In.Formation

>> ONLY FOR EDUCATIONAL (RE)PURPOSE

IN.FORMATION

Who is the author ?

02.

The death of the author

03.

The poetics of L=a=n=g=u=a=g=e

04.

About L=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poetry

05.

Gathered: A brief history of appropriate writing

06.

The cut-up method of Brion Gysin

07.

THREE Basic forms of remix: A POINT OF ENTRY

08.

Remix culture vs. Object-oriented culture

09.

Loops of perception

10.

What comes after remix ?

11.

Thoughts on Web 2

12.

Web 2.0 Mashup Ecosystem

13.

Mix, Match, And Mutate. “Mash-ups” homespun combinations of mainstream services are altering the Net

14.

Tracking the DIY Phenomenon

15.

Psychogeography

16.

Theory of Derive

[ S T R U C T U F T H E CO N T

R

E O ENT A N

D T

H

E C

ONT E N T

O

A L S O C A L L I T AS T A B L E O F CO N T E N T .

T H

E ST

R UC T

UR E

]

W H I C H Y O U ( AS A C O N V E N T I O N ) C A N

01.

01.

WHO IS THE AUTHOR ? SAMPLING / REMIXING / OPEN SOURCE

New media culture brings with it a number of new models of authorship which

common interests and start a “project” or a series of “projects.” We can think

all involve different forms of collaboration. Of course, collaborative authorship

of this as a “social culture”; we may also note that while the new media culture

is not unique to new media: think of medieval cathedrals, traditional painting

may not have produced any “masterpieces”, it definitely had a huge impact on

studios which consisted from a master and assistants, music orchestras, or con-

how people and organizations communicate. Along with database, navigable

temporary film productions which, like medieval cathedrals, involve thousands

space, simulation and interactivity, new cultural forms enabled by new media

of people collaborating over a substantial period of time. In fact, in we think

also include new patterns of social communication. In short, the network-en-

about this historically, we will see collaborative authorship represents a norm

abled process of collaboration, networking, and exchange is a valuable form of

rather than exception. In contrast, romantic model of a solitary single author

contemporary culture, regardless of whether it results in any “objects” or not.

occupies a very small place in the history of human culture. New media, however, offers some new variations on the previous forms of collaborative authorship.

2. Interactivity as Miscommunication Between the Author and the User

In this essay I will look at some of these variations. I will try to consider them

In the first part of the 1990s when interactivity was a new term, it was often

not in isolation but in a larger context of contemporary cultural economies. As

claimed that an interactive artwork involves collaboration between an author

we will see, new media industries and cultures systematically pioneer new types

and a user. Is this true? The notion of collaboration assumes some shared un-

of authorship, new relationships between producers and consumers, and new

derstanding and the common goals between the collaborators, but in the case of

distribution models, thus acting as a the avant-garde of the culture industry.

interactive media these are often absent. After an author designs the work, s/he has no idea about the assumptions and intentions of a particular user. Such a

1. Collaboration of Different Individuals and/or Groups

user, therefore, can’t be really called a collaborator of the author. From the other

The most often discussed new type of authorship associated with new media

side, a user coming to a new media artwork often also does not know anything

is collaboration (over the network or in person, in real time or not) between a

about this work, what is supposed to do, what its interface is, etc. For this user,

group of artists to create a new media work / performance / event / “project.” Of-

therefore, an author is not really a collaborator. Instead of collaborators, the

ten, no tangible objects or an even definite event like a performance ever comes

author and the user are often two total strangers, two aliens which do not share a

out from these collaborations, but this does not matter. People meet people with

common communication code.

While interactivity in new media art often leads to” miscommunication” be-

sional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and

tween the author and the user, commercial culture employs interactive feedback

clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of cul-

to assure that no miscommunication will take place. It is common for film pro-

ture.” In software-driven production environment, these quotations come not

ducers to test a finished edit of a new film before a “focus group.” The responses

only from the creators’ memories of what they previously saw, read, and heard,

of the viewers are then used to re–edit the film to improve comprehension of the

but also directly from the databases of media assets, as well as numerous other

narrative or to change the ending. In this practice, rather than presenting the

words that in the case of the World Wide Web are just a click away.

users with multiple versions of the narrative, a single version that is considered the most successful is selected.

4. Collaboration Between a Company and the Users When it released the original Doom (1993), id software also released detailed

3. Authorship as Selection From a Menu

descriptions of game files formats and a game editor, thus encouraging the

I discuss this type of authorship in detail in The Language of New Media; here I

players to expand the game, creating new levels. Adding to the game became its

just want to note that it applies to both professional designers and the users. The

essential part, with new levels widely available on the Internet for anybody to

design process in new media involves selection from various menus of software

download. Since Doom, such practices became commonplace in computer game

packages, databases of media assets, etc. Similarly, a user is often made to feel

industry. Often, the company would include elements designed by the users in

like a “real artist” by allowing her/him to quickly create a professional looking

a new release.

work by selecting from a few menus. The examples of such “authorship by selection” are the Web sites that allow the users to quickly construct a postcard or

With another widely popular game Sims (2001), this type of collaboration

even a short movie by selecting from a menu of images, clips and sounds.

reached a new stage. The Web site for the game allows users to upload the characters, the settings, and the narratives they constructed into the common

Three decades ago Roland Barthes elegantly defined a cultural text as “a tissue

library, as well as download characters, settings, and narratives constructed by

of quotations”: “We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single

others. Soon it turned out that the majority of users do not even play the game

‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimen-

but rather use its software to create their own characters and storyboard their

adventures. In contrast to earlier examples of such practice – for instance the

6. Remixing

1980s Star Track fans editing their own video tapes by sampling from various

Remixing originally had a precise and a narrow meaning that gradually became

Star Track episodes or writing short stories involving main Star Track characters

diffused. Although precedents of remixing can be found earlier, it was the

– now it came into the central place, being legitimized and encouraged by game

introduction of multi-track mixers that made remixing a standard practice. With

producers.

each element of a song – vocals, drums, etc. – available for separate manipulation, it became possible to “re-mix” the song: change the volume of some tracks

Another way in which a company can be said to collaborate with the users of its

or substitute new tracks for the old ounces. Gradually the term became more and

software is by incorporating their suggestions about new features into the new

more broad, today referring to any reworking of an original musical work(s).

version of the software. This is common practice of many software companies.

In his DJ Culture Ulf Poscardt singles out different stages in the evolution of 5. Collaboration Between the Author and Software

remixing practice. In 1972 DJ Tom Moulton mixed his first disco remixes; as

Authoring using Al or AI is the most obvious case of human-software col-

Poscard points out, they “show a very chaste treatment of the original song.

laboration. The author sets up some general rules but s/he has no control over

Moulton sought above all a different weighting of the various soundtracks,

the concrete details of the work – these emerge as a result of the interactions

and worked the rhythmic elements of the disco songs even more clearly and

of the rules. More generally, we can say that all authorship that uses electronic

powerfully...Moulton used the various elements of the sixteen or twenty-four

and computer tools is a collaboration between the author and these tools that

track master tapes and remixed them.” By 1987, “DJs started to ask other DJs for

make possible certain creative operations and certain ways of thinking while

remixes” and the treatment of the original material became much more aggres-

discouraging others. Of course humans have designed these tools, so it would be

sive. For example, “Coldcut used the vocals from Ofra Hanza’s ‘Im Nin Alu’ and

more precise to say that the author who uses electronic/ software tools engages in

contrasted Rakim’s ultra-deep bass voice with her provocatively feminine voice.

a dialog with the software designers (see #4).

To this were added techno sounds and a house-inspired remix of a rhythm

section that loosened the heavy, sliding beat of the rap piece, making it sound

which “appropriation” does not have. And indeed, the original “appropria-

lighter and brighter.” In another example, London DJ Tim Simenon produced a

tion artists” such as Richard Prince simply copied the existing image as a

remix of his personal top ten of 1987. Simenon: “We found a common denomi-

whole rather than re-mixing it. As in the case of Duchamp’s famous urinal, the

nator between the songs we wanted to use, and settled on the speed of 114 beats

aesthetic effect here is the result of a transfer of a cultural sign from one sphere

per minute. The tracks of the individual songs were adapted to this beat either by

to another, rather than any modification of a sign.

speeding them up or slowing them down.”

The only other commonly used term across media is “quoting” but I see it as In the last few years people started to apply the term “remix” to other media:

describing a very different logic than remixing. If remixing implies systemati-

visual productions, software, literary texts. With electronic music and software

cally rearranging the whole text, quoting means inserting some fragments from

serving as the two key reservoirs of new metaphors for the rest of culture today,

old text(s) into the new one. Thus it is more similar to another new fundamental

this expansion of the term is inevitable; one can only wonder why it did no

authorship practice that, like remixing, was made possible by electronic tech-

happen earlier. Yet we are left with an interesting paradox: while in the realm

nology – sampling.

of commercial music remixing is officially accepted , in other cultural areas it is seen as violating the copyright and therefore as stealing. So while filmmak-

7. Sampling: New Collage?

ers, visual artists, photographers, architects and Web designers routinely remix

According to Ulf Poscardt, “The DJ’s domination of the world started around

already existing works, this is not openly admitted, and no proper terms equiva-

1987.” This take-over is closely related to the new freedom in the use of mixing

lent to remixing in music exist to describe these practices.

and sampling. That year M/A/R/S released their record “Pump Up the Volume”;

The term that we do have is “appropriation.” However, this never left its original

as Poscardt points out, “This record, cobbled together from a crazy selection of

art world context where it was first applied to the works of post-modern artists of

samples, fundamentally changed the pop world. As if from nowhere, the avant-

the early 1980s based on re-working older photographic images. Consequently,

garde sound collage, unusual for the musical taste of the time, made it to the top

it never achieved the same wide use as “remixing.” Anyway, “Remixing” is a

of the charts and became the year’s highest-selling 12-inch single in Britain.”

better term because it suggests a systematic re-working of a source, the meaning

Theorizing immediately after M/A/R/S, Coldcut, Bomn The Bass and S-Xpress

made full use of sampling, music critic Andrew Goodwin defined sampling as

Last but not least, It is relevant to note here that the revolution in electronic pop

“the uninhibited use of digital sound recording as a central element of composi-

music that took place in the second part of the 1980s was paralleled by similar

tion. Sampling thus becomes an aesthetic programme.” We can say that with

developments in pop visual culture of the same period. The introduction of

sampling technology, the practices of montage and collage that were always cen-

electronic editing equipment such as switcher, keyer, paintbox, and image store

tral to twentieth century culture, became industrialized. Yet we should be careful

made remixing and sampling a common practice in video production towards

in applying the old terms to new technologically driven cultural practices. While

the end of the decade; first pioneered in music videos, it later took over the

the terms “montage” and “collage” regularly pop up in the writings of music

whole visual culture of TV. Other software tools such as Photoshop (1989) had

theorists from Poscardt to Kodwo Eshun and DJ Spooky, I think these terms that

the same effect on the fields of graphic design, commercial illustration and

come to us from literary and visual modernism of the early twentieth century do

photography. And, a few years later, World Wide Web redefined an electronic

not adequately describe new electronic music. To note just three differences:

document as a mix of other documents. Remix culture has arrived.

musical samples are often arranged in loops; the nature of sound allows musicians to mix pre-existent sounds in a variety of ways, from clearly differentiating

8. Open Source Model

and contrasting individual samples (thus following the traditional modernist

Open Source model is just one among a number of different models of author-

aesthetics of montage/collage), to mixing them into an organic and coherent

ship (and ownership) which emerged in software community and which can

whole ; finally, the electronic musicians often conceive their works beforehand

be applied (or are already being applied) to cultural authorship. The examples

as something that will be remixed, sampled, taken apart and modified. Poscardt:

of such models are the original project Xanadu by Ted Nelson, “freeware,” and

“house (like all other kinds of club music) has relinquished the unity of the song

“shareware.” In the case of Open Source, the key idea is that one person (or

and its inviolability. Of course the creator of a house song thinks at first in terms

group) writes software code, which can be then modified by another user; the

of his single track, but he also thinks of it in the context of a club evening, into

result can be subsequently modified by a new user, and so on.

which his track can be inserted at a particular point.”

If we apply this model to a cultural sphere, do we get any new model of author-

this work and also what they can do with it (i.e. the ways in which it can be modi-

ship? It seems to me that the models of remixing, sampling and appropriation

fied and re-used) Similarly we may imagine a community formed around some

conceptually are much richer than the Open Source idea. There are, however,

creative work; this community would agree on what constitutes the kernel of this

two aspects of Open Source movement that make it interesting. One is the idea

work. Just as in the case of Lunix, it would be assumed that while the work can be

of license. There are approximately 30 different types of licenses in Open Source

played with and endlessly modified, the users should not modify the kernel in

movement. The licenses specify the rights and responsibilities of a person

dramatic ways.

modifying the code. For instance, one license (called Gnu Public License) specifies that the programmer have to provide the copy of the new code to the

Indeed, if music, films, books and visual art are our cultural software, why not

community; another stipulates that the programmer can sell the new code and

apply the ideas from software development to cultural authorship? In fact,

he does not have to share with the community, but he can’t do things to damage

I believe that we can already find many communities and individual works

the community.

that employ the ideas of license and kernel, even though these terms are not explicitly used. One example is Jon Ippolito’s Variable Media Initiative. Ippolito

Another idea is that of the kernel. At the “heart” of Lunix operating system is its

proposed that an artist who accepts variability in how her/his work will be

kernel - the code essential to the functioning of the system. While users add and

exhibited and/or re-created in the future (which is almost inevitable in the case

modify different parts of Lunix system, they are careful not to change the kernel

of net art and other software-based work) should specify what constitutes the

in fundamental ways. Thus all dialects of Lunix share the common core.

legitimate exhibition/recreation; in short, s/he should provide the equivalent of

I think that the ideas of license and of kernel can be directly applied to cultural

the software license.

authorship. Currently appropriation, sampling, remixing and quoting are controlled by a set of heterogeneous and often outdated legal rules. These rules

Among the cultural projects inspired by Open Source Movement, OPUS project

tell people what they are not allowed to do with the creative works of others.

(2002) stands out from the rest in how it tackles with the question of authorship

Imagine now a situation where an author releases her/his work into the world

in computer culture. Importantly, OPUS, created by Raqs Media Collective (New

accompanied by a license that will tell others both what they should not do with

Delhi), is both a software package and an accompanying “theoretical package.”

