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
