud. It is worth noting that the unheard does not follow the active/
passive distinction of the blatantly anthropocentric listening/hearing dichotomy inherent
to theories offered by theorists such as Pierre Schaeffer, Roland Barthes, Jean-Luc Nancy,
and others (cf. Bonnet 2016: 69–78 and de Seta 2020). Instead, the unheard follows a
framework closer to Bonnet’s conceptual typology in The Order of Sounds, where he divides
the apprehension of sound into three stages: the sonorous (or unheard) as that which falls
short of being “aurally perceived”; the audible—sounds that leave a trace that has yet to be
territorialized as heard; and hearing as that which qualifies and evaluates the audible as
intelligible to the listening subject (Bonnet 2016: 75). The sonorous is what reaches the ear
but does not imprint itself on the listener as something intelligible. In Bonnet’s typology,
“the audible exists, whereas the sonorous languishes in limbo” (ibid.: 137). The unheard
has little to do with the volume of sound but concerns instead its productive potential. To
unhear the unheard is therefore not to forget, negate or draw ones attention away from the
unheard, but a perceptual tuning-into the unheard’s excess of potentiality.
Another realm of the unheard is the as yet unimaginable sounds of the future. When
exclaiming “that’s unheard of!” what is really being said is that a preposterous or ridiculous
idea has been proposed—an idea that makes no sense in the given paradigm. It is an
450 The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound

anomalous concept that as-of-yet has not been conceptualized. The unheard in this case
is the moral, epistemological, or technical objection to something at the limit of current
human imagination:
To seek the unheard-of is to seek the unknown territory, the one that disrupts the territorial
chain, the chain of language. To seek the unheard is not so much to seek to make new sounds
emerge as to set out to encounter impossible territories.
(Ibid.: 274)

This does not mean that its existence is impossible but—quite the opposite—it means that
something is just on the verge of coming into being. The unheard of the present has the
potential of becoming the hearing of the future. The Cryptics knew this and wanted to
harness the unheard to listen in on the future. Once thought, the unheard has already
begun to take root in the mind of those who its aural virus has infected. Like an earworm,
the unheard has an uncanny ability to make itself real through real experiences without
actual sense impressions. This shows the potentiality of the unheard. Unhearing is
the attempt to attune oneself to this potentiality in order to influence it. In spite of its
virtuality, the unheard is able to instill material alterations in the world, such as when an
earworm causes its host to try out a wide variety of tricks to cure themself of its maddening
repetition. These material consequences exemplifies a point by Priest, which argues that
“the earworm’s ideosonic persistence is indicative of capitalism’s alien intelligence” (Priest
2018: 157), where earworms function “as both a product and source of contemporary
capitalism’s aim to draw value from involuntary nervous activities” (ibid.: 142). Clearly,
the unheard’s virtuality does not preclude it from interfacing with the actual, whether
economically or ontologically.
The unheard is the virtual plane of immanence from which the actuality of hearing
is derived. Hearing draws its perceptual qualities from the unheard. Hearing describes
the animal perception (non-human or otherwise) of sound in all its material forms.
Unhearing describes the potential for hearing in the form of informatic noise that is still
intelligible as signal—screeches that are still incomprehensible as song, babbling that is
still indecipherable as language, rhythms that are still unfathomable as milieus. Unhearing
is a mode of sonic perception that provides a muffled image of the unheard. It cannot
represent the unheard (which is always imperceptible and virtual) as heard, but instead
puts the human into contact with the still alienated parts of their sensorium. As Deleuze
writes, paraphrasing Spinoza, “we do not even know what a body can do” because no one
has yet come to know the structure of the body (Deleuze 2005: 255). Or as Goodman
paraphrases Deleuze: “We do not yet know what a sonic body can do” (Goodman 2010:
191). Unhearing is rarely an induced or willed activity, but something that happens to you
in the way that tripping, forgetting, earworms, death, and déjà vu happen. Its closest ally
is alienation and it is therefore only occasionally that unhearing reveals anything about
our senses, the future, or the potentiality of the unheard itself. It is for this reason that
unhearing bears a striking similarity to divination. As with all true divination, it is not
in the hands of the fortune-teller but arrives thoroughly from the cards. Unhearing is the
occulted hearing of the non-pulsed (in)humans of the future.
 The Unheard 451

