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Networks and the philosophy of noise

Kai Eriksson

University of Helsinki , Helsinki, Finland

Published online: 28 Aug 2008.

To cite this article: Kai Eriksson (2008) Networks and the philosophy of noise, Culture and
Organization, 14:3, 279-292, DOI: 10.1080/14759550802270700
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Culture and Organization

Vol. 14, No. 3, September 2008, 279292

Networks and the philosophy of noise

Kai Eriksson*
University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
(Received 13 February 2006; final version received 16 February 2007)

Taylor and Francis

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Culture
10.1080/14759550802270700
1475-9551
Original
Taylor
302008
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keriksso@mappi.helsinki.fi
KaiEriksson
00000September
&and
Article
Francis
(print)/1477-2760
Organization
2008
(online)

Although in communication the message replaces noise, noise is an integral part of the
message itself. The post-war period is one of an intensified attempt to think of
communication and noise together, so that the latter does not appear only as the source
of disorder but also as the material part of communication. Noise is thus absolutely
necessary for communication. On the other hand, in order to make a shared meaning
possible, a remarkable part of this noise has to be excluded. Furthermore, communication
has to be given a form in order to be distinguished from noise. Yet communication itself
cannot be given any single form, for it escapes all formalizations. This movement of
sharing and excluding, form-giving and fleeing from organization, is what determines the
field of communication. This article investigates the ways in which this movement has
found expression in the writings of Serres, Girard, Latour and Callon.
Keywords: noise; communication; ontology; networks; Callon; Girard; Latour; Serres

Noise has become an undisputed reference point in the thinking of communication, understood as a constitutive part of social and organizational life. Noise is not, however, merely
a technical term of communication engineering. It refers more to what has to be excluded
from communication in order to allow a common meaning to be produced. Whereas for
Frederick Taylor what had to be excluded represented laziness, inefficiency and unnecessary movements, for Claude Shannon it meant distortion in the reception of a signal and for
Norbert Wiener disintegration, entropy.
In what follows, I will examine some of the mutual relationships between communication and noise as these are seen in social thought today. I will do this in the light of two
recent views, both located within a broad field we can call science and technology studies.
I refer to writings by Bruno Latour and Michel Callon under whose influence this research
tradition has largely been reorganized, particularly through concepts of translation and
actor network (e.g. Callon 1980, 1986; Callon et al. 1986; Latour 2005). Yet, in the
following, I will examine Latours idea of circulating reference, after which I will move
to Callons views on the conditions of the organization of markets. These are fairly dissimilar formulations but they come from the same theoretical terrain. Through a new object of
research, both theoreticians again remobilize and open up concepts they have coined previously, while articulating at the same time interesting perspectives that place noise and
communication in the same frame. To start though, I briefly review the conception of noise
in post-war thought so as to introduce Michel Serress views on communication, since these
have been strong influences on both Latour and Callon.

*Email: kai.eriksson@helsinki.fi
ISSN 1475-9551 print/ISSN 1477-2760 online
2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14759550802270700
http://www.informaworld.com

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Communication and noise

Practices and mechanisms, which constantly renew the boundary between communication
and non-communication, facilitate a consistent experience of a given communicative
totality (society, organization). They provide the organization that experience requires, as
well as continually maintain this unity by recurrent demarcation. Usually, this demarcation
and boundary-drawing has been characterized by an insistent presupposition of a closure
a closed interiority. In this sense, the modern history of communication (beginning with
the emergence of electric communication on the mid-nineteenth century) has been defined
by an attempt to distinguish what is essential and necessary from what is incidental and
insignificant. This is also why organization, understood as a closed structure, has been a
predominant figure in modern administrative and political orthodoxy.
The tradition presented here is not the most dominant one, especially if seen from the
communication studies perspective. Instead of taking communication or organization as a
communicative whole as a starting point, this tradition poses it as a problem and rather
focuses on what communication has to eliminate or exclude in order to succeed (see, e.g.
Chang 1996; Peters 1999). Yet, what is at stake here is not just communication as such.
Rather, what is crucial is the fact that administrative boundaries have both multiplied and
became fuzzier with the rise of networks. For example, the demarcation lines both within
public agencies and between those agencies and the broader environment have become
more ambiguous than ever. At the same time, networks have provided a framework for
understanding the growing connections between varied organizations. For the administrative and organizational orthodoxy of the twentieth century, the fuzzy boundaries proved a
significant problem. This is because organization, at least in the modern period, has basically been about a search for coordination: thus it requires fixing responsibilities and drawing boundaries. This experience of fuzzy boundaries is at the root of what motivates the turn
toward what can be termed the philosophy of noise.
In this regard, the period beginning from the latter half of the 1940s is crucial. After the
Second World War, the accidental, unimportant and inconsistent what has to be excluded
in order to bring about an agreement began to be considered more and more in terms of
noise. This was particularly so in the research on self-regulating systems and information
theory. These disciplines defined a new technical paradigm for decades to come, a paradigm
that influenced the way in which the experience of the social domain also came to be
conceptualized. Norbert Wiener, one of the leading figures of this paradigm, conceived
communication as a kind of game played by communicative parties (whether humans or
machines) against noise.1 This is to say, noise represented a danger that constantly threatened to submerge communication (see Hayles 1999, 103): once unleashed, noise meant the
inevitable death of communication. Therefore, communicative parties have to form an alliance against noise. In fact, communication must already entail such an alliance, since
communication is possible only when noise has successfully been dampened, albeit temporarily. Also, for Claude Shannon, the idea was that such an alliance, as a kind of technical
contract, had already been built into the system of communication (Shannon and Weaver
1949).
Michel Serres subsequently elaborated Wieners idea about communication as a game
or a contract in which noise as the third party is excluded by common decision, thus creating
a space for a dialog to be formed (Serres 1982, 667). It was this contract that needed to be
formalized. So the pursuit of a common code, form, or method, has characterized the
modern history of communication. This protected meaningful communication from misunderstanding and interference. It was precisely the shared code that set the boundaries of

