Immersion Into Noise

Conclusion

Noise Against Oblivion: An Omnijective Philosophy of Noise Culture

In agreement with the philosopher Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, my expectation in espousing this entangled immersive art noise theory is that it will be understood not as a static aesthetic position, but as a glitch move that is continuing to amplify. This theoretical glitch hypothesis makes no pretensions to scientific methodology as it, by its very nature, must retain its speculative character because of the impossibility of attaining conclusive experimental data in art. A similar impossibility is also the case, however, with the field of consciousness studies, [329] a field which often insists on calling itself scientific. So, rather than contending that this book's conclusions are scientific, this investigation into cultures of noise ends by involving its findings in the artistic phenomenological question of the qualities (and levels) of awareness of our own consciousness within aesthetic realms which we are capable of attaining through noise art.

Especially inasmuch as I am involved in the humanities, I am reluctant to model my conclusive methodology on a mechanistic model of an earlier power-oriented science, even though the philosopher Werner Heisenberg maintained that the differences between art and science are minimized if one views both art and science from the more general vantage point of the Zeitgeist. Indeed, Gilles Deleuze also points out that “the special perceptions and affections of science or philosophy connect up with the precepts and affects of art”. [330] Therefore, in that “conscious experience is not directly observable in an experimental context”, [331] it is indeed this Deleuzian science/philosophy/art connected phenomenological zone that seems to be the appropriate theoretical model for this art noise summation. The philosophic rhizomatic theory [332] of Deleuze and Guattari, at a general level, supports such a connectivist-glitch approach towards theorizing art, as rhizomatic theory encourages philosophic non-linear and non-restrictive thinking/imagining.

For me, Gilles Deleuze’s vision of our post-industrial life opened the way for the production of current noise art by affirming the befittingness of multiplicity and the necessary entitlement of dissension. In recognition of his work, this reflection has been an attempt to hypothesize and demonstrate a counter-mannerist glitch excess, an idea that was specifically inspired by the rhizomatic thinking of Deleuze and Guattari. This glitch idea re-establishes an ambiguously private critical distance for art: a distance achieved through the connectivist challenge of (and disparity between) pleasure and frustration. This theory of noise art demands of society an active visualizing participation in private interpretations—and thus is a legitimate metaphor for contemporary art as a form of simulation-shattering engagement. For example, the noise music of John Cage demanded an open mind from the listener and a predisposed ear for all the sounds usually excluded from music in the traditional sense. If (s)he, the listener, can relate to the “noise” sounds (sounds that are always already there anyway) in a “musical” sense, then the distinction between music and noise becomes very diffuse, tentative, and rather arbitrary.

This reminds me of Raymond Roussel's themes and procedures that involved imprisonment and liberation, exoticism, cryptograms and torture by language—all formally reflected in his working technique with their inextricable play of double images, repetitions, and impediments, all giving the impression of the pen running on by itself through the dreamy usage and baroque play of mirrored form. Roussel's technique and the process he developed lends itself well to the creation of unforeseen, automatic and spontaneously noise art which gives me the feeling of prolonging action into eternity through the ceaseless, fantastic constructions of the work itself, transmitting an altered, exalted and orgasmic state of mind which after the initial dazzling creates one predominant overall effect, that of creating doubt through mechanical discourse.

The image of enclosure is common with Roussel where a secret to a secret is held back, systematically imposing a formless anxiety in the reader through the labryrinthian extensions and doublings, disguises and duplications of his texts, which make all speech and vision undergo a moment of annihilation. Roussel presents to us the model of noisy perfection of the eternally repetitive mechanical machine which functions independently of time and space, pulling the artist into a logic of the infinite.

Roussel's last book, How I Wrote Certain of My Books, is the last of his conceptual noise machines, the machine which contains and repeats within its mechanism all those mental machines he had formerly described and put into motion, making evident the machine which produced all of his machines—the master machine. All of these machines map out a noise space that is circular in nature and thus an abstract attempt at eliminating time. They reproduce the old myths of departure, of loss and of return. They construct a crisscrossed mechanical map of the two great mythic spaces so often explored by western imagination: space that is rigid and forbidden, containing the quest, the return and the treasure (for example the geography of the Argonauts and the labyrinth)—and the other space of polymorphosis noise, the visible transformation of instantly crossed frontiers and borders, of strange affiliations, of spells, and of symbolic replacements (the space of the Minotaur).

With such a wildly visionary [333] look at an art of noise, I wish to suggest what art's contribution could be to the enlargement of self-understanding [334] in the context of our conspicuously excessive, connected and collapsing society. My contention is that glitch awareness/appreciation potentially removes us out of our quiet and glib indolence and points us in the potent direction of expanding thunderous intensity.