Like informatic noise, the unheard is continually expanding. Noise here is derived
from the philosophical understanding of an ontological signal/noise distinction that
comes out of second-order cybernetics. This structural relationship between signal and
noise is further mirrored in Deleuze’s concepts of the actual and the virtual. Although
fundamentally different from any esthetic considerations of noise and music, or sonic
considerations of noise and silence, the structural relationship between signal and noise
can be used to describe some of the physical, aesthetic, and formal relationships that
other concepts of noise enter into. Ontological noise (as explored by Greg Hainge 2013,
Christoph Cox 2011, 2018b and Will Schrimshaw 2017—and heavily critiqued by Brian
Kane 2015 and Marie Thompson 2017b, receiving a reply from Christopher Cox 2018b)
should say nothing of the aesthetics of noise, of music, complexity, of loudness, but can
elucidate how these processes came into being.
Steve Goodman coined the term unsound to indicate different types of sonic potentiality:
● phenomena beyond audio-social predeterminations;
●
weaponized sounds that alter human sonic parameters;
●
non-cochlear infra- and ultrasound that is felt through the body;
●
non-cognitive, inhuman phenomena;
●
fictional sonic phenomena linked to the unknown.

Goodman grounds unsound in his bass materialism as a way to expand the notion of what
sound can be, and access sound’s virtuality (Goodman 2010: 191). The unsound spans
both sound-as-vibration as well as sound-as-experience. An unheard unsound is thus a
completely virtual sonic event that might never take place. To make the unheard unsound
sound is not a harmless invocation and may prove to be impossible. To alter the unheard
one must make oneself unstable, which is why the best summoners are often the people to
come. Altering the unheard requires a sacrifice. Melting into air is a good start, yet it will
soon be revealed that one must break oneself into disparate granules to reach the unheard.
There is no stability in the unheard, only a constant flux of becoming. One must not only
try to attune oneself to the unheard, but actively make oneself unheard.

The Circuit of Capital as the Logic of the

Unheard
In order to understand the production of the unheard one cannot solely rely on spectrometers
or microphones. A diagram is necessary. The unheard is defined by its surplus of sound
and bears a remarkable resemblance to the production of capital. Just like the unheard,
the logic of capital is defined by excess, expansion, and creative destruction. Just as with
capital, the unheard defines the current human form while simultaneously destroying it by
virtue of our continued exposure. Hence, accessing the unheard is not recommended, but
as with all perilous tasks it is best to know the strata before trying to wildly destratify them.
452 The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound

Figure 23.2 The Circuit of Capital (C = commodity; M = money; MP = means of

production; LP = labor power; P = productive capital; s = surplus value. Commonly
expressed as: .

The diagram in Figure 23.2 is based on a common example of the logic of capital (as seen
in Fine and Saad-Filho 2004: 55), which will form the basis of another diagram that shows
how the production of the unheard follows a similar logic.
From the outset of the first volume of Capital, Karl Marx emphasizes the importance of
money in the circulation of capital by introducing the loop in which money (M) becomes
commodity (C) becomes more money (M’)—thus creating surplus value. The M-C-M loop
shows how Marx places money (M) as the starting point of his theory. While capital is
mutable as a “social relation involved in the self-expansion of value” (ibid.: 54), money is
the immutable constant that is given as known data. Money used to purchase the means of
production (MP) and labor power (LP) carries a constant value, and the increase in money,
forming surplus value (s) is gained from production and exchange of commodities (C) is
likewise taken as a given as known data after each run-through of the circuit. In its most
abstracted form, Marx’s concept of capital is defined in terms of money, as money that
becomes more money. Money is spent on commodities (C), and is divided into constant
capital used to purchase the means of production and variable capital used to purchase
labor power.
The diagram is divided into two spheres that show the first important feature of Marx’s
logical method; the sphere of exchange (sometimes called the “sphere of circulation” as in
 The Unheard 453

