From the Mental State of Noise to the New Frontiers of Cognition

from the resistance to change to the catastrophic reaction and the flight into meaning

Few notions are more central than noise to the transformation of modern life. Noise has become synonymous with the complexity of our world and its global digitised information networks, for as the economist Fischer Black put it so adroitly in his seminal paper from 1986, simply entitled “Noise”:

the effects of noise on the world, and on our views of the world, are profound. Noise in the sense of a large number of small events is often a causal factor much more powerful than a small number of large events can be. (529)

Subsumed under the category of noise, in the context of Fischer Black’s paper on models for trading in the financial markets, is a range of uncertainties pertaining to economic forecasting, uncertainties about future tastes and developments in technology in this instance, or about irrational expectations. However, in terms of economic models alone, the profundity of Fischer Black’s insight goes well beyond the mere question of their efficiency. What he raises is a fundamental epistemological principle pertaining to all theory: noise is what afflicts our ability to test theories. We owe Fischer Black this stark truth of epistemological, ethical, and, dare I say, metaphysical consequence: because of noise, we are “forced to act largely in the dark” (529).

Steven Sands and John Ratey’s article of the same year, “The Concept of Noise,” which we are happy to be able to republish here, can cautiously be credited with having first spelled out the cognitive dimension of the predicament to which Fischer Black points as noise. In this article, Sands, then Clinical Instructor in Psychology at Harvard Medical School, and Ratey, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the same institution, propose the “mental state of noise” as a key concept transversal to the nosology or classification of psychiatric illnesses:

“NOISE” is a term we are using to describe a complex and distressing aspect of the bodily and cognitive experience of many very ill psychiatric patients. By “noise,” we mean an internally experienced state of crowding and confusion created by a variety of stimuli, the quantity, intensity and unpredictability of which make it difficult for individuals so afflicted to tolerate and organize their experience. Attempts to do so may only add to confusion and psychotic phenomena. (Sands and Ratey 290)

This article represents a first attempt at a theoretical synthesis of a range of approaches to the cognitive and physiological dimension of the experience of noise. Including, but not limited to sound, noise here alludes, rather, to a cybernetic conception that encompasses input of (sense) data, but also output – in this case a cognitive, behavioural, or physiological response. As also in Fischer Black’s article, Sands and Ratey’s diagnosis of noise indicates it as being the result of a mismatch between our faculties (conceptual, predictive, or physiological), and the unpredictable occurrence events, be they singular and traumatic events or a large cluster of small events.

Two aspects of Sands and Ratey’s argument must retain our attention, by way of an introduction to this special issue. The first is a hypothesis concerning psychotic explanations of sensations and affects. At stake is the pressure to make sense of the world. Referring to Schachter and Festinger, Sands and Ratey highlight that the pressure for relief from the mental state of noise provokes heightened “evaluative needs,” leading to a “defensive searching for a ‘name’ or cognitive label” of the distressing experience and, what concerns us primarily, to the “premature flight into meaning” (292). Provided a crude analogy is, of course, avoided and the specificity of both psychosis and of scientific discourse is respected, we may begin to think of the very emergence of rational thought as being grounded in the pressure to make sense of the contingency of the empirical world. The ever-receding horizon of a perfect applicability of theory to the complexity of empirical reality thus puts the philosopher in a position of necessary alertness to the temptation of just such a flight into meaning. The history of philosophy shows that this can only be parried partially by the ever-renewed commitment to epistemic humility.

The second point concerns our existential need for order and its paradoxical effect: namely that the attempt to restore a sense of order in the face of contingency may only add to the sense of confusion, disorientation, or being overwhelmed. The mental state of noise in fact cannot be explained purely in terms of incoming stimuli but implies the reaction to what is perceived as catastrophic. Leaning on the observations of the German psychiatrist Kurt Goldstein in rehabilitating soldiers returning with psychological and brain trauma from the First World War, commonly referred to as “shellshock” in Britain at the time, Sands and Ratey adopt his concept of the “catastrophic reaction” to designate behaviours aimed at “drawing experience around a smaller focus.” Seemingly opposite behaviours thus share the objective of creating an atmosphere of “sameness.” Impulsiveness, boisterousness, but also excessive orderliness or social withdrawal and even catatonia all serve the need for “sameness” and the “requirement of an already known order” (Sands and Ratey 291). In other words, noise is not merely a matter of a certain conformity of data or stimuli (for instance, variety, unpredictability, intensity). Noise encompasses both the contingency of events and the reaction to it.

