The locative effect of noise

The idea that what you understand as noise and what you understand as signal locates you as a subject with respect to a particular communicative system/community.

Two quotes by way of illustration: the first from Michel Serres’ The Parasite:

At the feast everyone is talking. At the door of the room there is a ringing noise, the telephone. Communication cuts conversation, the noise interrupting the messages. As soon as I start to talk with this new interlocutor, the sounds of the banquet become noise for the new ‘us’. The system has shifted. If I approach the table, the noise slowly becomes conversation. In the system, noise and message exchange roles according to the position of the observer and the action of the actor, but they are transformed into one another as well as a function of time and of the system. They make order out of disorder. (Serres, 1982, 2007: 66)

The second is from A.A. Walters Noise and Prices. Walters was a member of the UK government’s Roskill committee from 1968 which was charged with finding a site for a third London airport by means of a cost benefits analysis. By analysing the impact of aircraft noise on house prices the book attempts to construct an economics of noise and establish the free market value of a bit of peace quiet.

Air pollution, visual intrusion and noise have been with us for many decades but it is only during the past five years or so that these issues have come to play a crucial role in the decisions of authorities. It is no accident that the loudest and most effective voices of protest have been heard in the countries which have relatively high incomes; after all it is only the relatively affluent who have both the taste and and the income to support their search for a ‘high quality environment’; there are no constraints on the making of smoke or noise in Ankara or Calcutta. (Walters, 1975: vii)

Here noise simultaneously marks the geopolitical boundary between the first world and the rest – there is no “noise” in Ankara or Calcutta – and the historical emergence of “the environment” as a political subject.

For more on noise mapping:

http://noisemapping.defra.gov.uk/wps/portal/noise

http://www.londonnoisemap.com/ unfortunately now decommissioned

but this one works: http://www.xs4all.nl/~rigolett/ENGELS/maps/euromapframe.htm

Note: the city makes noise, but noise makes the thesis

Awoken at 4.35 am by student neighbours ‘after-partying’ in their garden (on a Wednesday!), the outline of Lud Heat chapter seems to fall into place.

Argument: within standard accounts of Modernism (Habermas “public sphere”, Adorno “fetish character”), difficulty functions as a sign of rupture/fracture/fragmentation.

Question: what happens when we read difficulty as noise? Paulson’s text-reader as complex-adaptive system too functional, but is it possible to apply ideas of emergence to Modernist poetics? Assemblage of heterogeneous materials versus organicism?

Invoke locative function of noise and examine how Sinclair exploits difficulty as communicative interference to establish the local as a critical category. Show how, within Lud Heat, the noise of the ‘local’ functions as an emergent quality that undoes both the national and the global.

Jacques Rancière and the politics of noise

After a frustrating summer trying to trace an elusive politics of noise in the pages of Jacques Rancière’s Disagreement, I’d pretty much abandoned all hope of explaining to my own satisfaction, let alone anybody else’s, just what Rancière means by “politics”, how it differs from “police” and what part exactly is played by  “the part that has no part”. The problem was that all of my attempted explications collapsed back into Rancière’s own terms and these seemed to preclude in advance the production of any positive examples. However, after a diversion in the discussion of an article by Ross Chambers in the ASCA Articulations seminar on Friday took us back to Rancière, I’m going to give it another go and see if I can make some connections with other theorists of noise.

The article up for discussion was Chambers’ account of Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick’s ‘epistemology of the closet’, entitled “Strategic Constructivism? Sedgwick’s Ethics of Inversion” and published in Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critcal Theory

To recap the article

Chambers takes us back to the 1980s when US gay and lesbian studies were stymied by arguments between essentialists who argued that homosexuality was hard-wired into biology, and constructivists who argued that sexuality is always a discursive construct.

It was an argument that had the uncomfortable corollary that political activism was most effectively propagated by essentialists (the philosophically conservative position) as constructivists were more or less condemned to denounce any gay-affirmative work as simply perpetuating the object of the action in their victimhood.

