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Face me , said the Bouquet Scholar to her listener. When he did, she kissed his mouth; lips turned into rosebuds. The two then spoke in unison. Let my words be the bloom of revolution. Not the round and round of circles that go nowhere, that repeat the same old stories under the veil of overthrow. Let this be the revolution whose axis is the heart.

—Joanna Freuh, Erotic Faculties 

My face grows flowers of pink and red. My mouth vomits flowers and sucks them in. I am the fucking fuschia arousing rose at the center of your heart. There no mind misconstrues pink as a maudlin color or mistakes rosiness for foolish optimism. A rose is not embarrassed by its color or its beauty.

The rose is rowdy. Flowering voices know Fuck Theory, the pink that was the rose of China Sharon Jericho. This pink is love. In the pink first meant in love, the highest state of health.

—Joanna Freuh, Erotic Faculties 

istmos:

(…)We must give up trying to know those to whom we are linked by something essential; by this I mean, we must greet them in the relation with the unknown in which they greet us, as well, in our distance. Friendship, this relation without dependence, without episode yet into which all of the simplicity of life enters, passes by way of the recognition of the common strangeness that does not allow us to speak of our friends, but only to speak to them, not to make of them a topic of conversations (or articles), but the movement of understanding in which, speaking to us, they reserve, even on the most familiar terms, an infinite distance, the fundamental separation on the basis of which what separates becomes relation. Here discretion is not in the simple refusal to put forward confidences (how vulgar that would be, even to think of it), but it is the interval, the pure interval that, from me to this other who is a friend, measures all that is between us, the interruption of being that never authorizes me to use him, or my knowledge of him (where it to praise him) and which, far from preventing all communication, relates us to one another in the difference and sometimes the silence of speech.(…)

Jacques Derrida, “Politics of Friendship”, p. 386-387

This shift in position is consistent with Michel Serres’s observation that, in human relations the positions of sender/receiver are always in flux. In 1948, Claude Shannon, a research engineer with Ma Bell, rationalized communications by offering a model that stubbornly remains dominant in information theory and beyond. Communication is an immutable message in the form of information initiated by a source, moved through a channel with all its susceptibilities and vagaries, and is finally received at its destination. This is the world of signals, noise, probability error, coding and decoding, and channel capacity, of clear transmission functions within tolerances.16 But Serres’s analyses of communication question the stability of this system. He prioritizes the concept of noise over message, noting that in French a secondary meaning of the word for “parasite” is “static or interference.” Rather than the unwanted remainder, noise is the motive force that moves subjects from parasite to host.17 There is no message without resistance.

In a certain way, identity, then, is a noise…that interferes with the messages that we transmit and receive. It’s hardly audible to others, but we hear it loud and clear. Yet it’s not the kind of noise that bothers us; on the contrary; it gives us a sense of reality, a measure of empowerment: it adds “room-tone” to the otherwise hyper-real world around us. Some may enjoy listening to it more than others; some may tune in to it more than the others would care to. And some play it so loudly just for the fun of it or in order to make the others listen; but the others usually do not and would not listen.18

Dystopia is a noisy non-place.

—Being Heard: Listening In—Sound & Our Dystopian Present by Matt Malsky