Thus the theoretical ideas about authorship articulated by Raqs collective do not

envoked and used today: on the one hand, completely open model that lets

remain theory but are implemented in software available for everybody to use. In

everybody modify anything; on the other hand, tight control of all permissible

short, this is “software theory” at its best: theoretical ideas translated into a new

uses of a cultural object by traditional copyright practices. Importantly, as distri-

kind of cultural software.

bution of culture, from texts to music to videos, is increasingly tmoving online, economically dominant ideas about authorship and copyright in our society

OPUS software designed to enable possible multi-user cultural collaboration in

will be implemented in actual software that will control who can access, copy

a digital network environment. In OPUS (which stands for “Open Platform for

and modify the cultural objects, and at what price. For instance, while MPEG-1

Unlimited Signification), anybody can start a new project and invite other people

through MPEG-7 media formats focused on “compression and the coordination

to download and upload media objects to the project’s area on OPUS site (it is

of different media tracks, the recent proposal for MPEG-21 focuses on digital

also possible to download OPUS software itself and put it on new servers). When

rights management. The authors of the proposal imagine a future “multimedia

the author uploads a new media object (anything from a text to a piece of music),

framework” where “all people on Earth take part in a network involving content

s/he can specify what modifications by others will be allowed. Subsequently,

providers, value adders, packages, service providers, consumers, and resell-

OPUS software keeps track of every new modification to this object. Each media

ers.” Like XML, MPEG-21 consists from a number of separate components,

objects archived, exhibited and made available for transformation within OPUS

those very names reveal its aim to manage all the difficult issues of content

carries with it data that can identify all whose who worked on it. This means that

creation and distribution in digital network environment through technologi-

while OPUS enables collaboration, it also preserves the identity of authors/cre-

cal solutions: “Intellectual property Management and Protection,” “Rights

ators (no matter how big or small their contribution may be) at each stage of a

Data Dictionary,” “Rights Expression Language.” OPUS anticipates this kind of

work’s evolution.

future by providing an intellectually sofisticated alternative paradigm of cultural authorship and access implemented in software.

The Raqs Collective introduces a new term “rescension” to address this type of colloborative authorship. In my view, “rescension” presents a sophisticated

9. Brand as the Author

comprise between the two extreme ideologies of digital authorship commonly

Who are the people behind Nike? Prada? Sony? Gap? Consumer brands do not

make visible design teams, engineers, stylists, writers, programmers, and other

themselves as corporate brands, in most case their mascarades still followed

creative indivdiuals who make their individual products and product lines. Com-

the conventiosn of artworld rather than of commercial brand environment. For

peting in already crowded semantic space, the company wants the consumers to

instance, when jodi.org burst into the emerging net art scene with their Web

remember one thing only: the brand name. To bring in the names of individuals

site a number of years ago, the fact that for the first couple of years we only knew

involved in creating brand products - which are numerous and which continu-

the project by the name of its rule URL but not the artist’s names was part of the

osly change - would dissolve brand identity. Note that a company does not try to

attraction. However, eventually the names of the creators, Joan Heemskerk and

hide these names - you can find them if you want - but they are just not part of

Dirk Paesmans, became public. And Etoy, the most systematic among artists’

brand publicity. Unless, of course, the name involved itself represents another

collectives simulating as brands, still has not been completely consistent in fol-

brand, like Rem Koolhaus or Bruce Mau. Koolhaus and Mau are brands because

lowing the rules of corporate authorship. Etoy presents itself as a company which

they function exactly like all other brands: they have big teams working on dif-

consists from a small number of etoy agents which go by their first names: etoy.

firent projects but the names of individual contributors are not made visible. A

zak, etoy.zai, and so on. Thus it foregrounds all the inividuals involved in brand

museum hires Rem Koolhaus to have a building by Rem Koolhaus - not because

managemnet, even though they go by semi-fictional names.

it wants to skills of a particular media designer, lighting designer, or an architect working for Koolhaus. The same goes for most well-known musicians, artists,

My aim here is not to critic jodi or etoy but rather to point that high culture and

and architects. In contrast to “corporate brands,” these are “individual brands.”

consumer culture follow very diffirent models of authorship, which makes it hard even for smartest artists to completely simulate the corporate model. Still,

When we think of these individual brands we not supposed to also think of all the

artist-as-ananomous-brand phenomenon that already existed before Internet

people involved in their creations. We can see here the romantic ideology with its

became much more common on the Web, with many artists, designers and

emphasis on a solitary genius still at work. In a certain sense, corporate brands

design groups choosing to focus visibility on the name of their site rather than

are more “progressive” in that they dont’t hide (although they dont foreground it

their individual names: from jodi and etoy to future farmers, unclickable.com,

either) the fact that everything they sell is created by collectives of individu-

uncontrol.com, and many many others.

als. And while in the last decade a number of artists’ collectives have presented

Conclusion The commonality of menu selection / remixing / sampling / synthesis / “open sourcing” in contemporary culture calls for a whole new critical vocabulary to adequately describe these operations, their multiple variations and combinations. One way to develop such a vocabulary is to begin correlate the terms that already exist but are limited to particular media. Electronic music theory brings to the table analysis of mixing, sampling, and synthesis; academic literary theory can also make a contribution, with its theorizations of intertext, paratext , and hyperlinking; the scholars of visual culture can contribute their understanding of montage, collage and appropriation. Having a critical vocabulary that can be applied across media will help us to finally accept these operations as legitimate cases of authorship, rather than exceptions. To quote Poscardt one last time, “however much quoting, sampling and stealing is done – in the end it is the old subjects that undertake their own modernization. Even an examination of technology and the conditions of productions does not rescue aesthetics from finally having to believe in the author. He just looks different.”

02.

THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR | ROLAND BARTHES . TRANSLATED BY RICHARD HOWARD

In his story Sarrasine, Balzac, speaking of a castrato disguised as a woman, writes

no doubt by our society insofar as, at the end of the middle ages, with English

this sentence: “It was Woman, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her

empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it

instinctive fears, her unprovoked bravado, her daring and her delicious delicacy

discovered the prestige of the individual, or, to put it more nobly, of the “human

of feeling” Who is speaking in this way? Is it the story’s hero, concerned to

person” Hence it is logical that with regard to literature it should be positivism,

ignore the castrato concealed beneath the woman? Is it the man Balzac, endowed

resume and the result of capitalist ideology, which has accorded the great-

by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it the author Balzac,

est importance to the author’s “person” The author still rules in manuals of

professing certain “literary” ideas of femininity? Is it universal wisdom? or ro-

literary history, in biographies of writers, in magazine interviews, and even in

mantic psychology? It will always be impossible to know, for the good reason that

the awareness of literary men, anxious to unite, by their private journals, their

all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices,

person and their work; the image of literature to be found in contemporary

and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot as-

culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes,

sign a specific origin: literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into

his passions; criticism still consists, most of the time, in saying that Baudelaire’s

which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with

work is the failure of the man Baudelaire, Van Gogh’s work his madness,

the very identity of the body that writes.

Tchaikovsky’s his vice: the explanation of the work is always sought in the man

···

who has produced it, as if, through the more or less transparent allegory of fic-

Probably this has always been the case: once an action is recounted, for intransi-

tion, it was always finally the voice of one and the same person, the author, which

tive ends, and no longer in order to act directly upon reality — that is, finally

delivered his “confidence.”

external to any function but the very exercise of the symbol — this disjunction

···

occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins.

Though the Author’s empire is still very powerful (recent criticism has often

Nevertheless, the feeling about this phenomenon has been variable; in primitive

merely consolidated it), it is evident that for a long time now certain writers

societies, narrative is never undertaken by a person, but by a mediator, shaman

have attempted to topple it. In France, Mallarme was doubtless the first to

or speaker, whose “performance” may be admired (that is, his mastery of the

see and foresee in its full extent the necessity of substituting language itself

narrative code), but not his “genius” The author is a modern figure, produced

for the man who hitherto was supposed to own it; for Mallarme, as for us, it is

language which speaks, not the author: to write is to reach, through a preexist-

fragment, derived from Charlus. Surrealism lastly — to remain on the level of

ing impersonality — never to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the

this prehistory of modernity — surrealism doubtless could not accord language a

realistic novelist — that point where language alone acts, “performs,” and not

sovereign place, since language is a system and since what the movement sought

“oneself”: Mallarme’s entire poetics consists in suppressing the author for the

was, romantically, a direct subversion of all codes — an illusory subversion,

sake of the writing (which is, as we shall see, to restore the status of the reader.)

moreover, for a code cannot be destroyed, it can only be “played with”; but by

Valery, encumbered with a psychology of the Self, greatly edulcorated Mallarme’s

abruptly violating expected meanings (this was the famous surrealist “jolt”), by

theory, but, turning in a preference for classicism to the lessons of rhetoric,

entrusting to the hand the responsibility of writing as fast as possible what the

he unceasingly questioned and mocked the Author, emphasized the linguistic

head itself ignores (this was automatic writing), by accepting the principle and

and almost “chance” nature of his activity, and throughout his prose works

the experience of a collective writing, surrealism helped secularize the image of

championed the essentially verbal condition of literature, in the face of which

the Author. Finally, outside of literature itself (actually, these distinctions are

any recourse to the writer’s inferiority seemed to him pure superstition. It is

being superseded), linguistics has just furnished the destruction of the Author

clear that Proust himself, despite the apparent psychological character of what

with a precious analytic instrument by showing that utterance in its entirety is a

is called his analyses, undertook the responsibility of inexorably blurring, by an

void process, which functions perfectly without requiring to be filled by the per-

extreme subtilization, the relation of the writer and his characters: by making

son of the interlocutors: linguistically, the author is never anything more than

the narrator not the person who has seen or felt, nor even the person who writes,

the man who writes, just as I is no more than the man who says I: language knows

but the person who will write (the young man of the novel — but, in fact, how old

a “subject,” not a “person,” end this subject, void outside of the very utterance

is he, and who is he? — wants to write but cannot, and the novel ends when at

which defines it, suffices to make language “work,” that is, to exhaust it.

last the writing becomes possible), Proust has given modern writing its epic: by

···

a radical reversal, instead of putting his life into his novel, as we say so often, he

The absence of the Author (with Brecht, we might speak here of a real “alien-

makes his very life into a work for which his own book was in a sense the model,

ation:’ the Author diminishing like a tiny figure at the far end of the literary

so that it is quite obvious to us that it is not Charlus who imitates Montesquiou,

stage) is not only a historical fact or an act of writing: it utterly transforms the

but that Montesquiou in his anecdotal, historical reality is merely a secondary

modern text (or — what is the same thing — the text is henceforth written and

read so that in it, on every level, the Author absents himself). Time, first of all, is

— or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, that is, the very

no longer the same. The Author, when we believe in him, is always conceived as

thing which ceaselessly questions any origin.

the past of his own book: the book and the author take their places of their own

···

accord on the same line, cast as a before and an after: the Author is supposed to

We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single “theo-

feed the book — that is, he pre-exists it, thinks, suffers, lives for it; he maintains

logical” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God), but is a space of many

with his work the same relation of antecedence a father maintains with his child.

dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one

Quite the contrary, the modern writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with

of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand

his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his

sources of culture. Like Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, both sub-

writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate; there is no

lime and comical and whose profound absurdity precisely designates the truth

other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and

of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture forever anterior, never original;

now. This is because (or: it follows that) to write can no longer designate an op-

his only power is to combine the different kinds of writing, to oppose some by

eration of recording, of observing, of representing, of “painting” (as the Classic

others, so as never to sustain himself by just one of them; if he wants to express

writers put it), but rather what the linguisticians, following the vocabulary of the

himself, at least he should know that the internal “thing” he claims to “translate”

Oxford school, call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given to the

is itself only a readymade dictionary whose words can be explained (defined)

first person and to the present), in which utterance has no other content than

only by other words, and so on ad infinitum: an experience which occurred in

the act by which it is uttered: something like the / Command of kings or the I

an exemplary fashion to the young De Quincey, so gifted in Greek that in order

Sing of the early bards; the modern writer, having buried the Author, can there-

to translate into that dead language certain absolutely modern ideas and images,

fore no longer believe, according to the “pathos” of his predecessors, that his

Baudelaire tells us, “he created for it a standing dictionary much more complex

hand is too slow for his thought or his passion, and that in consequence, making

and extensive than the one which results from the vulgar patience of purely liter-

a law out of necessity, he must accentuate this gap and endlessly “elaborate” his

ary themes” (Paradis Artificiels). succeeding the Author, the writer no longer

form; for him, on the contrary, his hand, detached from any voice, borne by a

contains within himself passions, humors, sentiments, impressions, but that

pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin

enormous dictionary, from which he derives a writing which can know no end or

halt: life can only imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, a

Let us return to Balzac’s sentence: no one (that is, no “person”) utters it: its

lost, infinitely remote imitation.

source, its voice is not to be located; and yet it is perfectly read; this is because

···

the true locus of writing is reading. Another very specific example can make

Once the Author is gone, the claim to “decipher” a text becomes quite useless.

this understood: recent investigations (J. P. Vernant) have shed light upon the

To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish

constitutively ambiguous nature of Greek tragedy, the text of which is woven

it with a final signification, to close the writing. This conception perfectly suits

with words that have double meanings, each character understanding them

criticism, which can then take as its major task the discovery of the Author (or

unilaterally (this perpetual misunderstanding is precisely what is meant by “the

his hypostases: society, history, the psyche, freedom) beneath the work: once the

tragic”); yet there is someone who understands each word in its duplicity, and

Author is discovered, the text is “explained:’ the critic has conquered; hence it is

understands further, one might say, the very deafness of the characters speaking

scarcely surprising not only that, historically, the reign of the Author should also

in front of him: this someone is precisely the reader (or here the spectator). In

have been that of the Critic, but that criticism (even “new criticism”) should be

this way is revealed the whole being of writing: a text consists of multiple writ-

overthrown along with the Author. In a multiple writing, indeed, everything is to

ings, issuing from several cultures and entering into dialogue with each other,

be distinguished, but nothing deciphered; structure can be followed, “threaded”

into parody, into contestation; but there is one place where this multiplicity is

(like a stocking that has run) in all its recurrences and all its stages, but there is

collected, united, and this place is not the author, as we have hitherto said it

no underlying ground; the space of the writing is to be traversed, not penetrated:

was, but the reader: the reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without

writing ceaselessly posits meaning but always in order to evaporate it: it proceeds

any being lost, all the citations a writing consists of; the unity of a text is not in

to a systematic exemption of meaning. Thus literature (it would be better,

its origin, it is in its destination; but this destination can no longer be personal:

henceforth, to say writing), by refusing to assign to the text (and to the world as

the reader is a man without history, without biography, without psychology;

text) a “secret:’ that is, an ultimate meaning, liberates an activity which we might

he is only that someone who holds gathered into a single field all the paths of

call counter-theological, properly revolutionary, for to refuse to arrest meaning

which the text is constituted. This is why it is absurd to hear the new writing

is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law.

condemned in the name of a humanism which hypocritically appoints itself the

···

champion of the reader’s rights. The reader has never been the concern of clas-

sical criticism; for it, there is no other man in literature but the one who writes.

