© 1998 Godspeed You Black Emperor!

Autonomy, Improvisation, Noise-Packaging

“Autonomy is badly misconstrued when it is castigated as an

individualistic or libertarian fetish. Autonomy understood as a
self-determining act is the destitution of selfhood and the
subjectivation of the rule.”
Ray Brassier, ‘Unfree Improvisation/Compulsive Freedom’ 1

“It is rather a question of leveling the hierarchical difference

between immanent practice and transcendent theory by
reimplicating theory into practice but in such a way as to
precipitate a crisis wherein convulsive conception interrupts
complacent sensation. The goal would be to effectuate a
critique that would no longer depend on the security of critical
distance; a critique that would remain inside. This would no
longer really be a critique but rather the discovery of an outside
through the inside.”
Ray Brassier, Jean Luc Guionnet, Seijiro Murayama, Mattin
‘Idioms and Idiots’ 2

1
BRASSIER, Ray. Unfree Improvisation/Compulsive Freedom. Delivered at: Freedom is a
Constant Struggle, Arika Festival (episode 4) (2013).
2
BRASSIER, Ray; GUIONNET, Jean Luc; MURAYAMA, Seijiro; MATTIN. Idioms and Idiots.
Delivered at: Live at NPAI Festival Niort (2008). p. 19
 “The compositions would then be characterized for exhibiting
many more regions of morphological tolerance than what
ontology would like to admit, and the maintenance inside these
limits of tolerance could or not be successful.”
J.-P. Caron, ‘From Ontology to Morphology: Reflexions about
the Musical Composition’s Identity’ 3

A decision takes place. It doesn’t matter how intensively aggressive the fundamental
contradictions were to each other until that instant of continuity: a synthesis occurs at the
exact moment in which a decision is taken, the moment when an ‘idea’ crosses the frontier -
how should we even start thinking about this line? - and comes into existence. A negation of
this axiom would theoretically paralyze our own notions of time and space and, thus, of the
universe; an absolute fluctuation of virtually possible decisions would not be able to create
anything, leaving just a hostile disequilibrium of unrestricted permissiveness, not having any
kind of constraints whatsoever so that even a rudimentary previsualization of
spacio-temporal experience would be practically impossible to come to light. This is not how
reality functions. It takes decisions. For that to work, the axiomatic principles have to be set
up (a question rises here: when exactly does the primary decision takes place, after all?),
and then reality is compelled, by itself, to posit a new decision supported by the primary
one(s); then another decision, based on that previous one(s), and so it goes, constructing
this ontological chain of commitments ad infinitum. It becomes quite clear the necessity of
some kind of organizational mechanism that guarantees an enough amount of
continuity-confidence in established structures. What comes to mind, when confronted by
this idea, is that the political concept of democratic centralism seems to appear as a main
contender for being a ‘quasi-natural’ form that could really work at explaining, at an
ontological level, the dimension of organization (individuation?) of life-forms (politics/ethics
and ecology). Out of a blank sheet – and by this we should understand nothing more than
just another stage of ordinary decision-making - every resolution actively and absolutely
supports (be it positively or negatively) the next and is supported (again, positively or
negatively) by the previous one; both confidence and antipathy are gained within the
systems through developments of collective syntheses; ideas gain material concretude.
What is also given is the always-present and fundamental space of possibilities of
reelaboration of syntheses, which is quite different than a retreat from commitments.
Nevertheless, when nature put this sketchical notion of reality at the hands of humans, what
we get is human history.
To claim that we have a history is to put forward some kind of chain of multiformal
causes and effects that engendered what we are at that exact moment of the claiming. We
are then surprised by a question: what is exactly this process that engenders? Where lies its
‘essence’: in our ‘individual/spiritual’ half or in our ‘collective/cultural’ one? The answer here
might be trivial, as in ‘some kind of mixing of the two, of course!’ But pursuing and further