Sedgwick’s strategy was to rethink the essentialist/constructivist binary through the terms minoritizing and essentializing. She argued that there is an underlying incoherence in thought about homosexuality: most educated westerners think that there is “a distinct population of persons who really are gay” – the minoritizing (essentialist) view, but also believe that sexual identity is radically unstable – that homosexuality is closeted in Western masculinist culture. In Sedgwick’s account the closet is the device for managing or policing that incoherence.

Although Sedgwick undertook this move for ’strategic’ reasons, Chambers argues that there is much more at stake. He argues that the incoherence is inherent in any social taxonomy which attempts to sort people into different kinds or classes – thereby creating distinct classes out of a continuum of difference (whether sexual, racial, social, ethnic, or based on able-bodiedness, for example).

Paradigmatic thinking

Any such category will be minoritizing or essentialising in that its members will have been selected contrastively from a continuum. However, the categories themselves are totalizing or universalizing in that they make a claim to constitute all that there is: you must be either straight or gay, man or woman, rational or irrational. Consequently to be a member of one category necessarily involves carrying a trace of the constitutive other: there are no straights without gays, no men without women, no giants without dwarves. That’s just the way paradigms work: paradigms minoritize and essentialize their members by asserting equivalence between all their members (all homosexuals are sexually attracted to members of their own sex). However paradigms insofar as they claim to constitute a totality – to exhaust all the options – entail that any essentialist identity is destabilized by the traces of the other against which the membership is defined and upon which it depends.

The universalizing function of such paradigms means that other possible groupings are forgotten or occluded (paradigmatic thinking forgets the differences within the set in order to concentrate on the differences between members of other sets). This forgetting or invisibility can be represented schematically like this,

red y         black y

red x         black z

Where the shared qualities of ‘y’ cannot be seen because of the relationship of equivalence asserted between members of the category red and the universalising logic of the paradigm red/black as a whole.

Rancière

It’s at this point that Chambers’ account of Sedgwick seems to illuminate, or at least throw into relief, Rancière’s ideas of  “politics”, the “partition of the sensible” and “the part that has no part”. Once again reverting to the simplicity of the schema: what passes for politics and that which JR wants to call police, seems to correspond directly with the categories red and black. Rancière dubs this kind of politics “police” because it is concerned with maintaining bodies in their existing places through the “partition of the sensible”:

The police is thus first an order of bodies that defines the allocation of the ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise… (29)

Consequently minoritizing political strategies such as affirmative action are effectively “police”  actions in that they maintain the paradigm or in Rancière’s terms, the existing partition of the sensible. For Rancière the truly political corresponds to the “part that has no part” the emergence, or the self-presentation of ‘y’-ness. Thus:

Political activity is whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or changes a place’s destination. It makes visible what had no business being seen and makes heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise; it makes understood as discourse that which was only heard as noise.  (30)

For Rancière the emergence of the occluded, or ‘y’-ness, occurs through “literarity” – a “wandering excess” which Davide Panagea glosses thus:

This excess of words over the existing distribution of the common that establishes the communal order represents the egalitarian power of language – which Ranciere calls literarity – the abiltiy to disturb the existing circuits of words, meanings and places of enunicaition….

A gloss which seems to deliver us back at the door of William Paulson’s remarks about “literature as the noise of culture” and “literary language as that which is crafted to maximise the potential of noise.” Paulson’s idea that the noise or difficulty of a text stimulates the system’s self-organisation at a higher level then takes on an immediate political dimension. Literature comes to be defined in terms of re-partitioning the sensible, a re-partitioning which is achieved through its noise.

Queer noise

However, it’s the apparent equivalence between queerness and noise that I want to highlight here. Is this just a ’straight’ substitution or does the translation of queerness into noise bring anything else to the model?

One possibility is that noise spatializes and temporalizes the Chambers’ paradigm. Rancière speaks of noise because in the attempt to re-invent the political in the face of the apparent triumph of neo-liberal economics, he returns to Aristotle’s fundamental distinction between logos (sense) and phonos (sound).

For Rancière this distinction entails two different forms of spatial organisation [What Manuel DeLanda would term forms of structuration?] between the market (agora) and the city (polis). Attention to noise as the voice of the occluded, the part that has no part, provides a foundation for a model of community which is more than a market because it is not reducible to the sum of its parts, but in which the occluded defines the totality as a process of becoming. The aletheria, or process of unveiling, entailed by Sedgwick’s ‘ethic of inversion’, on the other hand seems to hold the paradigm in a condition of stasis.

