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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).