3
CARON, Jean Pierre. Da ontologia à morfologia: reflexões sobre a identidade da obra
musical. Rio de Janeiro: UFRJ (2011). p. 14 (translation)
complexifying this argument, at every stopping point emerges a fundamental paradox: how
can we positively affirm anything as being something if we know that it can only be as long
as it comes (organically and/or conceptually) from something else? The other makes a
demand to each one of us: ‘understand that, as long as you are being something, you are
everything but yourself’. This loop is where the epistemological and the ontological coincide
and transform themselves into another kind of structural paradigm, one that tries not to be
just another grammar (even one that advocates immanently-possible openings), but to
compatibilize immediate happenings within conceptualized practice. What is very important
here is to always take into account where we are, inside any given space-time, at the scales
of inquiry - e.g at the ‘individual’ (‘micro’) or the ‘collective’ (‘macro’) side of the pendulum.
We should be able to see the negative implications of contemporarily internalized
ideas like ‘individual’, ‘freedom’ or ‘autonomy’ into the hard core of common sense. To
become this object that we see in our minds as being something because it has a history
and a teleology (be they sociological, transcendental and/or even conceptual), we must
understand it as something even before it had any chance of becoming anything.4 The
connection we make between our memory of a past full of blurred images and confusing
symbols (that is mentally construed as a fundamental touchstone of what we call ourselves),
the capacities and dispositional mechanisms of this self in the immediate present, and the
“teleonomial” dimension of our thinking where rules and goals are virtually met and realized -
the future -, is a very dangerous one; it eludes scientific conceptualization, and it is actually
impossible to even devise a plan of “exiting” this domain of deontological subjectivation (for
the cruel “satisfaction” of heideggerians).5 What we could do is try a fundamental rearranging
of how we perceive and conceptualize exactly what it is to be this thing that perceives and
conceptualizes: the individual – with a reassessment of the whole theory of
alienation/autonomy, through recent onto-epistemological developments (new perspectives
on normativity and rescued simondonian notions of individuation and transduction, for
example), and the tools and insights of generative/speculative aesthetics and noise studies
as our starting points. By trying a retroactive path that dismantles the commonsensical
historical ontology into some kind of situational morphology of lived experience, if anyway
successful, a glimpse of renewable possibilities emerges from the fact that we see ourselves
as something much more than just a historical developing of an essence into its final form:

4
This is usually one of the fundamental flaws of generally chosen Kantian-Hegelian
pathways.
5
Maybe Lacan can help us here: “Again, we find in the patient an organization of certainties,
beliefs, coordinates, of references that constitute, properly speaking, what Freud called,
since its origin, an ideational system, and that we can call here system, for the sake of
abbreviation. Does the resistance come uniquely from there? When, at the limit of this
domain of words that is precisely the ideational mass of the I, representing the sum of the
silence after which another word reappears, that which is supposed to be reconquered in the
unconscious, for it is a part of the subject apart from its history – is the resistance there? Is it,
yes or no, pure and simply, the organization of the I that, as such, constitutes the
resistance?” LACAN, Jacques. "Seminário 1. Os escritos técnicos de Freud (1953-54)." Rio
de Janeiro, Jorge Zahar Ed (1975). pp. 33-34 (translation)
we grasp the multitude of possibilities, i.e, the bleak-yet-hopeful openness of the present.
That question of “maybe this should go another way…?” seems almost irresistible to make.
There’s the moment of capture: the thing being appointed at is supposed to be called
‘this’, and then we use it to capture some other thing ‘that’, and we form propositions such
‘this and that are/do something, etc.’ What is at stake in this improvisational act of
appointment? Its arbitrariousness, is it existing in the world mainly by means of a subjective
agency or of an objective phenomenality? This is the starting point of a circular involvement
of entities that are immediately thrown into some kind of abstract substance, that mutates at
every fraction of a second in inconceivable ways, concreteness and mystified flux at the
same instant, forever fleeting but at the same time a powerful possibility of encountering an
alternative. Because if we are not happy with the labeling currently being used at the
capture, it would be appropriate for us to think about the labeling itself, and not to create
everchanging novelties that put hollowed contents into zombified forms.
Thus, in this tentative movement, we encounter noise. The concept of
epistemological noise elucidates that what we’ve thought before as immediately discardable
phenomena are not crude misapprehensions, simple misguidings of what we ought to be
perceiving and/or conceptualizing; they are sensorial tools for building reavaluation
frameworks of internalization dispositives triggered by aesthetic experience. Cécile
Malaspina, citing mathematician and economist Fischer Black in a seminar at King’s College
London last year, begins an important exposition of the commonsensical view that relegates
noise practically into an enemy to be destroyed:

“[…] he once remarked that [statistical] noise is what makes it

difficult to test theories, is what clouds our vision and what
forces us to act largely in the dark. Noise is the arbitrary
element, in an equilibrium model, that is no longer, strictly
speaking, a rational model. […] Research will be seen as a
process leading to reliable and relevant conclusions only very
rarely, and this is because noise creeps in at every step.” 6

Malaspina proceeds: “[…]. Noise, thus conceived, poses a challenge to the accord between
the intelligible and the sensible, between what the Greeks called the noueta and the
aestheta.” 7 A spectacular inversion comes to the front: we still see noise, as does Black, as
something essentially disruptive, some weird kind of ‘impossibilitating’ phenomena, that all of
a sudden turns its own negative aspect into a liberating principle: the ‘impossibility’ is just a
present and real incompatibility, and if we are, through previous likewise disruptive
experiences, already engaged in new processes of aesthetical susceptibility, this idea of an
incompatibility that might be complex, but nonetheless can always be reexamined,
automatically opens up unimagined possibilities of recompatibilizations and aesthetical

6
AESTHETICS OF NOISE. Jun 24, 2021. Cécile Malaspina: From Heraclitus to Japanoise
[Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJTheDPbDgA
7
Ibid.
reassessments - at the very least, we’ll be putting some grease into nature’s movement
mechanisms. Following these insights, noise-packaging would be an attempt at
conceptualizing the intensional (not intentional) practice of epistemological noise. Alas, as
Malaspina brilliantly resumes, all of this is nothing more than just some kind of “cut”.

“This cut is but the performative aspect of the problem this

book ultimately faces: how do we draw that line that makes the
form of an argument emerge, even an argument about noise?
What can we afford to exclude? How much variety, and hence
how much uncertainty can we retain, without dissolving the
very movement of thought, whose emergence we only begin to
comprehend? In this sense, we will ultimately come to think of
maximum noise as an unthinkable freedom of choice.”
Cécile Malaspina ‘An epistemology of noise’ 8

“Nevertheless, randomness is not the source of freedom.

Rather freedom is the labour of rational agency, the complex
dialectic between variables and invariants, the dynamic
correlation and propagation of constraints in the ongoing
interplay between chance and necessity. We are not free by
chance but through the revisionary-constructive imposition of
constraints.”
Inigo Wilkins ‘Irreversible Noise: The Rationalization of
Randomness and the Fetishisation of Indeterminacy’ 9

“All relatedness has its foundation in the relatedness of

actualities; and such relatedness is wholly concerned with the
appropriation of the dead by the living – that is to say, with
‘objective immortality’ whereby what is divested of its own
living immediacy becomes a real componente in Other living
immediacies of becoming.”
Alfred Whitehead ‘Process and Reality’ 10