Taking care to avoid over-conflating very different constituencies of experience, it is nevertheless relevant to point out the potential socio-political dimension of a reaction that is, at the level of the individual, cognitive, affective, and physiological, involving also the autonomic nervous system that makes our hair stand on end. The latter is also what triggers the involuntary fight or flight reaction first described by Walter Bradford Cannon, to whom we also owe the coinage of the term homeostasis, which is so crucial to cybernetic theory. Homeostasis describes the automatic mechanisms of self-regulation of an internal milieu in the service of steady states, resisting any fluctuations and change, for instance, of body temperature or glucose concentrations.

This is where, it seems to me, Sands and Ratey touch on the essential difficulty of categorising noise. Addressing the predicament of noise cannot be a matter purely of self-regulation if its efficacy lies in the automatic resistance to change. The cybernetic generalisation of the principle of homeostasis to all sorts of systems presents a classic case of the discrepancy between theory and our ability to test it against contingency: for, what is empirically valid for physiological constants, or for a thermostat, does not automatically apply to all aspects and dimensions of a system and even less to the variety of all possible systems. The development of a child, certainly, relies on physiological homeostasis, but it would be null if the child successfully resisted all change; and a society that successfully resists all change would never even reach the Stone Age.

Sands and Ratey quote from the art historian Meyer Schapiro to aid recognition of the patient’s desperate attempt to maintain a sense of order as the very “expression of his defect.” The insistence on imposing a sense of order in the face of the unfamiliar and the contingent is nothing less, in Schapiro’s words, than “an expression of [his] impoverishment with respect to an essentially human trait” (qtd in Sands and Ratey 292). By referring to the art historian, Sands and Ratey effectively cleave the psychiatric problematic of noise open towards its cultural and even civilisational dimension. There is a lesson here also for philosophy, concerning the sometimes-desperate attempt to impose an order designed to resist all change. The Kantian ambition of completing metaphysics as a framework of principles and limitations never to be enlarged and laid down for all posterity, is a case in point.

This broader, cultural perspective gives its full weight to the importance of Goldstein for the conceptualisation of noise. In his 1934 Logic of the Organism, written when Goldstein was forced to give up his position as clinical director of psychiatry in Königsberg and flee Germany, after being arrested and imprisoned for being a Jew: “The instinct for [self-] preservation can appear like an essential trait of the organism, even though in reality, the tendency towards preservation is a phenomenon of disease, of a life ‘in decline’” (Structure de l’organisme 355; emphasis in the original; The Organism). Goldstein is known to have been an important source for Georges Canguilhem, whose significance for an entire generation of French philosophers, including Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Gilbert Simondon, and hence for contemporary critical theory and philosophy cannot be overstated. In his seminal book, The Normal and the Pathological, first published in 1943 and written while active in the resistance to fascism, Canguilhem observes:

just as it has seemed necessary to recognize in health the normative power to question the usual physiological norms by seeking a debate between the living and the milieu – a search that implies a normal acceptance of the risk of illness – so it seems to us that the norm in matters of the human psyche is the reclamation and use of freedom as a power of revision and institution of norms – a reclamation that normally implies the risk of madness. (Canguilhem et al. 133)

Goldstein’s cautionary observation ought to make us vigilant about the cybernetic inflection of the concept of noise, and the extent to which the cybernetic paradigm generalises the concept of homeostasis. In the twenty-first century, the term cybernetics tends to evoke the aesthetic and cultural dimension of cyberspace, of sci-fi, online gaming, if not philosophical speculation rooted in mid-to-late twentieth-century computer science and in due course the invention of the World Wide Web. However, it should not be forgotten that cybernetic theory emerges at the intersection between control theory, biology, and anthropology.¹