We are now beginning to be the dupes no longer of such antiphrases, by which our society proudly champions precisely what it dismisses, ignores, smothers or destroys; we know that to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author. — translated by Richard Howard

03.

THE POETICS OF L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E

Reading can look at language as the arena,

An Informalism. Of connections.

as the medium,

The connectionism is a Surprise Machine.

the mode of engagement,

It works by ...

the centerpiece of Method.

MULTIMPLICATION.

What’s social here is not some separable content, but the Method of writing & of editing.

So-called Language Writing distinguishes itself:

Editing is the reading moment.

First, by challenging the transitive ideal of communicating, of the direct immediate

Reading constructs.

broadcast,

And it does so by combating the obvious at all levels —

of the Truth with a capital T (you pompous fool) —

in order to maximize openness at every level:

by challenging the usual generic architecture of signification,

acoustics, ‘looks’, page layout and design, authorship, genre, grammar.

of the unrequited or unrequitable sign.

The normal starts to seem precarious, contingent, even exceptional.

Second, by foregrounding in a pretty drastic way the materiality (and social materiality)

I want something that holds together that’s not smooth.

of the reading surface, down to its tiniest markers.

(Even punctuation. Remember: Russia, the 1905 revolution –

Something that would agitate or reinscribe the social raw materials of agency, of

the first soviet was formed in St Petersburg in order to coordinate a print-work-

subjects, of subject positions, of persons, of discourse —

ers strike called to demand payment for typesetting punctuation marks and not

and make them the building blocks of whatever it constructs.

just ‘letters’).

In reading, this makes for, instead, a drastic unnerving constructivism all the way down to the level of the sign.

And then beyond, backstage.

It looks behind the sign for the particulars, for an extremism of raw material, of what comes before signification, of preposterous dispersal & modularity, of energizing strangeness, of interferences, interruptions, & noise without a beat.

(This puts the reading experience closer to sacrifice and surrender, to anti-productive expenditures and excess, to a surplus or hyper-trophy of enjoyments.)

Faced with Collage & Noise,

Reading Software

Reading can be set loose from its usual anchorings (and hankerings).

Making it hard to recuperate it, or reterritorialize it, back onto the continuities that those anchors prescribe: First, set loose from GENRE [The writing is more like the music of so-called ‘free improvisation’ which means free from prescribed genre or idiom. Nonidiomatic.]

(Is normative syntax a genre?)

And second, set loose from the usual demands for a Psychology-Centered Subjective Expressiveness on the part of the Author (that all-purpose glue the traditional reader is supposed to identity with)

Language as an infinitive would mean to make different —

To start with:

given to us as an opportunity.

The page, like the windowed computer screen, can encourage a looking through or

To reentangle rather than decipher.

a looking at approach —

To rerehearse the shocks.

Looking through: as a transparent, dematerialized virtuality, cinema-style), or a looking at (as an opaque, action-oriented, control-panelled material reality).

I’m all scattered.

Reading works as a simulation of a flat control panel We make ventriloquism out of the building blocks, the raw materials of a social

where users are getting access to a complex body of information —

readymade.

more like using a search engine, an online encyclopedia, a hyperlinked website.

And try to turn literary space into a more wide-open information space or archi-

And just like when we use computers for gathering information, or as a storage

tecture, of materialized complicity.

medium, we move away from some of the usual expectations about being transported through an illusionary or fictional narrative.

For reading:

We get closer to the experience of actively using a database

If Making Meaning or Making Sense is Establishing Authority,

Words can become interfaces —

how is this done?

precisely because of the way they are already ‘wired’ to social codes (like the

That’s what I want to nudge at tonight —

programming codes of the computer).

with glances at some parallels between how this plays out in experimental writ-

Writing preforms and reading performs the equivalents of software extensions to

ing and how it gets sidetracked in hypermedia’s absorbing 3-D illusion (taking

the digital world’s ‘Dynamic Hyper Text Markup Language —

off from some points raised in a new book by Lev Manovich on The Language of

B.Y.O.: pulldown menus, cascading style sheets, layers, invisible tables, applets.

New Media).

The Reader becomes the software of textuality.

This doesn’t call for a reading that rejects or negates the referential, or even the baldly representational forces of language, but one that resists letting those forces be confined & recuperated & territorialized.

It would join in the adventure of keeping them active at a micro level, as singular & literal events — constantly varying, skidding, interpenetrating, mutually transforming, out in the open, on the surface.

We don’t start out with the usual phobic rejection of reference, and certainly not with the usual squeamishness about the non-literary social.

References? WE are the Other of words

What are we eliciting?

Something of the sensing that the social order isn’t freestanding, that language is a part of that system and its surround, part of the way the reproduction needs of that system get met.

So that we recognize how much both writing and language could work to record or construct or reactivate the social body.

But not smoothly, not without an edge.

Trouble is immanent to the social.

The process of social investment (and social trouble) is ongoing.

And with this kind of writing, the reading process just pleasurably performs that social investment, or some alternatives to it.

The words aren’t idealized, or de-realized, but hyper-realized.

The politics in reading doesn’t work by disavowal.

Signifying isn’t ruled out of court.

But it’s not an end in itself; it’s put back, in a social contextual rerouting, at the service of a socially worked-up affect.

We’re not taking up some moralistic distance from which the mechanisms of the normal would be exposed.

It gets down and dirty, covered with ashes.

We can emphasize the force of language and not just what it ends up meaning in its customary genre-confinement.

But the force of words doesn’t just come from writing’s refusals (of anecdote or representation, of participating in a larger scaffolding of illusion.

Because to go all the way with this refusal, to only allow purely nonreferential material, undercuts the potential force of sense: of capture, of captivation, of seduction and complicity.

In this reading: There is no single protagonist, no transcendental spectator, no gaze that isn’t manhandled, nothing trying to make an idealization pass for the real.

The optical — the paperweight of cinematic illusion and of picturesque imagist poetry — gets reduced to just one of many channels in the final (tactile) mixdown.

The words don’t ‘make images’.

They implicate situations

Social Address Mixdown

(which are social, and which are treated as social, in a more critical way).

The credo is self-reflexive.

And it calls for outreach.

This willingness to deal with reference doesn’t have to lead the reader toward an absorption into a separable world of illusion outside of the page, at a carefully calibrated distance.

The text broadcasts a social address that makes a comfy suburbanizing distance impossible.

It calls you out.

They play off a desire for subversion, for fragmentation, for miniaturizing and

It’s more presentational or theatrical, less given to auratic or cinematic absorp-

maximalism, for refusing the compensatory, for shortcircuiting.

tion.

Reading helps it ‘lay bare the device’ — at the social, not just the literary level.

Look how much smoothness of ‘editing’ is needed to sustain the illusion of a centered subject ‘involved’ in a centerable outside world;

The writing helps stage, rather than conceal, the particulars of its format.

most of that smoothness can be jettisoned along with that illusion.

It helps the text foreground its social constructedness, as a body of social sense,

If you want to immerse yourself into a visually represented world, the severity of

author control.

not just leaving us stuck with a fetishizing of artistic process or the preenings of collage might be a threat.

Drastic cutting and montage and whacked-out juxtaposition have to be ‘dialed

Don’t be dictated to.

back’.

Don’t be sutured — show us “some kind of rip”

A little of the ‘elliptical’ is okay — right now, it’s even fashionable — but just make sure there’s not too much, because that would endanger the fixed center of

Nothing like digital morphing.

personal expression or unmediated observation and the chance for us as readers

No pretensions to imitate (or reassure) any world we already know.

to identify with it.

(Try to avoid making the world seem pre-known or interpellative overall, whatever happens with its particulars.)

We don’t ‘rule out’ or try to escape from the mechanisms of social construction.

(This isn’t the langauge equivalent of pure abstraction.)

Try to avoid the entropy of closed systems that lose energy and wind down with-

Instead, this is what the texts seem to wallow in: to appropriate or sample them,

out enough external input. (And the field of literature is decorated with all kinds

hyperbolically.

of versions of closed anti-social formalisms susceptible to entropy like this.)

They incite pleasure by the scrambling of fantasy and ideological resolution.

Don’t let meaning coagulate.

Help it humor us.

Work to create an anti-aura, to make language ‘famous’ (remembering Brecht’s comment that alienation is a kind of fame).

The politics point outward, toward an embracing of concern for a public, for common goods (language as an overall body), not merely for ‘identity politics’, for enlisting recruits in one or another specific struggle.

We want a reading that sounds that out When illusion gets shattered, so does the comforting distance that nurtured our little dream of subjective centeredness and mastery and protected independence.

Words gain force by dispelling the illusion that Language is at my disposal (and that certifies me as a legitimate disposer, as a safe subject).

Texts that give us a semblance of a cozy interior don’t seem so compelling any

Our almost automatic complicity

longer. Or too sentimental.

If readership is the software, then the writing isn’t ‘laying bare the device’ of literature, so much as laying bare ourselves as the device.

We don’t want to think of the vivid action of reading as just an active, conscious — and increasingly po-mo self-conscious — reconcilement with circumstances.

Even a Brechtian style ‘alienation’ of immediacy can be too prone to pride itself on its mastery, on its meta-level ‘transcendence’.

But too often this is an empty pleasureless pride.

Maybe Brechtian distance is too reminiscent sublimation to give us a model for reading these texts.

Abject, the opposite of exalted or imperious — “offered in a humble and often ingratiating spirit”.

For reading: no self-validation, no self-assertion.

Its ‘face’ is not recuperable as persona or as private property.

Instead, we get a relentless impropriety, a rough trade.

Any fixed rendition of the self is put in danger.

Empowering of the language works as a self-disempowering.

This is personal abjection —

The subject suppressed (as a control tower) to pluralize the meaning.

We aren’t surfaces that can hide depth.

We’re moebius strips without a stabilizable outer shell (and therefore without a protected inside).

Privacy in shreds, the Other in the saddle.

Why do you want to imagine that you are conducting your own train of thought?

Nothing purely interior or individually psychological is allowed to familiarize all this.

Nothing lets us person-ize or character-ize these singularities of event and experience.

The self, the imagined integrity, wrecked.

The ego, that big towering regulator, starts to give way in the face of a deregulation... of who we are and all we might be.

We face up to words which are more like deindividuated subjectivities (or production lines for future subjectivity).

Subjectivity gets felt as a complex bodily surface, with the familiarities of the person subject to an ecstatic clearing and extension.

Or to notice that our own subjective and particular experiences don’t always have to be mediated through our ‘self’, that commodification.

A shifting pragmatism of experiential reactivity: that’s what we feel like.

In a more egalitarian textuality, these aren’t impulses I can take control over, or recuperate as personal souvenirs.

We’re messing with you.

Dismantling doesn’t just occur by insouciant disavowal.

Our reading’s efforts to be freestanding and resistant gets overwhelmed.

The reader is caught up in sensory reactivation — once the words are deregulated, once their representational uniform is put back in the closet.

Radical texts can provoke a bodily excitement, inciting a surplus of sense, with security crowded out by sensation.

In the Realm of the Senses

Remember, traces of power are invested in our sensory experience; they’re not just routed through our identities.

We don’t just remain the viewing screen of representations.

Those filtering devices have been dispossessed.

And the deterritorializing of language enhances its Force, its sensational affectiveness.

A projectile cluster (or stickerball) of words offers up a staged memory trace of how earlier word-clusters (and their repetition) turned the body into a lively, reactive surface of inscription.

We let ourselves become a staging ground for intense visceral (and postreflective) affect, for metamorphoses of sensation, for an ‘in your face’ Special Effects that become possible once we abandon our attachment to the author’s ‘first hand’ point of view, that perspectival fakery.

We get something more like a ‘special effects’ writing, well outside any of the usual realist or personally expressive protocols.

Distance becomes interior constructivism — a self-reflexive social forming.

The equivalencies and relays and thresholds don’t conceal the realities; they substantiate it.

Reading makes a jigsaw puzzle out of the snapshot.

Reading: To start with, unembarrassed by the artifice of language, but we let it operate on us granularly.

We might even find moments of non-interactive cinema-style description or

Technicians of the Social?

Don’t keep the social at a distance

anecdote popping up in this writing, but only within a more complex, and overall opaque surface.

We’re not seeking purity. We don’t need a tabula rasa.

We live within an immanent overdetermination — and learn to love it.

If you ask what immediate response gets created by this hypermediacy, it’s not minimalism. It’s not New Age; it’s not Old Age. It’s sensory overload, omnivoyeurism.

Still, this doesn’t encourage a disinterested aesthetic contemplation (of desocialized objects, tastefully sketched out and given ‘auratic’ presence).

For that, you’d need to lean on so much of the armature of familiarity.

The huge horizons of escape (from representation) pull us farther into the

But this writing, mostly, is too strange.

circuit of Language.

Strangeness puts things right in your face, right up to our ears.

It heightens our captivation.

Strangeness doesn’t endistance.

(Remember, it’s what reactionaries always want to quarantine.)

It pulls us in, puts its headphones on us, and requires more wide-angle work, more action.

We’re not stripping away illusions or normalizing machinery by talking about them, by ‘disagreeing with them’ or ironizing them, but by showcasing how they work at a micro-level. And they work by keeping us at a distance.

Norms are distancing devices.

Here, once the norms start to collapse, our proximity to textual particulars gets intense.

The spectacle isn’t something the words protect us from, or keep us safe from.

The words contain it, or burst apart trying to.

The Spectacle requires some distance for us to be absorbed in it.

These language texts, on the other hand, tend to intensify the reading action or praxis to the point where that distance disappears.

The armor of the private self gets soaked by complicity, ripped through by seduction, not by letting us keep a ‘knowing’ (or privileged nay-saying) distance.