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communication by excluding the multiplicity that endlessly threatened to submerge it. Here
the common form was protected at the expense of individual and idiosyncratic. The mechanism of exclusion eliminates all that could not be shared. In other words, the irrational
part of communication: noise. Thus the form of communication was set as primary and
noise as the source of its interference. Yet communication cannot dispense with noise,
because the latter constitutes the empirical part of it (Serres 1982, 6570). Communication
can only come into being via a movement expressed through what can be termed as noise
(e.g. ambiguous writing styles, regional accents, technical interruptions and so on) with
regard to an ideal form, while simultaneously attempting to distinguish itself from this
noise. This is why noise is absolutely necessary for the possibility of communication.
While being the absolute precondition of communication, noise is also the place in
which multiplicity is given its expression.For Serres, the archaic French word noise refers
to a pure multiplicity, a founding disunion. Noise designates an indefinable area, in which
things are indistinguishable. This area never comes itself to the sphere of communication,
although it is the precondition for all communication. It is therefore nothing that could be
jettisoned for the sake of achieving a common ground, since it is rather the incommunicable
origin of all communication. What is incommunicable exposes communication to breakdowns and disruptions in other words to difference and strife but without these, communication would not exist. Communication is about becoming exposed to what cannot be
shared, to what can never become common to all, and which therefore continuously threatens to swamp it. This is why successful communication necessarily implies the exclusion of
noise. But because noise is part of communication itself, the operation of exclusion both
takes place in communication and is directed against it. In fact, it is in this very event that
communication becomes communication: that message is separated from noise. To be
successful, communication has to find a balance between noise and a common form.
Although noise cannot be removed entirely, the relation between multiplicity and unity
can be optimized in view of the functionality of communication. This requires an inherent,
immanent method of communication, the task of which is to maintain the mentioned
balance. The establishment of such a method, however, implies the formalization of
communication. Serres has pointed out that formalization or mathematization is a process
through which one moves from noise to consensus, from contention to agreement, or from
politics to technology. It is therefore the optimal eliminating of noise, not its total obliteration. Yet it dissolves the connection to its historical origin, since from the point of view of
a common form (e.g. science as a generic form) its individual origin is not meaningful
(Serres 1982, 69). Naturally, communication or a common form can only exist empirically
and is indistinguishable from the practices, techniques or systems in which it receives its
expression. Nevertheless, communication cannot be reduced to the empirical but presupposes something common, something that exceeds its individual appearances. Moreover, it
is not possible to recognize what is common without excluding the very empirical material
in which it is based.
A common decision to exclude the empirical does not here involve a deliberate determination, since communication as such is a precondition for individual determinations. Rather
the question is about something which is already revealed in the possibility of communication. Communication is always a risky business, but if successful, then it implies that noise
has at least temporarily been overcome.
If noise has traditionally represented the individual and empirical element of communication which is its indispensable part but which, at the same time, always threatens to
submerge all meaningful communication, then in contemporary thought what is attempted
to be brought out is precisely the empirical in communication. This inclusion of the

