INFORMATION THEORY AND NOISE

Serres quickly repaints the problem in the terms of information theory. It’s these terms that persist in his phrasing of the wider problem in The Five Senses as one of reception and transmission. The body is composed of innumerably many interlocking systems. These systems are highly organized — on the molecular level, for example, our hydrogen does not suddenly escape us, wandering off to some other corner of the universe. On the cellular level cells ‘work’, replicate and repair — our bones self-heal, but don’t begin growing at right angles, or into Fibonacci spiralled shells. Cancers and other catastrophic pathological processes are the exception that prove the rule: our cells don’t conceive, any more than our hydrogen atoms, the wider organization of which they are a constituent part, which their properties and activity produce, yet nonetheless, and for the most part, work in meticulous organization to produce the continued highly complex structure of the body.

In terms of an information system, the body is overflowing with signals: hospitals full of equipment and expertise barely scratch the surface for an indirect and low-resolution image of all this information. With the signals is noise, the interior of the body, at any level of description (even the atomic-molecular) is not a smooth, homogenous desert like space: each of its myriad processes creates byproducts and refuse and, for the purposes of each particular process, its byproduct crowds around it. Rising up through the layers of complexity, this noisome waste should accumulate; even at a modest level of organization of sub-processes, it should already make all functioning impossible.

Take for example a crowded room full of conversation. Each conversation creates its din that has a negative effect on the smooth functioning of all the others. Furthermore, each conversation produces a pure waste product: reverberation and refraction — sound waves flying over their targets and bouncing around the room. Given the rising levels of noise, each conversation’s channel gets narrower and narrower, crowded in on all sides, more prone to error, requiring more and more redundancy (‘what?’, ‘pardon?’, hand gestures and facial expression). The signal is increased, amplified against the rising background noise, producing more byproduct. Eventually all conversation becomes impossible. The immense amount of noise in all of the channels erodes the signals; each conversation rises to peak redundancy with all of its error checking “What? What? What?”

So, Serres’ question now becomes ‘what happens to all of this noise in the body?’ Why are we not drowning in it? How is silence possible? It should be accumulating on an epic scale (imagine a whole building composed of rooms filled with conversations with all of their doors and windows open).

The solutions come from a (then) recent theoretical innovation in information theory. Noise is non-repeating, non-redundant, incompressible signal. As it enters a channel between sender and receiver, it corrodes the information laden signal that is being transmitted between them. Had we been, in the above example, recording an interview, the recording would be useless. The desired signal (the questions and answers) would be shot through with the ‘wall of noise’ created both by the other conversations, and accumulated reverberations. Because the noise is non-repeating and incompressible, the only way we could recover the signal would be to have another recording of the exact identical noise (i.e. a recording of the room at that time and place) to subtract, but insofar as that recording would also feature our interview (and its myriad reverberations) the situation is hopeless. In this situation noise is a kind of ‘junk’ that corrodes and destroys structure (repeating and compressible signal) and information.

However, and this is the theoretical innovation, if we leave behind our poor noise saturated sender and receiver, and turn our focus to their general situation, this noise, previously junk, can then become signal itself. Say we are the proprietor of the venue in question, and we worry that the impossibility of conversation for our patrons is driving them away, we also have a penchant for automation. We could count the patrons as they come in, and thus open up new rooms at some given number of patrons to distribute them, however this is an indirect measure (larger parties will perhaps be louder than smaller ones, for example) and if we focus on these sender-receivers walking in and their signals our calculations soon become quite complex (especially considering how the rising amplitude was auto-catalytic). Much simpler is we install decibel meters in the rooms, and then open new rooms when they read a certain level. Now the decibel meters are receiving the level of noise in a room, captured indiscriminately, and sending signals to doors in the venue, opening up new spaces for patrons to distribute to, effectively manipulating and channelling noise around the venue. The din of the rooms proves no impediment to this ‘higher-level’ sender-receiver system, and in fact is being converted in this system from unrepeatable, incompressible noise into repeatable compressible (i.e. clean and structured) signal (a simple decibel reading).