I believe that a post-Pop noise art is critical to us now [335] because its glitch counter-mannerist excess can problematize the popular simulacra and make livelier the underground privateness of the human condition while remaining immersed inside the social network that engulfs and (supposedly) controls us. This glitch consideration offers us a personal critical distance (by skip, by stutter, by gap), and thus another perspective on (and from) the given social simulacra.

Such a destructive-creative thought might provide us with two essential aspects relevant to our lives. First, it can provide a private context in which to suitably understand our current situation. [336] Secondly (but more importantly), it may then undermine this understanding by overwhelming our immersion in the customary—along with our own prudent pose as judge.

For me, then, a bacchanalian post-Pop glitch art is capable of functioning (paradoxically) by nurturing in us a sense of polysemic uniqueness and of individuality brought about through a counter-mannerist destructive-creative style (ever more circuitous, excessive and décadent)—a style that takes us from the state of the social to the state of the secret I, by overloading ideological demonstration to a point where it becomes non-representational. This destructive-creative thought makes judicious use of the process of Deleuzian/Guattarian nomadic thinking (hearing/seeing). [337]

Accordingly, Deleuzian/Guattarian noise art would be composed of variously formed segments, stratas, and lines of flight which involve territorializing as well as deterritorializing spacio/psychic activities. [338] It is this nomadic, non-representational, counter-mannerist vacuole glitch that can suggest breaks from the fascination and complicity with Pop art and the mass media mode of communication (hung up on the felt need to be liked).

As I have shown, the art of noise needs not be likeable—nor be polite. It is certainly not info-tainment. It is, rather, as Paul Hegarty points out, infliction. [339] For me it is, more precisely, an infliction of a pleasant frustration that can lead to creative visualization.

Subsequently, my idea of noise art can also be long-suffering drôle merde (funny shit). [340] Undeniably, such a comic art backflip ties into the counter-mannerist pataphysical anti-concepts developed by Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) and The Collège de Pataphysique founded on May 11th, 1948 by an anarchic group of artists and writers interested in the philosophy of Pataphysics. These zealots devoted their time to perpetuating (and often distorting) Jarry's philosophical pranks.

For Jarry, Pataphysics is the anti-scientific realm beyond metaphysics that examines the laws that preside over exceptions—an attempt to elucidate an imaginary cosmos. Jarry specifically defined Pataphysics as the “science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments”. [341]

In 1959, Marcel Duchamp agreed to be a satrap in the Collège de Pataphysique, and there have been numerous links established with the Oulipo literary movement, specifically through the participation in both groups by the poet Raymond Queneau (1903–1976). The fabulous wordsmith, Jean Genet (1910–1986), has described himself as following in the Pataphysical tradition. Pataphysics makes a rare pop musical appraearnce in 1969 in the Beatles' song “Maxwell's Silver Hammer” on Abbey Road by mentioning a student who studied pataphysical science in the home. But unlike pop culture as a whole, Pataphysics (like noise culture) navigates inside popular topographies by disturbing their sense of collective order.

Like the thinking of Jarry, art noise mostly arrives at an anti-social examination without demonstrating any sustained systematic analysis. It just interrupts. That is what makes it counter-mannerist. But what strikes me as most exact to noise art’s peculiar propositions in terms of Pataphysics is its deep reflection (one might even say brooding) on the theme of ignobility, and this realization should shoddily shift something in your appreciation of it. Notably, already evident in the art of noise is its display of a harsh obsession with volume, a volume (both visual and audio) that tests the limits of form and stretches the bounds of meaning by recasting our experiences of encountering wildly disjunctive ideas into the sumptuously physicality of negation.

This reality-rejecting-ness delivers an airy irrational punch of nonsensical negation to art noise by tying together methods of insouciant informality with a visceral irony: at turns hip and flamboyant or abrasively outrageous. Still, the audience is expected to work devotedly to appreciate its absurd conundrums, to supply mental transitions between the diverse assortments of irrational elements that supply the art of noise its Pataphysical hooks. One must fabricate a complicated forensic fairy-tale out of this counter-mannerist mélange as it keeps slipping in and out of idiosyncratic narration. And, alas, that recitation keeps turning back into one about stinking death, that strange, incurable and deeply irrational affliction.

So yes, as noise art is about self-transcendence by means of rupture, I read the art of noise as a meditation on humiliating death in all its undifferentiated fabulousness, by which I mean its essentially nasty comedy. It is a counter-mannerist art about comical, difficult death, then. Pulling down our pants and revealing our soiled undies while keeping everyone laughing (or at least gurgling) till the deafening end.

With the art of noise, there is then an awareness of impertinent splendor in the tranquility of decomposition, which makes it all seem faintly heroic in face of death’s inexorability. Thus this irrational art implies an antiphilosopher’s knowledge of dumb death’s putrid ignobility—but the art of noise will not give in to that parody either. And this is what gives the work its extraordinary sense of dignity, a dignity that asserts life’s primacy over death because death is beyond images, beyond sounds and beyond words.

