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In his 1980 work Le Parasite, Michel Serres deftly adopts the layered meanings of the word parasite in French. The translator notes: “In French, the word has three meanings: a biological parasite, a social parasite, and static” (Serres, trans. Schehr 1982, vii). In the biological context, the parasite is a kind of viral organism that latches onto and feeds off of a host organism for nutrients, providing nothing in return (Watson 1965, 1). The social parasite is a guest who sits, uninvited, at the dinner table, exchanging conversation for food (Serres, trans. Schehr 1982, x). Lastly, the third meaning of the word exists uniquely in its French translation, tracing its connotation to information theory; a parasite is a static interference within a system, literally coming to mean noise, or a disruption of signal. Thus, the overarching principle laid out is that of a relation - the parasite is an excluded third entity that imparts an imbalance to the status quo, order. It is through this imbalance, Serres explains, that the “parasite invents something new…builds a new logic” (Serres 1982, 35). In other words, the parasite or noise catalyzes the production of new meaning, or an alternative order, through the disruption and subversion of the existing one. In a text that would shortly follow Le Parasite, Genèse sees Serres expand on the notion of noise as an analogue to that of chaos or disorder. However, Serres departs from the conventional tropes of noise and chaos as purely degenerative forces of disorder. Quite contrary in fact, as the title Genèse, or “genesis” hints at “the birth, formation and generation of things and messages that give order to our lives” (Assad, 278). Thus, for Serres, noise traces back to the primary source of all things known; he states: “Background noise may well be the ground of our being” (Serres 1995, 13). This frames noise against the conventional trope of noise as decidedly de-generative, instead suggesting an alternative reading that argues for its potential as a productive force.
This thesis borrows Serres notion of noise and furthermore attempts to expand on the related terms of sound and silence. As such, Noise, Sound, and Silence will become the rhetorical apparatus on which the thesis operates. Although these terms will be further discussed in the sections to come, before we begin we must first properly define these terms and what is suggested in their use in order to advance our discussion. Noise, as we have alluded to, comes to paradoxically characterize both a disruptive force - the interruption of signal, as well as a kind of primal substance from which all things emerge. How can Noise be both disruptive and formative? For Serres, this is grounded in an understanding of Noise as “the milieu (the medium)” (Serres 1982, 70) between two points. That is to say, in every relation, there must be a means through which the relation moves. Given the example of a telephone call, we presume the existence of only two actors: the sender of the call, and the one who receives it. The conversation that follows is then a back-and-forth of messages transmitted between the two ends. However, this necessarily confirms the existence of a third actor, the noisy medium that carries the message from one end to the other. “As soon as we are two,” Serres states, “there is a medium between us” (Serres 1982, 70). This relationship establishes Noise as the carrier of the message, and in its passage through the noise-medium, the message is disturbed. As such, the kind of interference that Noise presents is a transformation of the message through its mediation, for if the message is heard untransformed, meaning that it was immediate, “one would have to be identical to the sender” (Serres 1982, 70). By the time the caller’s message reaches the receiver’s end, it has been colored by the static of the intercom that carried it through. The medium makes the message. The message is constituted by and emerges out of the Noise - without it it cannot be heard. This is what affords Noise the facility to simultaneously disrupt and generate - or rather, generate out of disruption. Serres’ understanding of Noise as the medium, the milieu, or the environment, is, therefore, ontological rather than phenomenological (Thompson 2014, 79). Noise is not an external force or phenomenon, but the fundamental matter of all relation. In this sense, Noise is boundless and unknowable. It is the stochastic multiplicity of accidents, errors, contingencies, uncertainties, dreams, and desires. Serres likens it to “the reserve, the stock and the source” (Serres 1995, 18), it is “possibility itself” (Serres 1995, 22, my emphasis).
What emerges from this reserve then, are singular moments of information, the knowable, order. Elsewhere, Serres has referred to this as negentropy (Serres Hermes) or negative entropy, a term used in information theory to describe the reversal of entropy. I believe an important point that Serres wants to convey in his notion of Noise is the integrated relation between disorder and order. Withdrawing from a traditional narrative of binaries, disorder and order in Serres’ thinking are not necessarily opposed, instead, order is bound to and produced momentarily from disorder. This understanding reflects Serres’ suspicion of the Modernist “privileging of order and the concomitant pathologization of anything that threatens it” (Smith 2021, 4). Order and disorder are not truly antithetical in a sense. To rhetorically expound on Serres’ view of Noise, I will use the term Sound to describe the phenomena that emerge from Noise. If Noise is to be understood as the foundational milieu or the chaotic force of possibility, what emerges from its wake is therefore the ‘possible’ or the actualized. While not explicitly coined as Sound, Serres writes extensively on the orders and structures that are born out of Noise - in Genèse he explains: “[f]ormed phenomenal information gets free from the chaotic background noise, the knowable and the known are born from that unknown” (Serres 1995, 18). This further resolves Serres’ ontological grounds of Noise as “a matter of being itself” (Serres 1995, 13), as whatever passes through it to the other side makes itself known and perceivable, and therefore phenomenological. The message that reaches the other end through the Noise becomes Sound, a signal that is rational and understandable. This is a process that follows, in Marie Thompson’s words, the “move from the infra-empirical towards the empirical, from (virtual) potentiality to actuality” (Thompson productive2012, 17). As such, Sound comes to describe the knowable; it is meaning itself, the signal and the message that is received, and the order that emerges from chaos. The usage of the term “Sound” in our case encapsulates an interpretation of sound as something relative and subjective. As Macs Smith illustrates, “[m]usic coming through the wall from my neighbor’s apartment is sound if I’m in a mood to listen to it, and noise if I’m not” (Smith 2021, 1). In other words, Sound, or the order that emerges from Noise in this case differs from absolute Order, which is to say the abstract and idealized order of Western Modernism.
This takes us precisely to our definition of Silence. Serres points out that, taken literally, true silence never exists in reality, “white noise is always there” (Serres 1982, 78). As such, Silence can only exist in a closed and isolated field. To create Silence is to expel Noise completely, to erase all difference, and to produce an idealized, flattened abstract space. Thompson describes this as “a Platonic, transcendent realm of a pure, ideal sonority, which (paradoxically) exists as undisturbed and eternal silence” (Thompson, 2014, 144). This parallels the Western Modernist disposition of abstraction, “selecting a few ideas out of the messy experience of the world in order to operate more efficiently” (Lara 2023, 331). I will use Silence in our discussion to refer to the oppressive and centralized ideals of Order established in Western Modernity. Using Serres’ understanding of Noise as the medium, to achieve Silence is to completely eradicate Noise - difference, implying the elimination of the medium. In other words, Silence is immediacy. This is a concept deeply entangled with the larger project of Modernity, which authors such as Macs Smith and Marie Thompson discuss at length. To be immediate is to eliminate the space and time in between, and to eliminate room for error. Disorder threatens efficiency. If disorder is diversity, absolute order is sheer conformity. While true Silence cannot meaningfully exist, the pursuit of efficiency tends aggressively towards Silence. Efficiency comes at the cost of diversity, sacrificing disorder to produce homogeneity. Everything that tends towards Silence is null: no Sound can come from Silence. That is to say, Silence is the death of culture.
