Noise That Stays Noise: Essays

Noise That Stays Noise

Noise That Stays Noise It really comes back to posing the question: How to speak of that for which we do not yet have an adequate language? —Henri Atlan Noise—a subjective category if there ever was one—is something most of us tr y to avoid, but in the stricter definition of info mation science, it’ s an essential, per haps even distinguishing, element of an ar tistic text. The experience of confusion or of nonunderstanding that for many people frequently accompanies the first reading of a poem is often a product of such nois working in concer t with the infor mation also contained in the text. The degree of nonunderstanding in a given piece changes from reader to reader and is often slight; the novel feeling it occasions is par t of the pleasure of reading poetr y and is the source of the simultaneous suspension and surprise that seems to bypass the cognitive faculties. In mild cases, the reader doesn’ t notice the noise as such; however, at other times it is sufficient t impede the reader’s full appreciation, at which point he or she often chooses to reread the piece, often many more times. During those rereadings, some of the noise is or ganized into information —perhaps factual, emotional, or for mal—that augments the initial appreciation of the piece. This process, which, borrowing a term from the biological sciences, I’m going to refer to as self-organization from noise, is par ticularly important in considering much recent American poetr y, which often contains a lot of what many would consider noise. Yuri Lotman described textual noise as the “remainder after complete translation,” which interestingly recalls Frost’ s comment that “poetr y is what’ s left after translation” and points to poeticity itself, in other words, the nonsemantic linguistic ef fects, 3 as constituting noise. The statement also underscores the notion of a “remainder” as an impor tant element of poetr y. Such an approach demands that we consider a literar y text solely as an act of communication, as a completely quantifiable messag passing through a channel from a sender to a receiver. Though this may strike some as cold, on the contrar y, I think it is just such an approach that can elucidate the ways in which literature differs from mechanistic models of communication and can, unlike them, augment the quantifiable with i reducible qualities of human sensation and emotion. The concept of “noise” in this sense can be traced back to the Macy conferences on cybernetics, which were held in New York in the late 1940s and early ’50s. These ideas were fur ther developed and used in communication studies by Heinz V on Foerster at the University of Illinois in the early ’60s. Since then, they have been increasingly applied to the theor y of infor mation, which was developed by Claude Shannon in the 1940s. In his work, Shannon chose to look at infor mation not qualitatively , but quantitatively; from this perspective he developed the probabilistic equations that form the basis of mathematical information theory. The main goal of that theor y has little in common with literature: it is simply to reduce the number of signals needed to transmit a given quantity of infor mation and to insure its minimal alteration in transmission. Information theory has numerous commercial applications, from improving phone lines to increasing the accuracy of electronic exchanges, and is concer ned not with the meaning of messages, but with their constr uction and transmission. Someone working on such projects or applications is always working against noise. Noise is most simply defined as any signal, inter ruption, or disturbance in the channel of communication that alters the quantity or quality of transmitted information. It does not necessarily have anything to do with sound; it is called noise because the phenomenon first su faced in relation to radio transmissions, in which audible disturbances such as static posed the greatest problems. However , in a text, various idiosyncrasies from typographical er rors to intentional ambiguities can also be considered noise if they too alter (or augment) the imparted information. 4 Information, in tur n, can be defined in te ms of the resolution of uncer tainty. Taking the simplest possible case, if a receiver is waiting for a yes or no answer to a posed question, the receipt of one piece of information out of...