Accordingly, art noise’s hypothesis is actually fine absurdist Ubu art. Ubu is first encountered in Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, a play that created a famous scandal when it was first performed at the Theater de l'Oeuvre in Paris in 1896. It is an important precursor of Dada. Through a language of shocking lad hilarity, Ubu Roi tells the farcical story of Père Ubu, an officer of the King of Poland, a grotesque figure who epitomizes the mediocrity and idiocy of middle-class officialdom. It was through writing Ubu Roi that Jarry became the creator of the science of Pataphysics, his absurd a-logic that defined the science of imaginary solutions as enshrined since 1948 in the Collège de Pataphysique. But an Ubu art does not merely help us pass the time away, it enlivens time if we surrender to its fearful difficulty—as noise art may provide the chance to do the counter-silent thing, to look at and hear what we fear, so that such an effort will help release us from fear’s irrational grip. Then we might pataphysically expand into the counter experiences of noise and see beneath the stucco surface of Maya [342] and so enjoy absurd life all the more. So that the ignobility of death can be ignored and nonsensical dignity restored—for the fleeting moment, at least.

Deleuze and Guattari's term for such counter-experiences to mannerism [343] is becoming-animal. For them to “become animal is to participate in movement, to stake out the path of escape in all its positivity, to cross a threshold, to reach a continuum of intensities where all forms come undone, as do all the significations, signifiers, and signifieds, to the benefit of an unformed matter of deterritorialized flux, of nonsignifying signs”. [344]

Building upon their suppositions, I speculate that glitch excess can put forth an aesthetic élan of superabundance that re-conceptualizes art in terms of noise connectivity so as to unbridle us (some). This is how I interpret the counter-experience of feeling intricated in a becoming-animal noise panorama by fashioning a map of intensities. [345] However, this glitch character of de-simulated openness, which an inception of the art of noise assumes, demands that we seek a liberation from custom, doctrine and influence, and that we grasp again the autonomy and priority of art as a special type of excessive ideological activity. [346]

According to Deleuze and Guattari, rhizomatic activity is boundless in its branching. Thus noise art reflections may cross wide chasms of psycho/optic space on one surface as the most disparate elements and details may be linked. Moreover, a psychic rhizome is continually dynamic and is ceaselessly actualized by the arousal its dynamism produces and thus it is never in accord with some pre-established strategy or imposed configuration. The psychic rhizome is regularly swarming itself into being as micro and macro factors attract. One cannot declare in advance what its limiting confines are or where it will or will not operate nor what may become connected and tangled up in the rhizome's multiple dimensions because the connections do not inevitably plait common types together. Rather, a psychic rhizome's multiple dimensions instigate cross-overs between both the highest synthetic level and the slightest, most minute discrete distinctions. An artistic noise rhizome would be a complication of perceptual vicissitudes so intertwined that it gives birth to different scopes of macro-perception.

Such a noisy probing at the outer limits of recognizable representation and the excited all-over fervor of such a syncretistic probe isn't a failing of communications within noise art terms then. It is its subject. Such a bountiful realization is insinuated through overloaded/excessive stimulus inasmuch as noise may represent every integrated meaning conceivable (as white noise) for, as I demonstrated, in the art of noise the focal/audio point is generally uncircumscripted. The expansive elements within noise art are not, by definition, passively received and accepted then.

By nature of its challenging, conflicting, excessive presentation, visual noise art is also psychically withheld as it is inexorably displayed all at once to the limited nature of our human perceptive competence. Thus a successful art of noise takes us away from the habitual focus of the picturesque and potentially liberates us inwardly from the infringements stemming from the deluge of mass-media images—and so stimulates us to assess anew the caliber of any such infringement. Hence it is in the amity felt with the glitch that we may feel a sensuous liberation from ideological monotony and cultural prudery.

Such an art of noise may then stand in defiance against the limits of ordinary perception and representation. Thus it is (or can be) about the opposition between the daily work-day and the transgressive/ecstatic moment. In a sense, it attempts to set up a long-standing form of ecstatic offence where one can go back and forth at will via the glitch. [347]

Underlying this aim is a miasmatic idea which questions linear and hierarchical structures and seeks to replace them with atmospheric loose structures, keyed to a penetrable, reciprocal flow of events. This realization came to me when reading Gilles Deleuze's Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. In it, Deleuze pointed me towards a recognition of my desires' productiveness, as he indicated how desires propel us to move towards greater or lesser states of magnificence “depending on whether the thing encountered enters into composition with us, or on the contrary tends to decompose us... “. [348]

So as noise art both decomposes us and stirs re-composures in us, this means a re-positioning of identity within an atmospheric and artistic ontological model of relations, diversities, shocks, connections, heterogeneities, breaks and unexpected links. This means that the intellectual situation of Deleuzian inspired noise art is one of magnanimous self-connectivity through confrontation.

