Abstract

"Stains" can serve as a metaphor for the role allotted to meaninglessness not only by partisans of the deterritorializing force of "brute matter", but also by diagnosers of symbolic incompleteness. For both, the blindspot that will lead to the disturbance of a given regime of meaning must be determined through a smear or glitch which that regime cannot sublate: the mark of a Real stripped of systematising mediation. However, we argue that it is all too easy to allow the stringency of this Real to be undermined by the inflation in its name of merely contingent empirical instances. Such blockages to theoretical and artistic practice can be removed with the aid of the articulation of incompleteness and inconsistency implied by François Laruelle's conception of the Real as non-consistent but hypercomplete "radical immanence". À rebours of Laruelle himself, different types of meaninglessness can then be distinguished, de-metaphorized, and conceptualized as "noise".