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empirical already dates back to the pre-Second World War period, yet it intensified only
after the war. Thus, for instance, Carlo Ginzburg has traced the history of the research
tradition which, by focusing on the apparently meaningless details and belittled, marginal
characteristics, was able to reveal something fundamental of its object. As he notes, for
Freud these were symptoms; for Sherlock Holmes clues; and for Giovanni Morelli strokes
of the brush (Morelli developed a new method for attributing authors to old paintings)
(Ginzburg 1992). A knowledge based on individual, empirical and local constituents has a
long history which Serres, in his idea concerning the formalization of communication,
seems to overlook. What is at issue is not only about the possibility of a specific type of
knowledge, but rather about the simultaneous thinking about both the general and the individual. In what follows, I will examine the way Latour and Callon have considered the
inseparable mutual connection between the general (what is common) and the individual
(what is specific).
Latour and circulating reference
Latour has argued about the traditional division between subject and object throughout
his work (e.g. Latour 1993, 1999, 2004, 2005). He has introduced the term circulating
reference which rearranges the juxtaposition between subject and object into a series of
reference structures that are, in principle, reducible to each other (Latour 1999). Thus, in
between subject and object, or between words and things, there is no longer a yawning gap
but rather a series of interlinked relationships and transformations. Following Latours own
case study, the question as to whether the forest is advancing to or retreating from the savannah in the Amazons Boa Vista, is progressively separated from its material basis during the
course of the research and is eventually converted into a linguistic representation, that is, a
scientific publication (Latour 1999). At the same time the particular becomes general, the
concrete abstract. In this process, what is lost in the real, in other words in the empirical
multiplicity, is gained in the conceptualization of the problem, its universalization, as it
were. What earlier has been soil in a difficult to reach part of the Amazon has turned into an
easily accessible text through a set of numerous interconnected transformations. Moreover,
there is no longer any gap or break between the soil and the text dealing with it, as the
tradition is inclined to see it or at least this is what Latour is claiming. The soil does not
change into a text by one sudden leap, but instead by a whole series of interconnected instruments, methods, and measurement and classification systems, step by step. Latour shows
that there is an unbroken series of interrelated elements between words and things and that
it is possible, in principle, to follow this series in whichever direction, since the referent
(soil) circulates in this continuous series through a set of transformations. This is why
Latour calls it a circulating reference.
The idea of circulating reference is an excellent example of the process of formalization
brought up by Serres. In it, one proceeds from the particular to what is common by excluding what cannot be shared by all. By moving from the concrete towards the general through
a number of different levels of abstraction, in other words by eliminating the empirical,
science as the common form that everyone can share becomes possible (Serres 1982, 69).
Latour makes explicit the mechanism through which this takes place. What is noticeable is
that although this mechanism excludes noise and thus lays the ground for communication,
noise is not rejected absolutely. On the contrary, abstraction is possible only if the referential relationship with noise, the original multiplicity, remains unbroken.
Yet as suggested above, the reflections on noise have also resonance for thinking about
fuzzy boundaries in the light of networks. In this regard, the circulating reference seems to

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bring out something fundamental about this issue from the standpoint of the thought that
considers communication and noise together. Latour has developed many other concepts,
used in different contexts, aiming at the same objective, but the circulating reference is
regarded here as the general term bridging the supposed gap between subject and object
or communication and noise. It shows, on the one hand, that the question about correspondence between language and the world is not pertinent, because there is no gap between
them but rather a consecutiveness of successive levels of transformation. On the other hand,
the idea about communication and its conditions as two distinct dimensions or planes is
equally misleading. Instead the circulating reference directs ones attention to their mutual
constitution.
Communication and electrical networks have, since the advent of telecommunication,
provided numerous metaphors, images and concepts which have helped the experience
about what is going on be conceived through a consistent conceptual form. Therefore it is
not surprising that also Latour, when describing the idea of circulating reference, rests
precisely on the metaphor of an electrical network. According to him, the word reference
designates the totality of a series of transformations: truth-value circulates [in it] like electricity through a wire, so long as this circuit is not interrupted (Latour 1999, 69; emphasis
in original).
This has also some relevance for political thought. In this thought the counterpart to
noise is precisely multiplicity or polyphony. This is because noise as the precondition of
communication is at the same time the place in which multiplicity receives its expression as
differences, discrepancies and contentions. The juxtaposition between polyphony and
unison is characteristic to the modern political history of communication. Now the metaphor
of an electrical network helps to transgress this juxtaposition and lay a foundation for thinking about the oppositional positions within a single whole.
In which way does the metaphor of electrical network organize Latours thought about
the political? The political opens up for him as something network-like which the concept
of circulating reference designates and integrates. Here the term circulating reference should
be conceived of in the light of its neighbour concept, the actor network. At issue is the
wholeness which gathers together both human (for instance, classification systems and
scientific papers, that is, words) and non-human (soils and microbes, that is, things). What
is crucial is that the term sets the connection between these as continuous and unbroken:
things flow into words through a network of transformations, and by following this development words can, again in principle, be traced back to things.
Latour is, of course, not alone with his idea about a network. In so far as politics is
understood not only as procedures, institutions, decisions and ordinances but instead as a
question of what gathers all these into a meaningful whole in a given era, it seems that the
idea of a network has become an intrinsic horizon for politics. The concept network is not
only an analytical tool for thinking about complex interrelations, but also and above all, a
general frame constitutive of our experience of society. Therefore the concept of network
should not be considered in light of representation as a question of correspondence or
the truth. Neither is its secret to be revealed by examining the attempts to ever more exact
definitions by some special disciplines. A network should be thought about precisely from
an ontological viewpoint: it is not just one conceptual vehicle among others to conceiving
what already is, but the concept rather enables and opens up something that would not exist
without it. Thus the idea of a network constitutes an ultimate horizon through which the
experience of society is constantly reproduced. This is the point of view that Latour also
exploits. Hence his term circulating reference does not only work as an epistemological
bridge between words and things but also as a mediator between communication and noise.