As such, noise art promotes as if imaginable desires for extrasensory [349] distributed disembodiment [350] involving the enthused transmigrational expansion of boundaries and a yearning to penetrate and merge characteristic of spirituality (ignudo spirto). Hence the role of noise art remains the necessary prosthetic task of artificially facilitating such an unrestricted state—and so remains associated with the most fleeting elaborations of artistic consciousness. This erudite desire to exist in an anti-mechanistic state of expansion is temporarily realized (albeit symbolically) in engaging noise art. As such, noise art posits itself as a meta-symbol of and for expanded human potential linked to tolerance. [351]

This goal of an expanded human capability through art is important to me, as I feel that the substantial ability to self-modify (self-re-program) ourselves is the point of art. In this inference, aesthetic immersion into noise adheres to and fosters Kendall Walton's theory of make-believe in which Walton sees art as a generator of fictional truths [352] which through art's inventiveness invites ontological self-modification via participation in the creative process. Moreover, Walton's theory of fictional truths reflects Friedrich Nietzsche's important assertion that “logical fictions”, which he saw as “comparisons of reality with a purely imagined world of the absolute”, are indispensable to humanity. [353] The key value of immersive noise’s fictional truths in terms of formulating an original theory of noise art, however, lies in underscoring the fiction behind the assumed "real" perspective [354] when seen as “empirically true and universally valid” instead of as “conventional and contingent” [355] idiosyncratic compliances.

Given that noise disturbs order, it is reasonable to interject here that the notions and experiences of aesthetically quickened disembodiment may (via noise art) claim the distinction of serving as the (or a) lucent interface between David Bohm's aforementioned implicate order and explicate order. But aesthetic noise consciousness above all renders a lightness of being which is supported by a metaphorical consciousness of passage principled on the electron transport conditions of the nerve cells. Hence aesthetic glitch sensibility is rooted in linked neurological self-programmable operations where the conceptual exchange between the disembodied/ecstatic and the bound/submissive (conceived of as teeming), constructs the neural-noise-metaphysics [356] of immersion into noise—as well as, what Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) would consider to be, its “combinational delight”. [357]

As I have outlined earlier, fixed-point perspective generally configured pictorial art in the West since the Renaissance. Immersion into noise's fundamentally spherical, all-over perspective of dynamic thresholds cast a fraction of art on its course since the Fin-de-Siècle. This marginal tendency has now amply flowered in noise art as art practice began shifting us away from illusionistic trompe l'oeil. Immersive noise-art’s 360° cognition enlivens receptive and organizing attributes of peripheral awareness and, as such, intensifies thalamic input to the cortex by making the active thalamic neurons in that region fire more rapidly than usual. Moreover, with this immersive noise vision there is a shift to a more conscious peripheral mode of perception which entails a de-automatization of the perceptual process (whereby more emphasis is placed on what is on the edges of sight, sound and consciousness) thus presumably adjusting us to an expanded and fuller consciousness. This emphasis on the peripheral utilizes the Deleuzian broad scan, Deleuze's non-linear dynamic conceptual displacement of a view along any axis or direction in favor of a sweeping processes in space/time. [358] Hence, immersive noise vision may acquire an increasingly computational-like encompassing range useful in expanding the customary perception so as to increase situational awareness. For, as Luigi Russolo said in his seminal text The Art of Noises, “Every manifestation of our life is accompanied by noise”.

Noise consciousness is essentially a cognitive challenge to our habitual sensibility, then—a challenge to find the fullest possible cognitive resources to cope with the expanded context of the art's excess, and a proposal that implies that those cognitive-visual resources are available, if as yet undefined. Hence aesthetic immersion into noise is consistent with Georges Bataille's intellectual comprehension of dithyrambian excess (itself suggestive of the human cortex with its vast array of micro intra-cortical nerve connections) as a mercurial movement that surpasses entrenched limits. The intensity of indeterminate dithyrambian excess as experienced in dynamic noise art is key to this cognition.

By refusing the dichotomized, utilitarian, manageable codes of representation with free non-logocentric associational operations, noise art triggers a multitudinous array of synaptic charges and thickens perception to the extent that it prevents the achievement of a prior determinate aesthetic. This threshold component of the immersive noise aesthetic adds enough uncertainty to the usual signals in the internal circuitry of the human biocomputer so as to make new configurations of the self probable (by organizing the internal energies of the self more broadly via disembodiment). The subsequent and ultimate aesthetic benefit of noise art, then, is in attaining a prospective realization of our perceptual circuitry as a self-re-programmable operation.

