Callings and Market Stalls

d[9.1]b

I wanted the present to be an ideal library. Infinity, plenum, chaos, dust. I wanted it to be an agora – total availability of the entire thick history of linguistic conviviality and the potential to be completely lost in the strangeness of the civic description.

Duration's artefacts are indiscriminate: the present is disquiet. In the city, law will not be separated out from food; clocks will turn against medlars; irises will be in with lamps. Thus the difficulty.

The present is the encompassing element; in the city more so. I’ll define city as a peopled-through sensing. Sometimes I think that the entire history of perceiving is encoded in a city. It's encoded in noise, in shelter, in cloth, in the baths, in stray animals. Noise gives the listener duration as an artefact.

What I am calling noise is the multiply-layered sonic indeterminacy that is the average, fluctuating milieu of dailiness. Here noise does not necessarily pertain to amplitude and intensity, although it might. Using the word ‘noise’ I want to obliquely approach the irregular and constant fabric of sounding that fluctuates through any given and situated present. Noise is and is not composed; the listener can isolate within its environment individual sounds of various origins, identifiable or not, but no intention or unity structures their overall combination even though that combination has been conditioned by various natural and social factors. Noise is the unwilled surplus produced by the temporal indetermination of conditions and practices in co-movement. Noise has an inchoate shape as weather does – we may measure it, but its movements extend beyond any identifiable cause. Noise exceeds its own identity. It is the extreme of difference. Noise is the non-knowledge of meaning, the by-product of economies.