The astonishing success of communication technologies and computation has undoubtedly generated a vocabulary that in its turn has acted as midwife to new scientific theories in the search for a language to frame hitherto undisclosed aspects of empirical reality (Morange, “Information”). Concepts like code, program, signal, message, and indeed noise, could thus be seamlessly transposed from computer science and from the mathematical theory of communication to a science of life that could no longer account for life, but only for molecular mechanisms (“Life is no longer questioned in laboratories” according to Francois Jacob (Morange, Life Explained 320)) – as also to a psychiatry increasingly proficient at disclosing the chemistry of the brain, yet increasingly losing faith in the idea of its animating principle, the psukhē [ψυχή].² The rise of molecular biology and the abandonment of the problem of life as a metaphysical rather than a properly scientific question, appears to have provoked what the biologist Stanley Shostak called “The Death of Life” (Morange, Life Explained 24). It is thus not surprising to find, among the cybernetic principles, a quasi-Cartesian and formal analogy (rather than merely metaphorical association) between, for want of a better terminology, manmade and living beings, or between technics and nature. In light of this analogy, living entities and systems of living entities are largely understood, and increasingly treated, as automatic control systems, subject to a reductive analogy with technical objects.

In her contribution to this special issue, which I anticipate becoming a landmark article, Yagmur Denizhan, professor at the Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department and Head of the Graduate Program in Systems and Control Engineering of Bogazici University, Turkey, cautions us to be vigilant of the enduring impact of the cybernetic paradigm on cognitive science and the humanities. This is not only because of the theoretical problems it entails, some of which she addresses, but also and especially because its often-unacknowledged legacy, in the form of methods and policies, plainly has adverse effects on intelligent agents. Indeed, Denizhan’s article directly addresses some problems, notably with regards to the distinction between artificial intelligence and human intelligence. In this paper she develops a truly innovative model of a closed-loop scheme to argue that true intelligence occurs at the limit between the modelled and the unmodelled and that what we call artificial intelligence, in contradistinction, ought to be called “automated optimisation”³ (Denizhan, this issue).

The very distinction between manmade and living beings is of course a matter itself worthy of a special issue, if one includes among the category of the living also ecosystems like forests entirely shaped by and dedicated to the industrial production of wood, genetically modified plants and animals, not to mention synthetic biology. It can be argued that the Homo sapiens that we are, cannot be untangled from the technological development by which our physiology, cognition, and sociality has become what it is and the discussion is worth having whether there still is such a thing as a nature truly untouched by the consequences of human artifice (Bensaude-Vincente and Newman). What is certain, however, is that we are capable of and in the process of destroying much of what we cherish about life and nature, even as we fail to fully grasp what these terms mean in relation to technics. As far as the history of Western philosophy is concerned, the reduction of living systems, nature, and the cosmos to a mechanical logic, can be argued to go back to different proto-mechanistic mental images, as far back – perhaps – as Anaximander, who is credited with first positing such a thing as a principle, and who makes, accordingly, all generation and decay subject to a principle of eternal movement or Democritus’ necessity of the movements of the atoms or even Plato’s Timaeus. If twentieth-century cybernetic analogy between technical objects and living entities started out more modestly, as a heuristic tool to explain the complex on the basis of simpler, better known manmade objects, it has nevertheless become a commonplace (i.e., the brain as a supercomputer). It is likely that the commonplace reduction of living to manmade systems, which implies a crude reduction of living entities to objects solely destined for use, has something to do with the process of environmental and social degradation.

However, the point here is not to reinflate the human with a metaphysical concept of the soul on artificial life support, nor to exaggerate the hiatus between nature and techne, or even between animate and inanimate matter. On the one hand the work of formidable thinkers associated with cybernetic theory must not be conflated with the way in which a scientific paradigm seeps into an air du temps, contributing to commonplace conceptions that have more ideological and scientific content. On the other hand, we must never underestimate what Althusser called the spontaneous ideology of scientists, nor forget (although Althusser would have disagreed) that no statement can be made about being, without employing metaphysical categories like substance, properties, relations, or events – least of all matter. We can do so either consciously and critically or labour away under an implicit, unexamined, and often outdated metaphysics.

