Noise

White noise. Signal to noise. The setting, the manifold.

And, the between signals: a space/time that has diminished so as to be barely perceptible. White noise has been cultivated, taken over, colonized, developed, made useful.

But could the becoming useful of noise, the development of white noise and occupation of what were spaces between, could this also be a becoming noise of the background? So that the fact of noise persists as an artifact of the limits of our attention and focus. By virtue of focus, components and blocks of noise become signals. They become for us. Our excision of them from the manifold, like a framing or sampling or remixing or collecting or archiving, is what distinguishes signal from noise.

The mistake we make is to think that their meaning is prior to this excision rather than a result of it.

But what about their truth?

If the symbolic always necessarily involves bracketing and exclusion, this not that, then what does this mean for the truth of what is included and what is left out? Currents in late 20th thought proceeded as if what were left behind had a more compelling truth, a truth that was more than a shaping and more than a necessary condition (a difference, then, between a fundamental fantasy which is Real because it insists rather than exists). So anything that was other to mainstream science, mainstream medicine, or mainstream politics was not just excluded in the production of the mainstream but true by virtue of this exclusion. It's as if a claim to truth somehow came to accompany critiques of exclusion, as if establishing the fact (and then the illegitimacy) of an exclusion depended on establishing the truth-value of the excluded.

What is the effect, then, of the setting of the decline of symbolic efficiency? A flattening and extension and re-manifold-ing (non-all) that occasions the end of games and procedures of truth and falsity and the proliferation of the neither true nor false.

One might think that the results are the possible and the credible, but these float away as well (or only flourish in the hothouses of insular communities of discourse, communities ever more porous even as they are ever more defended). Without conditions to determine the parameters of credibility and possibility, in fact, in the face of outright disbelief in the face of the actuality of the unlikely, anything is possible.

But if anything is possible, nothing is (as well).

Comments

[pollywog]

i reduced all i believe down to this years ago...

nothing is perfect
in the space where nothing exists
will one find perfection
the perfect nothing

accept nothing as fact
question everything
determine your own truth
define your own reality

im currently in a process of disengagement from the other that is not me and re connecting with whatever is left..damn it gets quiet sometimes

[Jocelyn Atkins]

"But if anything is possible, nothing is (as well)"-- i guess, i would say, nothing very literally is anything. this is where the terms break down and anything (the particular) becomes universal--it no longer points to possibility but, so many possibilities coagulate into nothing, the universal. Hegel is useful here to see the way the dialectic works on content. So for me, the excluded proper does not exist, it is a myth: the ineptitude of our attempt to capture/understand "difference".

So the nothing you speak of, yes, is there all along. This of course, is for me, the scariest point because this is the risk of getting stuck in Drive (in the Real). But I feel somewhat consoled by the way, as I understand it, that the hole in the Real (of nothing) that ensnares us is also the thing that constitutes freedom from it. The trick is getting into the realm of "anything" and staying there long enough to do something or at the least, avoiding the traps of Drive. I hope we are talking about the same thing, I just had this sinking feeling that maybe i totally misunderstood your piece. agh.