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In other words, it not only manifests the way language and the world are mutually articulated and constituted but also the way communication assumes its shape with regard to the
system of its own real conditions.
The question of the political is placed for Latour, above all, as a question of how democracy and science can be thought together. Again the concept of network (as circulating reference) constitutes a framework through which this becomes feasible. What is at stake, in
other words, is bringing together political multiplicity (differences, conflicts) and concert
(consensus, agreement). Or to put it another way, all that is polyphonic but ineffective with
all that is functional but restricts expression. At issue is, then, the demarcation between the
empirical (the realm of singularities) and the general (a common form). Traditionally, as is
known, these have had the tendency to invalidate each other. Once polyphonic democracy
has been endorsed, the result has often been indecisiveness and inefficiency which any
community cannot afford in the long run. On the other hand, when the community has
gained the ground for self-rule in the form of something common or shared, the disturbing
multiplicity has, at least temporarily, to be excluded. In this case, the closure prevents all
that is new from entering the political community, which it nevertheless would need in order
to function.
If one follows the tradition and thinks that what determines the political is above all the
possibility for disagreement and inversely, that all acts which restrict this possibility are
by definition anti-political then circulating reference appears as a kind of mechanism linking politics to the political.2 The term can be conceived here as an uninterrupted chain of
references, institutions and disciplines, in which any given link can be justified by invoking
either the preceding multiplicity of actions and interests or the succeeding linguistic
articulation which is, however, nothing other than a source of possible discrepant interpretations. Latour can be perfectly viewed in connection to a history which attempts to think
communication and noise together as not seperate but rather closely intertwined concepts
as the idea of circulating reference brings dissension and unison as both ends of one single
consecutiveness.
Let me move on to examine Michel Callons view on the social nature of the laws of
markets. Although his argument is closely connected to Latours writings, it can, at the same
time, be seen as a new theoretical formulation concerning the simultaneous articulation of
communication and noise, especially in the context of markets.
Callon and the laws of the markets
Callon has traced the prerequisites that enable market coordination, in other words, the functioning of market institution. According to him, these always imply the ability to anticipate
the possible consequences of actions. In so far as calculativeness an ability to anticipate
the consequences of actions in uncertain circumstances is the precondition of markets, as
Callon thinks, then the calculative actors are originally connected to other similar actors. In
short, the ability to calculate emerges from the connections opened up within the network
(Callon 1998a, 1012). Thus the network does not gather together pre-existing individual
actors but it rather makes them possible as calculative agents in the first place.
As Callon notes, the network is not an institutional context of action, a context which
would provide a place for action while remaining itself unchanging. Both an actor and a
network are mutually constituted in an endless circle. Callon presents the situation so that
either one enters the network through actors, in which case actors are thought about through
the structure of their interrelationships, or the network is thought about in itself, when the
interrelationships between the actors that constitute it are used to describe the network

