Noise and ethics: On Evan Parker and Alain Badiou

This essay investigates the possible relationship between noise and ethics through the music of improvising musician Evan Parker and the ‘post‐post‐structuralist’ philosophy of Alain Badiou. According to Badiou, one of the most important features of an ethical attitude is the recognition of a void in a situation, that is, the attention for something that cannot be thought, felt, or experienced within a conventional system, something that always already escapes established and existing structures. This seems to bear some resemblance to the way French thinker Jacques Attali describes noise. According to Attali, noise interrupts and disconnects. It is an aggression against all sorts of code, against all kinds of order. Noise is an evental break from the status quo or ordinary situation, which compels recognition of something new. Rethinking noise this way means that noise does not exist in and of itself, but only in relation to the system within which it is inscribed. Noise is a void in a situation and can therefore be connected to Badiou's ideas about ethics. In a relative rather than an absolute sense, the improvised music of Evan Parker – and this essay especially draws attention to one of his projects, Drawn Inward, in which electronics and acoustical instruments meet and hold a dialogue – produces noise, precisely in and through improvisation; in many ways it disrupts musical conventions. The essay thus explores the space within the triangle noise–improvisation–ethics.