[Moseley 2016]) and the sphere of production. Each of these depict the two main levels of
abstraction: the production of surplus value and the exchange of surplus value. Since there is
no beginning to this diagram, if we start in the sphere of exchange we ignore surplus value
for now and assume that it has already been divided into the individual parts. The sphere of
exchange is where money is advanced to purchase means of production and labor power—
here capital exists in the form of money. In the sphere of production, wage labor produces
commodities for sale—here capital exists in the form of production and labor power. In
the third and last phase, still in the sphere of production, money is recovered when use
value is transformed into value and surplus value through the sale of commodities. This
loop is what Marx often referred to as the valorization process where the advanced quantity
of money is “valorized” by becoming more money—unlike the labor process in which
physical goods are produced (Moseley 2016: 14).
Throughout these three stages of capital, the circuit exists as a real process. It is neither
built according to the diagram and nor does the diagram function as a metaphor or
approximation. Capital truly exists in the form of money, means of production, labor
power, commodities, and finally money again across the two spheres. This is a real process
that is bound to the passage of time. The circuit is not just a closed loop, but as Western
Marxist philosopher and political economist Moishe Postone says, it is a “self-moving
substance” (1993: 75). Postone tentatively takes up Lukács’s materialist reading of Hegel’s
concept of Geist as it emerges in the development of complex societies and breaks down
the object/subject position. For Hegel, Geist is an objective structure that simultaneously
constitutes individual human subjectivity and is itself subjective through its continual
identity as Geist—even as it unfolds and changes its form. For Lukács, the proletariat
embodies this Geist within the capitalist mode of production. The proletariat structures
consciousness under capitalism in a way that has a certain degree of self-reflexivity due
to the persistence of identity through societal change. It would be easy here to see the
unheard as an analogue to Geist, which is structured by the proletariat’s capacity to create
a revolutionary unhearing of capital.
Although intrigued by Lukács’s proposition, Postone critiques him for placing the
proletariat in the position of the historical subject—as the subject-object of the historical
process that constitutes the social world and itself through its labor. The way out of
capitalism for Lukács is thus the proletariat’s self-realization by overthrowing the capitalist
order (Postone 1993: 73). A similar way out of capitalism could thus be proposed as
the proletariat’s self-realization through access to the unheard as a mode to overthrow
capitalism. Yet as Postone states, the proletariat is only possible as a postcapitalist form
of organization if capitalism is defined purely in terms of private ownership of the means
of production and labor is considered as the standpoint of critique (ibid.). That is to say,
according to late Marx, the proletariat is not viewed as an affirmative totality; rather, Marx
refers to value as having a substance—which he identifies as abstract human labor—that
is an attribute of labor-mediated social relations. It is value that is “constantly changing
from one form into the other without becoming lost in this movement; it thus transforms
itself into an automatic subject” (Marx in Postone 1993: 75, emphasis in original). Postone’s
critique is not only leveled against Lukács, but also reveals Marx’s own critique of Hegel’s
454 The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound

idealistic dialectic. According to Postone, the self-moving substance is, unlike Hegel’s
Geist, not ruled by the dialectic as the universal law of motion. Conversely, Marx agrees
with Hegel’s understanding of the abstract and contradictory forms of capitalism, but not
their historical specificity. Capital or the unheard does not depend on, nor constitute, the
proletariat but is itself an autopoietic subject.
Value valorizes itself by constantly changing its own magnitude through the
movement in which it adds its own surplus value and presents itself as a “self-moving
substance which passes through a process of its own” (ibid., emphasis in original).
Marx thus characterizes capital as the self-moving substance without identifying that
historical subject with the proletariat, or even humanity. For Marx, according to Postone,
the historical subject is analyzed in the structure of social relations constituted by forms
of objectifying practice and grasped by the category of capital (Postone 1993: 76).
The subject of capital is not a passive subject observing the world, but an active force
that produces the objective conditions that in turn define and alter the subject while
preserving its identity throughout.
Reading closely into the diagram of the circuit of capital, we begin to sense what was
previously unheard. The implications of the M-C-M’ stretch and contort as the self-moving
substance expands outwards. The self-moving substance exists both in time yet defines
the nature of time in a continuous temporal restructuring. Past, present, and future lose
their meanings as capital moves to the ultimate meltdown. Capital reaches into the future
to restructure the present. As with the propagation of soundwaves, so is it with capital
as it expands in all directions, sweeping everything up in its path. Sound was one of its
earliest victims when oral traditions and slower forms of writing gave way to the printing
press and increased the distribution of the written word. Language was exteriorized at a
faster rate and made efficient by machines that greatly expanded human storage capacity—
temporally as well as spatially. Yet while information dissemination increased, so too did
the level of informatic noise. Machines bring their own informatic and organizational
noise (epistemic) through the increased complexity of a given system, as well as an entire
infrastructure of acoustic noise-sounds (sonic) related to a network of electrical generators,
laborers, paper mills, logging, smelting, mining, and transport—most of which goes
unnoticed by the writer and reader.
Where Jacques Attali writes on music and its relationship to capital in his book Noise
(1985), he defines noise in line with what Deleuze calls the plane of immanence. According
to Attali, noise is defined by its creative properties: “With noise is born disorder and its
opposite: the world. With music is born power and its opposite: subversion” (1985: 6). For
Attali, music has the potential to subvert and reform societies, and it does this through
its grounding in noise. Sound draws its power from noise and, with specific tools, this
power can be arranged into music that has both a purpose (political or otherwise) and
can serve as entertainment. Yet through his history of music’s various stages (the eras of
sacrificing, representing, repeating, and post-repeating), Attali deals mainly with noise in its
sensate representation as music. In other words, Attali might draw upon Nietzsche and
Serres in his understanding of noise as creative chaos, but his primary concern throughout
the book is aesthetics (of political economy, of social organization, and of music). Attali
 The Unheard 455

points to the codeterminous evolution of economy and music (ibid.: 126), whereas this
chapter aims to show the more structural role that the power of noise has in the circuit of
capital, while proposing a diagram of the unheard based on this structure. Undoubtedly a
Marxian analysis of noise as spectacle and event, here Attali attempts to set out a model of
social history that is able to grasp the entanglement of economics, politics, technology, and
music—and not the structural politics of noise immanent to human politics. Unhearing
is an exit from the circuit of capital that acknowledges the impossibility for the human
to do exactly that. Despite its title, Noise deals with the influence of music on capital. It
theorizes capital through music—the “organization of noise”—to show the “manufacture
of society” and create a sound-form of knowledge to predict the future (ibid.: 4). Where
Attali performs an impressive analysis of capital as it relates to the heard, the unheard
receives little attention. Where Attali deals with music as a form of noise in the capitalist
mode of production, the unheard deals with the informatic noise of capital itself.
The noise created by the self-moving substance is the noise of information theory. Often
defined in opposition to information or signal, noise is seen as the enemy of efficiency
and clear communication. This is exemplified by Norbert Wiener’s thesis that noise exists
in a binary to information—the amount of information in a system is equivalent to its
organization, whereas the amount of entropy/uncertainty (informatic noise) in a system
is negatively defined as a measure of its disorganization (Wiener 1961: 11). Although a
minor difference in terms of mathematics, Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver propose
an alternative, positive definition of information; it is rather information that should
be defined as a measure (and not a negation) of entropy or noise, since an increase in
information is also an increase in noise (Shannon and Weaver 1964: 27). With this simple
reversal, Shannon and Weaver account for the creation of novel information, since a
message without uncertainty is simply redundant. Entropy thus deals with the conditions
of possibility of information. In Deleuzoguattarian terms, noise is the virtual of which
information is immanent to. As Serres argues:
noise is a turbulence, it is order and disorder at the same time, order dissolving on itself
through repetition and redundancy, disorder through chance occurrences, through the
drawing of lots at the crossroads, and through the global meandering, unpredictable and
crazy.
(1997: 59)

