Text page
Noise An Ontology of the Avant Garde
"Noise An Ontology of the Avant Garde" treats capital as an abstract process of mutation and escape rather than as a merely managerial or institutional system.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The central claim is that capital should be understood as an inhuman process of abstraction rather than a humanly steerable institution. Meltdown names the way this process outpaces moral or political containment.
These texts work by describing markets, media systems, and social life as channels for accelerating abstraction. Capital behaves less like a policy object than like a self-intensifying circuit.
That matters because the section is trying to show how deterritorialization becomes historically real rather than remaining a philosophical slogan. The page belongs here when abstraction is presented as an operative force.
How to read this text
Read for the vocabulary of abstraction, escape, and process first. The page usually becomes clearer once capital is treated as a circuit rather than a classically economic object.
Notice where the argument leaves institutional critique and starts describing systems that exceed human command. That turn is the hinge of the section.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 3
Noise: An Ontology of the Avant-garde 219 Here, the real city acts as a transmitter, the ice-dust, mist and most im- portantly, the Antarctic light, constitute interference to the transmitted sig- nal, and Professor Dyer occupies the position of the receiver.
Definition · paragraph 7
Noise: An Ontology of the Avant-garde 223 rats’ meal—although the master is left with nothing to confirm his speculation, and concludes, like Dyer, that it was only a dream. Perhaps if he had cultivated his insomnia a little longer, and sat up in the dark without a light—for it is light that turns the real into an illusion—he might have discovered the source … be- cause the rats always come back.
Definition · paragraph 1
217 14 Noise: An Ontology of the Avant-garde Amy Ireland When he first sights the vast unknown mountain range from the window of an aircraft with his scientific team in tow, geologist and academic William Dyer, the protagonist of H.P.
Definition · paragraph 5
Noise: An Ontology of the Avant-garde 221 I. Inside Out II. Outside In The advantage of transcribing a philosophical description of consciousness into a cybernetic register is that it allows us to move from a transcendent struc- ture to an immanent one, and once within the latter, to move from one observ- er position to another.
Definition · paragraph 11
Noise: An Ontology of the Avant-garde 227 ty under the table, commensurate with the noise from which the avant-garde emerges, taking order with him (exchanging it for art) and reinstating, amidst the clamour of errant cutlery, the profound unreasonableness of an entropic regime—one that dissolves the borders between table-top and pleated pants, sauce béarnaise and boutonnière, Riesling, ramekin and wrist-watch.
Appears in sections
Capital, Meltdown, and Cybernetic Modernity Primary section
Capitalist abstraction, deterritorialization, cybernetics, and the archive's account of runaway modernity.