Silenced Noise

This presentation considers noise in relation to intelligibility and inclusion. It considers it as sound, quiet or loud, which does not fit into a semantic, musical, artistic or cultural and political regime; and which thereby remains unrecognisable, unintelligible and without conventional value. Such noise approaches silence through its own muted voice and brings to discussion the very frames of legitimation and intelligibility that determine quality, meaning, sense and nonsense. Noise thus becomes an issue of representation and the way we look at things. How we approach them and what we expect. This is an issue of proximity and orientation. To loosely refer to Sara Ahmed on this point: the way our ears turn make some things noise and others a sound, and conversely our orientation silences what looks an/other way.

From here my contribution attempts to practice a deliberate embracing of noise as a path towards inclusivity and as a critique of judgment, providing a feminist and decolonial stance: to entrain ourselves conceptually and physically in noise, to listen out for what we do not know how to call, for what we can find no referent, and what annoys, disturbs and unsettles us; to purposefully step into its muted voice and break its silence.

The aim is not to bring noise to intelligibility, to transpose, translate or pitch shift; to turn down the volume or ventriloquise, but to come to hear its own voice and sense its absence.

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As the economist Fischer Black remarked in the context of finance: noise is what makes it difficult to test theories, it is what clouds our vision and what forces us ‘to act largely in the dark. (Black,1986)

The objective of this monthly seminar, which will see the College international de philosophie hosted by King’s College London, is to bring the philosophical stakes of the question of noise to the foreground. Philosophers and theoreticians are invited to meet at the intersection of philosophy, digital culture and experimental artistic practices, in order to revaluate this notion of noise, not only in light of the importance it is given by Fischer Black, but also in von Neumann’s famous formulation, according to which noise is not only essential to any process under consideration, but ‘fully comparable’ in its importance to the ‘intended and correct logical structure’ of data. (von Neumann, 1956).