II. Blight
I would like to begin our discussion by examining the common perception of Noise (disorder) as it exists in the urban environment. To do so, I will look at noise itself as the acoustic reality of our environment, as well as graffiti and how it manifests in the surrounding discourse as “visual noise” supposedly threatening the ‘order’ and ‘harmony’ of our urban environment. The purpose of this section will be to challenge the conventional, and often conservative, conceptions of Noise (disorder) as a form of degeneration, and reevaluate the role it plays in the social and material production of space. The general perception and accepted meaning of noise as a categorically negative phenomenon has its seeds deeply rooted in a system of binaries paradigmatic of modern thought. The topic of noise pollution effectively places noise on the ‘bad’ side of a Cartesian dualism along with comparable relatives such as pollution, dirt, and disease. Lisa Goines and Louis Hagler’s 2008 article “Noise Pollution: A Modern Plague,” likens noise to a “manmade plague…from which there is virtually no escape” (Goines & Hagler 2007, 287). This treatment of noise is widespread and generally sees in it a supposed transgression of health and hygiene. However, it becomes increasingly evident in these beliefs that noise is conflated with volume, as noise control bylaws frequently cite dB(A) levels in their definitions and measures of noise pollution (Vancouver Noise Control Bylaw, Toronto Noise Control Bylaw, New York City Noise Control Bylaw). What constitutes as noise cannot be quantitatively measured, and even the municipal government of Paris “acknowledges that the line between sound and noise is fuzzy” (Smith 2021, 1). My intent is not to challenge the real and harmful effects of volume on the human body but to critically examine the underlying biases embedded in the dominant discourse surrounding noise pollution. I argue that the association of noise with pollution is linked to a view of the former as a threat to the hegemonic control and ordering of space. A Serrian reading of Noise, however, draws out an alternative perspective that succeeds a Modernist logic of reductive binaries (‘good’ vs. ‘bad’), and instead presents a relational view of noise that does not undermine its productive faculty. Serres’ understanding of Noise is two-pronged. On the one hand, it recognizes noise as an irreducible reality - white noise or ambient noise that persists ceaselessly in the environment. On the other, it considers the parasitic function of noise as interference that agitates and incites change within an existing system.
As Mary Douglas famously states, “dirt is matter out of place” (Douglas, 44). In other words, dirt is not dirt intrinsically, but dirt because it infringes on an arbitrary system of classifications. I argue that this is the very same basis on which noise pollution is founded. Noise is problematized not because of the inherent danger it poses to the health of urban dwellers, but because it threatens the integrity of an arbitrary social order maintained by the state. Despite their central argument that “[p]eople have the right to choose the nature of their acoustical environment” and that “it should not be imposed by others” (Goines & Hagler 2008, 287), Goines and Hagler’s article goes on to appeal for regulating, or rather limiting, the use of personal music players due to the dangers they potentially pose (Goines & Hagler 2008, 289). The internal contradiction of claiming the right to choose one’s acoustical environment yet simultaneously policing the use of something as individual as personal audio players highlights the latent prejudice in the terms and conditions of noise pollution. This becomes further apparent in the privileging of noises arbitrarily “considered necessary” (Goines & Hagler 2008, 288) over those that are not. According to Goines and Hagler, noises such as combustion engines, train horns, and police sirens either “serve an important societal purpose” (Goines & Hagler 2008, 288) or are unavoidable compromises that come with “time–and labor–saving devices” (Goines & Hagler 2008, 288). This is in contrast to other noises such as those coming from the radio, concerts, and public sporting events, which are apparently unnecessary, intrusive, and unhealthy (Goines & Hagler 2008, 288). Evidently, all noise is not noise - those sounds that emanate from or coordinate with the desires of Modern capitalism are heard as just such: Sounds. What is leftover then is noisy and out of place. It does not belong and was not invited; it threatens and jeopardizes the ordered system. As such, noise pollution is not so much about the reduction of noise, but the control over it and its sources.
The arbitrary distinctions that differentiate noise from sound and vice versa are paralleled in the visual sphere of the cityscape. In 1982, Kelling and Wilson introduced to the field of criminology the influential "Broken Windows" theory, a thesis that hypothesizes a causal correlation between the increase in crime rate and the degree of visual unkemptness of a given arena (Kelling & Wilson 1982, 3-4). Such a hypothesis attributes the production and upkeep of social order to the visual sphere, flattening the myriad complexities of lived reality that influence the cause of crime. Visual disorder seemingly threatens the order of the city's vista, which supposedly "leads to the breakdown of community controls" (Kelling & Wilson 1982, 4) in a ripple effect. However, what characterizes ‘visual disorder’ is left unclear. Kurt Iveson details the “diffusion of several military technologies into everyday urban systems and space” (Iveson 2010, 119) to combat and wage war on graffiti. Barbed wire, CCTV, and particle sensors are taken from their wartime origins and recontextualized in the urban environment (Iveson 2010, 119-121) as violent manifestations of the hostility harbored towards graffiti by the state. Evidently, graffiti is regarded as a threat to visual order. But what about its material existence differentiates graffiti from commissioned murals or street art that are ostensibly seen as harmless? As Douglas notes, “[t]here is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder” (Douglas, 2). Chapter 485 of the Toronto Municipal Code underlines such dubious lines between vandalism and street art, citing the latter to be "[m]arkings made or affixed to property that are approved by the property owner or occupant" (Toronto Municipal Code 2011, 485-1), and furthermore presupposing that such marks "aesthetically enhance the surface they cover and the general surroundings, having regard to the community character and standards" (Toronto Municipal Code 2011, 485-1). In this, we deduce two conclusions: first, contrary to the viewpoint of "Broken Windows," visual markings and inscriptions made on the surfaces of buildings may indeed 'aesthetically enhance' the surroundings (as apparently street art does), and second, what it means to 'aesthetically enhance' the surroundings is unclear, as are the terms of the so-called 'community character and standards' it supposedly aligns with. What settles these definitions, then, is left to the sole discretion of the property owners who authorize the inscriptions, producing a paradox in which the visual commons of the built environment are curated by a small and privileged subset of the community. Visual disorder has nothing to do with the perception of unkemptness, despite what Kelling and Wilson would like to suggest, and is instead concerned with enforcing echelons of authority and ownership over the built environment.
To expand on the dilemma of street art and graffiti (vandalism), Scott Burnham describes the 2005 Sony ad campaign (Figure 1) undertaken as a part of the launch of the new Playstation PSP device, which consisted of spraypainted motifs on the surfaces of various buildings throughout the city (Burnham 2024, 193). This event expands on our discussion of graffiti, order, and disorder, further illustrating how the war on graffiti is not so much a war about unkemptness, but a war about ownership and maintaining control over who gets to produce meaning in the city. Perversely, the campaign appropriates the visual language of graffiti and repurposes it for commercial use by purchasing the legal rights to mark up the surfaces of those buildings (Burnham 2024, 193). Shortly after, the campaign was met with widespread backlash by various graffiti and street artists in the city, protesting that they were "advertisements copying the street style" (Burnham 2024, 193). The city's permittance of a campaign that replicates, for all intents and purposes, the aesthetics, motifs, and stylistic elements found in traditional graffiti contradicts its pathologization of graffiti as a sign of urban blight, once again emphasizing that what is paramount in the battle against Noise is the preservation of hegemonic ownership over the public sphere. Commissioned murals bypass all assumptions about visual disorder insofar as they do not threaten the Order of authority. In fact, they fundamentally reinforce Order, complying with the hand of authority and repeating the notion that "what is deemed to be art/culture or indeed crime and deviance is what is designated, framed or contextualised as such by those with the means and power to delineate and 'place' them" (Zienleniec 2017, 3). In other words, corporations, property owners, city officials, etc. still decide what should be written and what is not.