8
MALASPINA, Cecile. An epistemology of noise. Bloomsbury Publishing (2018). p. 12
9
WILKINS, Inigo. Irreversible Noise: The Rationalization of Randomness and the
Fetishisation of Indeterminacy. Diss. Goldsmiths, University of London (2016). p.253
10
WHITEHEAD, Alfred North. Process and reality. Simon and Schuster, 2010. p.XIV
//////////
epistemologic sketches/schoenbergian metaphysics
1. art begins in an attempt to represent nature, both external (the world-matter) and internal
(the concept) aspects of it;
2. the focus on internal nature, i.e, the individual effort of a subjective system that develops
itself into a theory of harmony (“autonomy”): this is not supposed to be encouraged;
3. a shift of importance to the object: if we want to take away the point of view from inside of
the subject’s steroscopic vision, we need to concern ourselves not with building a new
structural paradigm qua grammar, but with an exposition of possible artistic procedures. A
turn to a morphology - how different life-forms come to be able to organize themselves? - of
conceptualized practice (an expression in which both external and internal aspects of nature
are mixed in some kind of borromean knot alongside what we call ‘the human subject’) might
be a better line of inquiry;
4. it does not matter if the starting point of investigation lies on true or false propositions;
both have the same essential possibility of progress: science and art develop through casual
(yet intensional) discoveries;
5. consonance (closer, simpler relations to fundamental tone) and dissonance (farther, more
complex relations) are not antithetical; the difference is not substantial, but gradual
(distance, degree; familiarity)
\\\\\\\\\\
‘incomplete movie about jail (excerpt)’, by efrim menuck
“the car's on fire, and there's no driver at the wheel
and the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides
and a dark wind blows
the government is corrupt
and we're on so many drugs
with the radio on and the curtains drawn
we're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
and the machine is bleeding to death
the sun has fallen down
and the billboards are all leering
and the flags are all dead at the top of their poles

it went like this:

the buildings toppled in on themselves
mothers clutching babies
picked through the rubble
and pulled out their hair
the skyline was beautiful on fire
all twisted metal stretching upwards
everything washed in a thin orange haze
 I said, ‘kiss me, you're beautiful -
these are truly the last days’” 11

11
GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR. The Dead Flag Blues [Recorded by GODSPEED
YOU! BLACK EMPEROR]. On F♯ A♯ ∞ [CD]. Kranky (1998)
 REFERENCES

- BRASSIER, Ray. Unfree Improvisation/Compulsive Freedom. Delivered at: Freedom is a

Consant Struggle, Arika Fesival (episode 4) (2013).

- BRASSIER, Ray, Jean Luc Guionnet, Seijiro Murayama, Mattin. Idioms and Idiots.
Delivered at: Live at NPAI Festival Niort (2008).

- CARON, Jean Pierre. Da ontologia à morfologia: reflexões sobre a identidade da obra

musical. Rio de Janeiro: UFRJ (2011).

- LACAN, Jacques. Seminário 1. Os escritos técnicos de Freud (1953-54). Rio de Janeiro,

Jorge Zahar Ed (1975).

- MALASPINA, Cecile. An epistemology of noise. Bloomsbury Publishing (2018).

- WILKINS, Inigo. Irreversible Noise: The Rationalization of Randomness and the

Fetishisation of Indeterminacy. Diss. Goldsmiths, University of London (2016).

- WHITEHEAD, Alfred North. Process and reality. Simon and Schuster, 2010.
- SCHOENBERG, Arnold. Harmonia. Prefácio, tradução e notas de Marden Maluf. Editora
Unesp (2001).

- GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR. The Dead Flag Blues [Recorded by GODSPEED
YOU! BLACK EMPEROR]. On F♯ A♯ ∞ [CD]. Kranky (1998)