Noise influences natural language use between human subjects, transferral of data between
computer terminals, radio wave transmission and reception, and interference within
a signal chain of electrical instruments. In Serres’s trifunctional model of the sign the
parasite (or noise) attaches itself to the sender–receiver relation. The parasite is not to be
understood as a sudden disturbance to that relation but as an immanent part of the relation
itself. Noise comes first. In terms of base communication, Serres writes that “[t]o hold a
dialogue is to suppose a third man and seek to exclude him” (1983: 21). Here Serres aligns
himself with Norbert Wiener who characterized “information as the negation of entropy
or negentropy” (Brassier in Malaspina 2018: x). While the circuit of capital expands to
continuously create more information, Wiener reminds us that this information only exists
456 The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound

in a din of entropy. However, this is where the cogs of Wiener’s theoretical machinery
start to rust in the early writings of philosophers Sadie Plant and Nick Land. The metrical
models of feedback laid out by Wiener in Cybernetics or Control and Communication in
the Animal and Machine create a binary between runaway positive feedback processes
and a cybernetics of stability. In his metrical models of feedback, Norbert Wiener’s
work functions as “propaganda against positive feedback—quantizing it as amplification
within an invariable metric—[to establish] a cybernetics of stability fortified against the
future” according to Plant and Land (Plant and Land 1994, Ireland 2017: 4). In Land’s
view, this leads to a simplistic choice between a dependable homeostatic equilibrium and
the pathological positive feedback loop (cf. Plant and Land 1994, Ireland 2017). The key
problem for Land is the lack of any clear distinction between short-range and long-range
runaway circuits. The effects of long-range runaway circuits cannot be described in metrics
alone. A long-range positive feedback loop that sustains itself over time will eventually
reach a “state of feedback density that effectively flips extensity into intensity” (Ireland
2017: 5), which produces something truly novel—a change in kind rather than degree.
Could this same flip hold true for the unheard? If so, it would open the possibility for
hearing into something else. If the unheard can be characterized as a long-range feedback
loop of sound and informatic noise, the intensification of the unheard might lead to new
kind of hearing currently conceptualized as unhearing.
Sonic and informatic noise have been the primary elements explored in relation to the
unheard. To connect these two notions to the economic aspects of noise is the last third
that will finally bind the unheard to its diagram. In her 2016 book How Noise Matters to
Finance, N. Adriana Knouf goes through three kinds of noise that e/a(r)ffects the world of
finance—informatic, sonic, and financial noise. It is the latter that I will now turn to.
In late-stage capitalism, the self-moving substance devours informatic noise while
it simultaneously increases the amount of noise through its expansion. Most of this
informatic noise remains unheard. In the twenty-first century, capital increasingly feeds
off information that is defined by the amount and type of available financial noise. In her
in-depth investigation into noise in the realm of high-frequency trading, Knouf writes that
“noise traders” are a necessary component for the stock market’s normal functioning. Noise
traders are traders who are allegedly unable to distinguish between “valid” and “invalid”
information within a market. While noise traders should not be able to survive within a
market due to the quick consumption of their capital, recent models and empirical evidence
paint a different picture (see Knouf 2016 for a thorough introduction to the relationship
between informatic noise and information trading). As Knouf contends, “noise becomes
a vital component of the system, the unpredictable activity that paradoxically powers
the equations that underlie modern finance” (2016: n.p.). Commodities have long since
dissolved into air, and noise traders show that purchasing financial noise is possibly as
profitable as buying “valid” information. Trading in noise is constitutive of the trade of
information itself—the two are not mutually exclusive but exist in a symbiotic partnership.
Noise traders thus trade noise, which forms the basis of their trading. The noise trader
relies on being their own self-grounding subject. Noise is not outside this process, but
immanent to it. In the world of finance, noise has reached a commodity status that creates
 The Unheard 457

new ground for the expansion of the self-moving substance—in the sonic realm defined as
the unheard. Financial noise produces, capital consumes.
As the M-C-M’ shows, capital does not exist in a perfect self-contained loop, since it
always spins outwards. Capitalism is full of spurts and false starts. Investments with no
return. Start-ups that end before they take off. De-growth movements and Buy Nothing Days
for the people who can afford it. Yet even when these supposed decelerations of capitalism
take flight, we see little evidence of anything slowing down. Capitalism subsumes these
attacks into its system and rewrites histories to its liking. Promises of future investment
gains, upward curves, and technological innovation obscure any minor setback. Capital
is able to do this because, like the unheard, it works imperceptibly. Capital hears all, while
continuously making itself unheard. What we hear of capitalism is only the surface. On the
surface, calls to increased ecological awareness, rural self-sufficiency, and protests outside
the New York Stock Exchange seem like proactive deceleration of capital flows because
they attempt to address the surface-level issues of capitalist acceleration. Escaping market
forces seems like a great idea until you realize the extent of the disease. Removing yourself
from the forces of capital does not alter its course. Capital has heard your noise and will not
let go. If a tree falls in the woods, how long until the forest has been pulped?

