Noise interferes—and continues to interfere—with the smooth functioning of sys-tems, be they scientific, musical, or financial. In the cases considered so far the primary focus has been on the informatic: that is, analysis began by considering noise from the perspective of information theory, moving towards specific sonic ex-emplars such as early electronic music or the resonances between open-outcry and high-frequency trading. Here I choose to begin nearer the sounds themselves, and thus move closer to discursivity and vocal enunciations. e informatic is never far, however, as each situation I discuss in this chapter exists because of the influence of computational performing devices on the production of these enunciations.
In this chapter I consider noise from the perspective of parrhesia , a concept appearing in ancient Greek and Roman texts and discussed by Michel Foucault in a set of lectures presented over the last year of his life¹. In short, parrhesia means
¹See Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson, Foreign Agents (Los Angeles: Semio-text(e), 2001) and Michel Foucault, e Courage of the Truth (e Government of Self and Others II):
Lectures at the Collège de France 1983-1984, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
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“free” or “fearless” speech, but as we will see, parrhesia admits more nuance than such a straightforward translation would allow. e conditions whereby parrhesia could take place, the types of people who could be a parrhesiastes (the one who is capable of parrhesia ), and the very types of “speech activities” allowed were all in question throughout the Greco-Roman periods considered by Foucault². e situations considered in this chapter will allow us to pose the question of parrhesia in the early years of the third millennium, and specifically how it might need to be expanded in light of new computational devices and their effect on speech activities.
e noise of parrhesia is due to the interferences these utterances cause in the smooth functioning of their intended discursive systems. While parrhesia was of-ten a sanctioned activity, the words of the parrhesiastes, by definition, would ofof-ten cause a disturbance or a perturbation in the dynamics of the agora, the relationships between the monarch and his advisors, or the relationships amongst individuals.
e dual of parrhesia as a sanctioned activity was the concern that such speech is mere “chatter”, unwanted and unuseful material that impedes the orderly activity of the polis. Yet since these discursive systems are not “closed”—they admit utter-ances not enumerated a priori—preventing parrhesia requires some form of social control, be it the internal regulation of speech in a subject, or the disciplinary re-pression of speech by a state or a monarch. As such, debates about what consti-tutes “good” or “bad” parrhesia can be found through these texts of antiquity. e discussions surrounding acceptable parrhesia can be understood to resemble
simi-2011 [2008]).
²Foucault prefers the phrase “speech activity” to the more common “speech act” of John Searle to make a point regarding differing levels of commitment in parrhesia and normal speech acts. See Foucault,Fearless Speech, 13.
lar debates found in earlier chapters regarding what is or is not acceptable noise, or what potential positive impacts noise might have.
Foucault primarily considers parrhesia from the perspective of speech activities;
that is, embodied vocal situations involving a shared discursive language. Neverthe-less, I believe parrhesia can be extended to other forms of vocal activities: the voices of robotic creatures or non-speech sounds. us, I prefer to use the word “enun-ciation” to consider the whole gamut of situations involving what we might term speech and non-speech. is focus on enunciation draws from the shared concerns of Félix Guattari, specifically his elaboration of collective assemblages of enuncia-tion. For Guattari,
Enunciation is like an orchestra conductor who on occasion accepts a loss of control over the musicians: at certain moments, it is articu-latory pleasure or rhythm, it is an inflated style that begins to play a solo and to impose it upon the others. Let us underscore that if an enunciative lay-out can entail multiple social voices, it also en-gages pre-personal voices susceptible of inducing an aesthetic ecstasy, a mystical effusion, or an ethological panic—such as an agoraphobic syndrome—as well as an ethical imperative.³
us enunciations are more than discursive speech: they are not localized in an in-dividual, but within an assemblage of components that are affectual (“affect is not a massively elementary energy but the deterritorialized matter of enunciation”).⁴
³Félix Guattari, “Ritornellos and Existential Affects,” Discourse 12, no. 2 (1990): 74.
⁴Ibid., 77.
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Moving towards the language of assemblages of enunciation rather than speech and non-speech allows us to consider the dynamical interaction of components that en-able certain types of vocalizations to occur—or to be suppressed. When considered in light of the “ethical imperative”, enunciations can thus become parrhesia as I will outline below.
Considering vocalizations from the perspective of enunciations also enables one to engage with how language in contemporary Western societies is made solid, closed to openings to other nondiscursive, nonsignifying potentialities: “Subjectiv-ity is standardised through a communication which evacuates as much as possi-ble trans-semiotic and amodal enunciative compositions”.⁵ is is not an either/or proposition; conventional language is not to be dropped in favor of grunts or howls.
Rather, it is how to both find a place within contemporary society for such forms of communication as well as reactivating the poetics of common language. Possi-bilities for both exist within new communicative technologies, and thus Guattari’s comments on their potential is applicable to the consideration of computational technologies:
It is certainly worthwhile reconstituting collective means of communi-cation and action appropriate to a historical situation which has rad-ically devalued old ideologies, social practices and traditional politics.
In this respect, we should note that it is entirely possible that the new communication technologies will contribute to a renewal of similar means of elaboration and intervention.⁶
⁵Guattari,Chaosmosis, 104.
⁶Ibid., 120.
Nevertheless, it is not the technologies themselves that create new forms of “com-munication and action”; rather it is through “[n]ew collective assemblages of enunci-ation” that work through “fragmentary ventures, at times risky initiatives, trial and error experiments”.⁷
is leads to the additional wrinkle in the use of parrhesia in the projects I en-gage with in this chapter. Each project requires the use of objects in order for parrhe-sia to take place. ese objects act as unruly doubles of the speaker, or displace the speaker in order to place him or her in a place safe from state control. In order to do this the user of the objects must cede some control over their self-presentation, over the dynamics of their interaction with the public. Yet in nearly all of the examples of parrhesia considered by Foucault objects are absent; the speech occurs “unmedi-ated” between a person and the polis or amongst individuals. To deal with this com-plication, and in light of the potential of computational “communication technolo-gies”, I consider the objects involved in these situations of parrhesia as performing objects to focus on their potential joint agency with their users. e concept of “per-forming objects” was developed by Frank Proschan in the context of the semiotic analysis of puppetry and other forms of object performance in the theatre. Accord-ing to Proschan, performAccord-ing objects are “material images of humans, animals, or spirits that are created, displayed, or manipulated in narrative or dramatic perfor-mance”⁸. Expanding Proschan’s definition, the performance theorist and puppeteer
⁷Guattari,Chaosmosis, 120.
⁸Frank Proschan, “e semiotic study of puppets, masks, and performing objects,” Semiotica 47, nos. 1/4 (1983): 4, emphasis in original. Even though Proschan focuses on iconicity, others he cites do not hold as true to this definition. Proschan draws extensively from the Prague Linguistic Circle, including from Roman Jakobson and Petr Bogatyrev, in their analysis of Russian folk theatre. Jindrich Honzl, another member of the Prague Circle, noted that an actor could potentially be made of a piece of wood: “If the wood moves about and its movements are accompanied by words, then such a piece of
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John Bell notes that “the term performing object has a broader scope and includes techniques of performance not normally labeled puppetry which nonetheless share the same basic approach” with the objects themselves “appear[ing] as one of the tra-ditional forms of puppet theatre, or as a new form of abstract, found-object, or me-chanical theatre”.⁹ us I propose to further expand the definition of performance and performing object beyond that suggested by Bell. e objects below each per-form because of both their programming and their use by individuals. We will dis-cover as well how parrhesia is a form of performance in public. us performing objects, enunciations, and parrhesia come together into new collective assemblages that potentially enable the reconfiguration of psychological and social machines.