kagablog

music - joel assaizky
vocal & lyrics - aryan kaganof
video edited by the isidore isou remix collective
3min37sec
june 2009

watch it here

http://www.meanwhile.co.za/MEANWHILE8/?p=321

“There are channels and thus there must be noise.”[10]

In a usual understanding of communication, noise is an unwanted third thing that interferes in what would otherwise be a clear connection between a sender and a receiver. On closer reflection, though, noise is more complex. To begin with, it always indicates the wider context or milieu in which communication takes place. A message must pass through a medium. The medium generates effects that attach to the message. Noise, therefore, is a constitutive feature of any communication. Noise is the presence of the medium through which the message must pass. Each new innovation in media promises to minimize noise, but inevitably generates its own new brand of clamor. This battle with the medium is never entirely successful because we can never eliminate the space of transmission. There is always a context of communication, or an environment and so there is always a noisy third term. Serres writes: “…We are surrounded by noise. We are in the noises of the world, and we cannot close our door to their reception. In the beginning is noise. The real seems to me to be stochastically regular.”[11]

The analysis of noise therefore proves to be far more interesting than we might have suspected. Noise directs us away from the message itself toward the medium in which it occurs. In Serres’ image of communication, noise is the “third man,” always on the perimeter of any circuit of senders and receivers. In order to communicate, sender and receiver have to battle with the clamor of the milieu. No matter how opposed the terms of their debate, they proceed on the understanding that they can minimize the threat of noise and control the environment in which they operate and transfer messages.

The attempt to eliminate the noisy middle changes the relation of sender and receiver. Security measures we introduce to protect us from the threat of terrorism, for example, change the very community we set out to protect. Every attempt to create better channels of communication between parents and children, by aping the language of our children, or compelling them to be clearer with us, changes the relation of parents and children. The reaction to noise, whether it is to incorporate it, or to try more effectively to expel it, transforms the communicants.

Serres’ theory of noise changes in important ways through his career. In his early work, noise appears to interfere in communication. He wonders how we might render the translation inert. Critics have pointed out an element of idealism in his early Hermes work, where he sees the empirical variations in communication — accent, misspelling, etc — as the extraneous stuff to be removed. In his later works, however, he begins to see noise as a positive force in communication.

Why look to parasites for insights on the relation of noise and communication? The simple answer is that in French, parasite can mean one of three things: an organism that lives off a host, a social loafer who takes a meal and gives nothing in turn, or static/white noise in a communication circuit. These very different senses of the term — biological, social, informational — share a common principle that we might call simply interference. In each case, the parasite interferes in, and ultimately upsets, some existing set of relations and pattern of movement. It compels us either to expel it, or to readjust our internal workings so that we can accommodate the needs of the parasite. Noise, in other words, is to communication what a virus is to an organism, or a scapegoat is to a community. It is not simply an obstacle, but rather a productive force around the exclusion of which the system is organized.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to address the full implications of the biological theory of parasitism, but I will mention in passing that recent work in virology supports Serres’ claim of the productivity of the parasite. Luis Villareal, a leading virologist suggests that new work on the role of viruses in evolution challenges our accepted ideas of “life.” Viral research places in doubt the common doxa that the cell is the basic unit of life, because it contains the material for its own replication. Viruses are purely relational beings that must live off the life force of some other thing. Because they lack the capacity for self-replication, viruses have been thought to be only partly in being, or to have some problematic, liminal status outside the web of life. Villarreal and others now believe, however, that viruses are far more complex and challenge our ideas of what constitutes life. In fact, they even suggest that cells may have required viruses in order to evolve. All of which affirms Serres’ basis premise of the productivity of the parasite and, more generally, the principle that relations precede being.[12]

Serres’ revaluation of “parasitic” noise builds on a basic principle of information theory. In Claude Shannon’s pioneering work in information theory, noise is recognized as a necessary consequence of transmission. The snow on the television set, the hiss on a tape, or a missed registration in a printing operation are all instances of noise, or parasitism. In each of these cases, the presence of the medium is registered in what would, seemingly, otherwise be a clear transmission.[13]

Claude Shannon recognized that whether or not a certain effect is considered noise depends on one’s position in the listening chain. Noise is interference only from the sender’s point of view. From the point of view of the receiver it may be considered a part of the information packet that is transmitted along a channel. When we hear the earliest sound recordings of Tennyson reading Charge of the Light Brigade, for example, the watered down and scratched out sound conveys the enormous passage of time, just as the static sound of Neil Armstrong’s voice on the moon tells us something about his physical distance from us and the newness of space technologies in the 1960s. It would not be difficult to think of countless other cases in which the presence of the medium mixes in with the intended message to produce some whole new effect, not intended by the sender, but taken as information by the receiver. In these cases, noise is not simply an extra third thing to be discounted. It has entered into the message and become part of it. To speak technically, the signal now has an “equivocation,” which is to say that two messages pass along the same channel. The sender may not have intended this, but the receiver may welcome it.

The detective genre offers interesting examples of this productivity of noise. The popularity of shows such as C.S.I. lies not so much in their capacity to puzzle out the mind of the killer, as in the kind of “media analysis” one finds in them. Typically, the killer wants to send a message by marking up a body, or dressing his victim in a certain way. The police, being good hermeneutists, ignore this message and seek out the unintended communication, the way that the medium attaches itself to the signal. They look, in other words, for equivocation in the message.

It is because the killer, or thief operates in an environment that is, in itself, a medium that he can be detected. The dirt that attaches itself to the car, the fiber from a couch, and the procession of insects that arrive at a dead body in a predictable and datable sequence are all things over which the killer exercises no mastery. The police recognize a basic principle of information theory that is also the starting point of Serres’s work: noise does not indicate a lack, but a surplus of information. And a medium/milieu affects, or acts upon, the signal. The active intention to transmit a signal requires that we open ourselves to the passive reception of the medium in which it can occur. The user is used by the medium. Marshall McLuhan began his media analysis on exactly the same point. “The medium is the message,” he explains, means that the user becomes the content of the message. The user is used by the medium.

Serres takes this principle in new and interesting directions. He follows the French biologist Henri Atlan in arguing that equivocation, or noise, in a system should not be seen as a lack that takes away from communication; rather, it is a positive force that does something. Atlan argues that noise prompts a system to reorganize in a more complex form that incorporates the disturbance.[14] Here we really find the heart of Serres’ theory of the parasite.

stephen crocker
noise is the presence of the medium
this excerpt originally appeared on ctheory.net