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
3 responses so far ↓
Note: the city makes noise, but noise makes the thesis « Meanwhileinmokum’s Weblog // October 25, 2008 at 9:21 am |
[...] : Parasite : Blog ← Jacques Rancière and the politics of noise The locative effect of noise [...]
paul caplan // October 27, 2008 at 11:19 am |
Interesting Walters’ mention of ‘voices of protest’. Is this noise? Is this a specifically Western thing? Orientalist? Also the idea of being able to buy silence – is that through the right noise-cancelling headphones?
meanwhileinmokum // November 1, 2008 at 10:36 am |
Don’t know, that’s the ‘rub’ I suppose. A voice implies signal, but the perception of noise is always relational: what’s noise at one point is signal at another.
In the case of these ‘affluent’ protesters, their protest seems to signal a division which is comfortably re-assimilated into an Orientalist discourse: noise pollution is a Western luxury. (Remember how the Green Party was dismissed as a middle-class affectation in Liverpool in the Militant 80s. It was a distraction in a debate organised around the slogan Coal not dole!) But now it’s also possible to hear those affluent voices as the noise within the old political discourses which signal the emergence of a radical understanding of the environment and the perception of how the reality of global networks demands a new political paradigm.
Noise-cancelling headphones? No! Augment that reality: