I guess I want to say thanks for having me and it's really great to be involved in one of the few events on speculative aesthetics that seem to have been held up to this day. It's a really impossible area of theory. It's like the impossible task I think for realism is thinking something that traditionally has been bound to the human. But we're all here nevertheless and that's really cool. So I'm going to finish off in a similarly hyperstitional vein, also talking about an alien insider before we got to lunch. This paper is called Noise and Ontology, the Avant-Garde, a cybernetic critique of an omnist representation.
When he first cites the unknown mountain range from the window of an aircraft with his scientific team in tow, Geologist and academic William Dyer, the protagonist of H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, is intensely troubled by the vision that confronts him. Like his counterpart, Professor Lake, before him, Dyer struggles to determine the images of Verity. Lake attributes the queer effects to the pre-Cambrian slate, upheaved strata, and volcanic quality of the highest peaks. But Dyer is not so sure. But this particular image, in which he discerns a, quote, seething labyrinth housed in the ranger's uppermost slopes,
has a menacingly novel and obscure quality about it, giving the effect, Dyer recounts, of a cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or human imagination. Of course, the professor is relieved when the image finally breaks up, dissolved by the shifting mists that screen the mountains, confirmation of its illusory status. But this relief does not last for long. As is the case for many an unfortunate Lovecraftian protagonist, Dyer's scientific zeal compels him to return. only this time he traverses the peaks and discovers that the distorted image he originally perceived has an origin that is irrevocably real and disturbingly human.
This is a long quote and an excuse to just read you a bunch of Lovecraft. This is Dyer's account. The effect of the monstrous sight was indescribable. for some fiendish violation of no natural law seems certain at the outset. Here, on a hellishly ancient table land fully 20,000 feet high, and in a climate deadly to habitation since a pre-human age, they're stretched nearly to the vision's limit. A tangle of orderly stone, which only the desperation of mental self-defence could possibly attribute to any but a conscious and artificial cause. We'd previously dismissed, so far as serious thought was concerned, any theory that the
cubes and ramparts of the mountainsides were other than natural in origin. How could they be otherwise? Yet now the sway of reason seemed irrefutably shaken, for this cyclopean maze of squared, curved and angled blocks had features which cut off all comfortable refuge. It was very clearly the blasphemous city of the mirage in stark, objective and ineluctable reality. That damnable portent had had a material basis after all. There had been some horizontal stratum of ice dust in the upper air, and this shocking stone survival had projected its image across the mountains according to the simple laws of reflection. Of course, the phantom had been twisted and exaggerated,
and it contained things which the real source did not contain. Yet now, as we saw that real source, we thought it even more hideous and menacing than its distant image. So this is a slide from Lovecraft's notes at the Mountains of Madness that includes right at the very top, above his sketch of an old one, a diagram of this particular image. at the very top it says layer of cloud and you can see the mountains and then the sketch of the alien city just behind the mountains and I'm showing you this because I think it's really great how this particular idea, this narrative device
seems to have a material basis of its own being informed by the shape of the top of the envelope so as Dyer approaches and finally crosses the mountains of madness straying over the threshold that encircles quote that mysterious father realm upon which no human eye had ever gazed his relationship to the image of the alien city and the verity he accords it shift dramatically what he first instinctively took to be real is demoted to the status of an illusion a revelation that is followed by his discovery of its real source a discovery that in turn restates the illusion as a problem of reflection and an epiphenomenal imprint of a very real thing, but a noisy, distorted one.
If one were to diagram this in the cybernetic key, following the models of classic communications theory, the following configuration would emerge. Here, the real city acts as a transmitter. The ice dust, mist, and most importantly, the Antarctic light, constitute interference to the transmitted signal, and Professor Dyer occupies the position of the receiver. The clear signal is scrambled as it passes over the mountains, but Dyer is at least first content to call the distorted image he receives real, as well as being an illustration of cybernetic noise. This image schematizes the basic cognitive operation of enlightenment subjectivity, an operation
inhibited synthesis, to put it in the vernacular of Nick Land, who goes on to clarify this notion in one of his early essays on Kant, where he writes, modernity lives in a profound and uneasy relation to an outside that both attracts and repels it, a relation that it precariously resolves within itself from a position of unilateral mastery. The paradox of enlightenment then is an attempt to fix a stable relation with what is radically other, since insofar as the other is rigidly positioned within a relation, it is no longer fully other. If, before encountering otherness, we already know what its relation to us will be, we have obliterated it in advance. This aggressive logical absurdity, the absurdity of logic itself, reaches its zenith in the
philosophy of Kant, whose basic problem was to find an account for the possibility of what he termed a priori synthetic knowledge, which is knowledge that is both given in advance by ourselves and yet adds to what we know. So modern subjectivity, forged in the cool climes of Kantian critique and enlightenment rationality, represents the object by passing it through the subject. It is in this way that Kant first sets in place the epistemological limit that would outlaw in a physics, that is, by installing a representational one. Put another way, for the modern subject, freshly stripped of all metaphysical guarantees, the world cannot appear without the presupposition of a self.