This post is just to note that this is potentially useful approach for talking about Sinclair’s take on the transformation of London in the 1980s: another situation where at first sight there seems to be a profound mismatch between the progressive positions philosophically and politically. Rather than viewing his “occultism” (anachronistically) as a repsonse to Thatcher’s “voodoo economics”, it seems possible to invoke the “part that has no part” as the foundation of a radical visionary tradition within the presentation of London… but more on this later. Next post I think I want to see if DeLanda’s virtual abstract machines connect up with this distinction between the spatialisation of the polis and the agora.

Satire as topology : Terdiman and Serres

Reading through Richard Terdiman’s account of the relationship of dominant- and counter-discourses in 19^th-century France, I’m struck by the ways in which his description of the transformation of satire in that period replicates the dynamics of Michel Serres’ “parasitic logic”. So this post develops the parasite/media theme through a brief application of Serres’ parasitology to Terdiman’s account of satire under the July Monarchy, (which may sound a bit recondite, but according to Terdiman it is one of the seminal events in “media history”, honest!).

First some Serres

In The Parasite, our favourite interdisciplinarian effectively takes the chaos theorist’s maxim that noise (parasite in French) is a more complex form of information, and applies it to Fontaine’s fable ‘The City Rat and the Country Rat’.

Fontaine’s fable, says Serres, is structured around parasitic relations - that is, relations based on taking without giving. Firstly the country rat eats at the table of the town rat, but fails in his sacred duty as guest to pay for his supper with a tale. Instead, scared by the noise at the door, he eats and runs. Tsk tsk.

Obviously the whole fable turns on the rat’s status as parasite within human society: his ‘feast’ is in reality the crumbs left by the householder. However, in Fontaine’s story the householder is a tax farmer and, as such, is himself living off the leftovers (surplus) of the farmer, the fable’s ‘true’ producer – just as, at a different scale, the city is a ‘parasite’ on the country.

Or so it seems, but according to Serres the farmer is also a parasite, living at the expense of his livestock: taking from nature but giving nothing back “except death”.

In Serres’ reading, consequently, “abuse value precedes use value”: everybody lives off somebody else. Or to put it another way, in every simple system of exchange, there occurs some noise, some interference, and when we shift our perspective and treat that noise as information, we see that the simple system forms part of a more complex ‘parasitic logic’.

Theorem: noise gives rise to a new system, an order that is more complex than the simple chain. The parasite interrupts at first glance, consolidates when you look again. The city rat gets used to it, is vaccinated, becomes immune. The town makes noise, but the noise makes the town. (Serres, 2007: 14)

So how does this play out in Terdiman’s account of discourse and counter-discourse in nineteenth-century France?

We begin with Louise-Philippe, a Liberal monarch promoting himself as the “citizen king” the champion of free speech. A proto-typical version of the ideal democracy in which subject and ruler are one and the same: perfect communication.

Here the noise/parasite takes the form of the satirical journal, Le Charivari founded in 1832 by Charles Philipon, and featuring the lithographs of Honoré Daumier. In exemplary parasitic fashion Le Charivari exploits to the full the host’s professed commitment to free speech, pillorying the corruption of the regime in true Rabelaisian style:

Louis-Philippe’s response to the satirist’s alternative take on the bourgeois feedback system is initially direct and legalistic: arrests, seizures of property, imprisonment.Which of course simply intensifies resistance – Philipon and Daumier meet each other in prison.

According to the logic of the parasite, however, the interruption of noise should stimulate the host to adapt and change – noise should produce a more complex communicative system which incorporates the parasite/noise as new information.

In other words, the story calls for a bang.

Cue Giuseppe Marco Fieschi and his infernal machine, a twenty-barrelled machine gun with which he attempts to assassinate L-P. He misses his target but kills 14 bystanders. In an early example of the shock doctrine, Fieschi’s infernal machine provides the government with the perfect excuse to transform the nature of the channel. Henceforth the discourse governing communication between government and populace will no longer be determined by the principle of free speech, but by the dictates of law and order.