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(Callon 1998a, 89). The problem is that by starting either from one (the idea of the totality
of the network) or from many (network actors), in neither case can one think about the inbetween, which is exactly what characterizes the network (see Nancy 2000, 34). Callon, for
his part, has tried, together with Latour, to transcend the opposition between actor
and network by their own notion of actor-network. In it, both the actor and the network to
which it belongs mutually constitute each other so that either is primary with regard to the
other.
The elementary unit of the network is, according to Callon, a triangular relationship.
Whereas Serres examined the triad through communication, Callon does it from the viewpoint of an economic transaction. This structure provides him with the simplest example of
the mechanism of the markets. Here, social relationships are reduced to a transaction
performed between seller and buyer while all other possible relations are temporarily
removed. In order for this exchange to be fully comprehensible, the analysis would require
a third member, says Callon. This resembles Serress model in which intelligible communication necessitates an excluded third party. Instead of Serres though, Callon refers to Ronald
Burt (1993) who investigates precisely the position and strategies of this third party with
regard to a given bilateral relationship. What is intended to be brought about in this kind of
analysis is the social setting within which a relationship takes place and without which it
would remain incomprehensible. The third party is considered to refer to the whole social
dimension in which the bilateral relationship is forged. On the other hand, Callon stresses,
the action of this third party is not intelligible if the given relationship between the two is
not taken into account (Callon 1998a, 10). Basically, at issue here is a field of interdependencies, similar to what Callon has previously thought about through the concept of actornetwork.
Although the third party appears for Serres as the precondition for understanding the
given relationship and thus the field of calculativeness emerging from the network of similar
relationships which must therefore be included in the triangular game, the idea of calculativeness also implies the requirement to exclude the third party. If the markets require calculativeness, this comes from what Callon calls framing. According to him, a clear boundary
must be drawn between the relations which the agents will take into account and those which
they will leave out of the calculations (Callon 1998a, 16). Frame is an area within which
rational, anticipative action becomes possible. The formation of a sphere of calculativeness
demands calculative techniques which provide means for comparing different relations,
processes and things and which, thus, open up a functional space of anticipation. Yet the
techniques are not all alike, but differ in their intensity: the more efficient they are the more
relations and agents they are able to take into account (Callon 1998a, 45).
The idea of demarcation or the necessity of a boundary line links Callons theory
about the laws of the markets closely with the modern history of communication. In this
history, it has traditionally been necessary to draw a line between communication and noncommunication, system and its environment, or inside and outside. The mechanism of
exclusion has, in its variable forms, characterized the idea of communication and communicability, but once we came into the 1980s, it seems to have been forced to give way to the
metaphor of network. Now the demarcation between inside and outside has become essentially more complex than in the era of relatively consistent hierarchical structures. But as for
Castells elsewhere (1996), it is also important for Callon to retain this distinction in a time
characterized by the evaporation of differences.
This brings us back to Serress view on the exclusion of the third term as the precondition of communication. If Callon suggested earlier that the third member of communication
has to be included in order for the communicative relation to become comprehensible, the

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idea of framing which Callon borrows from Goffman brings the theme of boundarysetting and exclusion to the foreground again. The term implies that the communicating
parties are framed, as it were, in such a calculative space in which some relations and
phenomena become possible objects for calculation. In other words, some entities are
activated as relevant as regards to the markets, whereas some others are not. Within a
frame, agents, practices and things become distinguishable and get a place of their own in a
calculative space in which their respective positions and relationships can be defined
with sufficient accuracy. This is the prerequisite for anticipation and therefore for the
functioning of the markets. The frame performs here as the exclusion mechanism: if
communication for Serres presupposes the exclusion of the third, for Callon the markets
require clear demarcation as regard those things and relations to be left outside the calculations. In fact, whereas for Serres successful communication practically demonstrates that
the third party has actually been excluded, for Callon the functioning of the markets implies
that a distinction between economically relevant and irrelevant phenomena has already been
made.
The limits of the markets
What, then, is the outside of the area of calculativity for Callon, what does it contain? He
illustrates this by the term externality which refers to all that are not taken into account in
the calculations but which, however, have economical effects. These can be, for instance,
fumes emitted by a factory or polluted soil. What Callon wants to point out is that these
kinds of externalities, escaping the confines of a given frame, always exist and that their
coming into existence is unavoidable in principle.
Externality designates the boundary between what is inside and what is outside.
Outside is not, however, a social context for economic processes. Rather it is a result of
some phenomena having been framed as relevant and of others as irrelevant with regard to
a given system of calculation. Thus the exterior of the markets results from the same operation through which the markets themselves were defined in the first place (Barry and Slater
2002a, 182). Interiority and exteriority are instituted in the course of framing and reframing
over and over again, as new areas and objects enter the sphere of calculativeness and the
existing systems of calculations come under inevitable renegotiations.
Callon states that politics in general remains outside the economic system of calculation. This strengthens the anti-political characteristic of this system. In so far as calculations
make it possible to determine the interrelationships between objects and agencies in a way
capable of reaching an agreement, this would curb political contention and negotiation.
Framing implies an intention to identify any potential disagreement and ambiguousness
threatening the unity of the system, and after this, to remove them through mutually
accepted procedures aiming at objectivity and stability. The frame always poses an interiority within which action can take place as somewhat independent of its environment
although it, of course, also remains to be connected by a multitude of threads to the outside
world (Callon 1998b, 2489). It both presupposes and produces a common terrain in which
agencies can recognize one another and anticipate the outcomes of action. On the other
hand, the systems of calculation engender, in the course of their own functioning, new
objects and phenomena, thus bringing political strife back to the system. As the system
loses the area of agreement, in other words the area within which the parties can agree on a
definition of the current state of affairs, it also becomes more inefficient. If an agreement
cannot be reached concerning the definition of the situation, incessant dispute gives rise to
inefficiency: the system overflows.