This self-re-programmable ontological operation occurs specifically in a constructed space between the noise art and the subject, similar to how Wolfgang Iser locates the encounter with a written text by its reader in a third realm of indeterminate interaction which he calls the work: a transaction situated “somewhere between” the text and the reader. [359] However, unlike a written text, the self-re-programmable ontological adjustments and modifications one makes during the process of coming to understand noise as art never ceases and sensorial closure is never evoked. [360] This kind of liberational ecstasy potentially found within aesthetic noise is exceptionally important, for as Brian Massumi tells us, “if there were no escape, no excess or remainder, no fade-out to infinity, the universe would be without potential, pure entropy, death”. [361]

Aesthetic immersion into noise's indeterminate vibratory excess, then, facilitates our desire to transcend the boundaries of our customary human cognition so as to feel that state of unconditionally Hegel called the absolute (our absolute sense as an unalloyed being akin to non-being) by way of a neuro-metaphysics conveyed through noise art's ambient milieu. This vibratory extrasensory dispersion, which presupposes a loss of fixed reference points, implies a diaphanous neural-metaphysics constructed around the disembodied psyche's enhanced identity as non-site consistent with Jean-François Lyotard's (1924–1998) assertion that metaphysical concepts have been realized in the contemporary world. [362] By the noisy psyche taking up an anti-position of circuitous non-site, I ascertain that the immersive noise sensibility is essentially non-logocentric, ecstatic, variational, non-hierarchical, and excessive. It is particularly excessive in that immersion into noise deframes and overwhelms the envelope of hardened fixed-point (i.e., window) perception with aesthetic input and, hence, is an excess of and for the prosaic gaze as it offers an immersive scope beyond our perceptual capabilities. Indeed, instead of nicely proceeding along towards an expedient comprehension and appraisal, immersive art noise actually opens up an oppositional anti-mechanistic space of self adumbration for the self-re-programming, ontologically-minded by revealing the loose limits of our solipsistic (and hedonistic) inner circuitry. The noisy excess necessary for triggering such an immersive keenness offers to the self-re-programming immersant a scope of sensibility beyond what Jacques Derrida identified as typical of the consolidated, passive, spectator/consumer. [363] Indeed, in our heavily materially oriented, technologically accelerated, information saturated culture, where experience is increasingly prescribed, facile, and fast, thoughtful langor in noise satisfies an essential need consistent with the interpretative theories of both hermeneutics and the phenomenology of perception. In this respect, noise fulfils the negative dialectical ideal of art as affirmed by Theodor Adorno when he upheld the view that the radical potential of art lies in formal innovations which refuse to allow its passive consumption, demanding instead an active-critical intellectual involvement (inherent in the noise aesthetic) in opposition to unthinking assimilation. It is for this reason that noise art possesses a negative dialectical felicity of its own. For as Luigi Russolo says in his seminal text, The Art of Noises, “to attune noises does not mean to detract from all their irregular movements and vibrations in time and intensity, but rather to give gradation and tone to the most strongly predominant of these vibrations”.

The negative dialectical confrontation with non-knowing typical of noise is an important component of noise-art-consciousness' intellectual satisfaction, as the entire benefit of addressing the espoused principle inherent in noise art exists in attempting to adhere to an exciting transmissible hyper-state that exceeds, ruptures, transcends, and overwhelms our former inner territory. [364]

Noise culture (wired with an excess that consequently disallows itself to be readily grasped) suggests a sense of immense inner incompleteness commensurable with a post-Hegelian consciousness, as Hegel maintained that no idea has a fixed meaning and that no form of understanding has an unchanging validity. Indeed, this post-Hegelian consciousness of excess is how immersion into noise challenges distinctive ontological beliefs about the limits of the self. In immersion into noise, self-re-programmable thought takes over the space displayed around the constructed self as the meta-programming ego expands to fill (by transference) the vastness of noise. So conceived, the ontological self ceases to think of itself as a substance or thing and, by contrast, thinks of itself as a continuously changing process of vibrational events.

This would indicate that, when challenged with art noise, our bio-circuitry—circuitry usually occupied with perceptual demands of a different (more standard) kind—must surpass our prior limitations (and lazy assumptions) as programmed by the petite bourgeois world-view. This self-programming variance, however, requires (and is) what Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) calls passion. Indeed, it is in this manner that I wish to use the term hyper-cognitive with respect to noise art, a term that has been extended out from Dick Higgins's term post-cognitive which he put forward to describe the field of post-1958 artistic production centered around developments in Intermedia [365] and Happenings that conceptually fused together aspects of traditional media so as to promote non-linear and multi-linear thinking. [366] Higgins adapted the term from the Fluxus related artist/non-artist/philosopher/noise-musician Henry Flynt's use of cognitive, a term that addresses the issue of becoming through connectionist activity which Flynt approached from a post-Logical-Positivist position he called beliefless empiricism. [367] Flynt's 1961 text “Concept Art” (first published in book form by La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low in the 1963 publication, An Anthology of Chance Operations) outlined the genre that later became known as Conceptual Art and had a strong impact on me. According to Flynt, Conceptual Art is “an art of which the material is concepts”, whereas Higgins asserted that “the process of cognition”, after 1958, was “no longer a major subject for artistic exploration”. [368]

