The poetics of noise

Hugo Liu

Media Laboratory & Comparative Media Studies

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Consider a television set unable to find reception. To the eyes and to the ears, what emanates is simply noise. Simply noise?! Hardly so. Prima facie this noise may appear to be a meaningless apparition, a contretemps in our quest for mainstream information and entertainment—but it is hardly arbitrary. Recall whence this noise. The “pure” signal departs the television antenna stationed atop a rugged hillside. Darting across the valley, the signal quarrels with a fog cloud, mingles its way through a soiree of chatty orange trees, and strikes up a wayward conversation with a radio signal, a fellow traveller. By the time the television signal has reached its destination, it has been transformed by its Odyssean adventure—its original naïveté has been enriched by its quarrel with the fog cloud, energized by the commotion of the orange trees, and impressed by a memorable conversation with the radio signal. The television signal tries to recount the riches of its heroic journey to the television viewer, but unfortunately the epic tale falls upon the deaf eyes and ears of one who is crippled by incapacity to comprehend all but the “pure” signal. Perfect information becomes perfect noise.

The misunderstood television signal is a martyr for the cause of our present poetic inquiry, begging a revaluation of our aesthetics—is noise arbitrary, or is it simply richness that we are not (yet) privy to?

Critique of information

In the present age of our modern world—the so-called “information age”—knowledge and information reign supreme. As consumers, we’ve a voracious appetite, not just for food or drink, but also for information commodities of all sorts—news, entertainment, multi-cultural experiences. With world trade at its acme and any cultural destination instantaneously accessible via the Internet, it has become hard to justify cultural and intellectual monogamy. But as with all gluttonies, there is a price to be paid for information excess. The mytho-poetic intension of experience is lost when experience is “crystallized” into knowledge, and when creative processes are “distilled” into scientific method. Knowledge privileges that which can be spoken clearly, science is seduced by that which is reproducible. But the experience of the meadows is hardly speakable, the touch of a lover hardly reproducible. The mind has its fill of knowledge and science, but at the same time, deep experiences are cast by the wayside—optimized out of our world. Walter Benjamin’s lamentations on the loss of ‘aura’ in this age of machines and on the decline of the oral storytelling tradition redouble this point—that in all communications, there must now be a point.

Only the purest of signals—some have called them memes—can win the attention of the populous. As society races to convert experiences into information commodities—knowledge and science in particular—does it really appreciate what is lost? Perhaps not—and the culprit may be as basic as language itself—our inapt metaphor for information as a box that concentrates and contains rich experiences, and science as an apparatus for separating truth from falsehood. Communication, too, is visualized as a lossless passing of boxes and apparatuses from one party to another. And so it has become our obsession to collect as many boxes of richness as we can into our societies and our minds—the process aided by the self-congratulatory smug of achievement, of besting the richness known to our ancestors.

But then a milestone is reached—maybe it was yesterday, maybe it will be ten years from today—we have come to celebrate the act of collecting and possessing information commodities more than the richness and truth they are purported to contain. For a moment, a fear—what if these boxes do not contain richness, but rather, distortions? No matter, because more important is the trade afforded by these boxes, that those we trade with believe that the boxes can contain.

Henceforth, only the most extreme and interesting of experiences will be boxed and passed, since those are the most sellable. Call it the polemic turn, the pathology of extremes in post-modernity. The producer of a Hollywood soap opera conjures up intense dramas because intensity grips viewers—it follows that, in portraying the relationship between mother and daughter, the mother is either overbearing, or she is neglectful—these are more legible than anything in-between, in an entertainment sense. Then teenage daughters everywhere, captivated by the soap opera narrative, are inspired to understand their relationship with their own mother. Is she an overbearing mother? Then she must be neglectful.

In the polemic turn, subtlety and nuance are blissfully betrayed in order to achieve only the most potent distillations of knowledge and entertainment. Subtlety and nuance still exist, but they themselves become refracted into poles—the pole of utter confusion, the pole of softness and roundness, the pole of the sublime, the pole of pure art and emotion. In the polemic turn, only the most extreme of human experiences and perceptions are deemed merchantable by media producers—once broadcast and consumed, these polemic narratives in turn reprogram how society perceives and experiences.

Shifting perspectives for a moment, is it possible that we are mistaken about deep experiences being cast by the wayside? The portrayal of the polemic turn here seems itself hyberbolic. What if the information age is in fact achieving judicious distillations—true compressions—of mundane phenomena into essences? Rounding 0.2 into 0.0, 0.7 into 1.0, ambivalence into passion? And humankind, stuck immemorially in Plato’s cave—settling for shadows—is finally able to transcend phenomenal corruptions to grasp noumenal truths? It is possible. But however successful we are in transforming our social reality into one based on essences, we are still residents of a nature that is continuous.

A rift grows between an increasingly essentialist society and the waning ranks of those who favor naturalism. Life, once embedded in smooth nature, is discretized and compartmentalized—into minutes and hours, facts and sound bytes. Natural reality is slowly overtaken by a simulated reality. Nature was bottom-up—patterns emerged out of the natural order—apples fell from trees, and because they always did, gravity was born by its grace. The simulated reality is however top-down—ideals, such as the laws of physics, exist by divine right—that apples fall from trees is not a marvel of any kind—it was predicted by the law of gravity. Apples and trees exist in order to glorify the generality of laws.

Top-down is how society has come to approach life. Take, for example, the success of meta-language in business and economics—psychographics, customer relationship management, risk management, markets, futures. Psychographics predicts that although people believe themselves to be unique, they are actually clusterable into psychologically identical groupings. Customer relationship management predicts that a well-design process can successfully and formulaically address the needs and satisfaction of customers. They call it “customer care,” but where really is the care of a business that only wishes to “manage” its customers, and could only care less about particular customers so long as the vast statistical majority of customers are satisfied? In business, meta-language is truth, is essence, is information. The few individuals who cannot be placed into psychographic buckets are anomalies—with resignation, they are tolerated as noise.