The point is what to do with the uncertainty about the precise definition of terms like nature, life, technicity, and even matter, and about their relation and difference? And to spell it out: the problem of noise confronts us with the question of how to dwell on this perplexity, without yielding to the pressure of a flight into meaning.

cybernetics as a melancholy zeitgeist

Cascades of breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, advanced robotics, smart technology, the internet of things, large-scale machine-to-machine communication, gene editing, and synthetic biology have together produced a version of the Cartesian cogito radically expanded beyond the species limitations of human cognition and perception to the level of planetary computation (Bratton). It briefly seemed plausible that the so-called fourth revolution would bring about a redefinition of the human species, a new self-conception as informational organisms, or “inforgs,” as Luciano Floridi argued, “not so dramatically different from clever, engineered artefacts, but sharing with them a global environment that is ultimately made of information, the infosphere” (651). This apparent optimism, inherited from the concurrent prophecies by the Soviet geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky and the Jesuit palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, saw the coming of a “noosphere.” For some inexplicable reason, it had seemed plausible just after the collective trauma of the First World War and during the societal and economic upheavals that followed, that the mind (Gr. Nóos [νοῦς]) and its products would eventually shape the Earth, so as to bring about a becoming-conscious of the Earth. Teilhard had presaged this as the “‘Omega Point’ of maximum complexity and self-transparency,” in analogy to the globe-like energetic system of the biosphere (Saldanha; Tynan).

The recent and ongoing coronavirus pandemic, however, brought to light a novel dimension of ubiquitous communication, that of “infodemics,” making it a social, political, and technical problem of utmost difficulty to draw the line between information and noise. Proliferating against the backdrop of biblical scale natural disasters and linked to the folly of seemingly unstoppable anthropogenic global warming, infodemics have joined the return of religious fundamentalism, the revival of authoritarianism, and the eruption of the extreme right-wing in Western mainstream politics, and the increasingly obvious brutality of liberal capitalism. Rather than an “Omega Point,” the twenty-first century appears like the dawn of a new obscurantism. Man’s place seems no longer to be at the cybernetic helm of the natural order, but at the epicentre of an unfolding disaster.

Rather than an infosphere, it is now pertinent to think about the planetary condition in terms of a form of alienation that the Catalan philosopher and noise artist, Mattin, calls “social dissonance”:

if cognitive dissonance is the uncomfortable tension which results from holding two conflicting thoughts in the mind at the same time, social dissonance is the discrepancy and tension between the narcissistic individualism promoted by capitalism and the extent to which we are socially determined. (Mattin and Brassier 17)

This shadow side of the infosphere, however, is not an unexpected reversal, but has instead always been intrinsic to a cybernetic ideal, whose afterlife pulses through our expectations and fears of the transformation wrought by new technologies. This is because the ideal of self-regulation is built on the core principle of negentropy, in other words, on the negation of entropy: “[The] Organism is opposed to chaos, to disintegration, to death, as message is to noise” (Wiener 95). Many cybernetic texts are buoyant with futuristic idealism of form and order, but behind this updated control theory, we find a barely masked melancholy science of finitude and of ineluctable civilisational decline, drawn against the bleak backdrop of the eventual Heat Death of the Universe.⁴ As Norbert Wiener put it succinctly, “Life is an island here and now in a dying world” (95).

True to the paradigmatic intersection between cybernetics and anthropology, the science needed to account for the human dimension of this planetary condition of disintegration would have to be what the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss had anticipated as the coming “entropology”:

civilization, taken as a whole, can be described as an extraordinarily complex mechanism, which we might be tempted to see as offering an opportunity of survival for the human world, if its function were not to produce what physicists call entropy, that is inertia […] Anthropology could with advantage be changed into “entropology,” as the name of the discipline concerned with the study of the highest manifestations of this process of disintegration.⁵ (Lévi-Strauss 413–14)

Lévi-Strauss’ idea of an entropology takes its cue from a conception of negative entropy introduced in 1943 by Erwin Schrödinger in What Is Life? “What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy. Or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive” (Schrödinger 71), a theory further refined by Léon Brillouin who first coined the term negentropy: “Information = negentropy (negative entropy).”⁶

What had promised to become the age of information and planetary cooperation, thus obeyed a logic of myth that always foresaw the tipping point towards an age of noise, disintegration, and strife, with clear undertones of Empedocles’ cosmology:

For Empedocles says that there is a cosmos which is ruled by evil strife and another, intelligible cosmos ruled by love […] and that in the middle of these distinct principles there is a just reason according to which the things separated by strife are combined and fitted to the one according to love. (Hippolytus, qtd in Empedocles 86)

contributions

We have learnt from Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment that no concept or theory is immune to the power of myths sunk into the collective unconscious and into the epistemic foundations of any given culture. However, the particularity of this special issue is that the problem of noise is posed precisely in terms of a resistance to the flight into meaning. This starts with strategies of resisting the Manichean opposition between information and noise, or noise and logos, including its reversal into what Inigo Wilkins has called the “fetishization of noise.” The papers united here all have in common the acknowledgement that the decisively negative connotation of noise is increasingly giving way to fine-grained scientific and even technological inquiries into the ambiguous nature of noise, understood as potentially deleterious and as potentially generative of functional aspects.

