The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common by Lingis Alphonso

Author:Lingis, Alphonso
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press

THE BACKGROUND NOISE

If the neosocratic communication theory of Michel Serres has not understood—has not wanted to understand—the noise internal to communication: the pulse and the wobble, the opacity of the timber and density of the voice, the noise of life, the noise each of us is in his or her particularity; it has also not understood—has not wanted to understand—the background noise in the midst of which we speak.

Advances in soundproofing technologies and digital recording promise the complete elimination of background noise. Sensory-deprivation tanks were first invented in the ’60s by John C. Lilly who was working with dolphins and, like every diver, loved the silence and the bliss of deep-sea diving and thought to duplicate it on land. But the technology that eliminates the noise also eliminates the communication. In the absence of auditory, visual, and tactual background signals, one no longer senses the boundaries between outside and inside, past and present, perception and images, and one soon hallucinates. If the reception of a determinate signal is impossible beyond a certain level of background noise, the intention to emit a determinate signal becomes unrealizable without a certain level of ambient drone to escalate, punctuate, and redirect. Recorded white noise—forest murmurs, the rumble of the city—was added to space capsules; the recordings are sold to terrestrials living in soundproofed apartments.

We understand that background noise is essential to communication when we understand that reception in the communication system of our bodies is not the passive exposing of a preprogrammed surface of sensibility to outside stimuli, but picking a signal out of the multiplicity of irrelevant and conflicting signals. Where the receptor organ can receive a wide variety of signals, perception is the active power to focus in on, isolate, segregate, shape a figure, and reduce the rest to indifferentiation. If, each time we look, we see a figure standing out against the adjacent objects, this is not due to the physical stimulation that is being spread across our retinas; it must be due to an active power in our gaze. Since communication is, for the receiver, actively separating a figure from the background, then in the absence of the background there can be no figure either. If one looks into a closed, elliptically shaped box painted black and uniformly illuminated with white light, one cannot see the black and cannot see the surfaces at all; all one sees is a luminous gray density. But if one then sticks a white strip of paper on the wall of that box, suddenly the light becomes transparent and the hue of the medium recedes and condenses into black on the walls of the box. When the psychologist seats a subject in a room such that he sees only the homogeneous surface of a broad wall uniformly illuminated, the subject cannot see how far it is from him, cannot see any surface at all, sees only a medium in depth about him, and cannot say what color it is. John Cage once emerged from a soundproof room to declare that there was no such state as silence.

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