I find that, with the necessity of understanding noise culture, cognition (now viral-cognition) is again a dominant theme for art. Indeed, I believe I have shown here that an allusive sense of embedded viral-cognition of productive paradox is indeed the inner logic (and one might also say the poetics) of the art of noise. [369] This finding collaborates what Siegfried Zielinski thinks is the potentiality of virtuality as an aesthetic enterprise in that Zielinski maintains that art's potential in terms of virtuality lies in the “tension between the virtual and the impossible”. [370]

Viral noise culture expands the measure of cognitive-perception through well-being's enthusiastic contact with impossible (and disturbing) excess and, thus, is a superabundance of and for the imagination. Insofar as ontological distinctions within noise culture clatter, it makes extensive demands on our previous facilities of critical reflection by addressing our inarticulate connections between the intuitive and the conscious realm that cannot easily be expressed in words but of which we can be occasionally appreciative.

Cultural noise, then, is identifiable (and interesting) when it sounds or appears as moments of non-narrative narative—where something runs counter to the narative imperative of the human psyche. Thus, fully understanding the non-narrative narative of noise culture is only possible through addressing the question of consciousness called cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a psychological term denoting the mental state in which two or more incompatible or contradictory ideas are held to be equally sustainable. A person who is successful at keeping contradictory ideas in dialectical suspension is said to have a high degree of negative capability. This is a particularly important concept for noise culture for, as Deleuze asserts, there is a “double structure to every event”. [371] Also, we must recollect once more Massumi's Deleuzian interpretation of the virtual as “a lived paradox where what are normally opposites coexist, coalesce, and connect”. [372]

So yes, Noise Culture as a perturbing designate of non-narrative narative may appear oxymoronic and hence cognitively dissonant. Subsequently, such a vacuole theory of paradox would be aligned with Gene Youngblood's theory of synaesthetic cinema, an alloy, superimpositional cinema [373] which creates an “awareness of the process of one's own perception”, [374] by being structured by the language of paradox. [375]

From a sociological point of view, [376] noise culture opposes (through enhancing our awareness of the plurality of the possible) existential post-modernistic oblivion—the dulled, blasé, over-stimulated gaze of the alienated and ironic. It does so in that the practice of noise-culture-mindfulness requires continual discernment with the mind in an imaginative and receptive, rather than passive, state. Hence, noise culture may provide a fundamental antithesis to the authoritarian, mechanical, simulated rigidities of the technical world. Indeed, aesthetic immersion into noise stands in opposition to mental (and cultural) sleep in that its methodology is to jolt, exceed and hence attempt to expand with appreciative input. Correspondingly, ontological consciousness expands into an enlarged synthetic field of vibration: the connective field of inter-consciousness. In this field-connective-condition, notions of a singular, discrete, logocentric consciousness are incoherent.

In this respect, Charles Baudelaire's ode Paradis Artificiel (Artificial Paradise) is increasingly outstanding for what it has to say about the promise of noise culture. In it, Baudelaire cites imagination as that force that serves noise culture's primary purpose, which is to enlarge consciousness so that it may approach the connective field of inter-consciousness. Georges Bataille confirms this assertion in his essay Baudelaire, particularly by linking Baudelaire's imagination with notions of the impossible. As noise culture places us in the position of indeterminate unknowing, consciousness ceases to be definitive and becomes inter-relational, and so provides questions that disturb and disable previous emphasis on the false objectivisms accorded to cultural production.

This extremely pliable state of cognition rests on the basis of relaxed (but extended) attentiveness. Indeed, it is within this elastic attentiveness (constituted between artist and audience) that noise culture takes place. In this respect, Giovanni Careri's description of Bernini's bel composto as a “vehicle of an experience that goes beyond all images” [377] pertains to the central idea of noise culture. By way of dishabituation and disorientation through merging with the mise en scène of noise, a partial obliteration of self-consciousness may occur which returns self-representational mimesis to the infinity of noise in the raw sense. In that sense, immersion into noise is a tender via negativa, a delicate overrunning and self-annihilation in the interests of further growth and expansion.

That said, I contend that what is also important about noise culture is that which is revealed as being in synthetic accordance with the basic extravagant and excessive aspirations of humanity, in accordance with the effective deployment of the earth's sustainable resources. Such a notion of responsible excess is important to the extent that it helps us push deeper into our stored ontological metaprograms, so as to enhance their (our) performance in the social and ecological field. As such, noise culture is an exercise in conscious responsibility coupled with liberty produced in the reflective province which Baudelaire calls art.

