Fragments of Noise

(2018)

Invited special guest to contribute to week 4 of the March discussion on the subject of “Noise: Disorientation, Contamination, and (Non)Communication” featured on the -empyre- listserv. The list is hosted by the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art at Cornell University. The archive of monthly topics from 2002 to present day: here.

Other special guests during the month: David Xu Borgonjon, Weida Wang, Wenhua Shi, Xin Zhou, Eleonora Oreggia, Ryan Jordan, Julien Ottavi, Norie Neumark, Sarah Simpson, Caitlin Woolsey, Gianluca Pulsoni, Junting Huang.

These are my fragments from the online forum, for the complete discussion follow the link to archive given above.

Diacritic transpositions into numbers and other formatting issues have been left intentionally.

PART 1

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, we’d like to remind you that we don’t applaud in this here place where we’re working. So, restrain your applause. If you must applaud wait until the end of the set and it won’t even matter then. The reason is that we are interrupted by your noise. In fact, don¹t even take any drinks, or no cash register ringing, etcetera. I’d like to introduce the musicians…”

– Charles Mingus, intro to “Folk Forms, No. 1” on the album Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus (1960).

What is remarkable about the above is that the audience is imaginary, this is a studio recording where Mingus wanted his musicians to play like they played live. The noise of the audience is silent. Noise imaginary. So even when absent, “noise is being asked to do a lot of work.” (David X. Borgonjon, March 8 post to empyre)

(https://drjazzdotlive.wordpress.com/2016/02/11/classic-revisited-charles-mingus-presents-charles-minguscandid/)

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The first sentence of “Bring the Noise” by Claire Bishop and Boris Groys used to go as follows: “As well as bring noted for their avant-garde painting, the Futurists performances were legendary for their intent to provoke and scandalise the public.” Unfortunately, the typo has since been fixed: “As well as being noted for their avant-garde painting, the Futurists performances were legendary for their intent to provoke and scandalise the public.”

(http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/bring-noise)

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There is a link to be made between failure and noise, and thereby the aesthetics of both.

Pushing that further, perhaps noise is the quintessential hyphenating agent, it impedes purity, resists totalization (Serre¹s Parasite comes to mind).

Can it therefore be both a human notion which functions as an arbitrary category (as pointed out by Murat Nemet-Nejat in his post from March 21) and also one that covers “the fluctuations of the universe that are beyond our complete understanding” (Nicholas Knouf, March 22 post)? The latter formulation easily collapses into the former since it relies on the limits of our understanding to determine what lies beyond it.

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Caitlin Woolsey brought up the noises of the body in her March 9 post. That is where noise appeared first for me. As a non-musician using sound as material, the body is a readymade instrument. One of its most interesting characteristic is that it cannot be played, it cannot be controlled. Well, at least some of its functions cannot. What I mean is that the sounds it produces are not always predictable. No matter how trained a voice might be, the voice is dependent on fallible organic circuitry. Some of my recording projects have featured body sounds that are less compliant, less trainable than the voice. I¹m thinking mainly South Winds (Oral, 2001) and Crackers (Locust, 2000). The former echoes with Norie Neumark’s evocation of putrefaction in her March 20 post.

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Joo Yun Lee’s provocative presentation of Ikeda¹s work (March 19 post), namely its “rich absence of contents” is one that I cannot help wanting to oppose. The plunge into the sensorium veers too easily into vacuous entretainment. But I appreciate being challenged to think through and question my own desire for content, strive for meaning. The recurring signal to noise dichotomies several posts have identified do limit the discussion, so this piqued my interest as offering a potential way out.

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Tracking the appearance of the word ‘noise’ in my Sonic Somatic: Performances of the Unsound Body book (Errant Bodies Press, 2012) I noticed that the majority stem from quotes.

Culled just a few of the more pithy ones:

“There is no silence. Your mind makes noise.” (Bruce Nauman)
“The word silence is still a noise.” (Georges Bataille)
“The body ignores silence.” (Henri Chopin)

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Jumping to silence and listening (brought up Murat in his comment on the Serres quotes, by Norie, and Sarah Simpson). Given the impossibility of the former and the subjectivity of the latter, where do the two meet? Only in the realm of ethics and politics? (Perhaps that¹s enough and plenty).

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Murat, what of the subjectivity implicit in the act of wanting to, as you put it, liberate noise from the subjectivity that humans impose on it?

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PART 2

I appreciate Murat’s formulation that “silence is the ‘unreachable’ zero point of noise, ‘part’ of noise.” My only question is whether noise in this instance is interchangeable with sound? Or, is noise here (and perhaps frequently elsewhere) a way to get to an expanded field of the sonic?

