Noise functions as a nonsign meaning the meaningless within communication systems

Evidence

As for the second logically possible permutation on this level of the sign, what can be called the position of the nonsign: it would seem to consist essentially in the inevitable presence of noise as such within any communicational system. In the case of Simon such noise is generally the aleatory or random insertion of irrelevant reference (such as, for example, the traces left behind by the picture book, Orion aveugle, which he cannibalized in order to construct Conducting Bodies as a novel), but it is, as it were, emblematized or allegorized in this work as an enigmatic pile of rubble in movement across the frames of the individual sentences (“something grayish, shapeless, and awesomely heavy that seems to be inching along inexorably, an avalanche in slow motion on the move for billions of years, patient and insidious, wearing away the floor, the walls” [CC 88/72]). Whether this is to be seen as a pathological ocular condition, a disintegration of the film itself within the projector, or a science-fictional being of some sort is not even “undecidable,” since this episode evidently has the paradoxical, and indeed contradictory and impossible, function of meaning the meaningless and intending to convey an absence of intention. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 342

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘position of the nonsign’ as noise in the sign system, with the Simon rubble passage as its allegorical emblem.
• CANDY: The image of rubble ‘an avalanche in slow motion on the move for billions of years’ wearing away the floor is a striking, shareable image.
• XREF: connects to: Noise is best defined contextually as any sound that obstructs intended communication — Almo Farina, Soundscape Ecology: Principles,…, 1241