by Alan Sondheim

*Pity for the world. let the new knowledge come.*
*- Michel Serres, Detachments*

*The poetic moans of this century are only sophisms.*
*- Lautreamont, Poesies*

"No place left to go and no money to take you there, abjection itself
will become the last accessible frontier. But the wherewithal to
undertake this exploration has been severely blunted by the media's
aestheticizing the hell out of horror. Thus the abjects. They explode
the aesthetic filters slapped on horror, restoring it to the capacity
to affect again."
- Biba Kopf, "Bacillus Culture" in Tape Delay, ed. Charles Neal


Approaching the second millennium, culture undergoes a great trans-
formation, the revenge of surplus and excess. Totality fragments;
fragments clutter; clutter accumulates. The social itself is wounded;
with the disappearance of the great narratives (progress, self,
family, religion, science, all tending towards the ultimate),
an exponentially increasing number of tragedies - criminality,
starvation, poverties, plant and animal extinctions - traverse the
depths of a damaged planet. The human(e) is broken, identified now
only with fictions. "Noise Culture" refers to both this state of
affairs and various (sub)cultural responses. Noise culture is
normative; culture undergoes splintered intensifications, floods,
dissipations...

---

Noise culture exists as social turbulence, invaded by parasites -
fragments of incomplete data-banks, addresses, indirect and coded
addresses, all operating within the incoherency of an outmoded
concept of "truth" - a concept with proliferating falsifications.
Logic itself has become exhausted as the foundation of mathematical
culture. Deconstruction and its trace vanishes, without a trace.
The fatigue of the body dominates and compresses the clarity of
thought (what was thought to be clarity), which becomes nothing
more than an occupational privilege, bound only to immediate
situations and their promise of economic and sexual power - the
checkmating of the professional elite.

Absolute identity (A=A) is no longer of any consequence; even
the degree zero of cultural anomie has vanished, replaced by a
null set defined as the set of those things not equal to
themselves. Within this accumulation of virtual displacements
(crises of identity), contradiction is impossible, replaced
only by waywardness - the crafty smile, the eroticism of
sleaziness. This waywardness, this contrary (as in the
"contrary child") inhabits a universe whose ethical structure is
sham; what's left is strategy and happenstance.

Contradictions themselves "float" as temporary, part objects.
In place of the well-defined semantic field (the occasion of a
theory of competence), one notes a swollen semiosis (sign
production) possessing fissures intead of inscriptions:
definitions are temporary, occurring at the weakest point of
the communicative domain. Such fissures pass for the entities
of a traditional linquistics, but their occasion within speech
or grammatological acts is chaotic, catastrophic, and ill-
defined. (One need only consider the use of words such as
"health," "drug," "intervention," "postmodern," "sado-masochism"
now, and forevermore.) There is no memory or tradition at work;
instead, memory becomes a construct inherited from the
photographic; the representative contents of recall are nothing
more than current representations, simulacrua, virtual
subjectities, Kodak-content. "Communication," "community," both
reserved for the past tense, are American imaginaries; the
Aquarian itself is tied to a surplus economics and demographics
of New Age illiteracies.

Noise culture is replete with the parasitic, commodity culture
feeding upon real and unreal human needs and the
creation/isolation of data bank fragments (dating services,
mailing lists, etc.). Given the exponential rise of information
in post-industrial society, given the contrary and imminent
nature of this information, given the transvaluation of all
truth-values, and given the problematics of scientific and
technological progress - then information becomes viral,
inhabiting the linguistic, decaying within it, and having no
immanent value whatsoever. Noise culture is a culture of
confusions, conflations - a culture of the inconceivable; it
is unbelievable, because belief itself is refused entrance,
except as imminent construct. What is seized is purely the
momentary hiatus amidst the chattering of signifiers.
Philosophy has become Das Mann, for example, and
as example, philosophy is further abandoned.

In place of any consideration of the modernist paradigm of
cultural objects (paintings, estates, media, within
formalist or New-Critical paradigms), consider the phenmenology
of the cultural site. The accumulation of artworks exists,
but existence is transgressive; the context is mobile, wobbly,
and competitive (in the sense that any jostling is
competitive). What once were considered objects are now objects
of (impure) representation, formally identified as the union
of the intersection of their family of descriptions; such an
inexact definition (i.e. what constitutes a painting, human
being, person) becoms a fissure within the swollen cultural
domain, a fissure according to the lines of wekeast resistance,
but a fissure nonetheless which passes as an inscription - a
temporary demarcation which may even, under exceptinal
circumstances, last the life of the organism. (Thus an
inscription is a "classical" demarcation within a
culture's mapping of the world, while a fissure is
an ambiguous, temporary, and commodified demarcation of both
the real and increasingly remote layers of representation.)