The fact is that noise has progressively ceased, over the past half-century, to be treated only as detrimental but has become central to our understanding of emergent patterns and complex organisation. Not only is the development of fault-tolerant actionable data now unthinkable without a working concept of noise. Every empirical field, from variations in population genetics to financial forecasting, from urban planning to climate change, is tributary to this profound shift in the theorisation of noise, each requiring its own specific and often still outstanding conceptualisation of noise. This is without speaking of a century of musical and artistic reckonings with acoustic noise, and randomness more generally, as an explicit resource for artistic creation.

The transversal relevance of the conceptualisation of noise calls for a wide angle and for a diversity of approaches, aimed for in this special issue and in its analogue, a special “dossier” published contemporaneously in Rue Descartes, Noise: Lessons from an Unhinged Empiricism.⁷ What unites the two special issues is that its authors take the utmost care to stay clear of a simple reversal of the hierarchical logic that has historically dominated the relation between form and formless, order and disorder, organisation and chaos, and indeed between information and noise. Rather, what is at stake is the mutual implication of these terms, their dynamical and sometimes reversible relation, and the normative assumptions that endow its terms with ethical and political significance.

Following on from Steven Sands and John Ratey’s “The Concept of Noise,” is Yagmur Denizhan’s article, “Intelligence as a Border Activity Between the Modelled and the Unmodelled.” In this article she proposes a philosophical and speculative conception of intelligence as a system’s capacity for “ontological expansion” via “internal restructuring.” Guiding readers from the humanities step by step through the basic notions, formalisms, and implicit assumptions of the technological context, she proceeds didactically by progressively dropping some of the assumptions essential to the cybernetic feedback scheme. Denizhan proceeds to develop a novel sophisticated closed-loop scheme, enabling her to demonstrate why natural intelligence is not artificially imitable. Owing to the theoretical problems attached to the cybernetic model of intelligence, she calls for a critique of its negative impact on living agents and proposes the more accurate term of “automated optimisation,” reserving the term “intelligence” for “ontological expansion,” as renegotiation of the border between the modelled and the unmodelled.

Feng Zhu’s article, “The Intelligence of Player Habits and Reflexivity in Magic: The Gathering Arena Limited Draft,” offers a case study examining the “gamer habitus” of players of Magic: The Gathering. Zhu carefully delineates the specificity of a particular form of reflexivity, which he defines as an “attentional style of delayed and shifting categorization.” The gamers’ “style” or “disposition” thereby emerges as an object of knowledge, a knowledge that can rework itself according to a dynamic and recursive reflexivity in response to the changing metagame. He defines this reflexivity as a dynamic, recursive process indicative of a form of intelligence that is able to reconsider what was previously excluded as noise. However, Zhu also expands this reflexivity outwards to the distributed ensemble of techniques, things, relations, the game’s “habit assemblage,” which the individual player instantiates in a practice-based synthesis. Dynamically shaped by the assemblage’s evolution, rather than codified, this reflexive synthesis, he argues, is characterised by the flexibility of a delayed and shifting categorisation.

In “Looking Through the Algorithmic Unconscious: Antimediation and Noise,” Luca Possati offers a critical rejoinder to the postphenomenological theory of mediation, by developing a novel understanding of noise as “antimediation.” Carefully considering reactions of users and the subsequent commercial failure of the first version of Google Glass, Possati explores the non-acceptance of technological innovations from the psychoanalytic perspective as a form of “antimediation.” Possati thereby elucidates a complementary, but entirely different aspect of the way technology is said to mediate our perception, cognition, and interaction with the world. Thus characterised, the failed incorporation of a novel technology, Possati argues, corresponds to a process of “antimediation,” which can inform a concept of noise related to a concept of “technological uncanny,” defined by Ciano Aydin as “an alterity within that cannot be simply explained in terms of something external that challenges or influences our internal convictions, preferences, values or goals” (206).