Human subjectivities, of course, may vary wildly, but the objectivity of their experience, as pointed up by Land, is assured by virtue of a universally attributed a priori purification of all that is inputted into cognition. For Kant specifically, this signal from the outside is cleaned up by the pure forms of intuition and the 12 categories which obtain in all human creatures. Kant explicitly notes that his deduction does not hold for the non-humans necessarily, thus underwriting the homogeneity and the intelligibility of the world as it is for us. This constitutes the nub of what Kant would call transcendental conditioning. We no longer discover the order of phenomenal nature and make it. Modernity's unprecedented capacity to breathe the individual arises from and feeds back into the constitution of objective reality and the truth of being by means of intersubjectivity.
The proper functioning of our significative regimes is unimaginable without this intersubjectively constituted objectivity. Regardless of whether we subscribe to a properly Kantian theory of cognition or not, it's important to recognize that Kant's badly named Copernican Revolution continues to determine the configuration of our subject-object relationships and thus our understanding of representation right up until the end of the 20th century, surreptitiously informing, in turn, standardizations of aesthetic representation. For it is there, in the early decades of the 1900s, that one sees the real maturation of this state of affairs, which places its denizens in a queer situation of utter dependence on representation.
The cumulative effect of 200 years of human reflection confirms that the real will always already be represented and that the material is always already conditioned by the ideal. There is no such thing as matter in itself. Well, originary moments of presentation and production are impossible for the moderns. Everything is mediated. Their world, our world, is one of representation and reproduction, right down to the ground, which here is irrevocably anthropomorphic, the human mind. So as Lann will tell us, almost 15 years before a single theorist uttered the word correlationism, The ontological condition of the moderns comes down to the following fundamental premise.
The outside must always pass by way of the inside. To this I will append the claim that the inside is a condition known in cybernetic theory as noise. What Kant sees as a clarifying process, land sees as a process of interference. The difference is a simple matter of positioning. In French, the word parasite has several meanings. It refers, as it does in English, to an organism that subsists by feeding off a host in a non-reciprocal relation, it means static interference or noise, and it denotes a point that is beside
another more integral one, beside the site. Michel Serre, in his book of the same name, The Parasite, uses these various meanings to frame a logic that is anything but absurd in the sense intended by land above. Rather, in a flagrant wholesale rejection of a priori thought structures, Serre's elaboration of his logic takes the form of a series of interrupted meals. Each meal is a message transmitted to a receiver, an act of consumption, digestion and signification. However, more often than not, the receiver is deprived of the message by means of an uninvited guest, a parasite who parasites or eats next to the host, effectively interrupting the transmission only to be interrupted in
their interruption, which is a message being transmitted in its own right by another message or guest. It suits Sayre's purposes that the words for guest and host are identical in French, auto. The message here, although Sayre makes sure it doesn't come through clearly, is that there is always an alternative position from which a guest may suddenly appear as a host, a message as a parasite, signification as noise. Borrowing Sayre's method of using cybernetics as a means of articulating complex relations between elements that are both internal and external to a system, we can diagram Kantian cognition from both the position of a human subject and the position of a non-human object.
The advantage of transcribing a philosophical description of consciousness into a cybernetic register is that it allows us to move from a transcendent structure to an imminent one and once within the latter to move from one observer position to another. Hence cybernetics affords us a vantage point from which to examine our own experience from the position of both the human and the non-human, effectively returning to the decent at Copernican viewpoint so cheekily co-opted by Kantian philosophy. Looking from the inside out, the transcendental conditioning of experience establishes clarity by admitting certain contents of an unknowable site of primary production. Yet from the outside in, the transcendental conditioning of experience is itself a degenerative
noise that degrades the clarity of its external input, rendering it unintelligible and ultimately inaccessible to internal modes of apprehension. What for the observer as subject is clarity, for the observer as object is noise. As Nicholas Luhmann once remarked, reality is what one does not perceive when one perceives it. Or to collapse the first critique into a single aphorism using another Luhmann quote, the world is observable because it is unobservable. As the signal passes through the human, by virtue of this processing which ultimately renders it intelligible to the human, it becomes distorted. Signification then rests on a fundamental interruption and defamation.
