Noise and the Theatre of Mutations

Posted by admin on February 2nd, 2008 filed in theory

Ragged responses to an interesting post that I read earlier in the week over on fractal ontology:

Noise drives away the parasites — it clears space by infesting it. Noise opens space, provides a substratum for objects. As a condition of logic, a pre-logical polyvalence…

…Yet beneath all this semiotic technology, the chaotic varieties of machinic functionalizations, there is a deeper and in some sense ‘non-abstract’ process — force, breath, spirit, impulse — characterized by the active production of a pure difference, a dynamism… not by absolutizing a given dimension as specific, bounded and ‘unitary’ but on the contrary assembling diverse forces and durations, producing diagrams which are open, extensible.

We encounter noise as plenum, as a parasitic occupation that provides the necessary metastability for a site of performed individuation. It is the dynamic force which agitates and creates space, a space of dramatization. The signal which moves through this space provides a dramatizing force, reconfiguring and establishing connections between the disparate elements and differential singularities, the distribution of points that constitute this clearing. A noise which provides a clearing, a substratum that conditions performance and a signal that dramatizes; for Deleuze, such a dramatizing force, or spatio-temporal dynamism, creates space and dramatizes ideas. To maintain any kind of opposition between the two would be a futile effort, ascribing a kind of sufficiency to noise. Wherever there is signal there is noise, blurring and eating away at the edges encapsulating the germinal force in signal. In noise, with a tilt of the head, there are always flashes of signal quietly tracing paths and forcing connections. This will always be a process of feedback and interdependence, of ‘indi-different/ciation‘. These are the operations working beneath ’semiotic technologies’: dynamisms and the production of difference, perhaps engulfing more than they subtend, the chaos which surrounds the permeable boundaries of such technologies.

Not reaction but counteraction: this is the real process itself capable of assembling new diagrams, of connecting all kinds of assemblages to one another…

But perhaps there is a reactivity to be found at work here, one identified in Toscano’s Theatre…: the doubling of pre-individual singularities and the subjective event which results in the dissolution of one dimension as the opening to the next, the introduction of a tension that tips the balance. If noise cuts out a space it is one of potentials, only in the encounter does the necessary reaction occur, a reaction capable of forcing movements. Neither subject nor substratum sufficiently constitute a distorting force ⎯ an element forcing movements; only in the encounter or the reaction between the two does distortion appear, constituting a tension which energizes space.

we need to expose, to experience immanent transcendences. Which ones? At least the three moments of expression — transportation, transcription, transversalization: “abstract” but very real processes, experimentally opening up new dimensions…

Through experimentation we arrive at explosive sites of reactions and interactions, a laboratory or theatre, a theatre of cruelty which ‘pile-drives sounds’, ‘trampling them underfoot’ (The Theatre and its Double, 70). This pile-driving of sound establishes a ground riddled with noise, a ground that murmurs and rumbles, upon which the performance of individuations take place. What such experimentation makes clear is that we must look to praxis as the method of mutation, identify sites of mutagenesis and ⎯ in the intensive contraction of singularities ⎯ confront mutagenetic elements. Noise is the simplest expression of the problematic field and only when immersed in it do we encounter a theatre of ‘“abstract” but very real processes, experimentally opening up new dimensions’.