Furthermore, by supposing a direct connection between visual disorder and crime rate, “Broken Windows” constructs a moral ideology that frames the former as emblematic of ‘evil’ and should be purged swiftly in the interests of civil ‘goodness.’ Dirty walls are impure, Noisy, and evil while clean walls are pure, Silent, and good. Marie Thompson discovers a similar ideology present in her critique of Canadian composer and writer R. Murray Schafer’s ‘acoustic ecology.’ Schafer’s ideology of sound in his book The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World underlines a politics that privileges silence over noise, positioning them respectively with the rural and the urban (Thompson 2014, 136). The hi-fi and lo-fi soundscapes Schafer depicts in The Soundscape highlight this stance. In reference to the high and low of high fidelity audio, the superior hi-fi soundscape is silent and, attributed to the pastoral and natural landscapes of the lost past. Low levels of ambient noise in the rural landscape allow one to separate and hear individual sounds more clearly as opposed to the chaotic and turbulent lo-fi soundscapes of the city (Schafer, 43). Thompson recognizes in Schafer’s thinking a throughline that ties the silent to the tranquil, the tranquil to the natural, and the natural to the good (Thompson 2014, 136). As such, she identifies “an overarching, ideological and moral division between a pure and positive silence and an impure and negative noise” (Thompson 2014, 148). By relating itself to ‘goodness,’ the clean and pure walls Kelling and Wilson seek and the transcendental purity of Schafer’s silence articulate a moral logic within which the elimination of Noise (evil) “is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organise the environment” (Douglas, 2). In doing so, they mythologize an image of Silence, an abstract and homogenous space where all difference is crushed. Certainly, Silence is also Lefebvre’s abstract space, which “tends towards homogeneity, towards the elimination of existing differences or peculiarities” (Lefebvre, 52). Serres’ illustrates this with an anecdote in which Descartes is compared to a man who burns his house to the ground to eliminate the rats that live in the attic (Serres 1982, 12). The man cannot sleep with the noise of rats - parasites, running amok in his attic, so he flattens the house and banishes it to Hell in an attempt to purge all noise, all disorder. However, if, for Lefebvre a differential space of heterogeneity always lies latent in abstract space (Lefebvre, 52), true Silence, for Serres, does not exist - there is always Noise (Serres 1982, 78).
Serres writes: "What passes might be a message but parasites (static) prevent it from being heard, and sometimes, from being sent" (Serres 1982, 11). A clean wall is a message; a clean wall is never really clean inasmuch as it is always polluted with signage, logos, and adverts. In Le Mal Propre, Serres interestingly remarks: “to pollute is to appropriate, mark a territory as one’s own, or make it uninhabitable by anybody else” (Serres in Connor, hardsoft 14). Therefore the ‘clean’ wall is only clean as it is an expression of private ownership or state authority over the public domain, broadcasted in its legal or commercial signage. Correspondingly, graffiti is dirty; it is Noise, an interference, a jamming of that message. In this we can gather the productive capability of Noise - graffiti invades the wall, transmitting its own signal. In doing so, the invasive signal disturbs and alters the original signal, generating a new signal altogether. If the intended message was an expression of “privatization of collective resources” (Zienleniec 2017, 11), the altered message echoes a sentiment “that the city is the shared property of its inhabitants, rather than a collection of discrete zones” (Burnham 2024, 191). By polluting the wall, graffiti temporarily reappropriates ownership over its facilities and allows its surface "to represent more than merely the interests of capital, finance or institutional power" (Zienleniec 2017, 4). Noise agitates and disturbs at the same time it carries a signal through a channel. In this way, graffiti demonstrates how Noise generates by assuming the role of both inter-ference and inter-mediation. This is not to uphold the abilities of graffiti on a utopian pedestal as a kind of revolutionary and emancipatory practice - there exists an expanse of literature that highlights its limitations as a subculture that is predominantly male (Macdonald 2001), or one that is increasingly distorted and adopted by neoliberal ideology in the 21st century (Matthew 2019). Rather, my purpose here is to recognize in graffiti an instance archetypical of how Noise can behave as a productive force that generates meanings alternative to the status quo through disruption. Graffiti is only Noise for as long as it “provokes a difference, a disequilibrium” (Serres 1982, 182). Noise is always an interference. That is to say, if Noise fails to interfere, it was never Noise to begin with. A legally authorized mural is an appropriation of graffiti writing “made into a spatial commodity” (Andron 2023, 58) that bypasses criminalization and folds back into commercial and capitalist ideals of state ownership, order, and control. It no longer jams the intended signal, no, it becomes part of the intention itself, waiting to be jammed by other Noises.
There are no simple equilibriums for Serres, they are always relative, dynamic, and internally nested (Howles 2024, 15). Every Sound, every equilibrium, or every instance of order is unstable and relative to the disequilibrium it is born out of. Meaning emerges out of difference because of the relations it produces. Thus, pure, Platonic Silence attempts to control and regulate the circulation of meaning by smoothing away all Noise and all difference. In the context of urban space and its soundscapes, Silence effectively strips away its life force by muting that which constitutes it in the first place. Again, Noise is both an interference and the medium, or more precisely, it interferes as the medium. It acts as the milieu, the irreducible material makeup of the environment itself. Serres writes: “The town makes the noise, but the noise makes the town” (Serres 1982, 14). The incessant attempt at regulating those noises deemed ‘unnecessary’ as advanced by Goines and Hagler or the romanticization of the clean, undifferentiated hi-fi soundscape found in the natural landscapes of the past as suggested by Schafer is done so at the willful loss of the city’s essence. Pascal Amphoux describes what he calls the ‘sound signature’ of a place: “a sound or a set of sounds which sign the place or the time and confirm in some way their “authenticity”” (Amphoux 1993, 389 - emphasis original). One set of sounds signifies the identity of a place (or its essence) precisely on the grounds that it is different from another set of sounds derived from a different place. In this sense, difference quite literally makes the place itself. Indeed, noise pollution discourse does not argue for the complete nullification of all noise in the environment, but rather specific noises, as is similarly Schafer’s intention. However, this is precisely the logic of reduction that aims to produce an abstract, homogenized space in the end. In other words, it is not an erasure of all noise itself, but Noise - difference and disorder. Serres equates this to the end of all being, writing “order and flat repetition are in the vicinity of death” (Serres 1982, 127). Much like the war on graffiti is about reinforcing the institution of private control over the production and expression of meaning in the public sphere, noise pollution bylaws attempt to sonically order the acoustic landscape such that only sounds servile to the capitalist needs of the state should and can be heard. As Thompson argues, “recognising noises as productive is not the same as saying that noise is positive” (Thompson 2012, 27). I caution bringing in examples illustrating the ‘positive effects’ of noise to our discussion at the risk of inverting, yet reinforcing the same moral and aesthetic dualism that condemns such noise in the first place. My intent is not to proclaim that those noises problematized and deemed unnecessary by the state are all ‘good’ or beneficial to the urban environment. Instead, using Serres’ understanding of Noise I contend for an alternative perspective on its role in the urban environment that circumvents a Modernist logic reading of the world through bifurcations of order/disorder, pure/impure, and good/bad.
