[-empyre-] Fragments of Noise, part 2

[Christof Migone]

I appreciate Murat¹s formulation that "silence is the Œunreachable' zero
point of noise, Œpart' of noise.² My only question is whether noise in
this instance is interchangeable with sound? Or, is noise here (and
perhaps frequently elsewhere) a way to get to an expanded field of the
sonic? 

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>From Fred Moten¹s Black and Blur, pp.63-64: ³While Adorno requires
recognition of the distinction between phonic substance or sound and
musical material, Gould demands reduction of the tactile experience as
well so that he might conceptualize what he can¹t imagine, imagine what he
cannot hear. It is, however, by way of ecstatic singing and humming,
irruptively involuntary movements of/and conduction, the supposedly
degraded and degrading accompaniments of the pianistic utterance, that
Gould achieves a certain content or essential music whose outward
manifestation is the irreducible sound of the piano and his irrepressible
phono-choreographic accompaniment. That ensemble of
accompaniment‹composition¹s disruptively constitutive innermost extremity,
the native fugue-state of being-composed‹is essential to that content; it
is its condition of possibility. It is the embarrassment not simply of
music¹s irreducible materiality but of the origin and end of music¹s
fantastic transcendence of that materiality in that materiality that is
the source of what we might call Gould¹s performance anxiety, which is
allayed and relayed in his performance of and through his love affair with
the mediating force of forced microphonic rendition and stereophonic
audition. This is all to say that Gould¹s recordings bear the trace, and
Girard¹s film insists upon, the centrality of visual, tactile, and aural
experience‹a performativity that improvises through the opposition of
media and the immediate‹to the abstract truth in music. By way of fantasy,
the recordings and the film document this unconcealment. Such
animateriality always verges on scandal, whether it takes the form of
discomposing song or abducted listening.²


Moten¹s animateriality seems the kind of (noisy) agent that lurks as
reminder/remainder to be a generative way to (back- but also fore-)ground
noise. An animateriality that ensures that the feedback loop of
referentiality always derails, even if just by a byte.

In the postface (titled Emit) of recently published selection of Erin
Moure¹s poetry (Wesleyan, 2017), Planetary Noise, Moure mentions the word
Œtexterior¹‹I can¹t think of a better pairing than Œanimateriality¹ with
Œtexterior.¹ Here¹s more context for Moure¹s neologism (I presume its
hers) (p. 165-6): "In poetry, texturalities, textualities, textscapes,
texteriors generate and are generated, thrall and intercalate. Anger and
despair are not alien to poetry either, for poetry is not Œmeaning' but is
this Œworking,' this formae vitae in which the individual poet¹s mind and
hands are plural with other poets and all are called to 'work at the
limits of signification.' Not entropic but amplificatory."

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Fred Moten, during the Q & A which follows his March 21 lecture ³The Gift
of Corruption² (https://vimeo.com/261854255 ‹ around the one hour mark)
writes on the blackboard: sinn + sin = nonsense.

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Christof


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