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Callon reflects on the impossibility to include all relations into the same total frame by
means of the concept of overflowing (Callon 1998a, 18). This concept implies not only that
all frames can overflow but also that frames actually produce this very overflowing. This is
because by determining the interrelations between agencies and the objects of action, frames
create new contacts and thus also new points of leakage. Establishing the sphere
of calculativity inevitably opens up new non-calculable relationships (Callon 1998a, 38).
Since calculability always requires a frame, it cannot take into account all possible relationships. Drawing boundaries always generates possibilities of new relations, leading to spaces
of ambiguity and even direct contentions which, for their part, require again some new
boundaries to be drawn. The mutual articulation of framing and overflowing, in which each
term both presupposes and produces the other term, does not essentially differ from the
problematics that in the sociological tradition have been customarily thought about in
terms of agency and structure. Simplifying the relationship, in this tradition the structure
sets the frame for the action without which it would not have been possible, whereas agency,
on the other hand, changes this frame in the course of its own unfolding. So agency and
organization need and feed each other.
Callon attempts, however, to replace the metaphors conventionally used in social
sciences, for instance, those of infrastructure and superstructure, by emphasizing that a relationship involves at the same time both entanglement and disentanglement (Barry and Slater
2002b, 291). In other words, communication entails both the dimension of order as well as
that of disorder, both message and noise. This relates to the idea criticized by Callon,
according to which society is viewed as a context or an already perfected structure to which
different actions and relationships can be attributed. Society is not for him a pre-existing
frame but rather a network of collective relationships and institutions that have to be incessantly reinstituted over and over again. Callon wants to focus attention on the way these
collective relationships simultaneously both presuppose and produce the movements of
intertwining, on the one hand, and those of withdrawing, on the other. In fact, what is at
issue is not two independent phenomena but rather one and the same process. Communication requires both the exclusion of noise and some relationship with it to be retained. They
are two faces of the same coin (Barry and Slater 2002b, 293). The framing of activities
produces also connections between different places. To put it more accurately, framing
institutionalization requires different technical as well as scientific elements that link up
institutions that previously appeared to be rather remote to each other and differentiate new
institutions out of a field that earlier was understood as being fairly consistent (Barry and
Slater 2002b, 293, 295). What now constitutes the object of study are the different practices
and struggles through which these simultaneous processes of institutionalization and differentiation get their expression. According to Callon, instead of the society been divided into
separate parts or sectors, one has to examine those local struggles in which the common
form of communication comes into being from the mutual movement of coming forth and
withdrawal, entanglement and disentanglement.
The ontology of noise
Let me take a short excursion to the thought of Ren Girard in order to clarify the philosophy of communication and noise from a different yet related angle. The idea about the
necessity to exclude the third party in communication that Serres worked out has found its
expression also in the cultural theory of Girard. According to this, social existence is
governed by mimetic rivalry, in which people imitate one another while pursuing the same
object which cannot, however, be attained by all. Yet this rivalry results quickly in disorder