III. Daemons
So far, we have discussed how Noise is antagonized in and perpetually expunged from the urban environment under the project of Modernity. Jeremy Till argues that, being situated in the realities produced by Modernity, architecture is inextricably tied to and negotiates its ideals, writing:
“Depending on whose argument you follow, architects are mere pawns in an overwhelming regime of power and control, or else architects are active agents in the execution of this power and control” (Till 127).
Consequently, I argue that Modern architecture is fundamentally defined by a Modernist aspiration towards Silence, a purification of difference and disorder, which is characterized in Noise. However, in this section I examine Modern architecture to explicate that while this aspiration for Noise-less purity materializes in the fantasy of transparency and immediacy, a paradoxical desire to convey Silence ultimately fails to produce more than the mere illusion of Silence. In other words, it produces the Sound of Silence, but never Silence itself, demonstrating the irreducibility of Noise in the transmittance of meaning. As John Law recognized, the modernist dream is a dream of a singular order, “the idea that if our lives, our organizations, our social theories or our societies, were ‘properly ordered’ then all would be well” (Law 1994, 4-5). The idea of an all-encompassing order implies a rejection of different orders and meanings, captured in the tendency to “treat it as distraction” (Law 1994, 5), and adhere to the fantasy of absolute homogeneity - purity. In many ways, this is the same homogeneity that is depicted in the “brilliant, shadowless sun” (Watkin 2024, 175) outside of Plato’s cave. A pure, clean, and Noise-less space - absolute Silence. According to Jean Baudrillard, “[m]odernity always emerges…through a resurgence of tradition” (Baudrillard, 70), thus we sensibly identify the origins of Modern architecture in such Classical ideals of purity and order. Purity, as Mary Douglas has shown us, makes dirt its contaminating, excluded other. White walls are a direct analog to a clean surface purified of any stains. Moreover, with the prevailing advancements in medical theory and discourse on hygiene at the turn of the 20th century, Modern architecture came to parallel the emerging developments in medical technology (Colomina 2008). Most significantly, this materialized in the illusion of transparency through the ubiquitous application of glass as a building material (Vidler 1992, 217) which was adjacent to the conception of the X-ray machine. Beatriz Colomina observes how “[j]ust as the X-ray exposes the inside of the body to the public eye, the modern house exposed its interior (Colomina 2008, 33). If the white wall was about the obsessive scrutiny and surveillance for any sign of contamination or dirt, transparency represented the ultimate form of purity, the pinnacle of surveillance through the disappearance of the surface altogether. With transparency, one could know that there was no dirt, no disorder, and no Noise - pure, unadulterated Silence.
This calls back to Schafer’s pure and silent hi-fi soundscapes of the natural world - hi-fi being a direct reference to high-fidelity audio systems, whose aesthetics are rooted in the aims to achieve ‘transparency’ in sound. A ‘transparent’ recording in hi-fi audio is the gold standard, and one that can “capture what it records accurately, without distortion” (Glasgow 2007, 163). Through a substantial suppression of electrical interference, it endeavors to reproduce the sound it records to the degree in which it is indistinguishable from actually hearing it live in front of you (Glasgow 2007, 163). This is essentially what Serres describes as a system without Noise, for which it is not a system at all. Noise is the medium or middle agent through which any system of relations moves; Serres writes: “in order to hear the message alone, one would have to be identical to the sender” (Serres 1982, 70). This is to say, a message or a Sound received without Noise would mean that there is no middle, no medium, and therefore immediately received. Analogous to this, Le Corbusier often spoke about “the walls of his building disappearing so that we can be in direct contact with the volume” (Smith 2021, 71). Transparency then, is not simply the quality of being completely see-through, but rather the elimination of mediation itself. If Silence is a purified, utopian space without the medium of Noise, Silence and transparency are synonymous and indivisible from one another.
Moreover, Schafer’s moral biases towards Silence, and therefore immediacy are similarly embodied in the ideals of Modern architecture. Macs Smith notes that Modern architecture’s progression towards immediacy was paired with “a rhetorical and ideological framework that identified transparency in architecture as a moral good” (Smith 2021, 72). This is most apparent in Adolf Loos’ polemical conviction of ornament as crime. Like Kelling and Wilson, Loos dreams of cities whose streets “glisten like white walls” (Loos, 20), instructing architecture to lose all ornament on the grounds that “it is a phenomenon either of backwardness or degeneration” (Loos, 22). Evidently, ornament is problematized in the same way that graffiti is. This, I believe, begins to illustrate a commonality in their shared capacity to mediate meaning and produce relations, therefore arousing subjectivity. Such a subjectivity is antithetical to the Modernist dream (or delusion) of singular, absolute order, such that it suggests the existence of a variety of orders, whether it is expressed in aesthetic difference or implied in subjective interpretation. Rafael Schacter draws a similar conclusion, speculating that the fear induced by both graffiti and ornament may “emerge through their providing evidence of an embedded form of sociality, expressing the evident ‘personhood’ of their producers, eliciting an evidentially animative quality” (Schacter 2014, 34).
Ornament, like graffiti, is parasitic in that it is “a substance that is both in and out of place, included and excluded, within and without” (Schacter 2014, 36). Oleg Grabar further argues that ornament “exhibits…an intermediate order between viewers and users of art, perhaps even creators of art, and works of art” (Grabar 1992, 45). In other words, ornament functions as the matter or channel through which architecture is able to transmit its message. In this sense, we can read ornament through the lens of Serres as necessarily Noisy, occupying the position of the intermediary. To discipline or eliminate ornament, then, is to desire immediacy, transparency. However, it is precisely on this reasoning that it stands that, despite Loos’ efforts to conquer ornament, it was ultimately a failed venture. Modern architecture wants to convey the message of immediacy, but paradoxically, to do so it needs something to mediate such a message. As we have alluded to previously, true immediacy, true Silence is not attainable in reality, it can only sustain itself in its own logic. Plato’s utopia of the shadowless sun cannot exist in reality because “the atmosphere always diffuses the light” (Watkin 2024, 175). This is to say, transparency in Modern architecture is not transparency itself, but merely an illusion of it. Ornament did not disappear, but rather disguised itself through an “almost inconspicuous application” (Schacter 2014, 31) in order to fulfill the mediation of an image of transparency. Antoine Picon demonstrates that “objects, furniture, textured and colored walls often played the role imparted to ornament” (Picon 2020, 288), while elsewhere Mark Wigley argues that the white walls and glass surfaces of Modern architecture quintessentially defined its fashion, and hence its ornament (Wigley 1993, 38). Modern architecture produced an illusion of immediacy (Silence) by making its intermediaries (Noise) surrogate and invisible.