- MACKAY, Robin, James Trafford, and Luke Pendrell, eds. Speculative aesthetics. Vol. 4.
MIT Press (2014).
NOTAS/IDEIAS
- Seminário I, pp. 33-34: “massa ideacional” ~= package of ideal objects (?) (micellar line as
the gate of unconsciousness)
“Do mesmo modo, encontramos no paciente toda uma organização de certezas, de
crenças, de coordenadas, de referências que constituem, para falar propriamente, o que
Freud chamava, desde a origem, um sistema ideacional, e que podemos de maneira
abreviada chamar aqui de sistema.
Será que a resistência vem unicamente daí? Quando, no limite desse domínio da palavra
que é justamente a massa ideacional do eu, representava para vocês a soma do silêncio
após o qual uma outra palavra reaparece, aquela que se trata de reconquistar no
inconsciente, por ser parte do sujeito separada dea sua história – estará aí a resistência?
Será, sim ou não, pura e simplesmente, a organização do eu que, enquanto tal, constitui a
resistência?”

- Uma das características fundamentais da proposição enquanto símbolo: sua bipolaridade

(região de escolha de aproximação ou não-aproximação entre dois planos, o das coisas e o
da enunciação (nomeação)) (Wittgenstein ~= Aristóteles)
“O enunciado predicativo é caracterizado, portanto, como o veículo de uma escolha,
veiculada pelo verbo, que consiste em privilegiar um entre dois pólos de uma alternativa
exclusiva.” p.22

- Wolterstorff: A divisão de tipos não precisa ser necessariamente pensada como uma teoria
essencializante (relação tipo/espécime (type/token)). Os tipos artísticos são categorias
normativas (obras são definidas pelas regras de ação, de realização)

- Something between the historical genesis of the composition and its abstract lifeforce
(between nominalism (Goodman) and mathematical platonism)

- Art is a school that teaches you about what a ‘material’ is, but it tends to repeat the same
lesson over and over again: “Either there’s no material, or one must redefine it to obtain a
radically new sense of what it is”. But we are always already implicated in the material
because there is no possible position from which we could obtain an ‘objective’ vision of it as
a whole. The latter is of course precisely what the concept of ‘material’ presupposes; but it
does so because it assumes the transcendence of vision (and hence a veritable exit from the
blind immanence of the real). Of course, nonphilosophy’s claims with regard to its material is
that such an immanent posture can be realized without exiting from the element of radical
immanence that is constitutive for its thinking. Nevertheless – and it is our conviction that this
is what art teaches us – the taking up of the material in immanence entails the end of the
material: we exit from the semantic field concomitant with the name ‘material’. There is
something incompatible between the NON and the material.

epistemologic sketches / schoenbergian metaphysics

art begins in an attempt to represent nature, both external and internal (the concept)
the focus on internal nature, i.e, the individual effort of a subjective system that develops
itself into a theory of harmony; this is not supposed to be encouraged
a shift of importance to the object: if we are not preoccupied with building a new structural
paradigm qua grammar, but with an exposition of possible artistic procedures, a turn to a
phenomenology of perceptual conceptualization might be a better line of inquiry
it does not matter if the starting point of investigation lies on true or false presuppositions;
both have the same essential possibility of progress: science and art develop through casual
discoveries
consonance (closer, simpler relations to fundamental tone) and dissonance (farther, more
complex relations) are not antithetical; the difference is not substantial, but gradual
(distance, degree; familiarity)
“maybe our system [equal temperament] is more advantageous, but not superior” p. 60

Por que é necessário que pensemos que há sempre algum nível préconceitual em qualquer
tipo de fenômeno? E que, portanto, deve haver um posterior desenvolvimento
acadêmico-discursivo que leve aos conceitos propriamente formados?

Epistemological noise is exactly that package of ideal objects that takes us where the
micellar line between what is considered information (the “phyllic”) and what is discarded as
noise (the “phobic”) comes to the forefront. In this sense, the initial project of this text is to
try, alongside Cécile Malaspina, J.-P. Caron, Ray Brassier, Inigo Wilkins, Mattin and many
others, a separation of the ontological idea of the one from the canonical amphiphilic notion
of individual, towards a sort of pragmatic phenomenological morphology of being, in regards
to the relation of the human species with the arts, the sciences, political economy and
cultural social life in general.