{"id":5590,"title":"Noise Culture: Thing I","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/noise-culture-thing-i","version":"23fc221f787d1152b07618981f73bfdcd8058971d27abfefa4519b55ed530987","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:04.4402898+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Alan Sondheim"}],"authorKeys":["Sondheim, Alan"],"subjects":["Texts by Author"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publisher","value":"manuscript","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC0833","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Noise Culture: Thing I.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/noise-culture-thing-i.","publication":"Alan Sondheim. Noise Culture: Thing I. manuscript. 1988.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5590.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC0833","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":20452},{"name":"abstract","source":"recorded publication abstract","generated":false,"characters":110},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":675},{"name":"archive_summary","source":"existing ETC archive summaries: ETC0833","generated":false,"characters":110}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"\u0022Pity for the world. let the new knowledge come.\u0022 - Michel Serres, Detachments \u0022The poetic moans of this century are only sophisms.\u0022 - Lautreamont, Poesies \u0022No 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\u0027s 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.\u0022 - Biba Kopf, \u0022Bacillus Culture\u0022 in Tape Delay, ed. Charles Neal Approaching the second millennium, culture undergoes a great transformation, 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. \u0022Noise Culture\u0022 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 \u0022truth\u0022 - 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 \u0022contrary child\u0022) inhabits a universe whose ethical structure is sham; what\u0027s left is strategy and happenstance. Contradictions themselves \u0022float\u0022 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 instead of inscriptions: definitions are temporary, occurring at the weakest point of the communicative domain. Such fissures pass for the entities of a traditional linguistics, but their occasion within speech or grammatological acts is chaotic, catastrophic, and ill-defined. (One need only consider the use of words such as \u0022health,\u0022 \u0022drug,\u0022 \u0022intervention,\u0022 \u0022postmodern,\u0022 \u0022sado-masochism\u0022 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, simulacra, virtual subjectities, Kodak-content. \u0022Communication,\u0022 \u0022community,\u0022 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 phenomenology 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) become a fissure within the swollen cultural domain, a fissure according to the lines of weakest resistance, but a fissure nonetheless which passes as an inscription - a temporary demarcation which may even, under exceptional circumstances, last the life of the organism. (Thus an inscription is a \u0022classical\u0022 demarcation within a culture\u0027s 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 \u0022simplest thing in the world,\u0022 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 appear 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 reorganizations 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 \u0022tradition\u0022 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\u0027s as if the culture were One but the \u0022family of man\u0022 syndrome has long been deconstructed. Familiality, the sheer goodness of things and commodities, is questionable amidst famine, drug culture, the neutralizations of late capitalism - 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, where it collapses into part-objects and representations. Character becomes an accumulation of \u0022character traits,\u0022 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 \u0022media\u0022 become problematic (designed for the body!) with the introduction of new information displays, formats and sensations. Enter noise culture\u0027s media dump: the accumulation of battered television sets, video disks, vinyl records, CDs, old computers - \u0022it\u0027s cheaper to get a new one\u0022 ...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, structure 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 \u0022Fort-Da\u0022 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\u0027s Panopticon). The Panopticon itself records everything, loses 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 \u0022block\u0022 of dead language - 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\u0027s 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 conflic","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":20452,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}