Fabio Tommy Pellizzer

The notion of communication system as presented in many works in the humanities is rooted in engineering and the seminal work of Claude E. Shannon titled “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” - published in 1948. In all, the narrowness of a mathematical understanding of communication, as presented by Shannon, presents severe limitations but also, as it will be shown, possible openings, directions or bridges towards the non-mathematical. In particular, the analysis presented here depicts any notion of communication as being inseparable from any noise. In fact, moving at or beyond the clearly defined mathematical limits that are explicit in Shannon’s theory means to invalidate the very possibility of a communication system at all. It is by looking at these limits, it is argued, that a discourse between a theory of communication and aesthetic theories of digital arts can be renewed. This is not least because in that dialogue might be found a plausible explanation for the ever-growing love of random functions and statistical modelling by many digital art practitioners.

What things mean to us involves more than what they afford in a straightforward sense (e.g., motor affordances). One can think of bodily adornments, lines, or precious stones. Differently from tools like hammers, these things are used to be displayed, watched etc. The paper investigates this very important feature of human behaviour, focusing especially on the expressive possibilities, or salience, of tools. This is interpreted as an emergent property of our engagement with tools, for which tools matter to us because of what they show, not just because of what we do with them in a strict sense. A phenomenological approach is obtained by building upon Heidegger's view of tools as structured by implicit “indications” of relevance; this approach is developed by engaging with debates on mark making, stone tools, and aesthetic experience. It is argued that the salience of things is a process where indications of relevance become explicit and relatively distanced from motor affordances; this alliance of explicitness and absence of action allows for things to "resonate" in us, inviting us to see tools as invitations to imagine, think, and remember. The paper considers examples of entanglements of salience and affordances, where tools and techniques shape symbols and imaginaries.

In this chapter, I explore the idea of noise as useless (perceptual) information, focusing especially on the relationship between perceptual configuration (temporal interplay, intersensory relations) and action (tool use, affordances). I do so building on Heidegger’s view of perceptual experience as involving indications and relations of handiness. I argue that noise is a disturbance of the unity of perceptual experience as informative about the affordances of things and places, and thus it affects the flow and unity of experience as action. I suggest that unlike broken tools, with noise the spotlight is on perception and on our role as agents who can and must act on how we perceive. I then explore some deeper ties between action and perception, arguing that the absence of (or deficiencies in) agency can result in perceptual contents lacking any order or structure in terms of which things are meant to be grasped properly, therefore generating some noisy experiences. I thus look into ‘alien tools’ and artefacts to emphasize some positive implications of noise as useless perceptual features that afford exploring new possibilities of perceptual configurations and reshaping the boundaries between noise and information.

This volume’s aim is to stimulate philosophical interest in the experience of noise. There are at least three important open questions about noise. First, how should the relationship between noise as a scientific phenomenon and as a type of experience be understood? Is the one to be understood in terms of the other, and what implications may be drawn from this? Second, are experiences of noise strictly limited to perceptual states or to one type of perceptual state – for instance, to acoustic experiences? E.g. is there noise that is visual or tactile? Is there noise that is cognitive, affective, or evaluative? Third, how can philosophy make sense of noise in the first place? Should noise simply be relegated to the hither side of the explananda of philosophy, as the mere leftover of whatever philosophy sets out to account for; meaning, being, totality, etc.? Or may noise be understood as a positive phenomenon in its own right, which has its own distinctive features and content, difficult though they might be to pin down? This volume will contribute to the burgeoning philosophy of noise by highlighting how contemporary philosophical perspectives with a phenomenological or experiential bent – the latter under both broad and narrow construals – can make inroads to these questions about a fascinating yet little understood quarter of human experience.

What things mean to us involves more than what they afford in a straightforward sense (e.g., motor affordances). One can think of bodily adornments, lines, or precious stones. Differently from tools like hammers, these things are used to be displayed, watched etc. The paper investigates this very important feature of human behaviour, focusing especially on the expressive possibilities, or salience, of tools. This is interpreted as an emergent property of our engagement with tools, for which tools matter to us because of what they show, not just because of what we do with them in a strict sense. A phenomenological approach is obtained by building upon Heidegger's view of tools as structured by implicit “indications” of relevance; this approach is developed by engaging with debates on mark making, stone tools, and aesthetic experience. It is argued that the salience of things is a process where indications of relevance become explicit and relatively distanced from motor affordances; this alliance of explicitness and absence of action allows for things to "resonate" in us, inviting us to see tools as invitations to imagine, think, and remember. The paper considers examples of entanglements of salience and affordances, where tools and techniques shape symbols and imaginaries.

In our experience, we see more than what we see in a strict sense. We see things as identical through (and despite) multiple spatio‐temporal appearances; we recognize things as something. In this article, I address this issue by asking how temporality allows us to see more in the present than what the present actually contains. I argue that presence and absence are “available,” not just as they are perceived through our senses, but as they are encountered through time, and notably, according to the relations that unify past, present, and future. To support this view, I refer to Heidegger's interpretation of Kant's notion of synthesis. Specifically, I consider Heidegger's reading of the so‐called A‐Deduction, where Kant describes our relation with objects as enabled by three syntheses (i.e., apprehension, reproduction, and recognition). I reconstruct Heidegger's holistic interpretation of the threefold synthesis as an interplay of past, present, and future. I show how in such interplay, temporal dimensions are unified by relations that do not rely on perception; these “time‐relations,” which Heidegger also calls “rules,” allow us to see what we see not just as it is literally perceived, but as part of an “image” of the manifold.

This paper provides an interpretation of two paragraphs from Heidegger’s 1925-26 lectures on the question of “truth”. First, I will consider Heidegger's criticism of Lotze’s notion of “ideality”; then, I will focus on Heidegger's claim that Husserl was “fascinated” by such a Lotzean notion. In the first section I will describe Heidegger's ontological approach to the distinction between reality and ideality. In the second section I will explain why, in Heidegger's view, Lotze’s understanding of the notions of “reality” and “ideality”, construed as different forms of Wirklichkeit, depends on some uncritical presumptions. In the third section, I will evaluate the consequences of Lotze's perspective on the notions of ideality and truth, so as to turn my attention to Husserl’s Prolegomenaand his allegedly adoption of Lotze’s notion of “ideality” as universality. Accordingly, I will suggest that Heidegger’s criticism is limited not only to Husserl's Prolegomena but to his phenomenology as a whole. Finally, I will discuss the problem of universality from the point of view of Heidegger’s existential analytic. By referring to a 1925 lecture, I will suggest that Heidegger’s rejection of Husserl’s “reduction” is to be read in light of his criticism of the notion of “ideality”.