A detailed critical examination of the concept of noise, its
significance in scientific disciplines, and its use and misuse in the
humanities and sonic arts.
In this wide-ranging inquiry, Inigo Wilkins elaborates the theoretical
and practical significance of the concept of noise with regard to
current debates concerning realism, materialism, and rationality.
Drawing on contemporary scientific thinking, Wilkins develops a
multilevel analysis of noise, exploring the associated notions of
randomness and unpredictability across different disciplinary contexts.
Wilkins articulates noise within a functionalist-computationalist
philosophical framework that follows Wilfrid Sellars's inferentialist
account of reason through his commentaries on Hume and Kant. Outlining
the significance of noise to information theory and cybernetics, its
relation to thermodynamics, dynamic systems theory, evolutionary
biology, and complexity theory, and to recent theories in cognitive
science and AI, he goes on to examine how randomness and noise are
pertinent to political economy and contemporary finance. Finally,
Wilkins explores noise in its specifically sonic guise, looking in
particular at the phenomenology of listening and neurophenomenological
models of auditory cognition, and situating the use of noise in
experimental and popular music within a deep historical account of its
evolutionary development.
The central aim of this pioneering critical work is to demystify
noise--to counter the neoliberal politics of self-organizing systems and
the tendency to fetishize indeterminacy in contemporary art--by showing
how constrained randomness is intrinsic to the functional organization
of complex hierarchically nested systems, including higher cognition,
and how the navigation of noise is a necessary condition of reason and
consequently of freedom.