The Circuit of the Unheard

Sub-bass frequencies rise from below, while high-pitched shrieks push down from above.
Compressed between the two, it is increasingly difficult to access the ultra- and infrasound
frequencies that make up the inner workings of capital. From their compressed state,
humans cannot modulate these frequencies, but like the Cryptics, we must become one
with them. Unhearing is the only way to decode the noisy flows of the unheard. While
the process cannot be diverted or shut off, it is possible to tune into its frequencies and
modulate its rhythms—amplifying and filtering the unheard to modulate its micro-
frequency outputs.
To prove the material valency of the unheard, it is necessary to return to Marx’s circuit
of capital to show how the same diagram can be drawn for the circuit of the unheard. Just
as the main goal of Marx’s theory is to explain how the initial money (M) of the circuit
becomes money + surplus value (M’), the main goal of the unheard is to explain how
the initial informatic noise (N) becomes noise + surplus noise (N’). How noise becomes
sound becomes more noise (N-S-N’). Noise here refers to informatic noise (which is
not necessarily “sounding”), with the caveat that acoustic noise is always informatic to
something or someone. Similarly, the category of sound in this diagram refers to the
sounds created in the process of production. If, as Moseley suggests, the expanded circuit
of money capital is the logical framework of Marx’s theory, then the expanded circuit of
noise must be the logical framework of the unheard (Moseley 2016: 12).
The expanded circuit of noise starts with informatic noise (N), which becomes reified as
sound (S) in the sphere of transduction through a dual process of the means of perception
458 The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound

Figure 23.3 The Circuit of the Unheard (S = sound; N = informatic noise; MP = means
of perception; NP = noise power; i = information; n = surplus noise. Also expressed as
.

(MP) and noise power (NP) (Figure 23.3). Perceiving sonorous material as sound is always
predetermined by the intentions that fuse with it—whether these intentions be human,
crustacean, algorithmic, or otherwise. This intentionality or transductive filtering is
what reifies unformed informatic noise into tangible sound. According to Bonnet, the
transduction “orient[s] its power of focalization, its faculty of transforming the sonorous,
the unheard, into the audible … Sound is thereby reified, rendered tangible” (2016:
192). Hearing, mobilized and driven by these tensions, constitutes audible sounds and
determines them formally or symbolically. The moment of reification shows that hearing
always exists in a context.
Noise is spent on the means of perception (MP) which transduces some sound into
perceivable sonic experiences (as hearing) and outputs the remainder as noise. Noise
power (NP) turns noise into sound through a destructive process of amplification that
turns up noise to be transduced into sonic drilling, entertainment, subaquatic navigation,
or sonic warfare. In the sphere of production, sound is turned into information (i) for a
wide variety of sonic and non-sonic purposes (such as sonic telemetry, data-collection
from the ocean floor via sonar, or data about speech patterns gathered from virtual
assistants for the purpose of improving speech recognition). This process creates further
noise (N’) that again becomes sound (S) and surplus noise (n). With the production of
 The Unheard 459