In “Noisiness, the Stuff of Thought,” Sha Xin Wei addresses what Bernard Stiegler considered “the evolution of the living by other means than life,” leading Stiegler to coin the neologism “epiphylogenesis” (Stiegler et al.). Stiegler’s term encompasses the ulterior sedimentation, accumulation, and memorisation of our species’ experience by technical means, thereby extending its epigenetic evolution beyond the strictly biological into the technical. The other concept Sha foregrounds is that of the “transindividual relation,” a concept by which Gilbert Simondon designated a collective individuation, based on the individuals’ prior (physical, biological, psycho-social individuation) and, crucially, on what remains indeterminate in each individual (Individuation; On the Mode). Sha articulates these two concepts with reference to pattern recognition, 4E experience (embodied, enactive, embedded, and extended), and art. This leads him to distinguish “non-schematisable” noise from the prevalent conception of noise or randomness as a function of theory and measure. The consideration of how thought develops “epiphylogenetically” in the presence of indeterminacy leads Sha to point out the constitutive role of noise in the complexification and enrichment of developmental ontologies and, conversely, the limits of algorithmic technology.

J. Augustus Bacigalupi’s paper, “Creativity: Transcending the Cybernetic Mode via the Virtuality of Relevant Noise,” complements Xin Wei’s approach by developing a category of “relevant noise” and relating it to Gilbert Simondon’s concept of “disparation.” For Simondon, “information is never relative to a single and homogeneous reality,” it is, rather, “the signification that will emerge when an operation of individuation discovers the dimension according to which two disparate reals can become a system” (Individuation 11; emphasis in the original). Bacigalupi puts Simondon’s concept to work in relation to the category of relevant noise, by critically comparing the adaptive creativity of living systems with current efforts to automate creativity according to the cybernetic schema. For this purpose, Bacigalupi develops a heuristic model for unbounded creativity, against which to assess and weigh the ethical implications of both biological models of adaptive and creative behaviours, such as the Kuramoto model (Strogatz), and the contemporary cybernetic outlook.

Catherine Malabou’s article, “The Mental State of Noise: Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia or Should we Stop the Brain’s Noise?,” offers a comparative reading of Sacks’ and Merleau-Ponty’s writings on synaesthesia. While acknowledging the pathological aspects of synaesthesia, as detailed by Oliver Sacks, she nevertheless puts the phenomenon on a spectrum alongside what, according to Merleau-Ponty, constitutes a normal, low-level phenomenological hum resulting from the contiguity of the senses, whereby “all senses secretly communicate,” and which Merleau-Ponty associates with poetic creation. Malabou thereby places the conceptualisation of synaesthesia as a form of mental noise on a tightrope between the accident and the condition of possibility of creativity.

In “Pierced Eardrums: Liminal Noise in Post-Semiotic French Thought,” Patrick ffrench offers a magisterial reading of French philosophers dealing, during the 1970s, with the liminal spaces and dynamic relations between sense, sound, and noise, in the wake of the impact of semiotics. In a luminous cross section of texts by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jean-François Lyotard and Roland Barthes, ffrench analyses the relations between articulated sound and noise, language and sound, the formed and the unformed, the coded and the non-coded, sound and music, sound and silence, and other formulations of acoustic liminality. Referring to the “mental state of noise” as elaborated by Steven Sands and John Ratey and to An Epistemology of Noise (Malaspina and Brassier), he brings to light the extent to which an implicit conception of noise can be said to be operative across this material.

Sonia de Jager’s contribution, “Semantic Noise and Conceptual Stagnation in Natural Language Processing” refers to Semantic Noise (Shannon and Weaver), in order to problematise the variability of semantic denotation and function of words according to context. De Jager’s article looks in particular at the challenge that Winograd schemas pose to natural language processing (NLP) in terms of the interpretation of ambiguous – i.e., semantically noisy – cases. A frequently cited example is “The trophy would not fit in the brown suitcase because it was too big,” whereby “it” may refer to the suitcase or the trophy. De Jager raises the problem of pronoun disambiguation as a significant issue with respect to the presentation of NLP task resolutions as neutral. She points out the apparent lack of interest to speculate beyond extant models, as blindsiding the problem of modelling the generative effect semantic noise and, consequently, as posing unacknowledged conceptual, aesthetic, and political problems for NLP. Semantic noise, the author argues, calls for a broader multidisciplinary alliance to engage with an ambiguity that is dialogical and open-ended, problematic but also generative in nature.⁸