Or, to return to the body, heat is a major byproduct of cellular processes, and plays the role of ‘noise’ in physical systems. At a certain temperature the ‘work’ of the cells becomes eroded, at a higher temperature still the molecules break down. But in the normal functioning of a body, heat is generated which, from the perspective of the systems producing this heat, works like the errant reverberations in our above example. However, the body monitors its own heat, and reacts at certain thresholds — controlling, for one, perspiration. The glands, and the system they form a part of, are reading fluctuating heat levels, which for metabolic and other processes are ‘junk’, as a clean signal rising and falling. Thus, Serres theorizes the body as a series of layered systems reading the layer beneath them, like a set of Russian dolls.

“In a certain sense, the next level functions as a rectifier, in particular, as a rectifier of noise. What was once an obstacle to all messages is reversed and added to the information.” (Serres, 1982, p.78)

At each level, noise is translated into a signal and incorporated into a process that produces its own noise which is then taken as a signal for a still more global process, up and up to ‘us’. I don’t hear the noise of my gut and digestion until the processes occurring in there cross a threshold that triggers a system, which itself crosses a threshold, triggering another, until my stomach contracts and I feel a pang of hunger.

Each layer is, in a sense, ambivalent to the vicissitudes of the layer below it. Our decibel-controlled door opening system does not pay attention to each individual conversation, or separate out the noise from the signal occurring in the room — it has no way of knowing what is desirable signal and what is deleterious noise within the conversations of the patrons. It just sums the entirety of the local situation, and extracts from it a fluctuating signal.

This allows Serres to move (seemingly) orthogonally into psychoanalysis: the conscious’ relationship to the unconscious is like that of our decibel metering system to the conversations, or our sweat glands to our metabolic activity. Freud imagined a total account of the mind where the unconscious, in its deepest regions and extension, simply just was metabolic processes exercising various drive pressures that were then expressed in this or that way in consciousness and action. What Serres wagers is that this information theoretic approach can provide the much-needed translations and gradations between the levels. Furthermore, the entire psychoanalytic interpretive procedure can be read as one more translative layer, collecting noise from consciousness itself. The “noise” here being repression which introduces gaps and distortions into consciousness, generating the accumulation of anxiety (as with phobias), and ticks (such as Freudian slips).

“Each level of information functions as an unconscious for the global level bordering it, as a closed or relatively isolated system in relationship to which the noise-information couple, when it crosses the edge, is reversed and which the subsequent system decodes or deciphers.” (Serres, 1982, p.80)

However, a kind of promiscuous pan-psychism emerges here: if consciousness is ‘merely’ one more translation from an underlying ‘unconscious’ signal-noise couplet, a black box reading noise levels from another, which in turn reads from another, then owing to the reception problem, there is no reason not to believe that each black box, right down to the molecular, ‘receives’ in a conscious way. In explaining the epistemological obstacle of our not being able to ‘hear’ our bodies in terms of these nestled series of black boxes, Serres introduces the new epistemological obstacle of the reception problem to the fore (perhaps water is conscious, how to know?), then needing to resolve it in The Five Senses.

THE EAR — MAZE — FEEDBACK

Serres uses an objecting interlocuter to introduce the problem with his own, earlier, view:

“Objection. We observers may know and understand information transmitted by the box, its output, just as we might understand its input. How might we understand or know what occurs in the vicinity of that input-threshold? The box does of course receive, but what are we to make of that reception? We must receive it — yet the reception itself is not transmitted. We must therefore be located inside the supposedly closed box, the walls of which must as a consequence be moved. But whenever we talk about reception, the same irrepressible logic reasserts itself.” (Serres, 2008, p.139).

Serres writes that this objection “destroys both my book and any hope of describing reception” (ibid, p.140). Remember that this problem of reception dogs us even within our own, first personal experience. Not only is the body of an other (or their brain) a black box where I can observe only inputs and outputs, but not their reception and translation but for a hypothesized, inductive function I establish to describe this externally observed pattern, but even in attempting to describe my own immediate experience, the given, I can do nothing but translate it into a transmission, an output, be it a memory or a sentence or an artwork. Thus, I create a language to describe how the given is received and then translated into language, but this is yet another, smaller, black box placed next to the first, and the problem repeats. Everything is opaque and reception is never grasped. We never see what we see.

