[-empyre-] Fragments of Noise, part 3

Christof Migone cmigone at uwo.ca
Sun Apr 1 06:35:46 AEST 2018


Nice to see this flurry of activity. Difficult to know where to start,
what thread to pick up. It¹s tempting to refer to this plethora as noise,
but, aside from being too facile, there¹s 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 Œnoise¹ here, the negative attribute
is abated, but not eradicated. Its hold is strong. Perhaps it¹s 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, it¹s 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. I¹m 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: ³And 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?² 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 (Œmediate, compromise, mislead¹), 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. It¹s the etcetera. It¹s the
etcetera that resists and exceeds the Œit is¹ 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 ³sidelong
glance² Wittgenstein mentions in sect. 274 of his Philosophical
Investigations: ³Of course, saying that the word ³red² ³refers to² rather
than ³signifies² 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.² 
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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Christof







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