surplus noise the circuit is expanded, which either produces more noise and expands the
scope of the unheard, or the noise is repurposed to expand the circuit further. Whatever the
destination of the surplus noise, the overall amount of noise in the system grows, and with
it follows an increase of the enveloping plane of the unheard. As the logic of the unheard
expands, what was previously ordered and contained becomes granulated, discordant, and
chaotic. Music directed at an audience becomes noise to the nonparticipating neighbors.
Echolocation informs the ship crew but creates underwater noise for the subaquatic life.
Predictions based on past data become harder to pin down as future entropy increases,
while predictions based on the insurmountable data of the present tighten their scope and
become able to hone in with hyper-accurate nanosecond earshots.
If the logic of the unheard is an unfolding of the circuit of noise, then it is perhaps
imprecise to talk about it as a simple loop. Rather, the loop quickly turns into a spiral as
surplus noise becomes a self-fulfilling auto-productive runaway process. The logic of the
unheard is intimately tied to expansion. The outward spiral of the production of the unheard
has grave consequences not only for sound, but for time itself. Increased noise might lend
predictions a higher accuracy, but what use is prognostic accuracy in a future that is already
determined by the diagram? If the circuit of the unheard holds up, humans are truly locked
in time. From inside the circuit, time is relatively linear, which places the future in the realm
of the demonic unknown. But from the outside perspective of the unheard, the future is
“marked up by the immanent unfolding of the spiral [and] has already been determined
diagrammatically” (Ireland 2017: 6). The future is thus more actual than the virtuality of
the past. Ireland argues that drawing a “diagram is not simply to describe something that is
already there” (ibid.: 13), but the diagram is the intervention itself. The logic of the unheard
as presented in the diagram thus came before its material unfolding. Although the circuit
of the unheard is based on a material process, it functions through an affirmation of what
is outside of the circuit itself. It functions through expanding into the outside.

The Aquapraxis of Unhearing

How does one access the unheard? How can the diagram of material critique be used as
a discovery mechanism? To escape the circuit of the diagram is to follow Deleuze and
Guattari’s suggestion and make oneself a part of the unheard, and “accelerate the process”
(Nietzsche in Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 240). Yet they simultaneously warn against
uncoordinated total deterritorialization of flows reaching the Body without Organs:
You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you have to keep
small supplies of significance and subjectification, if only to turn them against their own
systems when the circumstances demand it, when things, persons, even situations, force you
to; and you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to
respond to the dominant reality. Mimic the strata. You don’t reach the BwO [Body without
Organs], and its plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 160)
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To give in to the process of the unheard it is necessary to “mimic the strata” and respond
to the dominant reality. To do this, and learn how to unhear, is a process that requires
fragmentation (and thus alienation) of one’s sensorimotor affordances. Mimicking the
strata through the act of unhearing was what the Fluvian Cryptics attempted in their
ancient sonofluvian rituals. Giving in to the unheard is gradually giving up on the human
sensory organism. As the vibrations break up into disparate granules, and sensory input
is synthesized and overloaded, the bounded Enlightenment humanist body soon becomes
flushed of its organs. If the process of acceleration is a critique of capital, it is necessary to
lean into noise in order to access the immanent critique of the unheard. A new group of
sonofluvianists must continue the Heraclitean task initiated by the Fluvian Cryptics, taken
up by Hyper-C in the early 2000s, and vexingly rediscovered by the US Department of
Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
What would it mean to accelerate the production of the unheard? The unheard
has been mapped onto a particular reading of Marx that takes the circuit of capital as
capitalism’s foundational logic. With its unwavering expansion, intimate connection to
temporal fluctuations, cyberpositive feedback, and its ties to the development of sonic
technologies, the unheard can best be described with a logic already proposed by the
theories connected to the acceleration of capital. The unheard is the sonic contingency of
capital’s intensification. As mentioned earlier with reference to Postone (Postone 1993: 76),
the circuit of the unheard is likewise a real process that is bound to the passage of time. The
continuous intensification of the unheard is intimately tied to time because it is grounded
in material change and the production of noise.
The future is thus outside of human control and it will most likely not respect the
current human form. As intellectual historian Vincent Garton writes: “If capital is an alien
invasion from the future, we ourselves are subjugated to the Nietzschean ‘strong of the
future’: the only way out is through” (2017a: n.p.). This entails that no extrinsic revolution
could be more thorough than the continuous revolution coming from within capital itself.
The Fluvian Cryptics already knew this when they suggested that rather than change the
course of the river (or the flux of becoming) from the outside, one should become the river
in order to continually revolutionize the process of change. Becoming the river, for them,
meant to submerge one’s ears.
It is not Attali’s rebellious proletariat, the music business, or technology as such that
pushes this process forward, but rather the circuit of the unheard itself. Humans may have
a hand in the production of sound, but they are caught up in a revolutionary process that
is not their own. In their 1972 Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari published what has
become known as their accelerationist fragment. Here they cite Nietzsche to reinvigorate
Marx and put emphasis on the fact that one cannot critique capitalism in order to destroy
or overcome it. Rather, its process is the critique caught in a self-propagating feedback
loop.
[W]hich is the revolutionary path? Is there one?—To withdraw from the world market, as
Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist “economic
solution”? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the
 The Unheard 461

movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are
not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and
a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go
further, to “accelerate the process,” as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we
haven’t seen anything yet.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 239–240)

