Postmodern Culture

Swiss, Thomas, 1952-
Music and noise: marketing hypertexts
Postmodern Culture - Volume 7, Number 1, September 1996

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Thomas Swiss - Review Essay: Music and Noise: Marketing Hypertexts (Review of: Eastgate Systems, Inc) - Postmodern Culture 7:1 Music and Noise: Marketing Hypertexts Thomas Swiss ©1996 PMC 7.1 Eastgate Systems, Inc. Given that musical references are common in the critical literature about hypertext, I begin with Jacques Attali, whose criticism poses a challenge not only for music and musicians but for other artists as well, including writers working in hypertextual mediums. Considering sound as a cultural phenomenon, Attali argues that relations of power are located on the shifting boundary between "music" and "noise." Music is a code that defines the ordering of positions of power and difference that are located in the aural landscape of sound; noise, on the other hand, because it falls outside of a dominant musical code, transgresses this ordering of difference. For Attali, then, music is tamed noise. By many accounts, hypertextual witing aspires to the condition of noise, not music. It means to jam the normal literary frequencies, create a disruption, some useful static. Said in a rawer, more openly political way, it "overthrows" "all kinds of hierarchies of status and power"; it is "radical," "revolutionary"--or so the best-known arguments go. But how radical is hypertextual writing in our current Age of the Web? How committed is any of it, to borrow Attali's terms, to producing an appreciation of noise (as opposed to music) that transgresses the...