Thus, my idea of noise art adheres to Antonin Artaud's proposal in Le Théâtre et Son Double (The Theater and its Double) that art (in his case drama) must be a means of influencing the human organism and directly altering consciousness by engaging the audience ritualistically. Even though in his essay, “The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation”, Jacques Derrida describes how Artaud's theory may be seen as impossible in terms of the established structure of Western thought, [378] this is precisely why noise cultural theory (with its, as previously explained, vital connections to the unbearable) can be placed in parallel position to Artaud's hypothesis. This is so in that, when inside noise art, one experiences a prelude to the work's fullness (its impossible commotion usually diverts the immediacy of the art), thus stimulating a viral desire that bio-chemically affects the state of mind.

In noise culture, we are essentially challenged to find new expanded boundaries. [379] For example, John Cage does not depart from music when he begins with noise. More accurately, he creates a music that belongs to the noises of the environment and takes them into consideration. As in Artaud's theory of cruelty, this challenge to find new expanded boundaries through noise is accompanied by a vibrating love-hate where we may sense an intimate—if disagreeable—relationship to the work. Through the immoderate excess of perceptual possibilities in an aesthetic immersion into noise (which involves a more active and continuously searching situation) one enters (and thus hopefully understands through experience) hyper-noise, a state which circumvents the current fragmentary view of the self in the world that has been built into the structures underpinning traditional culture.

I believe that my noise art examples have amply testified to the potential for noise culture—and, by concentrating on myself in relationship to noise art, I have articulated intense (but short-lived) art noise experiences that will not let me reach a final organization. Subsequently, noise forms a semi-living viral [380] culture where the form and the meaning construct a precise union in their agitational existence. This precise union suggests a taste for Mediterranean paganism’s stoic view of life where the arbitrary cruelties and difficulties of being are met without flinching. Here, forms of extended vitality are cherished and diligent forms of stasis shunned, including dreary scholarship and most aspects of routine public life—so as we may respond to all forms of art more vividly and completely, not merely the thwarted or offensive. So noise sophistication is about developing our quality of disinhibuted mind as manifested in full sensuous reactions.

The primal wantonness suggested in edgy art noise sophistication epitomizes what is exhilarating about culture. It rips open our delirious heart of darkness when noise (typically thought of as a bad quality) and art (typically thought of as a good quality) mingle. Hence hostility and anxiety mix with what lushly attracts us. And this is the magic formula for excitement: obstacle mixed with attraction equals excitement.

As we have seen, the scintillating genesis of noise culture starts in the semi-artificiality of the adorned prehistoric cave and points towards digital interconnection and viral rupture. But the lax digital (interconnected) signal fragment, and the speed and ease in which it moves of late, has now lulled our emotions and is beginning to fail to stimulate critical thought, transformation or perturbation. What I deduce from this history is that noise culture is brimming with hypotheticals, when adversary. The noise culture theory put forth here then clarifies, deepens, confirms and exalts a desire for elite, virtuoso, and indeterminate art noise that, as I have shown, has marginally existed in human culture throughout time.

This stoic theory of viral-noise culture is one of vibrational estrangement: breaks and bindings that admit unknowingness and the non-self. Its high seriousness insists on difficulty and is a reinvigoration of vangaurdism. As such, it is qualitatively and quantitatively distinct. Its politics are those of listening hard and seeing widely. Its esprit de corps is diaphanous being within a kind of experiential span and ocular extravagance through which abstract inter-relationals are felt to be a function of one another. For when seeing our well-being connected to states of exuberant, non-graspable noise, we temporarily dissolve former boundary ontological dichotomies into an unoccupied topos of being that implicates our internal self-programmer in a desire for unrealizable summational resolution. [381]

Noise art thus serves art's classical function of modelling in microscopic proportions the overwhelming phenomenon which Hegel and Nietzsche called the absolute (an imagined orb beyond immediate sense perception). As such it addresses, by extrapolation, self, social, and political limitations when we adapt and incorporate aesthetic noise (with its insinuation of natural infinity and its inexorable pull towards the liberation of confines) into our everyday view of the world.

In the space of linear perspective (with its historically invented fixed placement of the vanishing point on the horizon), the viewer imagined that she or he was looking at the complex world as if through a window—as a spectator. This implied a separating wall with a small rectangular opening in it between the subject's perceptions and the visible world as dictated by pre-established criteria. This pre-established window has become the post-industrial human's mental tendency. Behind this pre-established window, human sensitivity has become increasingly bored, neutral, distant, detached, separated and narrowed. With this tendency, restrictions on the excess of complexity are already decided unconsciously in advance, regardless of the actual character of our perceptual input. As a result, there has been a de-emphasis on the peripheral, and the ambient as vision has become restrained by the habits of linear perspective; pre-established habits now encoded in the methods and expectations of photography, video [382] and film. [383] Thus vision has increasingly taken on the attributes of a focused, singular, narrow vision which is staring straight ahead.