And seduction is more than a mental mystification we need to ‘see through’.

We don’t look through seduction; we’re caught up in it.

We’re delegated, vicarious — in one definition, ”occurring in an unexpected or abnormal part of the body instead of the usual one.”

The thrill is post-personalizing

The interior is not a safe haven.

A fluid architecture of information makes the contagion of the text more likely.

We find ourselves the accomplices of the text’s sense, not self-conscious lieutenants of it.

Because the mission of the text is to reenact some of the production process that stands behind (or withstands) personal (and that means social) identity.

Subjectivity is the waste product, not the source.

Subjectivity becomes a wildly multiplying (metonymic virus-like) series of effects. [The opposite might be a metaphoric borrowing of a secure vantage, or

cannibalism.]

We’re not offered up some cathartic release from all the bonds of the subject.

Instead we get an intensifying of all its particulars — once the wrapper is off.

Subjectivity gets stimulated — at the micro, building-block level — as it gets destabilized at the overall, macro level.

And identification comes in the form of a homeopathic medicine.

We leave with bodily excitation, but without the ‘proof of purchase’ (the valid signature, etc.) needed to return it.

After all, sometimes it seems as though the text’s conceptual unity and wholeness is sustained by there being an outside to the text, maybe one that could be captured by the gaze. But if there’s no outside that’s separable (if the surface contains it all, or implicates a zillion paths through it), then there’s likely to be no closure.

An infinite extendability or outreach, beyond any VR (‘virtual reality’) fixation.

The text encourages a spatializing performance. Reading plays along — to denaturalize or discombobulate perception.

Foster a softened mental space or architecture.

Space can be less fixed than in either: first, representational writing or second, writing that relies on clearcut formalizations or systems to create a solid objective space.

[Similar issues might arise in the aesthetics (and theorizing about) contemporary Installation Art]

Liquid Paper

Space — and the space of meaning and sense — isn’t just a projection, or even a clearly marked subdivision.

It becomes the staging ground for particular choices of trajectory, always on the move.

We face a dizzy proliferation of vectors, lines of flight, thresholds, fluid dynamics, the examples of Chaos Theory, instead of an architecture fixed enough to accommodate illusions of transparency (or translucency): ‘can we see well enough to drive?’.

Reading becomes vectoral rather than vehicular.

Emergency rather than immersion.

A social connectionism is there for the taking, not just to be taken for granted as something reflected or represented.

Now, identity may lean on the carefully ‘composed’ image as a prop. But a barrage or multiplication of images (or of the raw material for images) will knock those props out from under it.

So will the page as a flattened control panel.

Action becomes spatialized, uncentered.

We become less determinate, less neatly bordered, less fixed and fixated.

As these unfixed, navigable spaces make for a ‘liquid information architecture,’ or a liquid paper architecture.

Instead of opposing Absorption (of a cinematic type) to a distancing Artifice or Theatrical Showiness, we might contrast Immersion with a different kind of User Control, or Praxis; with Expedience or the Exploratory.

Manovich emphasizes how much the new media art offers us spaces of navigation. So we can think of this binary being played out between different types of navigation. On the one hand, there’s navigation as a souped up, hotted up menu choice within a pre-fixed space, something likely to have an absorptive effect (here, think of Brecht on what he called ‘culinary theater’).

And, on the other hand, there is a more activist navigation through the super-

Immersion & Navigation

impositions and concentric circles of resonance of Sense (that are offered up as a collage, not a ‘realistic’ continuity; more like the animated cut-outs of early computer games sitting on separable 2-D planes, not pulled together into the illusionary mechanics of the background).

Meaning isn’t elsewhere and fictional; it isn’t covering up some ‘Lack’.

It takes place right here, as our reading starts to resemble the operating of a control panel.

We’re using information more like we would in the adjustment windows in a GUI (Graphic User Interface). Similar to the way that a cyber presentation can remind us of cutting-edge graphic design — much less indebted to subor-

dination as its guiding light, less hierarchically arranged than something we’re

Here, predetermined sequence or fixed diachronics gives way to the side-by-

encouraged to look through.

side, to the between, to a synchronic everything at once, to a simultaneity of

The ‘screen’ of reading is more opaque, not a window we call up to transport us

takes place within the frame.

possibility, a deprivileging of time (or at least of represented time). Montage to an imaginary world.

This is no 3-D fly-through.

You’re on your own — all over the place —

The equivalents of hyperlinks and menus (from the control panel side of the

and your own isn’t your own.

computer experience) makes the immersive experience of conventional literature less likely.

We get a spatialized navigable space — but mental space, no longer based on linear argument but on words talking past

Reading these texts has little truck with the ‘depth’ claims of cinema-style illu-

each other in simultaneous ‘accounts’ of elaborated events or experiences.

sion. Those claims just don’t hold up in the face of the complexity of the tasks

Rather than a narrative, we get a collage of multiplicitous positioning.

that these texts solicit.

We learn to take up permanent residence within competing (and mutually contaminating) multiple explanations.

Illusion gets vaporized by the specific interactive activisms called for — by constantly choosing among competing accounts, alternate possibilities.

You can’t keep out the NOISE.

Reading gets closer to the moment-to-moment focus and future anticipations

Right away, it sounds off in a non-immersive density of juxtapositions and rela-

of gameplay.

tions, of micro-referencing and intimation.

More like constantly opening up multiple resizable windows.

This is multiple explanation as a viscerally immediate anti-absorptive read-

It doesn’t allow for the supposed fixations and security of any unified gaze.

ability.

We’re not using the physical choreography of language to decorate (or cover up) its referential, mediating role.

We’re not digging out latent meanings or dainty subordinations.

These are not dematerialized images we’re dealing with.

Excesses from the apparatus of illusion now get freed up and fastened on individual words.

The literalisms of language take charge (without just having to mediate ‘the

Words’ Nerves

real’) or take precedence over its mediating role. They swamp that role or heighten it at a micro level.

Objectification demolished, subjectification demolished.

But the spatializing of the words by the readers’ active practice gives them a paradoxically greater power.

It makes for rough and ready dislocations, or relocations.

‘It’s not disjunctive, it’s leaping!’

Affective response doesn’t get to ‘drop anchor’ in its familiar subjective harbors.

A textuality that works (immanently) on the nervous system.

The arbitrariness of language isn’t domesticated by being filtered through the

Playing out on the surfaces of the words’ flesh and our flesh.

usual packaging.

Usually, the body’s constraint is its self-denial.

It’s not as if the only kind of pleasure we can imagine is the stabilizing haven of a

If so-called language writing is reader-centered, it’s also more body-centered

subject in a plausible familiar world.

than we usually allow.

(And not because the usual normative packaging of & constraints upon the body

The implausible gives pleasure.

are taken for granted or not noticed, but because they are blown away.)

The unfamiliar gives pleasure.

This is desublimating.

Lack of homogeneity gives pleasure.

Writing plays off the body as a zone of multiple affect.

As a polyvalent (or multiplying) recording device.

Disillusionment gives pleasure.

The texts touch us here without representing some elsewhere.

Popping out of the stitches of suture gives pleasure.

We don’t just go to these texts for critical detachment, or for negative evaluations Carved out of their usual representational contexts, the language goes to work all

of a social body kept at arm’s length.

the more extravagantly on our nerves.

(We’re not just calling out requests for our favorite so-called ‘socialist one-liners’)

Sometimes it feels like it’s all about body reaction, corporeal sensation — the way that reading affects, even reshapes, the body and its enjoyments.

A more shocking intimacy shortcircuits the calming pillow of self-reflection, the

Inscription on the body: shouldn’t we admit that this is how radical texts work?

unruffled distance needed for subjective control.

The flesh gives up its location — like flight recorder boxes.

The distance rigged up for aesthetic (or auratic) contemplation comes crashing down in an infectious, sometimes traumatic visceral contact.

Contact is corrosive. You can’t keep it at a distance.

This is more of a free-floating fascinatability.

We look for fascinating texts, not something to keep a distance from.

Texts get intimate with us, involuntarily.

Which makes this writing closer to a linguistic pornography than we usually like to think.

For identification to be hyperbolic, it miniaturizes.

We swallow it in tiny doses.

Once we get beyond the settling, unruffling visual simulations (so prominent in traditional poetry and fiction), the flesh is subject to greater disturbances of meaning, directly materialized and inscribed on us as readers.

As the texts create a near-behaviorism of impact and affect.

We participate in these texts mimetically, contagiously.

With ‘mimesis’, from ‘mime’, implying “portraying a character by bodily movement” — in this case, a social character.

With a direct investment of flesh and bodily surface, we become the recording tape loop.

[Compared to the horizontal relations — of sign to sign (‘value’) or signifier/signified (‘signifying’) — this is a vertical relation, of sign to world, of the tangle of reference and mimesis.]

Mimetic Responsiveness

This brings us close to mimicry, an insidiousness — [insidious, from ambush and to sit: a. awaiting a chance to entrap b. harmful but enticing c. having a gradual and cumulative effect d. developing so gradually as to be well-established before becoming apparent The mimesis is bodily.

Text works an immanence.

Readership is the symptom.

Flesh isn’t left coordinated or packaged and organized the way it once was.

In reading, this becomes an unprotected, homeopathic flesh, prone to physical metamorphosis.

A bodily mimesis may even suggest a certain passivity.

Our habits are roughed up tactilely (not ‘tactically’) We celebrate the barely discernible seizure and passing of our habits.

The flesh is ignited —almost like a masochism of affective stimulation.

The object — or Other — takes precedence over the subject.

And it extends to the boundary limits of language.

A voyeurism or magnetized hearing that’s combustive, abject.

To give us time experienced in material literalness, rather than the unrecoverable time of representation.

(The utopian allegory is that of eternal life — or of recuperable time, nothing forgotten.)

So here, the page (like the computer user’s screen) functions as a site for direct sensation and future hope, rather than (like the cinema screen) as a safebox for memory.

Real time in reading triumphs over the fixed spaced which is usually used as a prop or support for some imaginary represented Time captured in a bite-sized image.

Time & Time Again

It helps make time (as a reader confronts this new writing) the time of both present ‘active engagement’ as well as the multiplex time of concentric circles of ... plausibility, authority, explanation, sense.

Reading makes a contest on every temporal plane: a) over the Past: over a topology of meaning, fought out in the trenches of individual words; b) over the Present: the degree to which the active user is outfitted or energized

(instead of being caught in Absorption); c) and over the Future: the degree to which we can free ourselves from unreflective social norms, the degree of our openness to Difference.

The ‘present tense’ of writing rigs itself up to a layer of social usage that contains a less personal past and promises a future.

The future — a grasp of its social limits —means reading a reading.

Future perfect.

We’re back to the choice of what to emphasize in the language experience: between information or action, on the one hand, and immersion or representation, on the other.

Words carry a dual role, just like the image-complexes on our computer screens.

They can serve as miniature representations (of fictional depth), and also as interfaces and control panels that govern actions on the surface — (actions, in reading, that can even involve a parallel to cyber ‘teleaction.’ offering control over the ‘remote’ layers of meaning or social sense).

Take Action: Writing as Extra Rehearsal

Reading combines: from Column A, a materialized present tense activism moving through a real-time space (of hearings and sightings and choices [of response and relation]; along with, from Column B, a social version of movement in psychological space.

[Here, the words become the social characters, and that’s how you’re composing: you build the text out of a broader social translation for what goes on within and between persons, for the ‘psychological tension between characters’ (which, in conventional literature gets reductive and hydraulic pretty fast).]

Reading needs to honor the opening up of possibilities of relation, since reading now combines the equivalents of editing, animation, title generation, navigation, compositing — a micro-judging omni-attentiveness, all in one, all at once.

To encourage a connectionism given all the more force because the words under-

It calls up the notion of concentric circles or layers of resonance: Meaning at the level of Signification we investigate, detonate, push

mine the proscenium distance of separation.

into disequilibrium; The combo is ‘Meta’ PLUS ‘Curiosity’.

Meaning at the level of Value is something we help generate;

A meta attitude isn’t enough. There’s no closure. Gotta keep things open. You

Meaning at the level of Discourse and Social Sense we help chal-

can’t act like you know it all.

lenge.

Meaning or social sense is 3-D animated, but by the reader, not ‘ahead of time’.

Writing becomes a cultural management — hybridizing, disappropriating.

We never get ahead of time, or outside of it.

We’re exploring a social gameworld, a multi-dimensional stadium of meaning It’s remote control — over meaning. But right here.

— not being marched through it.

And that’s remote control over the possibilities of recoding.

This is bravura multitasking.

Any individual unit, anything resembling an image, comes with its code implied,

We get sensational involvement and Brechtian distance — both at once, and not

revealed — as if everything (already, always) involves a translation, a switching

in contradiction with each other.

back and forth (but of active bodily energies).

In reading, this is a hyperbolic extension of the way that single words or letters or phonetic building blocks carry a charge that is social (and too often, if unrecognized, normalizing).

But what about the things that Poetry traditionally prides itself on?

We could still talk about combining the Lyric with the Language focus, with Lyric regarded as a personalized vocal music.

But then we’d have to ask what restrictions are being placed on musicality.

And how phobic we are about noise.

And how penetrated and fragile is any humpty-dumpty voice.

We’re not just waiting to peer at the ‘presence’ of the writer, with literariness as the well-upholstered backdrop.

In the interface, we stage or sound the emotional ambivalence of our freely

We are repercussionists

chosen and freely juxtaposed possibilities of meaning.

Facts make music.

And the rhythm of navigation makes up part of the acoustics of reading.

To create a field of lively reading-opportunity, you carefully gauge the resonance or ‘charge’ of individual words (and sounds).

And this judgement is entirely social.

Meaning is never fixatable privately.

Meaning is a public address technology.

If address involves the public side, the surrounding and eliciting of the public, this emphasis intersects with an emphasis on Sound, on Noise — rather than on

the visual ‘transporting’ ambitions of writing.

solicits, and invests in us.

[If the visual is more private — the ‘private sector’? — that would fit with the

Readership becomes a savings and loan association.

immersive dreams of the trends in computer hypermedia. It also brings to mind

Texts invest in us.

the idea, from psychoanalytic theory, that making yourself seen recuperates back to the subject, whereas making yourself overheard solicits ‘the Other’. So, the

We are the newest versions of the software available for download.

visual emphasis — whether in the iconics of concrete poetry or the naturalizing graph of voice in the New American Poetry — comes back to the subject and reasserts a romanticism; as if you could achieve a surveillant penetration of artifice to get to an ‘essence’.

