There is nothing more inescapable within the bazaar than Noize. 
Nothing more inadvertent either …

Business logic itself, to the contrary, is quiet, no background noise needed. The quiet stillness of its core calls to mind worlds we have often known in the past—the assembly, say: the noise-free meeting of minds reliably resolving in regulative consensus.
The commonsense dialogue of the big Other.

At its core, business logic is simple. It’s that silent agreeable accord with a nod of the head simple agreeable accord, nothing more beyond the simple maxim: can you and I each be seen to benefit?

I’d say ‘will you and I each benefit?’…
But of course, the whole genius of sales is my selling you my idea and making you think it was yours! It’s value situated within the universe of Noize! While the simplicity to a deal itself remains, it’s the fundamental irrationality of business practice and market attractions within the cacophony of ecstatic screaming that matters most…

Noise isn’t inherent to market exchange,
but the bazar’s excessive friction and its auditory dust are inescapable results 
of accumulative success!

Money talks, after all. But there’s really not much listening involved.
You don’t even talk to your business partner, you’re more talking to yourself… 
…making sure you hear yourself…
You can’t think straight when you’re out and about, surfing or walking. Excessive noise is often said to be anti-capitalist but that was before Noize became so central to business practice, so regulative of all sorts of value
and so compromising to the idea of a logical actor who thinks in silence without noise.

Instead, the consummate confident of the new business ontology is he who thrives in Noize, who gives himself up to it entirely— seen nowhere more clearly than Adam Sandler’s diamond dealer in Uncut Gems (2019).

That’s why Howard Ratner is such a powerful operator: he exists in a constant world of aggressive stimulus and takes it all in. Disorder is his kingdom. He flees from harmony into dissonance that he makes sing. Nearly the first twenty minutes of the film are constant assaults of auditory batteries that leave the viewer reeling but seem to leave Howard unfazed.

The whole film is harried by a nearly constant pulsating throb of auditory disturbance. Synths, soaring choral arcs, long ambient streaks of tones hovering on the brink of the drop, and always so much chanting—yelling, yelling, yelling. It’s hard to see voyeuristically,

much less strategize, plan, and attack. But Howie Ratner follows the only rule of business perfectly: nothing matters more than making money. And he perfectly embodies its necessary extension—giving yourself completely to the noise, moving in and out of discordant and dissonant situations, performances, pleas, and ploys so well that it ultimately claims his life.

You must move at the speed to business and commit to its exchange entirely.

Nauseating panics of sensory overload everywhere
Strategies of resistance find themselves swimming against the stream, but it’s just as easily that one can release and float along in the current as well.

There is nothing more valuable to capital than Noize, where the constant hubbub of noise becomes its own reference point of destabilizing universal capture…
as they say—this is where the magic happens!

Magic was always something impossible and yet perfectly plausible,
because we believe it! It’s Archimedean at heart, the proper positionality to leverage circumstance such that neither you nor others cannot see—
the ultimate non-position, best had amongst all that Noize!

Like business science—and sciences at large—instrumental magics (opposed to moral ones) are a desire to control, and there’s two magic-makers in Uncut Gems: Kevin Garnet, the Celtics star, and Howard, the ‘crazy ass Jew.’ The Safdie brothers were rather clever with this performance of magic mirrored by black folk and Jews—peoples that have historically managed to thrive in the naked uncertainty of noise, in the private hells of ghettoization…
…whose forefathers had to embrace the cacophony, with no other choice—
but to embrace the dissonance, to rise in beautiful resistant harmony!

Because that’s KG’s magic: the pure precision of deep and beautiful poise on the court, that which rises from the depths of his soul. You could almost call it a groove, or if you’re an old white man: jazz! KG is the straight man, seeking Howard’s rare black opal because it helps him connect with the ineffable and exist within the dictates of his moral universe.
Do right by muses and they will do right by you! 
The opal is a focal totem through which an inner calm might be accessed against the Noize, when KG goes to block out all the fans, coaches, and players on the court to concentrate on the shot—to submit to the destiny of his moral universe.

Is there a conceivable harmony with the dissonance?
Surely that’s Howie’s power: horizontal, superficial, and always protean. He is possessed of a profound ability to create echoes in sound and bring out the depth of its own uncontrollable difference. That’s really what Noize is, no? Shadows that speak? 
Garnet’s skill is something Howard alone can see, because his mobility within the world of Noize creates the depth within the stone. 
It’s that gem KG fixates on that, along with Howard, drives him crazy in his almost seduced enthrallment and dependency:

“The fuck’s going on, man? Ever since I met you, you’ve been giving me the run around with everything, man.
Feel like you’re fucking with my emotions. You’re just playing with me at some point.
This hasn’t been straight since I came here.”

Is Garnet speaking to an errant lover cheering from courtside, or to the owner of a rock?

In reality, KG has come through but a moment of the Noize that Howard lives in, and it disturbs him. That sheer sense of oppressive uncertainty with dangerous mob-violence and staggering losses at every turn—the constant reversibility within the quicksand that Howard miraculously manages to turn into sand traps… 
And it’s only now that we realize surprisingly that the black opal is a valueless piece despite being central to the film—only Howard and Garnet see value in it: value only with a price tag in the catallaxy of Noize. 

But while it’s the object of belief, the source of inspiration, in KG’s mind, for Howie it’s a malleable piece of inherently valueless rock that can garner all sorts of appraisals…
There’s no ‘real’ value appraised to this seemingly incredible diamond, beyond what we say about it. No lesson more valuable than that...

Unless we forget the depths of the incredible magic that inspires an athlete, the power that the Voice of a businessman wields! Moral and instrumental magics, intertwined and interlaced as the stuff and substance of our existence in the cosmos of Noize!

“I see you, KG! I see your conviction, I see your passion—you’re gonna make miracles with that stone!”

Conviction, honesty, and sincerity: it’s what we need to make magic incomprehensible! It’s the universe of noise through which pointed, unabashed singularity makes its emergence!

Without Howard’s noise, there’s nothing for Kevin!

So who’s the real miracle-man here, the greatest conqueror of disadvantage, auditory torture, and torturous alienation from a moment of silence?
The Safdies were explicit that they wanted to take Jewish suffering and turn it into Howard’s superpower. And it is, though not in the way they think: to lose is to suffer but to win is also to suffer—to become further ensnared in the shifting sands of instrumental magics that are bound to be reversed at some unknown point.

Howie’s power is most profound but in giving himself up to it entirely it eventually kills him, with a single bullet he couldn’t have predicted.

But even before that, the substance of his self has dissolved, 
such that he exists purely in dreams and in speculation.

Into what basis does the self dissolve in Noize?

Into the flows of business logic and annihilative ecstasy, all to make a quick buck?
Into an essentially fixed point of personal pride, the agent identified as the source of noise?
Into a collective political subjectivity of desire, direction, and depth?

Any revolutionary advocacy of noise must undertake these rigorous interrogations. We cannot afford to continue treating noise as resistance in and of itself. Be careful when calling for this sort of dissolution, noise in the cosmos of Noize. In deference, either to the essential self or to the essential speed of exchange, noise is no inherent force of resistance any longer.
To the contrary, it’s the simple stock of which our values are constituted.

“How do you know, Howard?”
“I don’t know; I just know!”

It seems within this world we discontents have two choices charged with individualizing instrumentalism or communal moralism, magic’s two divergent directives:
Figure out a way to create quiet… 
or learn to do something different with all that noise.

17 April 2022