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.