The Voice of Silence

Posted by admin on December 17th, 2007 filed in theory

There is a great post on the idea of noise and silence over on ibitsu. He picks up on blah-feme’s post on silence as a noisy matter, making a much better job of developing it than I did:

Indeed, linguistically silence is always a very noisy matter. One in which its very conception is dependent upon the sonorous, upon the incessant murmuring which will never let it rest, upon the buzzing from the fragility of logocentrism which never lets silence be silent; silence must always be noisy.Lyotard speaks of phenomenology, a phenomenology which situates the body as a filter, where the earth’s sonority may become music. A music is then dependant upon a silencing, a filtering of those sounds via sonorous individuation; noises rejected by the body go unheard and are subsequently rendered silent. The body is thereby a filtering device, whereby a libidinal investment silences. Here though silence remains noisy, that is, silence becomes sound unheard; a static sound poised and ready to be heard and thereby always buzzing quietly in anticipation.

I hope to formulate some kind of response to the ideas raised in this post, I’ll update this post once I’ve found some time.