Here the objectivity of intersubjective experience is reconceivable as interference in a primary signal that originates beyond the human in the inexperienceable and unknowable world of things and themselves. So if enlightenment subjectivity is constituted in this jamming of a signal from the outside, can we, by negating human noise, reconstruct the vision of the source? In At the Mountains of Madness, as it is elsewhere, the perpetual Lovecraftian lesson is, of course, that the conditions upon which our Our Enlightenment subjectivity, figured in the hapless man of science or the academic or the legislator, is founded and by which it is maintained constitute a fundamental
repression of something else, which, as is always the case in Lovecraft's prose, inevitably returns to invade the human from a point outside of it, usually from below. I want to suggest that we take the Lovecraftian lesson here just as seriously as we take our Enlightenment genealogy and interrogate human representations of self and world from the far side of the mountains of madness in order to cultivate a properly inhuman notion of representation with which to reconsider certain moments of 20th century aesthetic production. This widening of perspective to a point beyond the human afforded by thinking cybernetically, or perhaps one could even say by machining thought, brings
with it new tools for the critique of critique, and thereby the critique of representation in art and poetics, insofar as aesthetic representation is the representation of a representation that we can now grasp as a noisy one. Such a positioning is, of course, a form of philosophical speculation, better, a xenotheoretical act, one commensurate with the inversion Sir performs in his story of the rat's meal. At the door of the room, the rats heard a noise. What happened? The master is there. He disrupts the rat's feast. Why? He was sleeping soundly after a good meal of all the terms, a heavy dish.
suddenly he awakens he has heard a noise uneasy and anxious he gets up and bit by bit opens the door no one the rats have left a dream he goes back to bed who then made the noise the rats of course with their little paws and the gnashing of their teeth all that wakes him up the noise then was called for by noise at door of the room. He, the master, heard a noise. In the beginning, it is the noise of the master that interrupts the meal of the rats. But Serre then inverts the configuration by moving to the
position of the human, and now it becomes evident that the source of the noise is in fact the rat's meal, although the master is left with nothing to confirm his speculation, and concludes, like Dyer, that it was only a dream. Perhaps if he had cultivated his insomnia a little longer and sat up in the dark without a light on, for it is light that turns the real into an illusion, he might have discovered the source. Because the rats always come back. In fact, they've never left. Just as Sir conceives of the post-human as something that does not simply succeed the human, but precedes and subtensit to the rats wait in the ground perpetually ready to quote climb onto the rug when the guests are not looking when the lights are out when the party is
over the transmission itself begins in noise but this noise is different from the noise of the human subject it is a rat noise a noise from underground a a noise that is post, pre and sub all at once. Land would write in spirit and teeth that the rat has a hideous talent for decomposing interiorities, that it is a sheer intensity, a potential for disaster, whose destructiveness is almost unlimited, and that, much in keeping with the thinking of Sare, there is no such thing as a single rat unit, for as far as differentiation can occur within the rat swarm it is only quote differentiation within an unlimitable series an a logical dissimilarity an
indiscriminate proliferation of non-identity this concludes land is the logic of the rat now said differentiates the parasite producer of the message the one who is quote always attentive to the game of the things themselves from the parasite reproducer who, quote, plays the position or the location, which is to say that the one who positions themselves, sorry, the parasite reproducer is the one that positions themselves at the relation rather than at the object. These latter lack the complexity and generative potential that Serre suggests with the trope of fire. Those at the relation are the cold ones, or those at the object, the producers, are hot. Their operation is one of deliquescence,
dissolution, meltdown, the pursuit of a heat death in which the verticality of transcendence slips forwards or backwards into the news of horizontal imminence. Those of fire without location burn madly, so strongly that around them objects change as if in a furnace or near a forge. They are not the masters they can be slaves but they are the beginnings they are the noise of the world the sounds of birth and of transformations here is the primary noise the noise that produces the site of Genesis or primary production an uninhibited primary synthesis to put it in more Kantian terms from which the a
priori synthesis that can't attributes to the human mind is itself drawn land And, in Ser, both theorize the productive element of being as a pre-individuated, generative excess that precedes the mental processing which, under the direction of enlightenment, rationality filters from it all that is inefficacious or problematic for the consolidation of the category known as the human, serving up experience as a single, anthropocentrically calibrated, signifying channel. Thus, we have two parasites, two noises. One that is an endlessly proliferating, generative, disorganized, and unstable multiplicity, and one that interrupts and interferes with this multiplicity by constraining,
and in doing so maintains coherence in the reproduction of the conditions of its own possibility. One noise that is hot, that races, disperses, and transforms, and one that is cold, a noise composed of structured rigidity and immobile formalism. one noise that is devoid of relation that is immediate, that is the sight and the one that mediates is parasite is born of a relation the parasite that parasites the parasite for each the other constitutes an interruption on the other side of the mountains of madness the tunnel to the centre of the earth has its entrance Professor Dyer and his assistant
plumb the subterranean rat holes looking for evidence of the authors of the alien city what they find is futurism there was something vaguely but deeply unhuman in all the contours dimensions, proportions, decorations and constructional nuances of the blasphemously archaic stonework the reliefs involved a peculiar treatment of perspective but had an artistic force that moved us profoundly, notwithstanding the intervening gulf of vast geologic periods. It is useless to try to compare this art with any represented now museums. Those who see the photographs will probably find its closest analogue in certain grotesque conceptions of the most daring future.