Prejudice expands within the boundary-zones; born out
of the swollen, it is the "simplest thing in the world,"
collapsing the need for real observation. Anything for
demarcation, transcendence; godding and the sexual play similar
roles. Bondage/domination and sado-masochisms temporarily
harden what appear to be permanent positions of the
body(politic). Within noise culture, then, all
communication is distorted, and distorted necessarily.
Clutter carries no memory, no history, no competency.
Seriality is always on the horizon. Bodies penetrate and
grapple. People sigh and borrow from one another.

Clutter contains no memory; the absence of history, history
adjudicated and collapsed, is characteristic of noise culture.
History eliminates noise from temporality; as a process of
reorganization, it produces the purity of historical process.
History does what the present cannot do; cause and effect apear
incontrovertible and the cluttered horizon of everyday life
disappears into discourses on power, economics, media, bodies,
and demographics. With the accumulation of information across
the planet, there are more and more calls for reogranizations
which are problematized upon their creation; history has become
histories (mystories, herstories), and local history descends
into the mythopoeic, the realm of legend which futilely
inscribes itself as "tradition" against the incrusion of
electronic media (employed by local history as a matter of
record) - more information, more histories. Memory disappears
into legend and exhaustion. There are no conclusions to be
drawn (no time to draw them in). (History, history,
history.)

Romanticisms (jogging, art-school, substance abuse
consultations) appear in which individuality is promulgated
as defense; no one listens. There is no longer anyone to
listen; there are no sites for competencies. The best one
hopes for is computer matchups, successful searching, links in
which information may be exchanged without decay and the
presence of computer viruses, which clutter up the immediate
works. More and more, the binary interiority of the computer
dominates; the output is monitored and nothing more
(everything watches everything else). Dialogs are reduced to
microdialogs which circulate endlessly in eccentric space -
phallocratic and headless dialogs, situational ethics, invaded
by noise and parasites, dying and reborn endlessly (nothing
dies within the loop; power runs out).

The (transnational, managerial) corporate domain is also
invaded: terrorism, viruses, sabotage, and bureaucratic labor
continually collapse, on a local level, economic structures
parasitic upon an increasingly depleted planet. Still, this
domain speaks the totalization of culture everywhere; it's as
if the culture were One but the "family of man" syndrome has
long been deconstructed. Familiality, the sheer goodness of
things and commodities, is questionable amidst famine, drug
culture, the neutralizations of late captalism - questioned
everywhere; the most totalitarian systems leak within and
without the world information (dis)order.

The body becomes a production of the state; by capital; by
scarcity; by itself within noise culture, wherre it collapses
into part-objects and representations. Character becomes an
accumulation of "character traits," which give the appearance
of being able to be rearranged at will, as smokers stop smoking,
entrepreneurs make fabulous fortunes from foreclosures, and men
and women stop fucking in a viral atmosphere still reeling under
the myth of hygiene and self-control. Traits and body parts,
sexualities and aggressions, circulate in a space of
information overload; this is the liquidity of organic
information where the body collapses in fissures and
abjections. Again: No one listens, because no one can. As
usual, the "media" become problematic (designed for the body!)
with the introduction of new information displays, formats
and sensations. Enter noise culture's media dump:
the accumulation of battered television sets, video disks,
vinyl records, CDs, old computers - "it's cheaper to get a new
one" ... Clutter transforms into rubbish.