To step away from architecture briefly, studies on computer systems can help illustrate our case. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun recounts that real-time operating systems or interactive operating systems such as the ones used on every Mac or Windows “buttress the notion of our computers as transparent” (Chun, 89) by deceiving the user into believing that their actions are the ‘source’ of any process performed on the system. However, Chun argues, “[b]y making the interface “transparent” or “rational,” one creates daemons” (Chun, 89), which are background processes that run invisibly from boot time without the user’s action and perform essential tasks necessary to the system’s operation (Chun, 87). The naming of the background processes as ‘daemons’ is indicative; a daemon is a being described by Plato to be half-god and half-man, and therefore symbolic of the intermediate (Chun, 88). Likewise, it is also a term that Grabar frequently likens to ornament such that their intermediary function is ‘demonic’ (Grabar 1992, 45). The interface’s immediacy is a false impression produced by the hiding of its daemons, its ornament, its Noise, but never the complete eradication. To repeat Serres, what I am trying to say is that there are no immediate relations, “[a]s soon as we are two, there is a medium between us” (Serres 1982, 70). Moreover, it is the medium, the Noise, that constitutes the relation and allows meaning to be conveyed. Noise is productive insofar that it carries the message - meaning emerges out of it. Some authors such as Picon have contended that the function of ornament is indispensable to the becoming of architecture itself, stating that “[f]or a building to reveal itself as architectural was synonymous with a dynamic unfolding that mobilized ornaments to acquire visibility” (Picon 2020, 287), while others like Grabar understand architecture itself to be ornament, or a form of mediation (Grabar 1992). One thing is clear regardless of which to follow - mediation, by way of ornament, is vital to the formation of architecture and subsequently the experience of it. Ornament affords a building the transmission of its message and allows architecture to be read as architecture. Modern architecture’s reduction of ornament is rather its re-invention, parasiting the existing system to produce an entirely new one. Ornament could not have disappeared, as meaning emerges out of Noise as its medium. Paradoxically, Modern architecture’s abolition of ornament recognizes its agency to mediate and subsequently produce meaning. In the aspiration of a singular, absolute Order, Modernity turns to the mass concealment of ornament as its re-invention in order to mediate an image of uniformity that reflects the motives of “serial production and the authoritarian, bureaucratic state” (Anderson 1991, 71).
IV. Goths
This is perhaps an appropriate time to pivot and examine Gothic architecture as a foil to Modernism. In doing so, I hope to further highlight the productive faculty of Noise and draw out an ideology of design that embraces its facilities in an actualized fashion. Our discussion on Modern architecture emphasized, even in its attempted reduction, the irreducibility of Noise as an intermediary force, demonstrating its fundamental role in the production of meaning. In the following section, an investigation of Gothicism and Gothic architecture highlights a complete inversion of the Modernist logic, rooted in an explicit adoption and integration of Noise, rather than a reduction. Furthermore, a closer analysis of the formal logic of Gothic architecture will illustrate how, following Serres’ concepts, disorder and order are mutually entangled in the process of making. The Gothic methodology epitomizes Serres’ description of Noise as a boundless and infinite reserve of “possibility itself” (Serres 1995, 22), from which form (Sound) emerges. Gothic architecture and Gothicism by large is often pit against Modernism and Modern architecture as its antithesis. The popular and widely accepted variant of its origin myth details the conflation of the historical Goth peoples with German tribes who had “sacked Rome and overrun the old Empire” (Groom 2012, 31-32). Regardless of the true origins, the Goths were believed to have been the ones to have overcame and replaced the architecture and culture of the Classical Graeco-Roman civilization with their own set of values and edifices (Groom 2012, 31). In this sense, Gothicism and Gothic architecture was parasitic to begin with, disrupting the existing order to introduce a new one. The formation of Gothicism as one established in opposition to the cultural milieu of the Classical epoch resulted in the general association of the former with descriptors such as “monstrous and barbaric, wholly ignorant of any accepted ideas of sense and order” (Vasari in Groom 2012, 32). Gothicism was framed as immoral, representing treason against Classical order and harmony.
While Modernism is ideologically defined by its (supposedly) radical departure from tradition, the truth is much more complex. Jean Baudrillard advances this, revealing that Modernity is “never radical change or revolution, but always arises in implication with tradition in a subtle cultural play, in a debate where the two are hand in glove, in a process of amalgamation and adaptation” (Baudrillard, 70). Simply put, Modernism does not actually depart from tradition, it adopts the same values and recontextualizes them with a new coat of paint. This is well documented and seen all throughout Modern architecture, with the explicit appropriation of Classical ideals in symmetry as well as the ‘Golden Ratio’ of the Renaissance appearing in the work of giants like Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe (Payne 2018). Thus, while the Gothic historically symbolized a cultural aversion to Classicism and later the Renaissance, Modernism’s genealogical tie to the latter two paradigms makes its corresponding rivalry to Gothicism palpable. What’s more is that the lineage of Gothicism seems to have survived in cultural relevancy, with more recent genres and movements in art being theorized in close relation to Gothic sensibilities. Dani Cavallaro articulates the intersection between the Cyberpunk and the Gothic, outlining their shared themes in “decay, decomposition, disorder, helplessness, horror, irresolution, madness, paranoia, persecution, secrecy, unease, [and] terror” (Cavallaro 2000, xiv). In the literary context, these modalities are rhetorics used to depict and critique the social and political decline of Modernist capitalism and humanism (Cavallaro 2000, 166). What I am trying to say here is that Gothicism seems to be, in a quite literal sense, constructed by Noise on all levels. It is an inverted and skinless body concocted by chaos and disorder. Its aesthetics engage in a subversion of the status quo, parasiting Modernity to create in the place of its image a distorted form. This temperament can be studied throughout Gothic culture, true in its cinema, fashion, literature, etc. (put references). For our purposes, a closer look at Gothic architecture exemplifies an emergence of a design praxis that leans on and draws from the boundless reserves of Noise.
The most significant figurehead of Gothic architecture is often cited to be English art historian and writer John Ruskin (Usher 2023, Spuybroek 2016, Schacter 2014). This proves to be fitting in our discussion as much of his views on architecture directly oppose those of Loos, going as far as to propose in Lectures on Architecture and Painting that “[o]rnamentation is the principal part of architecture” (Ruskin 1907, 88). Ruskin was a known partisan of Gothic architecture, with his enthusiasm shown most considerably in his book The Nature of Gothic. In this text, Ruskin outlines six key characteristics that, for him, define Gothic architecture: savageness, changefulness, naturalism, grotesqueness, rigidity, and redundance (Ruskin 1900, 4). In the following section, I will examine savageness, changefulness, and redundance using Serres’ framework of Noise in order to illustrate how Gothic architecture manifests a methodology of design that acknowledges and embraces the productive faculty of difference and disorder. While important, I have left out naturalism, grotesqueness, and rigidity as they are less relevant to our overall discussion. Additionally, I will choose not to obsess over the detailed description and analysis of aesthetic features and motifs as my intent is not to call for a contemporary revival of the Gothic in the formal or stylistic sense, but to extract from it a set of principles that can be applied to any context. Rotterdam-based architect and writer Lars Spuybroek has done a similar exercise in theorizing what he dubs a “Gothic ontology” (Spuybroek 2016), which we will frequently reference.