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and conflict, and in order to restore peace, the community arbitrarily sacrifices someone
whom it regards as the scapegoat for the disturbance. The sacrifice momentarily restores the
order which, in turn, testifies to the authenticity of guilt (Girard 1987). For Serres, the exclusion of the third as the precondition of a dialogue corresponds to the sacrifice of the scapegoat as the prerequisite for peace in the community. It is a social event which makes a
collectively shareable meaning possible.
Also Girard has articulated his theory in terms of communication. He criticizes the
Platonic model according to which the difference between noise and communication has
been given a priori (Girard 2000, 184). Yet the distinction between what is noise and what
is message always requires an alliance between two communicating agencies against a third
one. But Girard points out that this alliance and the exclusion of the third is not based on
any plan but is completely random. Likewise, it is not able to maintain itself independently
allying does not depend only on a mutual decision. Above all, it rests on designating the
third party as the cause for noise. This designation, the pointing out of the source of noise,
is the ultimate condition for communication. At the same time, Girard claims, communication proves the correctness of the distinction made between the message and noise since
otherwise it would not have been possible in the first place (Girard 2000, 184). It is precisely
the finding of the guilty part that is the key for successful communication, and success, for
its part, proves the guilt.
Serres agrees with Girard here and regards scapegoat noise as the absolute precondition of communication. As opposed to suggestions that noise in information theory is
not an empirical fact but rather a logical necessity since communication depends upon a
logical exteriority (see Day 2001, 44), it seems evident that noise comprises also an
essential material dimension in both technical and linguistic senses (background noise and
stammering). Noise is precisely what cannot be reduced to a common logical form. But
because of its materiality, it is also a place in which multiplicity finds its expression. Noise
as the undividable excess brings the possibility of strife into communication.
This is also a viewpoint from which it is possible to view Latour and Callon as part of
the tradition of ontology. They can be seen as having reformulated the way ontology
appears to us late-moderns who are no longer under the spell of one consistent technology,
hierarchical structure or closed interior. Whereas Heidegger, for instance, still seemed to
remain stuck, to a certain extent, within the perspective of unitary technology, for Latour
and Callon the forms and appearances of technology have become inseparable from the
social in its everyday unfolding in principle. This relates to the development in which we
find ourselves today: the utmost complexity or sheer impossibility to locate straightforward
lines of demarcation between communication and noise, society and technology, or inside
and outside.
Both Latour and Callon reorganize, in their own ways, the ontological question of
demarcation. First, instead of approaching ontology as the difference between two distinct
realms or areas, they concentrate precisely on the mechanisms bridging this ontological
difference. That is, of specific interest are the particular ways in which communication and
what makes communication possible without being anything communicable itself, are
mutually constituted in a given circumstance. Thus, Latour analyses interlinked chains of
reference structures as the very place in which what is particular and what is common link
up and communicate. In fact, it is nothing else than this communication which constitutes
the reciprocal determination of words and things. Similarly, Callon directs attention to the
ways in which the inherent connection between framing and overflowing always structures
the field of communication anew. The ontological question does not thus denote separate
dimensions but the same movement which contains both. Secondly, the movements or

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mechanisms studied are not located in any transcendental domain but are instead constituted
immanently. For Latour, this means that the circulating reference, for instance, assumes
every time a new form of its own depending on the problem considered. And for Callon, his
conceptual pair entanglement/disentanglement is manifested circumstantially in every
gesture and movement. The ontological field is constituted through the incessant operation
of this entanglement/disentanglement which cannot but be historical as opposed to universal, transcendental and ahistorical. Hence there is no universal theory to be constructed, only
a set of historically based questions, practices and solutions which, taken together,
transform the way we live and comprehend this living.
As noise has increasingly come to be regarded as part of communication while communication needs to be distinguished from the former in order to be comprehensible, the exclusion by means of which the demarcation takes place can no longer be executed prior to
communication but has to be formulated during communication itself. This is what makes
the situation rather complex compared to earlier historical eras. These were eras with relatively straightforward mechanisms in place to make the demarcation required between
inside and outside, communication and non-communication, or organization and chaos. The
exclusion of noise has to be negotiated in the course of communication itself without any
pre-given agreements or principles to rest on. It is this negotiation, or better, the techniques
and procedures of negotiation, which come to the foreground. For the first time, it seems
that the wholeness of agency does not depend on a pre-given method of exclusion but rather
just on the mechanisms being engendered during the agency. It is thus not the principle of
exclusion that has to be studied but instead the particular historical ways this exclusion has
found its expression in some very practical issues and concerns.
What is one of the most crucial outcomes of the ideas elaborated by Latour and Callon
is that the demarcation outlining the boundary line between inside and outside has now
become an endless task. It is also conceivable only as an historical operation. What is
more, this demarcation takes place in a field of action, which has been conceived in
different terms throughout the history of communication (e.g. organism, machine or feedback-mechanism). The closer we come to the contemporary period, the more likely we
understand the site of this boundary-drawing as having the nature of a network. Network
seems currently the place as regards to which what is inside and what is outside is determined. The term designates the ontological place in which communication is distinguished
from what it is not. This is so, even though the place is not conceptualized as such, in its
totality, since it necessarily remains as unsaid with regard to what can be said. It names a
necessary wholeness of communication but does not totalize this whole so as to make it
as an essence.
Given this, however, there seems ultimately to be a strong tendency in both Latour and
Callon to equate noise with democracy, and communication with either science or theory.
In other words, while retaining the original metaphysical stereotypes of democracy and
science, these authors seem simply to add that they breach the boundary dividing them the
more they try to maintain it. In this way, science retains its communicative authority by the
cacophony of voices it fails to exclude. What characterizes the organization is the failing
attempt to retain its unity. Yet it is the organization not noise which constitutes the basis
for understanding and meaning. For his part, Callon (1998b) captures this self-defeating
process in terms of market overflows: the idea of containing the market within a protected
space both regulated and uncontaminated by politics ultimately fails as more and more
externalities are internalized. Yet markets do not merge with politics because markets do
have regularities of their own. Ultimately, it is these regularities, not noise, which form the
proper focus for Callon.