Forgetting and faith

Language is full of redundancies. Zipf’s law predicts the fact that, in natural languages, the most frequent word will be used about twice as many times as the second most frequent word—and that word will be used about twice as many times as the fourth most frequent word. In English, the most frequent word is “the” and accounts for about 7% of all word occurrences in writing. The second most frequent word in English is “of” and in line with Zipf’s law, it accounts for about 3.5% of all word usage. Supposing we wanted to make typing faster, we could mandate the following shorthand—write only “t” for every “the” and “o” for every “of.” Then, to explain the conventions of this shorthand, we would write, at the very top of every document, this legend explaining how to read the shorthand, much as maps have legends—

t > the

o > of

t1 > t

o1 > o

Sometimes we still may want to write just the letters “t” and “o,” but this is on rare occasion, so we can rename t to “t1” and o to “o1.” Using this shorthand, we would be able to type much faster, even when considering that we need to type the legend which explains the shorthand. In a nutshell, this is what is known as “information compression.” In the Brown corpus—a de facto collection of American English text—the most frequent 135 words accounts for roughly half of all words appearing in this corpus. Supposing we created shorthand for those words, even if we had to write that shorthand legend at the top of every document, our communication would become quantitatively more efficient. Each typed letter becomes much more informative.

Cultures too can be regarded as compression schemes, and the study of these schemes has thus far been the providence of symbology and semiotics. Consider a red octagonal sign with a white trim—in most countries, this sign is shorthand and signifies “please stop at this intersection, look both ways, and then proceed if the cross-street is clear of traffic.” The process of decompressing signifiers like red octagons into their underlying signified meanings is called signification. Most significations are not so cut and dry—in any given culture, what are all the ways to imply love, status, happiness, depression? The process of adapting to a culture means coming to understand its complex systems of signification—or in other words, the legend needed to decode and decompress that culture’s texts. But whereas some legends can be written down, a culture’s legend can never be fully written down—the unconscious resists articulation.

What would happen then, if the overmuch complexity of cultural politics so pushed you over the edge, that you woke up tomorrow, realizing that you’ve lost your legend? What is today a stream of perfect information would tomorrow be reduced to a stream of perfect noise. The price to be paid for living in this highly compressed and efficient age of information, is living in fear that tomorrow could bring an absurdity. Tomorrow, the world could be lost. The threat of amnesia may seem remote for an individual, but it is very real at the scale of societies and ages. In Western civilization the middle ages collapsed into renaissance, baroque into modern, modern into post-modern. Collapse and re-birth happens when a civilization has acquired so much complexity that it chokes a people and must be abandoned wholesale. The new age looks back upon the old with self-righteousness and misunderstanding. “What unjustified clutter”—a modern may remark when reflecting upon baroque aesthetics—mistaking its drama for melodrama, its sophistication for ornamentation, its generosity for gratuity.[i]

Sudden loss of context on the scale of individuals and society means that what once was a compression is reduced to noise. But what of the opposite transformation—can perfect noise come to be understood as perfect compression? With faith, it can.

Faith explains away noise and assuages fear of the illegible by aestheticizing noise as divine information we are not (yet) privy to. Faith invents a legend[ii] to decode nature’s whispers, and leans on poetic appeal to validate itself. With the provided legend, nature’s perfect noise can be decoded by the faithful as perfect information—accident as fate, coincidence as omen. While faith can be derided as spurious and apologetic, it has at least an aesthetic and economic utility—it organizes mental and cultural complexity by providing a singular aesthetic framework under which knowledge and customs can be collapsed and unified. Two polarities of faith are mysticism and scientism. At one extreme, mysticism asserts that nature’s perfect noise is perfect compression, yet insists that the legend is opaque to human understanding—after all, how can mere mortals access divine intention? At the other extreme, scientism believes that the secret of the legend will unravel to human understanding piece by piece by applying the scientific method, our understanding of nature will progressively transform noise into compression, and one day, scientific knowledge may unlock the total logic of the universe.

Once, the movement of the stars and the behaviour of falling objects was a divine noise—not at all legible to humans. But scientific achievements such as the articulation of astronomical and physical laws, to a great extent, deciphered these mysteries. In the information age, harnessing advancements in computation, even some of the most chaotic natural phenomena such as weather patterns have surrendered their mystery to scientific modelling. Once well within the realm of divine noise, of the illegible, weather is now appreciated for the sophistication of its fractal systems of interaction, rather than worshipped for its impenetrable moods.

Faith has always shielded humanity from the absurdity of noise by insisting that noise is information beyond understanding. In the modern era, the prowess and success of science has swelled; scientism has increasingly become the dominant form of faith, while mysticism has slowly atrophied into the quaint. But the era of science has engendered as much woe as it has cured. When science vanquished noise, the “real” was also slain.

Liberating noise

Science was the instigator of meta-languages, of abstractions. A number line, seemingly harmless, is first used to plot the counting numbers—1, 2, 3, 4, etc. Then, another harmless innovation—each point on the number line is labelled with a year—3000 B.C., 0 A.D., 1492 A.D., 2006 A.D., 2100 A.D., and in this manner, time and events can be ordered. “Time becomes the time-line.” The metaphor is infectious, but insidious. Our history and our present are reduced to mere points, distances, and trajectories? As surely as the future can be plotted as points to the right of the present year, so the future already exists and thus becomes a foregone conclusion. In the purview of science, time processes as uniformly as does space, nature will invariably obey fundamental laws, generalities will always hold more truth than will particulars.