Cartographies of Loss: The Afterlives of War

Unsound Cartographies

Working Paper

The artist/research collective AUDINT—a portmanteau for “audio” and “intelligence”—explores frequency-based strategies, technologies, and programs developed by military organizations to orchestrate “tactical hauntings” in conflict zones (AUDINT, xi). Obvious forms of sonic warfare include high-frequency crowd dispersal, auditory attacks linked to Havana Syndrome, and sonic torture of detainees. But AUDINT is especially concerned with more insidious psy-ops: the weaponization of vibration as ghostly resonance. These “unsoundings” are not just frequencies that fall outside of normal human hearing range—“the imperceptible and the not-yet or no-longer audible”—but also the “inhuman” and the “unknown,” including the “hum, hyperrhythmia, and auditory hallucinations” (AUDINT, 1). Their effects are undeniably real, even violent: gut-felt dread, anxiety, dizziness, nausea, disorientation. As Steve Goodman writes, this vibratory terrain constitutes a “frequency of fear,” “a system of speeds and channels, dense pressure pockets, vortices of attraction, basins of acoustic immersion and abrasion, vibratory and turbulent: a whole cartography of sonic force” (2010, 9). During the Vietnam War, for instance, the US military broadcast “Wandering Soul” tapes—recordings mimicking the voices of dead Vietcong fighters—via helicopter-mounted speakers, weaponizing sonic grief against the living (AUDINT, xii).

This essay advances a provocation: that all cartography is necrocartography. Every map is underwritten by absences—disappearances, silences, deaths—that exceed spatial capture and epistemic legibility. Unsoundings are not simply sonic anomalies or perceptual distortions. They are modes of address, spectral speech acts, resonant coordinates. And as addresses, they demand to be heard. Their mortifying force lies in the reversal of apostrophe’s classical trope: not the living hailing the dead, but the dead hailing the living—not the living imbuing life into the dead, but the dead imbuing an uncanny sense of death in the living. In such hauntings, it is the living who are refigured as spectral—claimed by undead voices and compelled to listen. Death here is not metaphorical, nor reducible to absence. It harrows and inhabits through auditory force: rhythms, resonances, feedback, repercussion. When Vietcong soldiers heard the wailing voices of “Wandering Soul,” they did not merely fear the enemy; they “could not help but dread that what they were hearing was a premonition of their own postdeath dislocated soul” (Goodman 2010, 20). The sound was not representational—it was affective, ontological, destabilizing.

With sufficient intelligence, one might map the coordinates where acoustic space has been weaponized—times, places, targets. But the perceptual effects of such unsoundings call for a different kind of mapping. They demand what I call an unsound cartography: a necrocartography (see Szczepan and Siewior 2021) that finds no analogue in coordinate grids of conventional spacetime. These resonances dislocate. They sever us from the cartographic hegemony of visuality, epistemic rationalism, and imperial capture. In their place: a spectral, sonorous, somatic landscape. A timeless time. A placeless place. A realm between the kingdoms of the living and the dead. These are displacements both posthumous and posthuman, and they ask us to feel before we plot.

Here, we struggle to map what haunts us: itineraries of grief, trauma, and displacement. These are not linear progressions; they are recursive, iterative, and vibratory phenomena. They demand that we speak—and move—metaphorically, lyrically, attuned to tempos of unburied lamentation, loss, love. What I’m staging here is not a hypothetical exercise but a rhetorical intervention: a claim that all cartography is always already necrocartography, and that mapping itself is, by definition, unsound. Every point on every map, every blot of ink or pixel, fixed and silent, refers not to presence but to absence, to a referent sustained only by legend. The existential coordinates by which we orient ourselves—and by which maps become meaningful for human life—can never be fixed in Cartesian space. Our bodies: zombie resonance chambers. The places we inhabit—where we worship, work, eat, fuck, shit—are rendered mute and vacant on a map. Wo es war. Maps of concentration camps, mass graves, the location of mortal remains, bone or ash, point only obliquely to the absence of those who can never be found in these places. These marks gesture, never locate. Their function is not spatial but spectral.

