Since the beginning of speech, people have been making and hearing unintelligible sounds; since the invention of the alphabet and later of moveable type, spirits of all kinds have conjured with the combinatorics of letters; and since the 19th-century invention of audiovisual transmission and recording, new kinds of white noise have erupted. This talk aims partly to inventory and exemplify forms of gibberish, and partly to consider the necessarily nonrandom fates that chase us symbolic animals.
John Durham Peters (Yale) teaches and writes on media history and philosophy.