And yet without it, there would be no message. There is, in short, no message without resistance. Instead of remaining pure noise, the latter becomes a means of transport. Thus in the first volume of the Hermes series noise is analysed as the third, empirical element of the message. Ideally, communication must be separated from noise.
Every formalism is a way of moving from one region of knowledge to another.
To communicate is to move within a class of objects that have the same form. A parasite is a noise in a channel. Noise in language as in other systems of communication has its equivalent in the very notion of system itself. For, 'we know no system that functions perfectly, that is to say, without losses, flights, wear and tear, errors, accidents, opacity - a system whose return is one for one'. At one point in his intellectual trajectory, the notion of structure seemed to serve the purposes of translation - and therefore, transport very well.