Noise, Crossed Signals, and Media Infrastructure

            Noise. A pejorative term for sound a human perceives to be disorganized, unimportant, or useless. Larkin uses the term noise to denote the aesthetic of pirated media as well as the "corruption" of media infrastructure, or its use for purposes beyond the original intent of the engineers. Larkin develops these concepts of noise in creative ways, citing the chapter "Asia in Miniature: Signification, Noise, and Cosmopolitan Style" from James Ferguson's Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt as a source for his ideas.

            In Ferguson's chapter, noise does not signify sound itself, but sound as a metaphor for the clouding of cultural texts. Semiotic interpretation of cultures, he writes, takes for granted consistent systems of shared meaning. But "cities are noisy" (Ferguson 209), with many languages, cultures, and "social microworlds," creating discordance and miscommunication. Ferguson suggests that noise, unintelligibility, and misunderstanding are crucial components of societies, with their own social logic. Ferguson argues "for an analytic of noise, for a mode of analysis that would take seriously both the fact that signifying actors might have social reasons not to establish a bond of communication but to rupture it, and the way that stylistic messages take on a social significance­—whether they are 'understood' or not—through a social process of construal of the partially unintelligible" (Ferguson 210). Defined in this way, the analytic of noise can easily be applied to infrastructure when, as Larkin describes, its originally intended use and meaning are ruptured.

            Larkin returns noise to its more literal meaning before crafting his own extended theory. At first he discusses noise as distortion of copied pirated material:

 Piracy imposes particular conditions on recording, transmitting, and retrieving data. Constant copying erodes data storage, degrading image and sound, overwhelming the signal of media content with the noise produced by the means of reproduction. Pirate videos are marked by blurred images and distorted sound, creating a material screen that filters audiences’ engagement with media technologies and the new senses of time, speed, space, and contemporaneity. In this way, piracy creates an aesthetic, a set of formal qualities that generate a particular sensorial experience of media marked by poor transmission, interference, and noise (Larkin 218-219).

Later in the chapter Larkin describes musicians deliberately destroying loudspeakers to achieve the distorted sound they find aesthetically pleasing (Larkin 237). The distortion, fuzziness, and interference make these media sources seem more real, more material, he argues.
            But Larkin extends his argument further into a theory of noise as disruption of infrastructure. Piracy itself, as a restructuring of technological infrastructure, can be considered noise. In piracy infrastructure is re-appropriated for unforeseen and unintended use. "All regimes of capital depend on infrastructure" (Larkin 219), he writes, yet "much work on the transformative effects of media takes for granted a media system that is smoothly efficient rather than acknowledging the reality of infrastructural connections that are frequently messy, discontinuous, and poor" (Larkin 220). Piracy, for Larkin, involves a "corruption" of media infrastructure, fuzziness and noise disrupting the original intent of the engineers. This corruption uncouples Nigeria from the official worldwide economy and integrates it into an unofficial world economy. I find the idea of noise as lost connection intriguing, but the creative use of media infrastructure is not a Ferguson-esque lack of understanding, but a highly developed and organized alternative infrastructure. If a system of infrastructure does not feed into official modes of movement of capital, and yet manages to function in a highly organized and efficient manner, is it still noise?

Click here to access the Ferguson chapter

Ferguson, James. Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, c1999 1999.