la brea tar pits

Mud can perhaps be seen as a kind of slack, exhausted, overfolded dough, a material in which all possible lines of folding have been included, to the point where there is no longer any difference or potential left. Like many jokes, it embodies a double movement, whereby a signal is first degraded into noise, but then the noise rises up, like a tarbaby or creature formed out of mud, in the form of a new signal.

StevenConnor – ‘Michel Serres’s Milieux’