Specifically, a press act is introduced which criminalizes satirical attacks on the king, his government or their actions. It also prohibits the publication of any image which hasn’t been given prior approval by the government. Fieschi’s noise effectively institutionalizes censorship.

Censorship as noise

For the publisher of a satirical daily, state censorship constitutes some fairly serious noise on the line and, in Terdiman’s account, instigates a major adaptive manoeuvre on the part of Le Charivari:

with no possibility of criticizing the king or his government, Philipon shifted the focus of the paper’s mockery to those of whom king and government in any case had always been the synecdochic representatives. (Terdiman 163)

From political satire Le Chariviri changes up to ideological satire: it targets bourgeois society as a whole, and does so through another classic parasitic manoeuvre, by co-opting the existing visual language of the physiognomy, or portrayal of recognisable ‘types’ through which the bourgeois had traditionally signified its difference from, and superiority to the non-bourgeois.

In Terdiman’s account this detournement of an existing language provoked by the interruption of censorship effectively transforms the language of satire and marks the triumph of counter-discourse over dominant discourse. The aim of a counter-discourse, says Terdiman,  is to wrest control of the symbolic from the dominant discourse, and this is achieved by Daumier’s “corrosive” deployment of the language of description far more effectively than the use of exaggeration and deformation in political satire.

Censorship as filter

As such, this latest interruption once again transforms the system. Instead of noise on the line, censorship acts as a filter which eliminates the noise of a fairly messy/medieval/Rabelaisian satirical language characterized by carnivalesque exaggeration and deformation. It brings about its replacement by a language which subverts the bourgeoisie’s own self-expression: for the bourgeois it is no longer possible to speak and act as a bourgeois without the consciousness of the satirist at his shoulder. (There is a great Daumier litho of a landscape artist at his easel with a cartoonist at his easel behind him, unfortunately not on-line.)

If the aim of counter-discourse is to wrest control of the symbolic from the dominant discourse and thereby make us see the world differently, Daumier achieves perfect satire. He no longer has to exaggerate the feature of the bourgeois world in order to make it appear ridiculous, it is enough to simply repeat its banalities.

Media as noise

But of course such perfection demands to be interrupted. This time it is the media itself which insists on being heard:

. . . as anyone who has examined an original Daumier lithograph . . . has noticed, the surface of the plate is itself disrupted by the print-through of the page 4 advertisements, which under the conditions of nineteenth-century letterpress technology was extremely difficult to prevent. A phantom, palimpsest presence of the medium’s commercial side thus floats on the surface of its satire. (Terdiman 190)

The interference of the commercial underside of the media with its satiric content points to another shift within the relationship between dominant- and counter-discourse. Not only are Daumier’s satires of bourgeois life disseminated by the media from which the bourgeois derives its wealth, his readership has also become bourgeois. Whereas the original public consisted of republicans and conservative critics of the “bourgeois monarchy” (Left and Right), the readership now comprises the bourgeoisie itself. A change recognised by Daumier when he has Macaire (the figure through whom he satirizes the rapacity of the bourgeois) pay a visit to his studio to complement the cartoonist on his work. In another lithograph reproduced by Terdiman, he shows two bourgeois readers of Le Charivari with their faces hidden by the paper in which they will discover their own images. As Terdiman says,

The Chinese-puzzle exchange of efforts to undo or outflank the discourse of the Other is thus particularly complex in this representation. But the configuration of this ‘mise-en-abyme’ is really that of the termless struggle to re-envelop the opponent which constitutes all discursive combat. Indeed, the play of opposing efforts to achieve symbolic domination resembles nothing more than the childhood fantasy (or the topological enigma) of two predators each of which is intent upon devouring the other, absorbing the substance of its rival into itself (Terdiman, 179)

In this and other images, Daumier effectively depicts the topological relationship between satire and its media, suggesting that satire as a counter-discourse is always in the position of parasite and host. Satire lives off its object, feeds off its energy. Interrupting Terdiman with Serres, I hope makes the topological relationship between discourse and counter-discourse clearer and helps us rethink the space of satire as a mode which operates not through the mechanics of resistance and opposition but through the constant transformations of noise.