[-empyre-] Fragments of Noise, part 3

[Murat Nemet-Nejat]

Hi Christof,

I want to join your exploration for a fluid, shifting noise where it never
calcifies, solidifies into an authoritarian solidness. It all depends I
think on the alertness of the mind looking at it and is able to shift leg
in mid motion. One specific passage you just quoted may be a way to suggest
how that may happen:

"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."

Henri Chopin's "act" is a poem ("noise" in that positive sense) until the
moment it is enacted (in other words, before the surprise, until the "zero"
moment of its existence). Then, it becomes a "sound," a poetics of
performance. As suddenly, eliciting an intense moment of loss and an ebbing
away of language as time, the burnt poems become noise, lost, receding (in
memory) and radically undefinable.

Ciao,
Murat

On Sat, Mar 31, 2018 at 4:35 PM, Christof Migone <cmigone at uwo.ca> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 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).
>
> -----------
>
> 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.
>
> -----------
>
> 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.
>
> -----------
>
> 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.
>
> -----------
>
> Christof
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
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