This issue can be seen often in quickly phrased descriptions of mental processes given in terms of neurology. We have a smoothly functioning causal account of signals and chemicals and impulses travelling through a biological matrix, and then, often, the account becomes frustrated at the final step: the activities in the biological register are then, we are told, ‘converted to consciousness’, i.e. received. Now, we know that this or that region, structure or system within the brain or nervous system or sense organs is related to this or that feature of consciousness — damage here or there will remove them one by one. However, we gather this information from monitoring outputs and inputs, flicking the switches and turning the dials on the black boxes, knowing it, or they, receive but we’re unable to access that reception. Once we have fully mapped all of the functions of translation from the inputs to the outputs, the question of the ‘emergence’ of consciousness still remains. “Either there is a private dimension, in which case there are no objective messages; or the latter are in fact in circulation, in which case there is no private dimension.” (Serres, 2008, p.139) We either pursue a materialist account, and never find consciousness, or we pursue a phenomenological account, and sweep Berkeley’s God under the rug with the epoché. Everywhere the cleft between two incommensurable series.

However, Serres has one advantage. In this section (chapter 2) of The Five Senses he is not lost in the visual, the eye and its object beyond the window, but asking his questions of the ear, and hearing:

“The same logic dogs us: the ear needs a more central ear to hear what is transmitted by the three others, outer, middle and inner, which hear each other, each in turn. The hearing centre. Which centre? Move the partition. Partition after partition, black box after black box — this is a projection of the abstract receiver.” (Serres, 2008, p.143)

Serres, in searching for the ‘final ear’ that could do the hearing stumbles across the first ear, the ones on the sides of our heads. His narrative point of departure for this chapter of The Five Senses, is his sitting at the amphitheatre at Epidaurus. Greek amphitheatres are famously designed for their acoustical properties, amplifying the dialogue taking place on the stage. Serres likens the architectural form of the amphitheatre to an ear on the Earth, visible from airplanes. Here a particular structure for focusing sound, much like the twisted cartilage of the ear itself. Sound waves, spreading out in all directions, immediately filling any space they are present in, through being refracted and reverberated, are altered, attenuated, doubled up (amplified), given timbre and texture (a form of noise). In fact, hearing, and its attendant aesthetics, depends upon this ‘routing’ of sound through spaces, this filtering. The perfectly flat and infinite cartesian plane is perfectly silent, an anechoic wasteland. Sound requires a complex and organic space, a chaos of refractions and reverberations to gain its intelligibility.

Owing to how refraction changes the character of sound, it is impossible to ‘sample’ this character without thereby contributing to the refraction, by being oneself another point of dampening and refraction within the space populated by the sound. Furthermore, at its lower ‘audible’ frequencies, hearing opens out onto touch. The deepest bass is felt through the skin as much as it is heard through the ear. This means that even though sound seems to be the best candidate metaphor (or case) for the abstract model of a sender and receiver of signals, with the perils of noise in the channel, this very metaphor/case problematizes the simplistic sketch of these virtual nodes trading signals along transmission lines.

Instead, the audible suggests the image of a maze. The proliferation of a sound traverses all of the angles of a space, doubles back on itself, twists and turns through nooks and crannies, and finally through the twisted surface of the ear and into another maze in the auditory canal.

“Mazes maximize feedback. They provide a very long path within a short distance and construct the best possible matrix for completing a cycle. The best possible method for all kinds of reception, they are often to be found in sensation, whose problems they solve clearly.” (Serres, 2008, p.143)

How clearly do mazes solve the problems of sensation and reception? Where previously Serres was dealing with black boxes with their inputs and outputs (introduced to explain the ‘silence’ of the body), proliferating endlessly, now the boxes are opened up and folded out, crumpled and textured. The system of translation from one layer to another is not a jump across a cleft, there are not endless closed systems punctuated by void across which they communicate, but a single endlessly folded labyrinthine system.

A given maze will provide character to a signal that passes through it, owing to the layering of feedback and refraction, the resulting signal is smeared across time when it arrives at a given point, echoes of itself following indistinguishably on its heels contributing to its particular texture, and its signal-noise ratio. ‘Reverberation’ is just a quick echo. The sound is combined with a (slightly uniquely dampened) shadow of itself displaced by a minimum of time, with a fraction less energy. The shadow is followed by another, and so on and on, to produce a tail. All of these ‘shadows’ arrive nearly instantaneously, but each of them has taken their own path through the space of their diffusion (hence the minimally different times of their arrivals). We should remember that the propagation of refraction patterns, this ‘shadowing’, is of sufficient detail and complexity to allow bats to fly through a forest and pluck insects out of the air mid-flight.