In noise culture, bureaucracy and language are viral
themselves; the former is paralleled by T2 or T4 bacteriophage,
which possesses modularity, assembly-line technique, and the
bacterium as a market investment transformed back into itself.
Everything is absorbed within the bureaucracy, which ideally
possesses no inputs or outputs. Starvation and a mismanaged
(managed) ecosystem are the result. Language, too, is manipulated
on the model of 1984; the part-objects of social realities
are bureaucratically constructed. Words are identified with
manipulation; released, they result in idle chatter dominated by
prejudice and confusion. (No one admits this, the poverty of
language, the abject fear and sorrow that lie just beneath the
surface of most of us. No longer speaking, we try out speech; no
longer thinking, we try out thought. No wonder so many turn to
the frozen realm of ideology - Christian fundamentalism,
right-to-life, RCP, whatever. Certainly the thought of the Other,
which can pass for our own, structures lives in a fast-forward
culture where reality and Otherness themselves are problematic.
The Christ-narrative continues to find expression, moving from
cultural center, however, to the periphery of empowering the
bitter and meek.) Even the Freudian model of loss, retrieval,
and reconstruction (symbolized by the "Fort-Da" all over again)
has been transformed into the bureaucratic shuffle of memory
input and recall, across the confusion of conflicting data-bases
within an impotently totalizing eye (Foucault's Panopticon).

The Panopticon itself records everything, loss everything;
epistemologies shift under its eyes which always operate across
the wrong spectra. Information is assorted piecemeal (knowledge
is replaced by knowledge management, knowledge management by
turbulent information flows), and the result is the "block" of
dead langage - the advertisement, propaganda message, little
(colored) book, holding things together within the flux of
distorted communication. (Hence the naivete and absurdity of
the conclusion of Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition:
open access to data banks is literally open access to
nothing.) The tens of thousands of commercial messages
one is exposed to every day conflict; the message is always
Buy! but the effect, like everything else, is one
of increased noise and destructuration.

Noise is literally that in noise culture - an
effusion or emission of partial signifiers everywhere and
nowhere at all, and an effusion which transgresses ontological
and epistemological boundaries on a random basis. Teleology
becmes an accumluation of "asides" and deflections;
goals are presented fully immersed in discourses which
are impossible to unravel (the soap-opera approach to life).
"Truth-values" become smeared across these (broken) discourses,
ultimately referring to a conflation of noisy logics. This noise
is compounded by a parasitology composed of AIDS, computer
viruses, advertising, piecemeal ideologies, criminalities,
bureaucracies... Behavior appears ab nihilo and protean.
This noise cannot be modelled (i.e. reduced to a chaotic
domain), since it partakes of ontological confusion on one
hand, and the imminence of making-do on the other. Nothing
coheres.

---

Noise culture is the culture of the _worn,_ worn-out, the
culture of exhaustion. It is abject, corroding whatever
mythopoeic sites are left. Pure power remains the only
immobility, ultimately grounded in the asolute speed of nuclear
retaliation. In reality, confusion reigns in the battlefield,
equally ill-defined. Civilians and soldiers alike are ground
up in a general slaughter. The pessimist might assume that all
states are states of total war - internal, external, or both. War
has been transformed from a series of operations ("battle,"
"strikes") to a condition, within and without the
parasitic. Noise culture is a civilian response to a situation
of fear, foreboding, and information overload, to which the body
responds by a continuous literal deconstruction (no metaphysics
here!), including drug culture. Dulled and disassembled, producing
and reproducing the lie, one move in media res, in extremis.
The cords binding the body in sado-masochistic theater spell out
in hieroglyphic everything and nothing that remain to be spoken.
The stutterings of desire, cries of infinite orgasm, are the only
hygienic result (take the plunge!).

Looking!: Take the plunge! The gaze is dissolved; there's no
longer a site for it. The gaze collapses into aimless and endless
loops of saccadean, protean movement. Absorbing absence, it's
replaced by a glance which covets power. (Think of the Obsession
and Charlie perfume ads, existing between gaze and glance,
mediated by commodity, searching surface, producing a
body-economics and nothing else.) Only pornography remains as
absolution within noise culture, contributing to its parasitology
- only pornography provides the site for the collapse of
distorted communication into the immediacy and arousal of the
body. Erect tissue chatters until its completion (complementation)
within itself. (And flesh is everywhere, resonating in the quantum
domain; noise culture is also the release of the flesh,
from object into millenarian field.)