Naomi Waltham-Smith’s “Noise Strike: Wakeful Listening at the Limits of Liberal Cognition” critiques the long-standing opposition between noise and logos. Drawing on the work of Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Lauren Berlant, Fred Moten, Jacques Derrida, and Catherine Malabou, she foregrounds the figure of the “noise strike.” Noisy protest, rebellion, and riot become the prism through which noise can be understood as disconcerting liberal hegemonic norms of ordering society and of the inequalities they produce. Quoting Lauren Berlant, Waltham-Smith puts the spotlight on the “inconvenience” of noise, which she rearticulates as “the noise of world-absorption when the world offers inadequate object streams to take in and on” (Berlant 10). This leads Waltham-Smith to situate the transformative potential associated with noise in the differential that inserts itself, as a form of inconvenience, in non-relational forms of sovereignty. By foregrounding the figure of the noise “strike” – rather than, say, a rumbling or murmuring disquiet – she insists on its startling potential to “awaken” citizens to these injustices and efforts to suppress them.

In “Topos of Noise,” Inigo Wilkins situates the growing significance of the concept of noise in the context of new developments in mathematics, computing, and cognitive science, ranging from topology and topos theory, to interactive computing and univalent foundations, and predictive processing and cognitive morphodynamics. His philosophical objective, far from a mere cataloguing of recent techno-scientific developments, is to point towards the problem of a “transcendental-empirical torsion” of image schemata and of the social interactive elaboration of freedom.

The special issue concludes with Yuk Hui’s meditation on a speculative axiology of noise. In “Sketch of an Axiology of Contingency,” Hui plays on an epigraph from the Gospel of St John, by replacing “word” with “contingency,” resulting in the following détournement:

In the beginning was Contingency,

and Contingency was with God,

and Contingency was God.

In this paper he situates a number of conceptualisations of contingency from the history of philosophy in relation to the Romanian-born Greek-French avant-garde composer and engineer Iannis Xenakis and the Romani-Belgian jazz guitarist and composer Django Reinhardt. The Hegelian inflection of his word play opens up a speculative philosophical perspective on contingency as fundamentally related to the very heart of philosophy, placing the conceptualisations of noise at the very heart of the philosophical engine of conceptualisation, according to the logic of axiology of contingency.

Framing the issue is Rosa Menkman’s iconographic contribution, “The Shredded Hologram Rose.” Inspired by Fragments of a Hologram Rose, a 1977 science fiction short story by William Gibson, this 3D narrative work by Rosa Menkman explores the violent stories of standardisation embedded in 3D composite objects.

Notes

1 For the sake of disambiguation, control theory is an interdisciplinary branch of engineering and mathematics that deals with dynamical systems, like a swinging pendulum or population growth, and whose founding principles date as far as the control of irrigation systems in Mesopotamia. Ancient Greek navigation contributes the name, cybernetics, derived from the helmsman (Gr. kubernetes, κυβϵρνήτης). Control theory is thus not intrinsically concerned with the control of human beings, nor intrinsically inclined towards the totalitarian exercise of power. The fact that one can lead to the other, that extrapolations from a systems theory like cybernetics to human systems like politics, mass communication, or business management, can open up totalitarian prospects, notably in relation to the development of new technologies, must therefore be treated cautiously. To suspect an intrinsic affinity between control theory and a sinister biopolitics of implicitly totalitarian control would imply having to exclude the knowledge of dynamical systems and the benefits of its implementation, for example, in relation to climate science or food security, from any prospect of political self-determination, democratic or otherwise. This, however, does not exclude a critique of the de facto historical interrelation between cybernetics, warcraft, and biopolitics as an aspect of the unconscious ideology of scientists, as Althusser might say, or, as Denizhan has recently argued, as the consequence of a political ideology that favours some developments of science and technology over others.

2 “If there is one central intellectual reality at the end of the twentieth century, it is that […] treating mental illness as a genetically influenced disorder of brain chemistry – has been a smashing success” (Shorter).