To begin, we must decipher what is referred to in the terms savageness, changefulness, and redundance. While the naming is less than terrific, savageness is the first of the six characteristics outlined by Ruskin and refers generally to the tendency for imperfection and error found in Gothic architecture. More specifically, Ruskin draws attention to the “wildness of thought, and roughness of work” (Ruskin 1900, 8) manifested in mistakes, imprecisions, and textures as “creations of ungainly shape and rigid limb, but full of wolfish life” (Ruskin 1900, 7). Instead of condemning such attributes, Ruskin equates them to an expression of vitality and, as others have noted, a “material index of the making process” (Usher, 1135). He writes: but do not mock at them, for they are signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone, a freedom of thought (Ruskin 1900, 13)
What is clear is that Ruskin views this penchant for error as a form of spontaneous freedom unlimited by a prescribed order. Thus, we can think of savageness as the allowance for the material occurrence of error in design. The next characteristic, changefulness, is the second characteristic Ruskin describes, referring to the capacity of variance exhibited in the design of Gothic architecture. Ruskin compares the contingency of elements found in the Gothic cathedral to the rational and repetitive symmetry typical of Classical and early Modern architecture, lamenting that “great art…does not say the same thing over and over again” (Ruskin 1900, 24 - emphasis original). Changefulness then is the “infringement of every servile principle” (Ruskin 1900, 25) present in traditional European thought, giving rise to a dynamic and fluctuating form “capable of perpetual novelty” (Ruskin 1900, 25, emphasis original). Changefulness is also closely tied to savageness insofar that spontaneity is conducive to variance as error calls for correction. We will revisit this shortly. The last characteristic we will discuss is redundance, and it is coincidentally also the last characteristic on Ruskin’s list. Redundance or redundancy is described simply as the excessive “accumulation of ornament” (Ruskin 1900, 56) found in Gothic architecture. Ruskin’s description of redundance is short, but makes clear that he correlates the surplus of ornament to the acknowledgement of the “fulness and wealth of the material universe” (Ruskin 1900, 56-57).
I have chosen to discuss these three principles in detail for the reason that I believe they are inherently linked and mutually inform one another. Serres’ thinking in the texts Le Parasite, Genese, and Hermes assembles a clear framework for us to use in our discussion. That is to say, savageness, changefulness, and redundancy demonstrate the interrelated concepts of parasite, negentropy, and noise respectively. For Serres, as it is for scholars of information theory, redundancy is an “isotropic multiplicity” (Serres 1992, 116), a repetition of something that, when pushed to the limits, produces clarity, stability. This is not the same redundancy that is meant by Ruskin; Gothic redundancy is more suggestive of an excess, an infinite increase in complexity. This is made obvious in his explicit denouncement of the Classical repetition of elements, such that the Greek temple is essentially unchanging repetition, an ‘isotropic multiplicity’ of Doric, Corinthian and Ionic columns (Ruskin 1900, 23). For Serres, isotropic multiplicity is equivalent to homogeneity, absolute order (Serres 1992, 117). For us, it is what we have called Silence. No, redundancy in the Gothic cannot be such, as Ruskin clearly addresses it as “the rude love of decorative accumulation” (Ruskin 1900, 56, my emphasis), ‘rude’ alluding to excess and superfluity. How do we make of this? I suggest, while Gothic redundancy is a repetition of sorts, it is a turbulent repetition, a repetition that is consistent only in its in-consistency. I approach this in three parts. First, ornament in the Gothic is not to be understood as a supplementary addition to the rest of the building. Rather, it is conceived of inseparably from the structural elements, merging the two as one. Scholarship surrounding Gothic architecture shows that this has been widely studied. Irenee Scalbert notes the way in which the rose motif of the window seen in the Sainte Chapelle “demonstrates that the distinction between structure and ornament does not apply to gothic” (Scalbert 2016, 76). Similarly, Lars Spuybroek highlights the dual properties of both structure and ornament expressed in the figural ribs that proliferate Gothic architecture (Spuybroek, 57). Thus, when Ruskin speaks of ornament, we can reasonably speculate that he is essentially speaking of a greater portion of the entire building. Second, building upon this, if we are to take savageness seriously, the inclination for error and idiosyncrasy in Gothic architecture would logically affect the redundancy of ornament (and structure), and thus the broader assemblage of elements within the building. This is not to say that there would be no cohesion, but that its uniformity would be imperfect and riddled with subtleties. And lastly, it is also commonly suggested that the design of Gothic buildings were collaborative efforts, rarely authored by a singular architect and often completed without plan and section (Scalbert 2016). This only reinforces the inevitability of inconsistency and error in redundancy. All of this points to the conclusion that Gothic redundancy is one of irregularity and not reiteration. Thus, I would like to consider it as akin to a stock, an inventory of recurrent but discrete parts that can be called to action - to use Serres’ words, “a formless fount of forms” (Serres 1992, 18). This is the role of Noise, which is not unanticipated, as we have already discussed the intermediary function of ornament previously. If Modernity fooled itself into a false immediacy through the reduction of ornament to invisible and disguised forms, the Gothic engages in the inverse. Redundance is the opposite of reduction. The Gothic ornament, in all its redundancy, is closer to Bolter and Grusin’s hypermediacy, which Macs Smith employs to describe the effect of a heterogenous layering of media on a wall (signs, posters, graffiti) until “it becomes impossible not to see that mediation is going on” (Smith 2021, 78). To run the point to the ground, Serres frequently illustrates his understanding of Noise by using the image of the sea, citing the etymological relation between noise, nausea, and the nautical, and stating that “[w]e never hear what we call background noise so well as we do at the seaside” (Serres 1992, 13). Ruskin employs a similar metaphor, comparing any monotony of elements found in art and architecture to the sea (Ruskin 1900, 26). We can assume that he is referring to redundance here as this is a monotony that he notes is intermingled with and perpetually broken in the Gothic by variance (changefulness) (Ruskin 1900, 28). In this sense, we can think of changefulness as a kind of emergence emanating from a sea of redundancy. It has been noted by many authors that the figural elements in Gothic architecture display a live capacity to stretch, contract, and adapt to other elements as they intersect (Spuybroek 2016, 33, Scalbert 2016, 93). What this means is that we can furthermore view redundancy as a reservoir of sorts, a stock of elements that contains in itself x number of possibilities. It forms a system. Savageness (spontaneous error), then, inflicts error, introducing disorder and agitating the system. It is parasitic, it is an external force that, while welcomed, is not prescribed. The parasite is both generative and corrupting (Serres 1982, 16). With it, the possibility latent in the reservoir is activated. Redundance is passive Noise where savageness is active (parasitic). Now we revisit our point from earlier - savageness catalyzes changefulness. Ruskin alludes to the idea of imperfection as the impetus for invention and variance, using a vignette of two glass cutters to explain his point. Modern glass, he writes, is “true in its form, [and] accurate in its cutting” (Ruskin 1900, 17), but a strive for precision sacrifices the cutter’s capacity to invent. In contrast, the old Venetian glass cutter cuts clumsily, but his imprecision leads him to invent “a new design for every glass that he [makes]” (Ruskin 1900, 18). The first system is stable, there is no Noise, it is not much of a system at all and produces nothing; “[i]t is information-free, complete redundance” (Serres Hermes, 100) (here Serres is referring to the definition of redundancy used in information theory). The second system is Noisy, it is full of possibility in entropy. Combating the Noise, reversing it, the Venetian glass cutter attains new order, a moment of meaning, Sound. In Hermes, Serres uses the term negentropy to describe the moments of information or “pockets of local orders” (Serres hermes, 75) that emerge out of Noise, which I have chosen to call Sound in earlier sections for the sake of simplicity. Here I will use the original term as it is necessary to discuss some other ideas of Serres previously unused. I argue that the logic of changefulness is essentially the negentropic outcome of the Gothic system; spontaneity (savageness) disturbs the system until it is forced to reorder. Scalbert indicates that the design of Gothic architecture is elaborated in its making process (Scalbert 2016, 93) which is tied closely to Ruskin’s notion of changefulness to the extent that in its description he details what can only be understood as a mutation that occurs as the building comes to need it. He writes: “whenever [the Gothic] finds occasion for change in its form or purpose, it submits to it without the slightest sense of loss either to its unity or majesty” (Ruskin 1900, 28). This can only be ascertained as the result, or rather the self-correction of spontaneity and the inevitable error it accelerates. Therefore changefulness is not variety for variety’s sake, but an outcome, a rational signal that emerges at the other end through the passage of Noise. Ruskin confirms this, writing: The variety of the Gothic schools is the more healthy and beautiful, because in many cases it is entirely unstudied, and results, not from mere love of change, but from practical necessities (Ruskin 1900, 28)
The effect of changefulness is, without a doubt, the generation of new order, Sound. However, it is equally important to understand that Ruskin observes this as a continuous occurrence, never sustaining itself for long before it begins to variate once again. He emphasizes the ‘perpetual novelty’ of changefulness rather than a static one, such that the forms seen in the Gothic “are changeable to infinity” (Ruskin 1900, 25). Spuybroek similarly observes the following behaviour of changefulness:
Since changefulness is a highly coordinated system of movements, of figures channeling force and balancing with other figures, it tries to include everything, but only up to a point, when the pattern starts to crack, which does not mean the system is failing but that the pattern is reorganizing itself on another scale. (Spuybroek 2016, 63-64).
