Brassierian Essay on Noise: The Anti-Aesthetics of Noise, Negative Normativity, and the Metaphysics of Extinction

Abstract

Noise tests philosophical assumptions, as it contains, according to Ray Brassier in his essay Genre Is Obsolete (2007), a subversive epistemic function. Specifically, it confronts the dissociation in the loss of collective reality between understanding and sensitivity, as kantian faculties of knowledge, and their extension into culture and science. This article is divided into two sections: the first addresses the limits of a noise aesthetics, exploring a failed conceptualization illegitimately based on heterogeneity and correlationism, as well as its false connection to capital; the second part proposes a reconsideration of noise as epistemology, through a transgression from cybernetics, information theory, and speculative materialism, criticizing a blind idea of modern philosophy.