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Conclusion
Instead of being viewed exclusively as the enemy of order, noise also constitutes today the
starting point and foundation for order. Richard House has presented an idea, following
Henri Atlan, concerning self-organization from noise (House 2000, 27). It questions the
Shannonian theory in which all changes in the message sent were defined as noise. Noise
was thus a common name for all that could impair the transmission of the message (Shannon
and Weaver 1949, 8). House points out that this theory is true for any such system, analysed
by Shannon, in which the received message comprises all the information available for the
receiver. For Shannon, as we know, the complete reproducibility of the message set the
theoretical point of reference against which all other, that is, noise, came to be measured. In
contrast, Atlan (1974) showed that noise is a necessary part of communication since it is
only against it that the signal can be distinguished. Self-organization from noise applies to
a situation in which the difference in the received message as regards the sent message
comes as the basis of information about the system. If both the sent and the received
messages are known, then on these grounds it is possible to draw conclusions about the
functioning of the whole information system. Here the standpoint for observation has
changed from the received message to the operations of hierarchical levels within
the system in which the message circulates. If the transmission of a message constitutes a
process in which the changes taking place make it possible to evaluate the system as a
whole, then the relationship to noise changes accordingly: it now constitutes a source for
information about the performance of the system (House 2000, 27). This is characteristic of
the general theoretical turn in which the formal features of a given object of analysis are no
longer seen as capable of being distinguished from the external viewpoint from which it is
observed. In other words, outside gets twisted as an integral part and parcel of inside or
noise of communication.
For Latour the circulating reference implied an idea about a process of a certain
universalization through interconnected planes of reference. What was crucial was not
only achieving an outcome in the form of linguistic presentation (received message), but
also retaining an uninterrupted link with the empirical starting point (sent message), as
this was the precondition for abstraction. Although it is important to reduce the level of
noise out of the way of a common form, the tie to it is not completely cut off but only
becomes covered by numerous stratified reference structures. In Callon, this relationship is
manifested in his conception that collective relations imply both the element of entanglement and that of disentanglement in a similar way that communication entails both
message and noise. Similarly, it appears in the way calculativeness, as the precondition for
markets, always requires framing. Meanwhile, in the course of their own structuration and
institution, these frames continuously give rise to an overflowing that calls for their
continual reframing. Overflowing is therefore to frame what noise is to communication. It
comprises as equally important, the dimensions of individual and specific on the one hand
and that of flight and flowing on the other. The aim of framing is to control overflowing
but this, in turn, creates new overflows in differences, contentions and discrepancies. The
philosophy of noise brings out the fact that stammerings, cacophonies and regional accents
as well as background noise, cut-offs and various interruptions are contained in all
communication and that any administrative gesture comprises an aspect which escapes
governance. It stresses that these are not external but instead inherent elements to communication. Noise is thus unavoidable because it is precisely through it that communication
gets its expression. On the other hand, it is also nothing that could be shared with communicating parties: it escapes what is common, rational and the same. It is the necessary but
irrational part of communication. It is a precondition for what is common while at the

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same time designating that what produces differences as well as being self-differentiating
in itself.
Notes

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1. In his book Cybernetics or control and communication in the animal and the machine (1948),

Wiener encapsulated his thoughts concerning self-directing mechanisms based on a feedback

principle. In a book published a couple of years later, titled The human use of human beings:
Cybernetics and society (1950), he wished to popularize his ideas for a larger audience and also
to direct more attention to the social dimensions of cybernetics.
2. It is possible to make a distinction between politics and the political. Politics can be conceived as
a whole consisting of technical practices, forms of knowledge, institutions and ordinances,
whereas the political refers to the ontological space in and through which political action can be
recognized and defined specifically as political. If the possibility of disagreement is characteristic
of politics, as is thought in political philosophy, the concept of the political refers to area or space
enabling this disagreement or strife.

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