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Noise, Sound, Silence
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.