Compared to this, the emphasis on sound seems — in general — more rhetorical, performative, and public.]

All this gives so-called Language Writing a more explanatory thrust.

Explanation is embedded in the writing itself.

Works are responses, and the praxis of the reader reconstructs this responsiveness.

And reconfigures the relation to an outside context.

Here we’re not looking for mastery, but passionate or even dizzying embrace — of an implicated social body.

The pleasures it makes possible can’t be separated from the meanings it tenders,

We are the networked art.

The whole is phony.

We are reconstellating it. We are the reconstellation.

Power leaves no escape hatch.

Complicity (“to fold together”) is a given.

Socially, we are ecstatic accomplices, with words literalizing the vicarious.

Which is us — as personal readers.

Reading reimplicates us in the regulation and enforcement process which is immanent to our sense of selfhood.

Thresholding

We don’t have to read from the inside out, identifying with a writing that’s also supposed to work from the inside out.

Instead, reading tracks the outside in.

We counter-interpellate from the outside in, from the text being set loose to work on the affects which it stages, traceable to a social horizon.

And both are semi-permeable, letting us create a polyphony out of a situation: a polyphony of enunciation that pancakes the usually separate layers of a customary hierarchy of meaning.

Customary meaning tears apart in the face of social abjection.

It’s granularized — or miniaturized — sometimes thrillingly, sometimes with a

shock or a laugh.

The prescription and the infinitive are the same: to threshold.

If the work is drastic enough, it produces an abjection, relayed from ground zero of the social, and it takes hold of us bodily, dizzily.

It makes for a social abjection we cannot master, cannot just ‘think through’.

There’s no ‘talking cure’ for this abjection.

It’s seductive — personally, but also socially.

Language literalizes an agitated social body and ‘brings it on home’, inside the instrument panel of reading.

And we can ask: how might this extend outward globally, toward the translatable use we make of these texts and other writings it forms a coalition with.

Not to turn inward, or limitedly toward the semantics of some purely national or subcultural paradigm or secure identity.

But to encourage a swerve toward a transnational interactive space of translation and of that which is always already a translation: language.

This is another kind of totalizing... in reading.

A thresholding.

04.

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=R=Y “Goal is not to have a goal,” John Cage.

ing. Jerome McGann writes of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=R=Y in his essay “Contemporary Poetry, Another Route”:

“For modern poetry, since it must be distinguished from classical poetry and

Here a conscious attempt has been made to marry the work of the New American

from any type of prose, destroys the spontaneously functional nature of lan-

Poetry of the fifties with the poststructural work of the late sixties and seventies.

guage, and leaves standing only its lexical basis,” Roland Barthes, from Writing Degree Zero.

As Frost, Yeats, Auden, and Stevens are the “precursors” of the poets of accommodation, Pound, Stein, and Zukofsky stand behind the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers. Oppositional politics are a paramount concern, and the work stands in

“Narrativity is short-circuited from the moment the reading process is spatial-

the sharpest relief, stylistically, to the poetry of accommodation.

ized,” Jerome McGann.

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=R=Y also recognized that language is political. In the same way that American farmers hid behind tree trunks and took pop shots

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=R=Y was born in 1971 with the release of a new

at British soldiers who stood in formation in open fields during the revolution-

magazine titled This, which culminated in the release seven years later of the

ary war, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=S fractured the language in an attempt

magazine titled L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. The early 1970s was an ideal time for a new

to wage their own rebellious assault against the social and political structure

movement in poetry. Early challenges to mainstream poetry had already begun,

inherent in the Imperial force of the English language. In doing this, the entire

thanks in large part to the Projectivist poets of Charles Olson, a Black Mountain

reading process was overhauled, with the reader of this type of poetry forever

poet.

changed in the way that he or she encounters text of any type.

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=R=Y was not simply a movement to bring

As McGann continues in the same essay, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=S

renewed interest to language, but to the structures and codes of language: how

experimented with form and diction, ultimately bringing organization/form to

ideas are represented and formulated to transmit ideas, thoughts, and mean-

where previously none (or little in the sense of being a poetic work) was found.

He quotes advice given to budding L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=S by poet Bernadette Mayer in her work, “Experiments”:

Work your ass off to change the language & don’t ever get famous.

A difficulty for many readers of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=R=Y is its preoccupation with fragments, nonsense, and unmeaning; as well its rejection

Systematically derange the language, for example, write a work consisting only

of the narrative model that has been the basis of nearly all types of literature.

of prepositional phrases, or, add a gerundive to every line of an already existing

The traditional mode of reading for referential meaning does not work, as

piece of prose or poetry, etc.

writers of this type of poetry attempt to unlock meaning by first unlocking our preconceptions (and preoccupations) of meaning. Charles Bernstein, a critic

Get a group of words (make a list or select at random); then form these words

and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T, says the construction (and reading) of poetry

(only) into a piece of writing—whatever the words allow. Let them demand their

should not be envisioned as “designing a garden,” but rather as “making a path.”

own form, and/or: Use certain words in a set way, like, the same word in every

Where poets before opted to make a path along pre-existing sidewalks and

line, or in a certain place in every paragraph, etc. Design words.

avenues, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=S opted to clear-cut through the wild and thick brush of the English language to create previously untrodden footpaths

Write what cannot be written, for example, compose an index. (Read an index as

for a new generation of readers.

a poem).

Whether L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=R=Y succeeds to gain a large audience is Attempt writing in a state of mind that seems least congenial.

irrelevent. The movement has brought together a dedicated and insular community that thrives on each other’s ideas and perceptions. Many poets who are not

Consider word & letter as forms—the concretistic distortion of a text, for ex-

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=S have gained a new sense of their “poetic” place

ample, too many o’s or a multiplicity of thin letters (illftiii, etc.)

and understanding from simply exploring the movement’s aesthetic. Ironically perhaps, many writers considered L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=S resist the

Attempt to eliminate all connotation from a piece of writing & vice versa.

label and attempts to define themselves within it.

Despite similarities between the work of John Ashbery and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=R=Y, Ashberry has said he doesn’t align himself with these poets because he believes language should ultimately depend on references to meanings generated outside language.

Regardless, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=R=Y remains an interesting legacy that will continue to bewilder and invigorate generations of poets and readers.

David Melnick wrote in the first issue of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, where his own work appeared: The poems are made of what look like words and phrases but are not ... What can such poems do for you? You are a spider struggling in your own web, suffocated by meaning. You ask to be freed by these poems from the intolerable burden of trying to understand. The world of meaning: is it too large for you? too small? It doesn’t fit. Too bad. It’s no contest. You keep on trying. So do I.

05.

GATHERED, NOT MADE: A BRIEF HISTORY OF APPROPRIATIVE | Writing Raphael Rubinstein

Combining his quest for total objectivity with passionate bibliophilia, Walter

The epitome of this kind of writer is, of course, Borges’s splendid invention

Benjamin once dreamed of authoring an essay that would consist entirely of

Pierre Menard, the fictional early-20th-century French poet who sets out to

quotations from his sources. I’m not sure what my motivations were, but last

rewrite Cervantes’s Don Quixote word for word. (In the 1980s, Borges’s text

year I wrote a poem largely composed of direct quotes from a 1979 guide to

was often cited in relation to so-called appropriation artists such as Sherrie

artists’ videos. For the texts of other recent poems I’ve lifted from such sources

Levine and Richard Prince.) The idea of erasing the lines between authors was

as the table of contents of a 1950s literary journal, a review of an obscure 1960s

one which Borges returns to again in his short essay “The Flowers of Coleridge.”

film, an article on the Swiss pop music scene, and the intermittently legible

There, he raises the notion previously espoused by Shelley, Emerson and Valéry

legend on an old Mexican retablo. In some cases I simply transcribed the pas-

that all literary works are the creations of a single eternal author (a point he

sage I wanted, while in others I also had to translate it. What amazes me about

tries to demonstrate by tracing a recurring idea through Coleridge, H.G. Wells

these acts of literary larceny is how satisfying I find the process. Even though the

and Henry James). Arguing for the essentially impersonal nature of literature,

words are not mine, I derive from them the same kind of pleasure and pride I get

Borges reminds us that George Moore and James Joyce “incorporated in their

from lines I have written in a more conventional manner. Why, I wonder, should

works the pages and sentence of others” and that Oscar Wilde “used to give plots

it be creatively satisfying to simply transpose lines someone else has written into

away for others to develop.” More recently, a whole school of literary theory has

a text I intend to sign with my own name?

developed ideas remarkably similar to those Borges espoused. Roland Barthes, for instance, famously defined the text as “a multi-dimensional space in which

It is to answer that question that I decided to delve a little into the history of

are married and contested several writings, none of which is original”

what could be called “appropriative literature.” I wasn’t interested so much in the 20th-century tradition of collage poetry--exemplified by “The Wasteland”

The following list doesn’t include any Wilde-derived stories, alas, but there are

and The Cantos--as in a more extreme approach in which, rather than weave

plenty of instances of writers utilizing “the pages and sentences of others.” I

obvious quotations into his or her words, the writer becomes a kind of scribe,

don’t pretend that this is an exhaustive list -- I’m no literary scholar and didn’t

transferring small or large passages, usually without attribution or other signals

go far beyond what I could find on my own shelves. However, I think it does

that these words were written by someone else.

suggest the extent and vitality of the modernist tradition of textual pilfering.

If nothing else, it has given me a better idea of why it seems so natural, and so

poems in the book were actually slightly revised quotations from a novel called

creatively satisfying, to avail myself of the words of others.

Le mysteriuex Docteur Cornelius by Gustave Lerouge. According to Cendrars, he wanted to demonstrate that Lerouge, a popular novelist little appreciated by

(In emulation of Borges’s bibliography of Pierre Menard’s “visible” works, I’ve

the literary establishment of his day, was in fact a writer of considerable poetic

assigned each entry a letter.)

ability. While no one caught on to Cendrars’s borrowings, the Kodak company objected to the unauthorized use of its trademarked name in the title. In subsequent editions, the book carried the title Documentaires.

a) Isidore Ducasse’s (a.k.a., le Comte de Lautreamont) Les Chants de Maldoror (1868).

Some 80 years after this proto-surrealist masterpiece was published, scholars

c) Hugh MacDiarmid’s Cornish Heroic Songs for Valda Trevlyn (1937-38),

discovered that long passages of it were direct quotations from an 1853 encyclo-

a collection of poems MacDiarmid abandoned only after writing some 700 pages.

pedia of natural history. Although Ducasse left no explanation of his borrowings

In his introduction to MacDiarmid’s Selected Poems (1993), Eliot Weinberger

in Maldoror, he did pen a defense of plagiarism in his sardonic manifesto

describes how the Scottish poet composed much of the book by transcribing

Poesies (1870). “Plagiarism is necessary,” he wrote, because “it stays close to the

“long passages from obscure travel and science books, reviews in the Times

wording of an author, it uses his expressions, erasing a false idea and replacing

Literary Supplement, Herman Melville’s letters, the writings of Martin Buber,

it with a correct one.” Ducasse’s famous remark that “poetry should be made by

Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kroger.” As Weinberger explains it, MacDiarmid had

all” encapsulates his challenge to conventional authorship.

“discovered that the way out of the traditional prosody and rhyme he had hitherto employed almost exclusively was to break prose down into long jagged lines.”

b) Blaise Cendrars’s Kodak (1924), a book of poems ostensibly inspired by Cendrars’s travels in North and South America. Decades later, Cendrars revealed that the purportedly “documentary”

d) Stefan Themerson’s Bayamus and the Theatre of Semantic Poetry (1949,

LeQueux’s 1917 children’s book Beryl of the Biplane, which Ashbery had found

revised edition 1965),

at a quayside bookstall in Paris. Other poems in the collection draw on American

a novella in which the author replaces certain words with their dictionary defini-

magazines the author used to leaf through during his years living in France.

tions. Here, for instance, entering the salon of a brothel, the narrator describes its some of its features:

In one of her readings of Ashbery’s work, Marjorie Perloff draws a useful distinction between the quotations of contemporary poets and those of their

“There were four openings: three of them serving as entrances with wooden

modernist predecessors: “In the consciousness of the postmodern poet, frag-

structures moving on hinges for closing them, and one, not very large, filled

ments of earlier poetry float to the surface, not to be satirized as in, say, Eliot’s

with panes of glass fixed in a movable frame and covered by a sheet of pale yellow

work, or to make the past contemporaneous with the present as in Pound, but as

cloth lowered from a roller above, and by a sheet of green cloth hanging on a rod

the ‘blank parody’ Fredric Jameson has defined as pastiche, which is to say, the

and drawn across so as to keep out sun and draught.”

neutral mimicry that takes place when there is no longer a norm to satirize or

In other words, the room had three doors and one window.

parodize.” (“Barthes, Ashbery, and the Zero Degree of Genre” in Poetic License:

Themerson, a Polish exile who founded the avant-garde Gaberbocchus Press

Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric, Northwestern University Press,

in London in 1948, believed that turning to dictionary definitions was a way “to

1990, p. 282.)

translate poems not from one tongue into another but from a language composed of words so poetic that they had lost their impact, -- into something that would give them a new meaning and flavor.”

f) Louis Zukofsky’s “A-15” (1964).

The opening stanzas of this section of Zukofsky’s epic poem A use English words to imitate the biblical Hebrew of the opening of the Book of Job. (Zukofsky also

e) John Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath (1962),

applied this technique of homophonic translation to poems by Catullus.) For the

which contains the long poem titled “Europe” (first published in 1960) that

reader who knows their source, lines such as “He neigh ha lie low h’who y’he gall

is partly composed of phrases taken more or less at random from William

mood” initially don’t seem so different from the English transliterations found

in some Jewish prayer books, but as one perseveres with Zukofsky’s Hebrew-

and fellow poet Ron Padgett, Berrigan frequently borrowed lines from others,

English hybrid, underlying meanings emerge and the stage is set for the modula-

particularly in his poetic sequence “The Sonnets.”

tion of “A-15” into an elegy for the recently assassinated John F. Kennedy.

In a 1971 interview with Tom Clark, Berrigan admits to another kind of borrowing. Starting with “a sort of ghastly poem” by a friend, Berrigan tells how he g) Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch (1963, English translation 1966).

“rearranged a few lines, moved the things around, changed a couple of things....