Their evocation of Nietzsche’s call to “accelerate the process” suggests that this process
is auto-productive in its creative destruction since it appeals to nothing beyond itself.
It is therefore inherently nihilistic. Accelerating the process for Deleuze and Guattari is
thus not a call to over-consumption or reckless technological innovation, but a critique
of capitalism from within. As Land argues, it is the realization that “mankind is [capital’s]
temporary host, not its master” (2017: n.p.). A similar range of hosts exist for the unheard,
distinguished by any information-processing listener participating in the decoding and
recoding of sound into informatic noise and back into sound again.
As the unheard is not a process that can be steered from without, but must be accessed
from within, what is to be done?
Writer and economic theorist Edmund Berger channels Marx when he argues that
“from the perspective of power, perhaps the forces rushing upwards are not to be visualized
as all that is solid melting into air, but the crushing of all that is stable and standing into
disparate granules” (2017: n.p.). Fragmentation won over centralized planning. Cavitation
won over organized flow. Complexity seems to be only increasing—whether in politics,
social relations, gender, family dynamics, or cultural allegiances.
As Garton writes: “To the question ‘What is to be done?’, then, we can legitimately
answer only, ‘Do what thou wilt’—and ‘Let go’” (2017b: n.p.). From this acknowledgement
follows an acceptance of the unheard’s immediate subsumption of any opposition to its
structure and the impossibility of reinstating a sono-political homeostasis. The unsound
methods handed down from the Fluvian Cryptics, aquaassassins, Hyper-C, and oceanic
xenofeminists form an antipraxis of cavitation. Antipraxis (as coined in Garton 2017b:
n.p.) is not a call to do nothing or give up, but a desire to enter a minor politics on a
molecular level. With a xeno-machinic models of listening, as proposed by Gabriele de Seta
in this volume, it would be possible to counter the human-centric orientation of listening
with a non-human listening that requires new strategies of inquiry and representation (de
Seta 2020: 422) This cavitational antipraxis—or aquapraxis—is to be found in the in a
mode of listening that disrupts and infects dominant communication and propagation
media. Aquapraxis may find an alliance in the “aggressive listening” coined by artists and
musicians Tobias R. Kirstein and Claus Haxholm in their Handbook of Aggressive Listening
(2018). They suggest “a sort of territorial aggressive listening that changes the surroundings
[and considers] listening as warfare” through pithy fragments like “EARS AS WEAPONS,”
“INVADE YOUR SURROUNDINGS BY LISTENING,” “STEALTH BY INVOLVEMENT,”
and “CAPTURE AND ASSAULT” (Kirstein and Haxholm 2018: n.p.). These fragments
are appeals to use the human sensorium as a capturing apparatus and “LISTEN AGAINST
THE STREAM” (ibid.). With unhearing as a way to invoke the occulted unheard,
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Handbook of Aggressive Listening suggests purposeful inattention as a mode of reaching

the unknown: “DISTRACTED LISTENING IS A KEY TO AN UNKNOWN UNLOCKED
DOOR” (ibid.). Combine this with the model of xeno-machinic listening as instantiated by
Hyper-C’s commitment to cavitation as a method of collapsing communication pathways.
A cavitational aquapraxis is a mode of aggressive listening that aims to insert itself in the
slipstream of communication in order to take down the medium of its own propagation.
Cavitation enjoys the rare privilege of being both explosion and implosion all at once;
the maximum and minimum of informational overload. And since the future is not set in
stone, but in a “dynamic torsion with the present as a series of feedback loops, commitment
consequences, and universal–particular exchanges” (Sheldon 2019: 127), there are still
loopholes to be infiltrated.