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From Fred Moten’s Black and Blur, pp.63-64: “While Adorno requires recognition of the distinction between phonic substance or sound and musical material, Gould demands reduction of the tactile experience as well so that he might conceptualize what he can’t imagine, imagine what he cannot hear. It is, however, by way of ecstatic singing and humming, irruptively involuntary movements of/and conduction, the supposedly degraded and degrading accompaniments of the pianistic utterance, that Gould achieves a certain content or essential music whose outward manifestation is the irreducible sound of the piano and his irrepressible phono-choreographic accompaniment. That ensemble of accompaniment‹composition’s disruptively constitutive innermost extremity, the native fugue-state of being-composed is essential to that content; it is its condition of possibility. It is the embarrassment not simply of music’s irreducible materiality but of the origin and end of music’s fantastic transcendence of that materiality in that materiality that is the source of what we might call Gould’s performance anxiety, which is allayed and relayed in his performance of and through his love affair with the mediating force of forced microphonic rendition and stereophonic audition. This is all to say that Gould¹s recordings bear the trace, and Girard’s film insists upon, the centrality of visual, tactile, and aural experience—a performativity that improvises through the opposition of media and the immediate—to the abstract truth in music. By way of fantasy, the recordings and the film document this unconcealment. Such animateriality always verges on scandal, whether it takes the form of discomposing song or abducted listening.”

Moten’s animateriality seems the kind of (noisy) agent that lurks as reminder/remainder to be a generative way to (back- but also fore-)ground noise. An animateriality that ensures that the feedback loop of referentiality always derails, even if just by a byte.

In the postface (titled “Emit”) of recently published selection of Erin Moure’s poetry (Wesleyan, 2017), Planetary Noise, Moure mentions the word exterior—I can’t think of a better pairing than ‘animateriality’ with exterior. Here’s more context for Moure’s neologism (I presume its hers) (p. 165-6): “In poetry, texturalities, textualities, textscapes, texteriors generate and are generated, thrall and intercalate. Anger and despair are not alien to poetry either, for poetry is not ‘meaning’ but is this ‘working,’ this formae vitae in which the individual poet’s mind and hands are plural with other poets and all are called to ‘work at the limits of signification.’ Not entropic but amplificatory.”

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Fred Moten, during the Q & A which follows his March 21 lecture “The Gift of Corruption” (https://vimeo.com/261854255 – around the one hour mark) writes on the blackboard: sinn + sin = nonsense.

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PART 3

Nice to see this flurry of activity. Difficult to know where to start, what thread to pick up. It’s tempting to refer to this plethora as noise, but, aside from being too facile, there’s a lingering fear that this would be read as dismissive rather than laudatory—the latter is intended. Despite the fact that we have been articulating thoughtful and rigorous reversals and layerings of the term ‘noise’ here, the negative attribute is abated, but not eradicated. Its hold is strong. Perhaps it’s simply a corollary of its common usage‹the ease with which it can appear in untold contexts. And perhaps that surface-level currency speaks to the richness and slipperiness of the term. In other words, it’s both spectacular and spectral (i.e. fore- and back- ground, as mentioned in part 2).

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Henri Chopin describes burning a bag in which he had placed all of his poems as his first poetic act. I’m interested in the double negative at play in that statement; the poetics of an act versus the poems on the page; enacting an erasure; the wordless gesture overpowering the wordful pages.

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Caitlin: “And how do we talk about noise and sound work like “Vibrespace” that seems to both elude and invite the impulse to describe or analyze or locate? I grapple with this problem as someone who is trying to write about sound works. Is there any way to describe them that doesn’t mediate, compromise, mislead? That is, to generate a whole lot of language/description around the locus of the noise that resists being fixed?” Is this problematic particular to sound works, or all art works? Either way, any such activity, from ekphrasis to interpretation to translation will do all of these (immediate, compromise, mislead), if not more. By definition and by necessity. It seems to me that the opening (reversing the funneling that the act of description implies) lies in finding writing strategies that downplay the authorial voice, the historification impulse, the canonization drive, the declarative thrust. Expanding rather than reducing. Unfixing the notion that writing is fixed. By extension, one could posit that noise is ubiquitous, part and parcel of event, acts, gestures, objects, subjects, etc. It’s the etcetera. It’s the etcetera that resists and exceeds the ‘it is’ of this sentence.

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If noise as hyphenating agent is to be a productive notion it must be able to fold in on itself, an infinite konvolut. Perhaps akin to the “sidelong glance” Wittgenstein mentions in sect. 274 of his Philosophical Investigations: “Of course, saying that the word ‘red’ refers to rather than signifies something private does not help us in the least to grasp its function; but it is the more psychologically apt expression for a particular experience in doing philosophy. It is as if, when I uttered the word, I cast a sidelong glance at my own colour impression [in other translation, it reads: a sidelong glance at the private sensation], as it were, in order to say to myself: I know all right what I mean by the word.”

The ability to retreat into a private language. To invoke it surreptitiously. Noise hyphen I, noise hyphen you, noise hyphen ad infinitum.

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