Chapter 34 of this cornerstone of literary postmodernism braids together in

There was no attempt to hide that it was all by him [his friend Dick Gallup].”

alternating lines a long quotation from an old-fashioned novel and a passage in

Here, the poet becomes a kind of editor-plagiarist.

the voice of Hopscotch’s narrator. Since it’s very hard to shift orientation at the end of each justified line of type and even harder to keep both narratives in mind simultaneously, the reader is tempted to proceed by skipping every other line,

i) Oulipo: la litterature potentielle (1973),

reading the first entire quote and then Cortázar’s words. But the great Argen-

a compendium of various literary methods assembled by the Paris-based writ-

tinean fictioneer slyly blocks this strategy by having the second text continually

ers’ group Oulipo (l’Ouvoir de litterature potenielle). In one chapter, Raymond

comment on what is happened in the first one, compelling the reader to read

Queneau describes and presents several examples of “Definitional Litera-

chapter 34 line by mindbending line. As well as being a wittily subversive piece

ture,” which consists of replacing every word in a sentence with its dictionary

of fiction, this chapter of Hopscotch is a precursor of poststructuralist philo-

definition. (Queneau gives credit to Stefan Themerson for using this method

sophical texts such as Derrida’s Glas., a book in which a column of quotations

previously -- see above.) A short sentence thereby expands automatically, and

from Jean Genet runs continuously alongside the author’s discussion of Hegel.

if one then subjects this expanded sentence to the same process, the text once again grows in size.

h) Ted Berrigan’s poem “cento: A note on Philosophy” from circa 1964-68

In the next chapter, two other Oulipo members, Marcel Benabou and Georges

in which every one of the 58 lines is taken from another poet. Like his friend

Perec, offer a refinement which they call “Litterature Semo-Definitionelle.”

Here, one chooses the definitions with a view to creating a text that is in the

mutation. Splitting in half proverbs such as “It’s an ill wind that bodes no good”

style of a particular author. In their examples, Benabou and Perec turn unlikely

and “All roads lead to Rome,” Mathews reassembles the parts to create what he

phrases into sentences that sound like Sade, Genet and Philippe Sollers.

calls “perverbs” (e.g. “It’s an ill wind that leads to Rome”). This recombinative procedure becomes the basis for a story made from rearranged proverbs,

(For more information on Oulipo, readers may consult Atlas Press’s Oulipo

dozens of paraphrases of various “preverbs,” and many poems (some perverbial

Compendium, edited by Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie.)

translations from Dante, Shakespeare and Mallarmé).

Considering dictionary definitions as “the words of others” might seem an ab-

In his foreword to Selected Declarations of Dependence, itself made from

surdly large expansion of appropriative literary practice -- if taking words from

fractured proverbs, Mathews pens some lines which could be applied to all the

the dictionary is considered as “appropriation,” then every word we write could

authors cited here: “Words lie waiting, intentions of the dead, and what to the

be said to come from another source. I’m reminded of Francis Ponge’s early

dead were intentions of the dead. Words are gathered, not made, for intentions,

prose poem “The Augean Stables” which describes how difficult it is for poets to

new and old.”

contend with the fact that the words they use are also employed for antithetical political and commercial purposes. Within the writer, Ponge laments, “the same sordid order speaks, because we have no other words at our disposal.” Calling up

k) Kathy Acker’s story “New York City in 1979” (1979).

an analogy with another art form, he observes: “We are like painters who, from as

Taking a cue from William Burroughs, whose books were patched together from

far back as can be remembered, would all have to dip their brushes in the same

his own cut-up manuscripts, Acker wove together her own tales from the punk

immense can in order to thin out their paints.”

underworld with all manner of texts. In her 1989 essay “A Few Notes on Two of My Books, she recalls one of her earliest pieces, “New York City in 1979,” which combined an account of life on Manhattan’s lower east side life with Baudelaire’s

j) Harry Mathews’s Selected Declarations of Dependence (1977),

description of his diseased mistress Jeanne Duval. Resisting the “appropriation-

a book elaborated from 46 proverbs that Mathews subjects to all manner of

ist” label many tried to give her, Acker commented, in the same essay “When I

copy, I don’t ‘appropriate.’ I just do what gives me most pleasure: write.” Even if

to a typewriter. . . . The writing is a spontaneous invention starting from these

one knows that Acker is copying, it’s hard to tell her sources and where the lines

‘exterior’ materials, and the argument of the work that develops is a projection of

lie between copied and “original” words. For Acker, textual borrowing was part

the interior voice onto the exterior words.”

of an assault on the capitalist system. A few years before she died, she heralded the rise of the Internet as a way of challenging the concept of literary ownership which lies behind copyright law.

m) David Shapiro’s poem “Those Who Must Stay Indoors” (1983).

In the acknowledgements of his 1983 collection To An Idea: A Book of Poems, Shapiro advises the reader: “Some lines in “Those Who Must Stay Indoors” are

l) Clark Coolidge’s chapbook Smithsonian Depositions (1980).

after the Field Book of Natural History.” The last quatrain of this 20-line poem

Like this homage to Robert Smithson (which is a concatenation of passages

is set off in quotation marks and is obviously drawn from the volume of natural

from 30 different sources, ranging from Godard films to geology textbooks to

history mentioned in the acknowledgements. But it’s just as obvious that the

Smithson’s writings), much of Coolidge’s work is strewn with snippets of bor-

preceding 16 lines also draw heavily on the Field Book of Natural History, or

rowed discourse. For Coolidge, the poet seems to be a kind of sublime intercep-

some similar volume, the only difference being that Shapiro has selectively cut

tor, tuning into all forms of communication and snatching at passing language

and reordered passages to produce lyrical (and quotation-mark-free) stanzas

fragments when they suit his purposes. It’s important to note that Coolidge’s

such as:

mosaic poems cannot be elucidated by discovering the poet’s sources. Like the great be-bop musicians, Coolidge takes a found phrase and draws out of it end-

“Where ravens work cooperatively in the night

less, wildly inventive variations.

The stars and the maps and the horizons should now be rent We mean a number of things, but chiefly we refer

Noting that Coolidge is “not forthcoming on his techniques,” one commentator on his work (Barrett Watten in Total Syntax), proceeds to “imagine a writing scenario” in which “words or materials (open books, clippings) are on a table next

To variations in brilliance, groups of stars, lines in the maps now dots.”

While explicit acknowledgements such as the one I’ve just cited are rare in Shap-

records the words (and empty spaces) which Mayer encounters on a printed page

iro’s books, more or less covert borrowings are in fact plentiful in his oeuvre, as

as she traces an X across it. Ostensibly doing nothing more than transcribing

suggested by the title he gave to a 1994 collection, After a Lost Original.

an arbitrary sequence of words, Mayer opens up her unidentified source text to diverse meanings. That appropriation plays an important role for Mayer can be seen in a list of experiments presented in her workshop at the St. Mark’s Poetry

n) Walter Abish’s 99: The New Meaning (1990)

Project in the early 1970s (published in the 1986 anthology In the American

which contains a text the author describes as “no less than 99 segments by as

Tree). “Experiment with theft and plagiarism in any form that occurs to you,”

many authors, each line, sentence or paragraph appropriated from a page bear-

reads one entry. “Use source materials, that is, experiment with other people’s

ing that same, to me, mystically significant number 99.” Another text, “What

writings, sayings, & doings,” advises another.

Else,” is made up of 50 extracts from autobiographical writings by various other authors. Reading through the book, one may, every so often, recognize an author -- J.G. Ballard, Daniel Spoerri, Paul Nizan -- but usually the quotations, however

p) Charles Bernstein’s poem “Emotions of Normal People”

vaguely familiar, are unidentifiable, at least to this reader. In a prefatory note,

(in the 1994 collection Dark City) which appears to derive from a random

after describing the texts as “not actually ‘written’ but orchestrated,” Abish

sampling of the banal printed matter that figures in everyday life: computer

speaks of his aims in terms that remind us he is a writer of fiction, someone who

handbooks, direct-mail consumer surveys, anonymous letters on noise com-

by definition speaks with the words of others. “I wanted,” he writes, “to probe

plaints, a thank-you note, a catalogue description of the 1989 edition of Poet’s

certain familiar emotional configurations afresh, and arrive at an emotional

Market. In contrast to Clark Coolidge, a poet with whom his work is sometimes

content that is not mine by design.”

associated under the rubric of “Language Poetry,” Bernstein leaves his borrowed texts relatively undigested. His unit is not the “musical” phrase that Coolidge employs, but the discursive category. Constructed out of the various types of

o) Bernadette Mayer’s “X on Page 50 at half inch intervals.”

discourse which constitute contemporary identity, texts such as “Emotions of

Reprinted in the 1992 Bernadette Mayer Reader, this prose text of the 1970s

Normal People” appear to question the use of the self as an organizing principle,

not only for poems but for the entire realm of human history.

the novel which is being charted is none other than Reader’s Block, which one of the Reader’s notes seems to be describing when it evokes: “A novel of intellectual reference and illusion, so to speak, minus much of the novel.”

q) David Markson’s Reader’s Block (1996), a 193-page novel consisting almost wholly of material derived from other books.

While there are occasional quotations (never with quotation marks) and numer-

r) Kenneth Goldsmith’s No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96 (1997),

ous titles and author’s names, most of Reader’s Block offers tersely stated details

a 600-page, genre-defying book consisting of thousands of phrases, each

from the lives of various writers, artists and musicians. Many of the biographi-

ending with an r sound that were read or heard or otherwise collected by the

cal details concern coincidences or what are commonly called “amazing facts.”

author during the nearly three-year period indicated in the title. Described by

Recurring themes include incidents of anti-Semitism among cultural figures

Charles Bernstein as “the longest, and maybe the last, list poem of the twentieth

and causes of death of the same. Here’s a brief sample:

century,” Goldsmith’s encyclopedic project orders its contents by syllabic length and alphabetic order. As the book progresses, the syllabic length of the entries,

“A less than anonymous Paris prostitute named Marie Duplessis, who was dead

each separated by commas, grows and short bursts of borrowed language give

at twenty-three.

way to longer chunks of found discourse. The final chapter consists of the entire

And became the model for La Dame aux Camelias.

text (uncredited) of D.H. Lawrence’s short story “A Rocking Horse Winner,”

Hart Crane committed suicide by jumping from a freighter in the Caribbean.

which is present for the simple fact that it concludes with an “r” sound (the word

F. Scott Fitzgerald was an anti-Semite.

“winner”).

Molloy, Malone, Estragon.”

Coming to writing by way of visual art, Goldsmith appears at first to be assuming Interspersed among these book-derived facts are comments charting a writer

a Warholian passivity to the world around him, but the rhythmic structures he

identified as “the Reader” who is developing ideas about a novel centered around

establishes and the personal nature of his choices soon make the reader real-

a figure identified as “the Protagonist.” Eventually, the reader (small r) realizes,

ize that even this extreme form of linguistic appropriation is permeated with

personal vision.

only one to hold the key to the sources, while here readers will immediately recognize many of the English poets Ashbery draws from, including Hopkins, Marvell, Coleridge, D.H. Lawrence and Auden. And that’s as it should be.

s) Marjorie Welish’s poems “The Glove” and “False Entry”

Recognition is a central feature of the cento form, with its implicit tribute to the

from her recent chapbook titled Else, in Substance (1999). Both poems are made

literary past, and the sotto voce suggestion that the store of great lines may be

by bringing together an assortment of quotations both literary and nonliterary.

running low.

In “False Entry,” Welish begins and ends the poem with a sequences of riddles, familiar and not (“When is a door not a door? . . . . There is a red lady locked up

As it happens, I’ve put Ashbery into a little cento of my own. It’s the second

in a room whose door is often open yet she can never escape?”), while the middle

poem in my collection The Basement of the Cafe Rilke (1996), where it stands

stanza recycles questions from a driver’s license examination.

as a tribute to two of the writers from whom I’ve learned the most. I hesitate to conclude this stellar alphabet with one of my poems, but, then again, it’s not me who wrote the following lines:

t) In his most recent collection, Wakefulness (1998), John Ashbery includes a poem titled “The Dong with the Luminous Nose.” A

Courtesy Ashbery and Auden

subtitle identifies the poem as a cento, a form which goes back to the classical Greek tradition of constructing new poems using only lines from the Iliad and

Because life is short

the Odyssey. An earlier Ashbery cento is the famous “To A Waterfowl” of 1961. In

we have to keep asking it the same question,

“The Shield of a Greeting,” his 1980 essay of Ashbery, David Lehman identifies

but the answer is hard

one couplet of “To A Waterfowl” as “half Spenser, half Stevens, ergo all Ashbery.”

and hard to remember.

The borrowings in “The Dong with the Luminous Nose” are very different from those of Ashbery’s “Europe” (see above). In “Europe,” the poet is probably the

06.

THE CUT-UP METHOD OF BRION GYSIN | Written by William S. Burroughs

At a surrealist rally in the 1920s Tristan Tzara the man from nowhere proposed to

and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it says

create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat. A riot ensued wrecked the

much the same thing. Sometimes something quite differentócutting up political

theater. AndrÈ Breton expelled Tristan Tzara from the movement and grounded

speeches is an interesting exerciseóin any case you will find that it says some-

the cut-ups on the Freudian couch.

thing and something quite definite. Take any poet or writer you fancy. Here, say, or poems you have read over many times. The words have lost meaning and life

In the summer of 1959 Brion Gysin painter and writer cut newspaper articles

through years of repetition. Now take the poem and type out selected passages.

into sections and rearranged the sections at random. Minutes to Go resulted

Fill a page with excerpts. Now cut the page. You have a new poem. As many poems

from this initial cut-up experiment. Minutes to Go contains unedited unchanged

as you like. As many Shakespeare Rimbaud poems as you like. Tristan Tzara said:

cut ups emerging as quite coherent and meaningful prose. The cut-up method

ìPoetry is for everyone.î And AndrÈ Breton called him a cop and expelled him

brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years.

from the movement. Say it again: ìPoetry is for everyone.î Poetry is a place and it

And used by the moving and still camera. In fact all street shots from movie or

is free to all cut up Rimbaud and you are in Rimbaude is a Rimbaud poem cut up.

still cameras are by the unpredictable factors of passers by and juxtaposition cut-ups. And photographers will tell you that often their best shots are accidents

Visit of memories. Only your dance and your voice house. On the suburban air

. . . writers will tell you the same. The best writing seems to be done almost by

improbable desertions ... all harmonic pine for strife.

accident but writers until the cut-up method was made explicitó all writing is in fact cut ups. I will return to this pointóhad no way to produce the accident of

The great skies are open. Candor of vapor and tent spitting blood laugh and

spontaneity. You can not will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredict-

drunken penance.

able spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.