In other words, the effect of changefulness is rational as much as its being is fleeting and unstable. What I mean to say is that it is a phenomenon. Its stability is quickly interrupted by parasites (savageness), reverting it back to Noise and it tries all over again to variate and restabilize. But this is precisely how Serres registers the relationship between order and disorder. As Lilian Kroth points out, “Serres makes it unmistakably clear that he sees order and the rational as the exception, not the rule” (Kroth 2023, 25). Sound is the phenomena to Noise’s ontology. Serres portrays his understanding of order as “negentropic islands on or in the entropic sea” (Serres hermes, 75) - localized territories of Sound poking out from a sea of Noise. We can now understand changefulness as operated by three concurrent logics: 1. a dynamic self-correcting reflex triggered by active Noise (savageness), a reversal of error so to speak, 2. directly emerging out of a reservoir of redundant possibilities (redundance), and 3. is fleeting in its stability, sustaining only until it is re-triggered by error, starting the process again. All three are mutually informative and necessary for changefulness to occur, which is fundamentally the emergence of new form. In savageness, changefulness, and redundancy, the Gothic system demonstrates the broader inquiry of this entire thesis - how Noise, and by extension difference and disorder are not degenerative but in fact productive and constitutive of new meaning, or Sound. The purpose of this section was not call for a stylistic revival of Gothic architecture, but to glean, from an analysis of its formal logic, principles of design that offer an alternative perspective on the relationship between disorder and order that seem to be largely misunderstood in the contemporary context. Disorder and order cannot simply be understood as antithetical, despite the dominant Modernist logic of binaries that buttress this notion. Instead, as this thesis has hopefully shown, they are two forces dynamically entangled in a constant flux, equally necessary in the process of making, whether that concerns the social, cultural, or formal(architectural) spheres.
V. Monsters
Rumour raced at once through Libya’s great cities,
Rumour, compared with whom no other is as swift.
She flourishes by speed, and gains strength as she goes:
first limited by fear, she soon reaches into the sky,
walks on the ground, and hides her head in the clouds.
Earth, incited to anger against the gods, so they say,
bore her last, a monster, vast and terrible, fleet-winged
and swift-footed, sister to Coeus and Enceladus,
who for every feather on her body has as many
watchful eyes below (marvellous to tell), as many
tongues speaking, as many listening ears.
Virgil, Aeneid BkIV:173-197
Rumour, compared with whom no other is as swift.
She flourishes by speed, and gains strength as she goes:
first limited by fear, she soon reaches into the sky,
walks on the ground, and hides her head in the clouds.
Earth, incited to anger against the gods, so they say,
bore her last, a monster, vast and terrible, fleet-winged
and swift-footed, sister to Coeus and Enceladus,
who for every feather on her body has as many
watchful eyes below (marvellous to tell), as many
tongues speaking, as many listening ears.
Virgil, Aeneid BkIV:173-197
Book IV of Virgil's Aeneid portrays a flamboyant allegory of Fama, the Roman goddess of rumor. In this tale, rumor begins humbly, but quickly circulates throughout the city, and eventually extends her wings into the skies. Like a pathogen, rumor spreads in thin air. It amalgamates with the atmosphere as a kind of ethereal miasma. And perhaps miasma is fitting for rumor since Virgil's description of Fama is more grotesque than it is graceful. Rumor is not a radiant or angelic being, but rather some kind of uncanny creature, a "monstrous bird with many feathers, eyes, tongues, mouths, and ears" (Dyer 1989, 28). So rumor is a monster. But on the inverse, the monster itself is also a rumor. The monster as a cultural entity cannot escape the realm of rumors. The intensity of the monster's presence is equivalent with the amount its word is spread about and communicated person to person. The terror of the Yeti or the Sasquatch, whose existence remains unproven, comes not from its material or physical being, but from the collective belief of those convinced of its roaming "out there somewhere" (Abatemarco, 1). Likewise, ghosts and other spirits thrive off a common circulation of tales and folklore such as Bloody Mary or the Flying Dutchman, which empower them and bring them to life. The monster and the rumor are inseparable from another. As the town continues to whisper, gossip, and spread word, the monster's essence and capacity to instill fear grows in strength. As the rumors begin to dim and peter out however, the tangibility of its perceived terror disappears. Fear resides in the multiple - which is to say, fear resides in the Noise. Serres writes: "What terrifies is not the meaning of the noise...but the increasing multiplicity that says it" (Serres 1995, 66). The monster is more terrifying the more people reproduce its story.
But fear is not the only attribute that legitimizes the monster. In many European traditions during the nineteenth century, the Werewolf existed broadly as a supernatural transformation bestowed upon a person after death as punishment for moral wrongdoings during their lifetime (Mencej 2023, 196). As a result, the Werewolf was adopted into a wider cultural rhetoric where it was used as a derogatory term to badmouth individuals thought to be socially deviant or irregular (Mencej 2023, 202). To say someone was a Werewolf was to jeopardize their social status and to intentionally spread "bad" rumors about them. The Werewolf transcends the realm of terror as its influence proliferates a higher network of communication. In this sense, the monster does not simply dwell in the space of rumors, but is fundamentally synonymous with rumor itself. Linguistically, rumor and Noise are closely intertwined. The French 'rumeur' is both rumor or gossip, as well an indistinct rumbling sound - some kind of hubbub or murmuring. In Metamorphoses, Ovid depicts Fama's dwelling as an ever present reverberation reminiscent of the murmur of a distant sea (Ovid, Metamorphoses XII:39-52). For Serres, the rumor is a Noise, a stochastic turbulence that "acquires strength at the bifurcations" (Serres 1995, 58). The rumor is volatile and heterogeneous; it relays and breaks apart. Its propagation is a mechanism of disorganized recurrences which grow increasingly stronger with multiplicity (In Virgil's Aeneid, Fama gains strength as she accelerates, alluding to the plural nature of the rumor). A singular rumor cannot not exist, only the virality of multiple rumors. As the rumor is passed on, the notion of a single truth turns fuzzy and misconstrued. Instead, what becomes is the unstable buzzing of many truths, or rather, some Noise. The rumor is a virus, a rabid parasite. If the monster is a rumor, it starts with Noise.