In contrast, noise culture proposes a style of consciousness marked by an emphasis on din and by a re-entry into the rich fringes of sensation. Keep in mind that John Cage’s music starts from the simple fact that we are always already surrounded by noise. What is vital to our consciousness is how we connect to those noises. Cage suggests a lucid scheme: if we try to disregard them, they agitate us; but if we listen to them and recognize them, they may become enthrallingly artistic.

The viral noise theory of consciousness that I have been sketching out here is not a precise theory of consciousness in that it does not explain what consciousness is, nor does it explain exactly how it arises in the first place. Such problems of defining the essential constitution of consciousness have been widely discussed elsewhere within the realm, principally, of philosophy, thus far without arriving at a consolidated consensus. But if we accept the more modest definition of a theory of consciousness as a theory of self-awareness of how our inner life and thoughts function (and may function fully), I take it that what I propose concerning noise consciousness might be judiciously placed within the arena of contending theories of how consciousness functions (and/or may function)—in this case, through ruptured induced expansion.

Lateral (horizontal) thinking, a term introduced by Edward de Bono, refers to the capacity to shift the context of thought away from conventional logical (vertical) progressions to unaccustomed lateral ones, thereby shifting thought away from fixed, predefined orders and towards creative ambiguity. According to Albert Rothenberg, “creation involves intense motivation, transcendence of time and space, and the unearthing of unconscious material”, [384] and lateral thinking is beneficial for shifting consciousness out of habitual formulations and “ways of seeing”. [385] In lieu of my ideas of intense noise culture, creative immersive noise thinking might now be conceptualized not as a vertical or even lateral thought process, but as diaphanous and spherical. Such a boisterous and diaphanous formulation defines noise culture's general pull away from established thought and is what makes it, in Paul Hegarty’s words, a form of anti-fascist [386] resistance. [387]

Noise art, with its implied access to the ineffable, suggests gentle chaos, which is of course the basis of our most advanced recent revolution in scientific understanding: chaos theory. Still, the art of noise, for the connoisseur, is generally a ribald art of the outside(r) where noise culture feeds into a cognitive process that involves a deep involvement in (and appreciation of) the contradictory nature of opposites and antitheses (now blended into living abstractions). Such creative thought is useful in configuring a viral-oriented cultural vision of the technological world sensitive to what John Cage made clear: that all the music we hear—and I add much of the art we see—is constantly and inevitably pervaded by noise, by uninvited vibrations. In this operationally defined model of the creative intellect, artistic and divergent thinking wins the capacity—through situating itself within an immersion into noise—to generate and appreciate multiple alternatives by deviating away from overly hushed modes of perception-cognition. Such sensitivity is enhanced by experiencing—and participating in—noise culture.

This sensitivity, if I may say so, is required today because we tend to live numb, embedded, as we are, in our spectral age of easy image/sound production and consumption, both gluttonous and frictionless. [388] Noise culture offers a stimulus for—and way of—thinking and feeling against easy answers that never interrogates, for noise art emphasizes disorientation for the inner life. Thus, the art of noise may act as punctum in the slick palimpsest simulation in which we live, disrupting all plodding, dehumanized, routined conceits.

Dare I say it: the art of noise extends the possibility of a transforming rupture (something renewed and renewing) by addressing the frissure between intellect and the sensible. The frissure that noise art offers culture is that of a different view of the sensible, one that no longer regards the sensible as only an image (signal) cast by a remote and detached intelligibility. In noise art sophistication, signal (foreground) and noise (ground) are impenetrably interlocked and inter-embedded. And this interpenetration reveals the truth of reversibility in our culture, laced, as it is, with the counter-force of incoherence. Yet its inclination surpasses simple nihilism (as demonstrated in the Apse of Lascaux) by a collected inwardness that says a delicate yes to incoherent sense and impulse—and so inverts aesthetics, bending it towards rapturous plentitude.

This reciprocity of rupture and rapture is of utmost consequence. The rupture of noise is the embedded, immersive and immanent space from which the signal comes and to where it goes. Noise in art deconstructs signalness/thingness by functioning as a self-withholding ground for signal: something raw beneath and beyond conceptual language. [389]

But noise has no inherent value. It can be awful for you, or grand. It can be grand when it reminds us of the marvellous: that pre-eminent primal energy that surrounds and forms us, both beneath and beyond us—and when it demetaphors our techno-mechanical society. [390] But mostly, it is gradational and, as such, a conceptual tool for the judicious revolutionary: those that coordinate reason and irrationality, harmony and dissidence, lucidity and obtuseness in the interests of open-minded transformation.