3 The term “automated optimisation” emerged during a discussion after Denizhan’s presentation at the seminar series The Mental State of Noise & the New Frontiers of Cognition, involving in particular Victoria Alexander, Josh Bacigalupi, and Suzan Uskudarli. The seminar was organised in 2021–22 by myself on behalf of the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris, and in partnership with Patrick ffrench at the Department of French and Mark Coté at the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. The other contributors and respondents to the seminar included Mercedes Bunz, Benjamin Dalton, Patrick ffrench, Yuk Hui, Catherine Malabou, Monique David-Ménard, Daniel Nemenyi, Luca Possati, John Ratey, Inigo Wilkins, Feng Zhu, and myself, as well as a sadly cancelled session that would have included Mark Coté and Murad Khan. (Recordings are due to be made available on https://www.youtube.com/@aestheticsofnoise9562.)

4 In light of recent publications on the idea of entropy in the humanities, it is worth pointing out that the idea of the Big Chill or Heat Death of the Universe (which dates back to the eighteenth-century French astronomer Jean Sylvain Bailly and to Lord Kelvin’s thermodynamic formulation in the mid-nineteenth century). This view has been thrown into doubt since the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, notably in light of the argument highly relevant to the conceptualisation of noise, that “there is no universally accepted notion of entropy for systems out of equilibrium, even when in a stationary state” (Gallavotti 290).

5 I was made aware of Levi-Strauss’ neologism “entropology” by Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, during his a talk in Benjamin Bratton’s programme, Antikythera, at the Berggruen Institute, Los Angeles, on 31 January 2023. Cf. Geoghegan.

6

An isolated system contains negentropy if it reveals a possibility for doing mechanical or electrical work. If the system is not at a uniform temperature T, but consists of different parts at different temperatures, it contains a certain amount of negentropy. This negentropy can be used to obtain some mechanical work done by the system, or it can be simply dissipated and lost by thermal conduction. A difference in pressure between different parts of the system is another case of negentropy. A difference of electrical potential represents another example. A tank of compressed gas in a room at atmospheric pressure, a vacuum tank in a similar room, a charged battery, any device that can produce high-grade energy (mechanical work) or be degraded by some irreversible process (thermal conduction, electrical resistivity, friction, viscosity) is a source of negentropy. (Brillouin 1153)

Fischer Black’s problem of applicability of theory to the complexity of the empirical world, which we had seen in relation to homeostasis, thus serves as a caution in relation to the overzealous generalisation of this negentropic principle: the concept of negentropy relies on the idea of a closed system, but not all systems are closed systems; moreover, it is generally acknowledged that closed systems exist in absolute terms only as theoretical models. They cannot be replicated in empirical reality and if they could, we would not be able to observe them.

7 Articles include J.-P. Caron, “Strategies for Architecture: Noise Praxes and Structures of Determination / Stratégies pour l’architecture: pratiques bruitistes et structures de détermination”; Matthieu Saladin, “Noise Pareidolia / Paréidolie noise”; Reynaldo Young, “An Education in Noise / Une éducation dans le bruit”; Cécile Malaspina, “Contemporary Hecuba: On Transcendental Noise / Hécube contemporaine: à propos d’un bruit transcendental”; Mattin, interviewed by Cécile Malaspina, “It is Easier to Imagine the End of the World than an Alternative to the Liberal Individual / Il est plus facile d’imaginer la fin du monde qu’une alternative à l’individu liberal”; a review of Social Dissonance, by Antoine Chessex; “TR 34; ISTANBUL,” photographic series by Maria Sewcz and text by Cécile Malaspina; and in the Epistemology section annexed to this special “dossier”: “On the Role of Uncertainty in the Information Economy / Du rôle de l’incertitude dans l’économie de l’information” by Anna Longo. http://www.ruedescartes.org.

8 For the purpose of this introduction I asked ChatGPT, “can you invent a funny example of a Winograd schema?” The answer was:

Sure, here’s a funny Winograd schema: “The computer programmer decided to go on vacation in the mountains, but he didn’t have the proper hiking gear. So he packed his laptop instead, in case he needed to code some mountain-climbing algorithms.”

The ChatGPT answer is indeed funny, incidentally, because of the misattribution of gendered pronoun “he” rather than “it” to a laptop, pointing to a failure to find a funny example of the Winograd schema. I further probed the ChatGPT to find a verse of a famous poem exemplifying the ambiguity of a Winograd schema. It was interesting to see this mesmerisingly eloquent program produce a confused set of responses, clearly unable to handle this specific difficulty adequately.