Promenade of wine perfume opens slow bottle.

The method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page. Like this page. Now cut down the middle and cross the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4 . . . one two three four. Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one

The great skies are open. Supreme bugle burning flesh children to mist.

Cut-ups are for everyone. Anybody can make cut ups. It is experimental in the

The cut-ups can be applied to other fields than writing. Dr Neumann in his

sense of being something to do. Right here write now. Not something to talk and

Theory of Games and Economic Behavior introduces the cut-up method of ran-

argue about. Greek philosophers assumed logically that an object twice as heavy

dom action into game and military strategy: assume that the worst has happened

as another object would fall twice as fast. It did not occur to them to push the two

and act accordingly. If your strategy is at some point determined . . . by random

objects off the table and see how they fall. Cut the words and see how they fall.

factor your opponent will gain no advantage from knowing your strategy since he can not predict the move. The cut-up method could be used to advantage in

Shakespeare Rimbaud live in their words. Cut the word lines and you will hear

processing scientific data. How many discoveries have been made by accident?

their voices. Cut-ups often come through as code messages with special mean-

We can not produce accidents to order. The cut-ups could add new dimension

ing for the cutter. Table tapping? Perhaps. Certainly an improvement on the

to films. Cut gambling scene in with a thousand gambling scenes all times and

usual deplorable performance of contacted poets through a medium. Rimbaud

places. Cut back. Cut streets of the world. Cut and rearrange the word and image

announces himself, to be followed by some excruciatingly bad poetry. Cutting

in films. There is no reason to accept a second-rate product when you can have

Rimbaud and you are assured of good poetry at least if not personal appearance.

the best. And the best is there for all. ìPoetry is for everyoneî . . .

All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overhead. What

Now here are the preceding two paragraphs cut into four sections and rear-

else? Use of scissors renders the process explicit and subject to extension and

ranged:

variation. Clear classical prose can be composed entirely of rearranged cut-ups.

Cutting and rearranging a page of written words introduces a new dimension

ALL WRITING IS IN FACT CUT-UPS OF GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR

into writing enabling the writer to turn images in cinematic variation. Images

OVERHEARD? WHAT ELSE? ASSUME THAT THE WORST HAS HAPPENED

shift sense under the scissors smell images to sound sight to sound sound to

EXPLICIT AND SUBJECT TO STRATEGY IS AT SOME POINT CLASSICAL

kinesthetic. This is where Rimbaud was going with his color of vowels. And his

PROSE. CUTTING AND REARRANGING FACTOR YOUR OPPONENT WILL

ìsystematic derangement of the senses.î The place of mescaline hallucination:

GAIN INTRODUCES A NEW DIMENSION YOUR STRATEGY. HOW MANY DIS-

seeing colors tasting sounds smelling forms.

COVERIES SOUND TO KINESTHETIC? WE CAN NOW PRODUCE ACCIDENT

TO HIS COLOR OF VOWELS. AND NEW DIMENSION TO FILMS CUT THE SENSES. THE PLACE OF SAND. GAMBLING SCENES ALL TIMES COLORS TASTING SOUNDS SMELL STREETS OF THE WORLD. WHEN YOU CAN HAVE THE BEST ALL: ìPOETRY IS FOR EVERYONEî DR NEUMANN IN A COLLAGE OF WORDS READ HEARD INTRODUCED THE CUT-UP SCISSORS RENDERS THE PROCESS GAME AND MILITARY STRATEGY, VARIATION CLEAR AND ACT ACCORDINGLY. IF YOU POSED ENTIRELY OF REARRANGED CUT DETERMINED BY RANDOM A PAGE OF WRITTEN WORDS NO ADVANTAGE FROM KNOWING INTO WRITER PREDICT THE MOVE. THE CUT VARIATION IMAGES SHIFT SENSE ADVANTAGE IN PROCESSING TO SOUND SIGHT TO SOUND. HAVE BEEN MADE BY ACCIDENT IS WHERE RIMBAUD WAS GOING WITH ORDER THE CUT-UPS COULD ìSYSTEMATIC DERANGEMENTî OF THE GAMBLING SCENE IN WITH A TEA HALLUCINATION: SEEING AND PLACES. CUT BACK. CUT FORMS. REARRANGE THE WORD AND IMAGE TO OTHER FIELDS THAN WRITING.

07.

THE THREE BASIC FORMS OF REMIX: A POINT OF ENTRY, BY EDUARDO NAVAS The following summary is a copy and paste collage (a type of literary remix) of my lectures and preliminary writings since 2005. My definition of Remix was first introduced in one of my most recent texts: Turbulence: Remixes + Bonus Beats, commissioned by Turbulence.org. Many of the ideas I entertain in the text for Turbulence were first discussed in various presentations during the Summer of 2006. (See the list of places here plus an earlier version of my definition of Remix). Below, the section titled “remixes” takes parts from the section by the same name in the Turbulence text, and the section titled “remix defined”

Image source: Turbulence.org

consists of excerpts of my definitions which have been revised for an upcoming

Layout by Ludmil Trenkov

text soon to be released in English and Spanish by Telefonica in Buenos Aires,

Duchamp source: Art History Birmington

Argentina. The full text will be released online once it is officially published.

Levine source: Artnet (This text has been recently added to the section titled Remix Defined to expand

REMIX DEFINED

my general definition of Remix.)

To understand Remix as a cultural phenomenon, we must first define it in music.

A music remix, in general, is a reinterpretation of a pre-existing song, meaning that the “aura” of the original will be dominant in the remixed version. Of course some of the most challenging remixes can question this generalization. But based on its history, it can be stated that there are three types of remixes. The first remix is extended, that is a longer version of the original song containing long instrumental sections making it more mixable for the club DJ. The first known disco song to be extended to ten minutes is “Ten Percent,” by Double Exposure, remixed by Walter Gibbons in 1976.[1]

The second remix is selective; it consists of adding or subtracting material from

The third remix is reflexive; it allegorizes and extends the aesthetic of sampling,

the original song. This is the type of remix which made DJs popular producers

where the remixed version challenges the aura of the original and claims autono-

in the music mainstream. One of the most successful selective remixes is Eric

my even when it carries the name of the original; material is added or deleted,

B. & Rakim’s “Paid in Full,” remixed by Coldcut in 1987. [2] In this case Coldcut

but the original tracks are largely left intact to be recognizable. An example of

produced two remixes, the most popular version not only extended the original

this is Mad Professor’s famous dub/trip hop album No Protection, which is a re-

recording, following the tradition of the club mix (like Gibbons), but it also con-

mix of Massive Attack’s Protection. In this case both albums, the original and the

tained new sections as well as new sounds, while others were subtracted, always

remixed versions, are considered works on their own, yet the remixed version is

keeping the “essence” of the song intact.

completely dependent on Massive’s original production for validation.[3] The fact that both albums were released at the same time in 1994 further complicates Mad Professor’s allegory. This complexity lies in the fact that Mad Professor’s production is part of the tradition of Jamaica’s dub, where the term “version” was often used to refer to “remixes” which due to their extensive manipulation in the studio pushed for allegorical autonomy.[4]

Image source: Vinyl Masterpiece

Image source: Rate Your Music

The third remix is reflexive; it allegorizes and extends the aesthetic of sampling, where the remixed version challenges the aura of the original and claims autonomy even when it carries the name of the original; material is added or deleted, but the original tracks are largely left intact to be recognizable. An example of this is Mad Professor’s famous dub/trip hop album No Protection, which is a remix of Massive Attack’s Protection. In this case both albums, the original and the remixed versions, are considered works on their own, yet the remixed version is completely dependent on Massive’s original production for validation.[3] The fact that both albums were released at the same time in 1994 further complicates Mad Professor’s allegory. This complexity lies in the fact that Mad Professor’s production is part of the tradition of Jamaica’s dub, where the term “version” was often used to refer to “remixes” which due to their extensive manipulation in the studio pushed for allegorical autonomy.[4] Allegory is often deconstructed in more advanced remixes following this third form, and quickly moves to be a reflexive exercise that at times leads to a “remix” in which the only thing that is recognizable from the original is the title. But, to be clear—no matter what—the remix will always rely on the authority of the Image source: Last FM

original song. When this activity is extended to culture at large, the remix is in the end a re-mix—that is a rearrangement of something already recognizable; it functions at a second level: a meta-level. This implies that the originality of the remix is non-existent, therefore it must acknowledge its source of valida-

tion self-reflexively. In brief, the remix when extended as a cultural practice is a second mix of something pre-existent; the material that is mixed at least for a second time must be recognized otherwise it could be misunderstood as something new, and it would become plagiarism. Without a history, the remix cannot be Remix.[5] The extended, selective and reflexive remixes can quickly crossover and blur their own definitions. Based on a materialist historical analysis, it can be noted that DJs became invested in remixes which inherited a rich practice of appropriation that had been at play in culture at large for many decades. Below are brief definitions with visual examples.

REMIXES Extended Remixes The Extended Remix was an early form of remix in which DJs from New York City became invested. On close examination this was a reaction against the status quo, where everything was made as brief as possible, from radio songs to novels.

I argue that due to this, the extended remix is not found in mass culture prior to this period.

The Disco DJs, going against the grain, actually extended music compositions to make them more danceable. They took 3 to 4 minute compositions that would be

Image source: Ebay

friendly to radio play, and extended them as long as 10 minutes.[6] In the seventies this was quite radical because in fact, it is the summary of long material that is constantly privileged in the mainstream—which is true even today. The reason behind this tendency has to do in part with the efficiency that popular culture demands. That is, everything is optimized to be quickly delivered and consumed by as many people as possible. An obvious example of this tendency from history is the popularity of publications like Reader’s Digest, which offers condensed versions of books as well as stories for people who want to be informed but do not have the time to read the original material, which is often more extensive. [7] Another recent activity that is now emerging on the web is the two-minute “replay” available for TV shows like “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.”[8] If you missed the show when it aired, you can spend just two minutes online catching

Image source: Youtube

up on the plot; in essence, this is a more efficient version of Reader’s Digest for

while leaving its spectacular aura intact. An example from art history in which

TV delivered to your Internet doorstep. This two-minute replay is also called

key codes of the Selective Remix are at play is Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain

“video highlights.” At the same time, this optimization of information allows

(1917); [10] this work consists of an untouched urinal (save for a traditional

entire programs to be uploaded by average consumers in short segments to

artist signature) to reinforce the question, what is art? And codes of a second

community websites like Youtube, which in the end function as promotion for

level remix on Duchamp can be found in Fountain (after Marcel Duchamp) by

TV media.[9]

Sherrie Levine who, in 1991, questioned Duchamp as a privileged male artist and his urinal as art, leaving intact Duchamp’s aura as an artist but not the Urinal’s

Selective Remixes

spectacular aura as a mass produced object. [11] In both of these cases there is

For the Selective Remix the DJ takes and adds parts to the original compostion,

subtraction and addition (selectively–hence the term, Selective Remixes).

A second example where key codes of the Selective Remix are at play can be

Reflexive Remixes

found in DJ culture itself. Notice how the CD remixer gains authority by al-

The Reflexive Remix differs in various ways from the Selective Remix; it directly

legorizing the turntable. In this case the Technics 1210 functions similarly to

allegorizes and extends the aesthetic of sampling as practiced in the music studio

Duchamp’s urinal: the basic turntable designed for listening was appropriated

by seventies DJs, where the remixed version challenges the aura of the original

by the DJ to mix and scratch music live; it was used as an actual musical instru-

and claims autonomy even when it carries the original’s name. In culture at

ment, and Duchamp appropriated a urinal to recontextualize it as art. It is crucial

large, the Reflexive Remix takes parts from different sources and mixes them

to note that the necessity for precision in performance by turntablists led to

aiming for autonomy. The spectacular aura of the original(s), whether fully

developing a specialized turntable that could withstand physical abuse, while for

recognizable or not must remain a vital part if the remix is to find cultural accep-

Duchamp, it was enough to leave the urinal intact, save for the artist’s signature

tance. This strategy demands that the viewer reflect on the meaning of the work

(R. Mutt). Then the Technics SL-DZ 1200 similarly to Levine’s urinal, selectively

and its sources-even when knowing the origin may not be possible.

allegorizes and appropriates elements from the Technics 1210 turntable; in this instance the critical elements that validate the turntable in DJ Culture are not

An example from art history in which the codes of the Reflexive Remix are at

only left intact, but in fact celebrated.

play is the work of John Heartfield, who takes material out of context to create social commentary. His Photo-montages like Adolf the Superman: Swallows Gold and Spouts Junk[12] and Hurrah, the Butter is All Gone,[13] question the very subject that gives them the power to comment. In the former, Hitler, as the title connotes, is presented swallowing gold and is questioned as a leader of Germany; while in the latter, a German family is having dinner, eating military weapons, thus the stability of the home is questioned due to German politics. In his case, the spectacular aura of the source image (like in the second remix) is

Image source: Panasonic Europe

left intact-but only to be questioned along with everything else: we believe the image but question it at the same time due to the dual transparency of a montage

and the realism expected of a photo-image; the work then gains access to social

parts of men and women remixed to create a collage of de-gendered figures. The

commentary based on the combination of recognizable images.

authority of the image lies in the acknowledgment of each fragment individually, and a specific social commentary like the one found in Heartfield’s work is no longer at play; instead, each individual fragment in Hoch’s work needs to hold on to its cultural code in order to create meaning, although with a much more open-ended position.

Image source: Turbulence.org Layout by Ludmil Trenkov Sources: towson.edu Another example from art history where the codes of the reflexive remix can be found is the work of Hannah Hoch. Her collages blur the origin of the images she appropriates; the result is open-ended propositions. Her work often questions notions of identity and gender roles. Yet, even when it is not clear where the material comes from, her work is still fully dependent on an allegorical recognition of such forms in culture at large in order to attain meaning. This is the case in pieces like Grotesque [14] and Tamar. [15] Although they were made 30 years apart, both decontextualze the objects they appropriate. Here we have body

An example of the Reflexive Remix in culture at large is Wikipedia. The entries to the online encyclopedia are constantly revised and updated by different contributors; when a controversial entry is made, a discussion ensues and a posting is placed at the top of the site explaining the current state of debate.