In daily life, however, the glance predominates - the glance
whose province is clutter itself. The glance is a moment in
retreat, a continuous search and withdrawal. This retreat is
(as simulacrum) inverted in the video or computer game, with their
temporary totalizations of space, time, and power; the player can
be assured of a definitive (one-to-one) response based on his her
well-defined operations. The space-time of the game is therefore
classical, temporarily empowering - but now a space-time
based on capital investment. Here, the gaze appears momentarily
(concentrate!, concentrate!); these games are another pornography
(as are all investments). Channels of desire, sexuality, and
capital have collapsed into general (catastrophic) flows from
somewhere to somewhere; one sees (on the computer
bulletin-board) only the banks of the rivulets, which themselves
are changing course. Classical mathematization (taxonomies,
addresses, hierarchies) is being replaced by a universal mathesis
of widely disparate domains and computational heuristics. The
result is the gaze's meander, traversing for example the
shopping mall, in which desire is accessed by the body
(or the body's representation, the creditcard) in every direction,
and through every sense.

The body, too, is jargon. The "jargon of authenticity" has
been transformed into the authenticity of jargon, the
language-stream of the culture slipping forever away. What occurs,
if not exhaustion, overwork, impotency, performance - one withdraws,
backs down, selfcensors, editing out all but the most vociferous
(desirable, dangerous) messages. The world of the dream,
no matter how nightmarish, provides at least temporary escape;
the noise of the day transforms the random firing of neurons,
a firing ultimately under the control of the brain as a totality.

The resulting dream is a structural reorganization of firings
comming- led with both traumatic memories and everyday activities.
The dream curiously parallels its Fruedian interpretation. Instead
of reflecting the past-unconscious, it reflects the
present-conscious commingled with deep organization. It "saves"
the organization, not through sublimation, but through
guaranteeing, at least "in dream," the ability of the mind to
recuperate its environment, make sense of it. On this level,
it is irrelevant whether or not the dream is pleasant or night-
mare; what occurs is narrative, and noise culture itself is put
to bed. (Providing of course that one sleeps, and sleep disorders
have become an integral part of culture's disorders of the real.)

Put to bed: to a degree. For beyond this, exhaustion dominates,
and the dreamworld no longer functions, except perhaps on the
level of distorted narrativs of fear, abandonment, anxiety.
Exhaustion is all that can occur within turbulence. Do not forget
that nothing is absolute, transcendent (and that nothing itself
is nothing); even deconstruction leaves one only with play in a
world which already has too much. (For whom?) One fears totality
as one fears fascism: there is no turn, no Kehre, no return.
(Adorno: "Fascism is the absolute sensation.") The collapse of
noise (collapsing noise within noise) is the re-presentation of
the repressed with a vengeance. Too much play: nothing operates.
Theory dissolves as well (and what is the use of theory if, as here,
it can only remark incoherencies with incoherencies of its own?).
Language plays itself out in the empty space of mutilated bodies,
the remnants (Panama City, Beirut, Baghdad, East Timor, Kuwait,
Brazil, China) of the World War I battlefield in which the
distance between bodies was reduced to zero (nothing), and
in which bodies were literally fragmented into noise and the
abject. Does this alter? Has this been altered? Does this alter
anything? Only these spaces (collapsed, commingled) remain.
Of course there is no conclusion (no time for one).

Beyond noise culture, what refuges remain? Apocalyptic
culture reproduces classical narrative structure,
beginning, middle, the caress of the end - but here the
ultimate, resulting in the simultaneous death of
reader and writer. Apocalyptic culture can be considered in
terms of a field of operations upon deteriorating logics,
focusing on the margins of these objects for both recuperation
(1950s atomic paranoia) and lurid effect (Manson's writings).
Essentialisms of all sorts produced the privileged witness,
the guarantor of classical truth-values; deconstruction is threby
applied to the Other, critique produced from a stabilized site.
"Essence" itself is taken for granted, resulting in false or
inauthentic consensus. Spiritualities appear to entail
specific rites and beliefs (why, for God's sake?), resulting
again in essentialisms as well. Disbelief joins belief at
the margins suturing the subject (surely in need of construction).
Radical disbelief denies "believing in," and perhaps
that is the best one can hope for. This position, however, with
its denial of transcendence, remains problematic in regard to ethos
and praxis. It also opens to noisy inundation. Finally, pervading
all, are the various subcultural responses; these aren't passiave
productions, but may in fact be cultural assualts. It is here that
a frontier appears, that orgasm recuperates; it is here that the
existence of an avant-garde becomes meaningless, as culture
continues to proliferate and aesthetics simultaneously moves to
outer space and the liquid interiority of the body.