If you are not part of the signal, then you are part of the noise. But don’t worry, keep your noise clean, don’t poke your noise around, don’t get your noise out of joint, and you can always jump back on the bandwidth of the signal. Here are a few ways of making your noise more signally:

1) Shine on the noise: If you keep your noise shiny (Glanz auf der Nase) it might eventually attract glances and focus the signal. Obviously the present world makes it more and more difficult for you to keep a shiny noise but let’s not abandon hope. Just keep yourself close to strong light sources and let your noise shine and condense the signal. If that doesn’t work, it must be your bad luck. It’s not the end of the world now is it? Consider the other options.

2) Noise in the air: Even if your noise does not have the shine to focus the signal, you can still catch the signal by having your noise in the air. Give your noise some airtime and increase the chances of contracting the signal. Don’t forget that the noise knows. Just noise around and make some effort to search for the signal. Keep looking. Maybe the signal is just under your noise. If that also fails, too bad, but there’s still hope.

3) Brown noising: You can disguise your noise under the ambient pseudo-random background of an existing strong signal. This is called brown noising or Brownian noise. You should know that a brown noiser can no longer follow his/her own noise. If you take this road, the signal will arbitrarily lead you around by your noise. You will just need to put on the old noisebag and keep your noise out of others’ business. Still fails? There is another option.

4) Bloody noise: This strategy inverts the shine on the noise tactic. Instead of focusing the signal by attracting emergent glances, bloody noise focuses the signal by attracting the gaze of emergency. You were unable to follow your noise for fear of turning unsignally, yet you can still follow your noisebleed to tune into the emergency signal. Since your noise have been sacrificed for the greater good of the existing signals, you have a right of distress: You can declare the existing signal false and unjust, and claim that you are the true signal. But there’s a catch: You must show blood to keep the gaze of emergency, which means that you will have to take charge of your own sacrifice ritual. There’s also a side effect: If you follow your noisebleed, you will become unable to see further than the end of your noise. This is perhaps a relative advantage since this reduction of perspective will also spare you from helplessly witnessing the end of the world.

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

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