Noise poetics: A flow of cuts

Abstract

The motivation of this research is to explore the potential and (dis)functionality of noise in experimental language practice. In this, my task has been to expand on more highly developed noise-discourses, such as music and philosophy, and their corollaries to language – but also to seek an original conception of what noise can, and does, produce in an experimental language context; along with the political, philosophical and artistic implications arising from it. Following Charles Bernstein’s affirmation that ‘one might be able to read novels or letters or scientific treatises in terms of their poetic qualities’ (Bernstein, 1992, p. 151), I seek the implication of poetics in the works of major theorists and philosophers who inform ideas of noise, including Julia Kristeva, Fredrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze and Roland Barthes. In tune with the nature of the subject, I have chosen to make some radical gestures within the formal submission, infesting the text itself with cross-references, strike-throughs, syntactic and layout glitches, which add a kind of visual and cognitive noise to the reading. The resulting thesis is an example and an interrogation of practice-as-research, making use of the tension between its formal qualities, and a non-linear imperative. Findings include a rich network arising from integral terminology, such as ambiguity, glitch and abundance which are explored for their relational productivity as part of a complex milieu around noise and poetics. In my live performance and print work, as with the thesis itself, I seek to affirm that these notions can be deployed in an affecting and original poetic – producing an active and performative document which enacts a fission of dichotomies, particularly, the flow of cuts invoked in the title.