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In an article published in Diseases of the Nervous System, Roland Fischer (1969) points out that with Descartes and rationality, consciousness came to mean "to know in oneself, alone" and lost the sense of "knowing with," which is to say "sharing knowledge with one another" ("The Perception-Hallucination Continuum" p. 163). This irrationally inflected sense of " knowing with" will greatly inflect both technoculture and the mind sciences in the 21st century, and so research in composition must inquire into the distributed compositional strategies common to diverse communities--some, steeped in remix culture, others, in scientific inquiry/technological development, still others in political and economic processes. All conduct inquiry and share projects in an increasingly messy mesh. "Noisiness" is a trope, or commonplace, of dynamic media, as this vector/feature extends through the technological innovations and the practices that support and evolve them. In this piece, I will suggest uses for the forms of dissonance, or noise, that practices of linking in wikis amplify in their use.

Competing defintions of "noise" clash at the crux of an enormous number of technosocial and scientific issues. Noise enables medical and communications technologies, is essential for synthesizing and collating research in robotics, evolutionary biology, and embodied cognitive science, and synchronizes diverse communities of musicians, programmers, researchers, and writers. At first blush, the MGM v. Grokster case and the Authors Guild class-action suit against Google Print would seem to revolve around music and books, respectively; however, each case finds the same two competing and fundamentally different visions of intellectual property in acute dissonance. And so the rhythmic art of composing such complexity into patterns of argument and inquiry that bring a commons into being—the art of the "peer-to-peer rhetor"—has become elemental to writing performance. In what Lawrence Lessig calls "remix culture," finding rhythm requires a rehearsed training in and capacity for working with unpredictable network effects. In other words, local cultures and communities of writers, each by necessity working within localized and unique idiom (sentencing practices, definitions, languaging in general), need a "pilates of writing" to cultivate the sort of flexibility suited to ecologies of continual and often sudden change.

freesound. select and sequence sounds to produce arguments, create conditions necessary for forming "clusters" around specific problems, allow affect to enter into the process of organizing collaborative rhetorical processes of project-building.

on the culture and politics of hearing, sound, and noise

the cicadas of The Phaedrus

the "the source of uncertainty" features integrated into the instruments designed by electronic music pioneer Don Buchla

More than chaos to be ordered, noise introduces a necessary complexity as it opens new pathways and bounces writers "out of the box" and into the rhythmic between-space where collaboration and transformation can take place.

MarchTwentyFirst