As one approaches the heat at the centre of the earth, Pre collapses into post and sub intensifies. At the nadir of their descent, the scientific language with which Dyer controls his narration gives way entirely, and it's only through the negative that his retelling is able to continue. Meanwhile, his assistant could only chant the names of the stations of the Boston-Cambridge subway line, portentous in their accelerating rhythm. South Station under, Washington under, Park Street under, Kendall, Central, Harvard, an analogy that's not lost on diet. The legislative power of the a priori is waning, and this something else, the Lovecraftian alternative to the professorial regime of sense, swerves abruptly into human experience.
It was the utter objective embodiment of the fantasy novelist's thing that should not be, and its nearest comprehensible analogue is a vast onrushing subway train as one sees it from a station platform, the great black front looming colossally out of infinite subterraneous distance, constellated with strangely coloured lights and filling the prodigious burrow as as a piston fills a cylinder. It is an acephalous alien thing, a, quote, nightmare plastic column of fetid black iridescence, a 15-foot sinus, formless protoplasm, pure noise, the precondition of life, and gathering unholy speed.
It is also modernity. But more profoundly, it is a certain element of modernity that, despite its ostensible development from it, comes back to Enlightenment rationality, to the human, from a position outside of it with the tremendous force of an interruption. This noisy drive to rupture and to race, to deform and disrupt, to collapse all boundaries between art and life, between life and machine, between the reproduction of reproduction and the reproduction of production as a gesture towards the ultimate collapse between reproduction and production itself belongs, I contend, to the inhuman will, to quote D. H. Lawrence, of the modernist avant-garde, an envoy from the
future, definitionally out of time. A figuration of the non-relation, then, between human and world can only be posited within the aesthetic as an eruption of this primary noise into the secondary noise of human representation. Thus F.T. Marinetti, Kurt Schwitters and Sybil and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, for the most part reluctant guests at a banquet held in the name of the German press association, the epitome of legislative a priori conditioning, demonstrate the doctrine of uninhibited synthesis. that entropy is generative.
Schvitas is on the point of getting himself arrested after insulting the official from the folk culture organisation who is seated beside him at the table and following the account of Sibu Moholi Nagy shoots a desperate glance at his fellow artists for aid. But before he can incite anyone to action, Marinetti has risen from his chair, swaying considerably. His face purple. Moholy Nage continues the account. My friends, Marinetti said in French, after the many excellent speeches tonight, the silent officials winced, I feel the urge to recite my poem,
the raid on Adrian Ope. Noah's polite applause, Some nice poetry would break the embarrassing dullness of the dinner. Adriano pleure, et ce n'est de toute pas. Paaaaaa! roared Marinetti. Wap, wap, wap! Départ des trans-souci-de! Wap, wap, wap! The audience gasped. A few rushed giggles were audible. Tchip tchip tchip tchip tchip tchip! FLEZ! He grabbed a wine glass and smashed it to the floor.
Tchip tchip tchip tchip! Des messages telegraphiques, couturiers, americanes! TAPI! Tum, tum, patrouille, tapis! Marinetti threw himself over the table. Vanity, viande, congelée, veilleuse to love and hold. almost as a whisper from his lips. Slowly he slid to the floor, his clenched fingers
pulling the tablecloth down with. Wine, food, plates and silverware pouring into the laps of the notables. Thus the poet descends along the vertical to assume a formless horizontality under the table, commensurate with the noise from which the avant-garde emerges, taking order with him and reinstating, amidst the clamor of errant cutlery, the profound unreasonableness of an entropic regime, one that dissolves the borders between tabletop and pleated pants, sauce, bernese and boutonniere, riesling, ramekin and wristwatch. That which would legislate artistic production will be shown a thing or two.