According to Jeffrey Cohen, the monster's body is a cultural body (Cohen 1996, 4). In other words, any culture that spawns a monster projects something collectively felt or understood onto its body. This body, then, is an assemblage of some "fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy" (Cohen 1996, 4) shared by the many. Frankenstein embodies a mutual fear of technology, and Bigfoot a fear of nature. But a monster like Frankenstein is also born precisely out of technological desire, and the fascination of Bigfoot stems from a romanticized allure of the natural world. Thus, the monster is an incarnation of the cultural zeitgeist they are born in. The word monster comes from the Latin 'monstrum,' whose root word 'moneo' means "to warn," and refers to a kind of divine omen from the gods (Martinez 2022, 12-14). Given this, the cultural function of the monster has always been that of communication. It exists as an ostension or a critical moderator of "a time, a feeling, and a place" (Cohen 1996, 4).
Vampires were ancient monsters that originated pre-nineteenth century in an era deeply concerned with health and contagion (Bacon 2023, Howell 2021). Accordingly, the original connotations of the vampiric body always seem to be tied to "ideas of infection, pollution, and disease" (Bacon 2023, 2). But the true power of the monster lies in its mutability; its threat, Cohen states, comes from "its propensity to shift" (Cohen 1996, 5). The Werewolf adopted new meanings, allowing it to live on. Evidently, Vampires have not disappeared from a culture where scientific and medical breakthroughs have more or less neutralized a universal anxiety of plagues (prior to COVID-19) - so what do they represent today? Amanda Howell emphasizes one affiliation of the Vampire with nostalgia in contemporary culture (Howell 2021, 258). Once signifying a rampant fear of contagion, in the 21st century, the Vampire has transfigured its monstrosity to manifest counter-narratives of anti-modernity and collective desires of an aestheticized and forgotten past (Howell 2021, 259). The monster is able to reallocate its powers as the sands of the culture that surrounds it shifts. As such, the Vampire communicates these sensibilities, appearing mediatically in "gloom-ridden soundscapes of Goth youth and music cultures" or in the "retro opulence of velvet-swagged vampire bars and cafes" (Howell 2021, 258). If the monster's function is to warn, its body is by definition a channel that transmits information. To embody the milieu of culture is to continuously move along with it. But as such, the monster also becomes a communicative medium, repeatedly relaying the signal of culture as it evolves.
Rumor is mass media, and Noise is the monster's domain. It moves freely and effortlessly through various types of media to adapt to new forms of transmission. In more recent times, a Japanese yokai called Amabie has reappeared in the collective consciousness (Bekirov 2023). Occupying the space of multiplicity, Amabie first began to make Noise in the form of commonly distributed woodblock prints during the late Edo period. In many ways, like rumors, the woodblock print was a kind of viral media, foretelling the yokai's revival as an internet meme in 2020 during the COVID pandemic (Bekirov 2023, 126). In folklore, Amabie is a fish-like creature with ambiguous features resembling parts of a bird (Merli 2022, 11). Emerging from the sea - the Noise, Fama's house - it warns of imminent disease, instructing the town to draw and reproduce its likeness if it so hopes to prevent such a fate from occurring (Furukawa 2020, 531). The monster mediates a common message shared by the masses, it is no different from an omnipresent "word" on the street. Amabie's memetic revival in the public consciousness during the pandemic serves as the communicative means of "a certain cultural moment" (Cohen 1996, 4). Rumor dissolves into the environment. It manifests as gossip on the street or text in the newspaper, but also online in forum threads and viral memes. If the monster's body is a cultural body assembled in the virality of rumors, it becomes the means of that culture's communication by navigating through mass media.
The creation of monsters is contradictory. While the monster signifies something about the overarching zeitgeist of the culture that creates it, its form is always placed outside or alien to normality. Cohen highlights the monster's "ontological liminality," pointing to its "refusal to participate in the classificatory 'order of things'" (Cohen 1996, 6). Monsters are strange, they are feared for their irregularity and transgressive position as the unfamiliar third man. This is to say, monsters are Other, and as such, they are parasitic. But the parasite is not truly external - so is the monster really an outsider? The parasite is unwanted by the host, but it comes from the host itself, meaning it becomes parasitic only when the host "[asserts] the existence of boundaries" (Smith 2021, 184). Similarly, the telephone call is disrupted by Noise, but the Noise is internal and essential to the call itself. The monster disrupts or deviates from social norms, but society's arbitrary creation of those norms is precisely what makes their transgression seem monstrous in the first place. In reality, those differences - those fears, desires, anxieties, and fantasies made bizarre when projected onto the monster already exist internally and essentially within the body of culture itself. They are "rhetorically placed as distant and distinct" (Cohen 1996, 7), but they belong intrinsically to the cultural stock. The monster is internal, but becomes external as it is displaced by society.
Now, neo-liberal urban revitalization engages a similar contradiction. It claims to promote the vitality of the street, but sets up arbitrary boundaries and systems of control that make monsters out of the very things that give the city life. It fails to recognize that the city’s vitality lies in its inherent proclivity for randomness and chance. As Serres would say: "The town makes noise, but the noise makes the town" (Serres 1980, 14). Difference and disorder are internal to the city's milieu. But sonic, visual, spatial, and social complexity become monstrous and parasitic to the Silence mandated by the city. Noise pollution bylaws serve public health and safety but conflate volume with sonic diversity. Graffiti is censored and broken windows are wrongfully accused for rising crime rate. Communities are expelled, and public space is controlled, surveilled, and often times substituted entirely for profit-driven alternatives. The city fears Noise, but what constitutes as Noisy is decided by the city itself. Mladen Dolar points out that the uncanny (unheimlich) is inextricably tied to modernity such that it "constantly haunts it from the inside" (Dolar 1991, 7). He states:
"Ghosts, vampires, monsters, the undead dead, etc., flourish in an era when you might expect them to be dead and buried, without a place. They are something brought about by modernity itself" (Dolar 1991, 7).
Silence is homogeneity and sheer conformity. But paradoxically, its mere existence produces its difference, its Other. Thus, a monster is born in the Noise. Or rather, what should be clear by now is that there was always a monster in the Noise: the monster is the Noise itself. Let us consider Leviathan, the great world eater, the monster of all monsters. The frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes' 1651 publication Leviathan depicts a large body comprised entirely of countless smaller bodies (Hobbes 1651). Leviathan is plural and irrational. This notion is not unique. Serres writes: "It so happens that this collective was given the form of an animal: Leviathan" (Serres 1980, 10). Leviathan is the monstrous figurehead for the Noisy and collective milieu. A mythical sea-serpent, it is unmistakably the monster in the Noise - an amalgam of rumors, or as Cohen would say, "pure culture." Moreover, this monster is innately architectural, "a Babel in flesh and fleece" (Serres 1995, 124) and "an unfinished architectonic surrounded by noise" (Serres 1995, 24). Many stories of monster architectures have been told in the past. Impossible architectures that are neither utopias nor dystopias, but uncertain architectures that speculate on the possible. The CITYEATER is a monster that lurks on the street. A big parasite. An unknowable Leviathan. It is the Noisy and erratic miasma of rumors. The collective milieu of anxieties, desires, fears, and fantasies. The repressed, but ever-looming disorder that inhabits the street.
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