Abstract

I argue that Japanese noise could only become meaningful and articulate at a time when thought and language have become somehow inarticulate. I very briefly recount T.W. Adorno's controversial claims that we live in a wholly abstract and instrumental world, where each object we encounter holds meaning only as 1) a representative of the class to which it belongs and 2) a tool for our use. As is now the convention in Adorno scholarship and cultural studies generally, I name ordering principles of such life identity thinking and the object of its inarticulacy the non-identical. Rather than devoting this paper to debating the veracity of these principles, once I unpack modern art's predicament within the confines of identity thinking I make a case for the utter sensibility of the prima facie senselessness of Japanese noise. But this ultimate sensibility of Japanese noise, I argue, exemplifies the crisis of all modern art: despite its efforts to frustrate sense and stall the prevailing cultural logic, it becomes sensible as a commodified cultural product. Japanese noise therefore provides a case study of the process by which a critique of a consumer culture becomes a commercial product of that culture, thereby neutralizing the critical power of the work. Within such structures the critical capacity of art in general is under threat.