In its weaponization of unsound, the state understands and exploits this unmappable absence only too well. A cryptic common sense. Domestically, the memory of its fallen soldiers is ritualized as nationalism, as economic calculus. Abroad, the enemy corpse is animated as a poor player in the theatres of war. The state understands that what haunts is not the supernatural but the deeply human: death as the horizon within which life flickers and by which it gains meaning. No living coordinate is free of the dead; all space dances in death’s turbulent wake. The perceptual ambiguity of unsound is not an exception but the rule. It drones, hums, and rings beneath perception. It is tinnitus, feedback, white noise. It is a condition of living.

And as cruel as it is to speak as the dead—to mimic their voices, to weaponize grief—the very effectiveness of such sonic psy-ops betrays a truth the state cannot fully repress: that these deaths are singular, irreducible, and unfinished. They still speak. Not as statistics, but as address. Unsoundings would fail—would not haunt—if this were not the case.

The state’s strategic deployment of unsound—and its attunement to what AUDINT calls the “oscillating relationship to the undead” (AUDINT, 2)—offers an inverse methodology: one we might reclaim not to speak for or as the dead, but to trace the tactile and tactical itineraries necrocartographers must follow. These trajectories do not locate; they attune. If absences are active—if they structure space, memory, and social life—then the project of mapping the dead becomes a matter of resonance, not indexicality. To map unsoundly is to listen otherwise: not just to what can be seen or cited, but to what drones, murmurs, and fractures the perceptual field. One goal of this work is to dwell in that ambiguity—to inhabit the dissonance between cartographic certainty and spectral presence. This requires leaving behind the coordinates of modern mapping: that visual, colonial, and epistemologically assured grid of conquest and containment. It requires us to suspend the desire to distinguish sound from unsound, signal from noise, life from death—to sit, instead, with the uncertainty of our own perceptual judgments. These judgments, too, may be haunted.

I have deliberately withheld any singular site or case study by which to “test” this tentative theory of unsound cartographies. Instead, I will be listening for unsoundings in the work of my fellow conferees—hoping to break the fourth wall of scholarly performance. I’m especially attuned to how necrocartographers navigate their documentary terrains: not only methodologically, but as a form of ethical comportment. What temporalities guide their pacing? What echoes haunt their frames? Do they move through space rhythmically, responsively, mournfully? In undead white noise—yes: drone, hum, tinnitus—but also in breath, birdsong, rustling leaves, rain. How could one not sense one’s own death portended in the deaths one traces? These works do not merely represent death; they hearken it. They are the haunt. For whom do we witness? To whom do we attune? I hope an expanded version of this essay will engage in detail with one or more of the projects presented at the gathering. For now, I offer this resonance—this unsounding—as a call.

To move tactically through this resonant terrain, I turn in closing to Michel de Certeau. In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau distinguishes between strategies—the purview of institutions, states, systems of power—and tactics, which are localized, embodied, and temporal manoeuvres enacted by those without power. Strategies establish places; tactics insinuate themselves into the cracks of those places, operating in time, in movement, in rhythm. If the state strategically deploys unsound to dominate and disorient, necrocartographers might instead respond tactically, mapping not to master but to mourn, not to locate but to resonate. For de Certeau, an itinerary is a form of movement and memory that resists capture: “it is a spatial acting-out of the place (just as the speech act is an acoustic acting-out of language)” (1984, 98). It’s in this sense that I propose we map our own itineraries of grief and resonance—where to mourn is to move, to listen, to be moved.

To be tactical, then, is to be attuned: to pace oneself differently, to inhabit space otherwise, to be disoriented and still continue. It is to move through cities, archives, soundscapes, and ruins in ways that undo the very coordinates that purport to stabilize us. Unsound cartographies are not totalizing visions; they are murmurs, repetitions, improvisations. They refuse the map’s grid in favour of the itinerary’s drift. In this refusal is an ethics. In this drift, a resonance.

References

AUDINT. 2019. Unsound: Undead. Edited by Steve Goodman, Toby Heys, and Eleni Ikoniadou. Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic.

de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Goodman, Steve. 2010. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Szczepan, Aleksandra, and Kinga Siewior. 2021. “Necrocartography: Topographies and Topologies of Non-Sites of Memory.” Heritage, Memory and Conflict Journal 1: 13–24. https://doi.org/10.3897/hmc.1.63418