Another example is Youtube, a community site, which like Wikipedia is driven by the community. If a video is offensive or deemed inappropriate the community will let Youtube staff know immediately. Youtube also has a complex tie in with the corporate media, in which copyright infringement is always present, and it is quite common that when a corporation finds it to their benefit, they demand their material to be removed if it was posted without permission. This opens the door to the complexiies brought about by the creative possibilities of “free culture” and “remix culture.”

For a detailed analysis of how the Selective and Extended Remixes are at play in new media art, please read the section “Remixes” in Turbulence: Remixes + Bonus Beats.

Image source: Wikipedia.org

There are many other examples from art history and popular culture which can be presented. Neo-dada material by Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and

For Heartfield and Hoch the subject which gives the work of art its authority is

their contemporaries can be connected to the reflexive remix, while work by

actually questioned; the result is a friction, a tension that demands that the view-

Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein can be related to the Selective Remix. The

ers reconsider everything in front of them. This is what makes their art powerful.

Extended Remix, however remains unusual, except in the club remixes and art

projects. The reasons for this are constantly entertained in Remixtheory.net.

[6] Brewster, 178-79.

In conclusion, what is crucial at the moment is understanding how different acts

[7] Reader’s Digest, , (October, 2006).

of appropriation throughout history, such as the ones revisited above, enable us to entertain Remix as part of the consumer/producer model currently at play in

[8] “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” nbc.com, September 2006,

culture.

[9] The 2007 Grammys can be seen in pieces almost in its entirety. See [1] Brewster, 178-79.

“Grammys 2007,” Youtube.org 2007 (April 15, 2007), http://youtube.com/ results?search_query=grammys+2007&search=Search.

[2] Paid in full was actually a B side release meant to complement “Move the Crowd.” Eric B. & Rakim, “Paid in Full,” Re-mix engineer: Derek B., Produced

[10] For an online reproduction of the famous Richard Stieglitz photograph visit:

by Eric B. & Rakim, Island Records, 1987.

“Fountain”Art History Birmington,http://arthist.binghamton.edu/duchamp/ fountain.html , (November 2006).

[3] Ulf Poschardt, DJ Culture (London: Quartet Books, 1995), 297.

[11] For an online reproduction of Levine’s appropriation visit “Sherrie Levine,” [4] Dick Hebdige, Cut ‘N’ Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music, (London:

Artnet, http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/cfinch/finch5-7-4.asp,

Comedia, 1987), 12-16.

(October, 2006).

[5] DJ producers who sampled during the eighties found themselves having

[12] For an image of Heartfield’s Superman, see: Towson.edu, http://www.tow-

to acknowledge History by complying with the law; see the landmark law-suit

son.edu/heartfield/images/Adolf_the_Superman.jpg, (October, 2006).

against Biz Markie in Brewster, 246.

[13] For an image of Heartfield’s Butter’s all Gone, see http://www.towson.edu/

heartfield/images/Hurrah_the_Butter_is_all_gone.jpg, (October, 2006).

[14] For an image of Grotesque visit Adam Art Gallery http://www.vuw.ac.nz/adamartgal/exhibitions/2002/big/lightsandshadows-Höch-lg.html, (October, 2006).

[15] For an image of Tamar ,visit “Hannah Höch: ‘Dompteuse(Tamar)’,” http:// www.yellowbellywebdesign.com/Höch/dompu.html, (October, 2006).

08.

[IDC] REMIX CULTURE VS. OBJECT-ORIENTED CULTURE

(Source: IDC List)

networked culture, is circumspect.

Thu Apr 13 19:13:28 EDT 2006 LM: In the last few years information visualization became increasingly popular A Conversation between Manovich and Lichty

and it attracted the energy of some of the most talented new media artists and

LM: We live in ‘remix’ culture. Are there limits to remixing? Can

designers. Will it ever become as widely used as type or photography - or will it

anything be remixed with anything? Shall there be an ethics of remixing?

always remain a tool used by professionals?

PL: Actually, I don’t think we live in a ‘remix’ culture, I liken it more to pastiche

PL: Actually, in the hands of the VJ, there are alrready real-time data visualiza-

or collage, or even object-oriented culture. To remix is to take cultural ele-

tion tools ready and in use through inexpensive packages, freeware, & open

ments and transform/repurpose them tot he point where the source referent is

source. I also understand that many VJ packages are severly limited, but others

obscured, idsappears, or its signifying power is backgrounded to the point where

have excellent potential for low-cost data visualization.

the new ‘author’s intent overrides. This is actually tightly linked to issues of intellectual control/copyright...

In addition, programs like VVVV, PD, Onadime, Keyworx, and even fairly accessible programming environments like Blitz3d, Java, Programming, and Python

In an object-oriented culture, the artist is more like a bricoleur/collage artist

can allow users to c reat data visualizatin environments (2-or 3D) _fairly easily_

where elements of culutral and content and contextual ‘code’ are combbined and

and at low cost.

thend compiled for transmission throughout that culture. The material is then, ideally, available in the cultural databes, with the new components added by the

LM: Today cinema and literature continue the modern project or rendering

artist, to be upgraded/reassembled/recompiled..

human psychology and subjectivity, while fine art seems to be not too concerned with this project. How can we use new media to represent contemporary subjec-

Therefore, I have few or no problems with an ethics of the remix as such, as the singularityof the artist as such as singular entitiy in light of a distributed,

tivity in new ways? Do we need to do it?

PL: This really depends on what we mean by being subjective. Some of the

over and over again. Will this situation ever change? What will be the next stage

award-winning fine media art seems to be very much about conveying a human

in media consumption after MP3 players, DVD recorders, CD burners, etc, etc,

moment/experience. David Crawford’s SMS contains a great deal of frozen

etc.?

pathos in the way his programs access his stop-motion experices. Barney’s Cremaster does not seem to be wholly formal, either. But I do agree that a lot of

PL: The producer/consumer model really depends on the modes of produc-

fine art does lack a subjective component at this time, and I consider this part of

tion and consumption being examined. If we look at Antin’s model of video vs.

the era. This will come and go.

television (grass roots/distribution vs. institutional transmission), I would say probably not, although the model might be changing. To consider this question,

LM: ‘Blobs’ in architecture and design - is this a new ‘international style’ of soft-

I think that one has to reevaluate the models of the producer and the consumer.

ware society, here to stay, - or only a particular effect of architects and designers

Production is not merely about making the product; it is also about having the

starting to use software?

promotional and distribution methods/infrastructures to transmit the messageunit and get it seen/consumed.

PL: Probably towards the latter. Adoption of new technologies often spurs practitioners to explore their new potentials, and this becomes evident. My

Can we say that the consumer will somehow get access to mass-market distribu-

belief is that after a certain point in time that the ’styles’ of the blob and other

tion channels mainly because they can make mass-market format media? Mostly

architectural forms will see some sense of integration.

not, for obvious reasons. However, can distributed media transmission models like Video IPods redefine transmission and distribution models? I don’t know

LM: While the tools to produce one own media have been more accessible and

- maybe.

more powerful, people never consumed more commercial media than now.

Thus the essential division between ‘media amateurs’ and ‘media professionals’

To ask which medium will arise next is difficult, and seems more of interest to

which got established in the beginning seems to be as strong as ever. In short,

marketers/manufacturers than consumers and grass-roots producers.

the 1960s idea that new technologies will turn consumers into producers failed

I think we can look at criteria for such a medium. There will have to be mass market saturation of technology. This is evident in terms of CD players, DVDs, VCR, IPOD, and so on. In short, there has to be a format and a platform that there can be a one-to-many model. For the grass-roots, there has to be some ease of use and ability to effortlessly get basic elements of high quality. Media artisanry is more of a cultural than a technical issue, and is beyond the scope of the question.

Lastly, and probably the most compelling, is the argument that there has to be content worth looking at, and making people aware of it. In an era in which there is exponential growth in media production, it’s increasingly difďŹ cult to get media in front of eyes, so one has to be increasingly savvy. That might be the reason for tactical media, but that’s another topic.

Thanks for the questions.

Patrick

09.

LOOPS OF PERCEPTION: SAMPLING, MEMORY, AND THE SEMANTIC WEB, BY PAUL MILLER, AKA DJ SPOOKY I get asked what I think about sampling a lot, and I’ve always wanted to have a short term to describe the process. Stuff like “collective ownership”, “systems of memory”, and “database logics” never really seem to cut it on the lecture circuit, so I guess you can think of this essay as a soundbite for the sonically-perplexed.

This is an essay about memory as a vast playhouse where any sound can be you.

Press “play” and this essay says “here goes”:

Graph model for IPROnto ontology

Inside the out-side Think. Search a moment in the everyday density of what’s going on around

Image source: rhizomik.net

you and look for blankness in the flow. Pull back from that thought and think

Text source: Zone

of the exercise as a kind of mini-meditation on mediated life. Pause, repeat.

April/May 2003

There’s always a rhythm to the space between things. A word passes by to define the scenario. Your mind picks up on it, and places it in context. Next thought,

“free content fuels innovation”

next scenario - the same process happens over and over again. It’s an internal

- Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas

process that doesn’t even need to leave the comfortable confines of your mind: A poem of yourself written in synaptic reverie, a chemical soup filled with electric

pulses, it loops around and brings a lot of baggage with it. At heart, the process

a deity, or prayers, or mantras, were all common forms, shared through cultural

is an abstract machine made to search in the right place for the right codes. The

affinities and affirmed by people who spoke the code - the language of the people

information in your mind looks for structures to give it context. The word you

sharing the story.

have thought about is only a placeholder for a larger system. It’s a neural map unfolding in syntaxes, linked right into the electrochemical processes that make

Today, it’s that gap between the interior and exterior perceptual worlds that

up not only what you can think, but how you can think.

entire media philosophies have been written about, filmed, shot, uploaded, re-sequenced, spliced and diced. And within the context of that interstitial place

Inside, we use our minds for so many different things that we can only guess

where thoughts can be media (whether they are familiar to you or not), the kinds

at how complex the process of thinking is. Outside, it’s a different scenario.

of thoughts don’t necessarily matter: It’s the structure of the perceptions and the

Each human act, each human expression, has to be translated into some kind

texts and the memories that are conditioned by your thought-process that will

of information for other people to understand it: Some call it the “mind/brain”

echo and configure the way that texts you’re familiar with rise into prominence

interface, and others, like Descartes, call it a kind of perceptual (and perpetual)

when you think. We live in an era where quotation and sampling operate on

illusion. In our day and age, the basic idea of how we create content in our minds

such a deep level that the archaeology of what can be called knowledge floats in

is so conditioned by media that we are in a position unlike any other culture in

a murky realm between the real and unreal. Look at the Matrix as a parable for

human history: Today, this interior rhythm of words, this inside conversation,

Plato’s cave, a section of his “Republic” written several thousand years ago, but

expresses itself in a way that can be changed once it enters the “real” world.

resonant with the idea of living in a world of illusion.

When recorded, adapted, remixed, and uploaded, expression becomes a stream unit of value in a fixed and remixed currency that is traded via the ever shifting currents of information moving through the networks we use to talk with one

The soundbite fetish

another. It wasn’t for nothing that Marx said so long ago that “all that is solid

Another permutation: In his 1938 essay On the Fetish-Character in Music, the

melts into air” - perhaps he was anticipating the economy of ideas that drives the

theoretician Theodor Adorno bemoaned the fact that European classical music

network systems we live and breathe in today. In different eras, the invocation of

was becoming more and more of a recorded experience. He had already written

an essay entitled The Opera and The Long Playing Record a couple of years

The loop of perception

before, and the Fetish essay was a continuation of the same theme. People were

As the World Wide Web continues to expand, it’s becoming increasingly difficult

being exposed to music that they barely had time to remember, because the huge

for users to obtain information efficiently. This has nothing to do with the

volume of recordings and the small amount of time to absorb them presented to

volume of information out in the world, or even who has access to it - it’s a kind

the proto-modernist listener a kind of soundbite mentality (one we in the era

of search engine function that’s undergoing a crisis of meaning. The metaphor

of the Web are becoming all too familiar with). He wrote that “the new listeners

holds: the poem invokes the next line, word leads to thought and back again.

resemble the mechanics who are simultaneously specialized and capable of

Repeat. The scenario: internal becomes external becomes involution. The loop

applying their special skills to unexpected places outside their skilled trades. But

of perception is a relentless hall of mirrors in the mind. You can think of sam-

this despecialization only seems to help them out of the system.” 1

pling as a story you are telling yourself - one made of the world as you can hear it, and the theatre of sounds that you invoke with those fragments is all one story

When Tim Berners Lee wrote some of the original source code for the World

made up of many. Think of it as the act of memory moving from word to word as a

Wide Web, it was little more than a professors’ club - but it echoed that same

remix: complex becomes multiplex becomes omniplex.

sense of abbreviation that Adorno mentioned. I tend to think of sampling and uploading files as the same thing, just in a different format. To paraphrase John Cage, sound is just information in a different form. Think of DJ culture as a kind

Search engine civilization

of archival impulse put to a kind of hunter-gatherer milieu - textual poaching,

As more and more people joined the Web, it took on a more expanded role, and

becomes zero-paid, becomes no-logo, becomes brand X. It’s that interface thing

I look to this expansion as a parallel with the co-evolution of recorded media.

rising again - but this time around, mind/brain interface becomes emergent

Lexical space became cultural space. Search engines took on a greater and

system of large scale economies of expression.

greater role as the Web expanded, because people needed to be able to quickly access the vast amount of varying results that would be yielded. Search engines look for what they’ve been told to look for, and then end up bringing back a lot of conflicting results: metadata that breaks down Web sites’ contents into easy

to search for “meta-tags” that flag the attention of the search engines’ distant

services, images, and especially content - made immediately accessible. The

glances. The process is essentially like a huge rolodex whose tabs are blue, and

result is an immense repository - an archive of almost anything that has ever

whose cards are for the most part hidden.

been recorded.

So too with sound. I’m writing an essay on sampling and memory using search

Think of the semantic webs that hold together contemporary info culture, and

engines and the Web as a metaphor because I see the Net as a kind of inheritor

of the disconnect between how we speak, and how the machines that process

to the way that DJs look for information: It’s a shareware world on the Web, and

this culture speak to one another, thanks to our efforts to have anything and

the migration of cultural values from one street to another is what this essay is

everything represented and available to anyone everywhere. It’s that archive

all about.

fervor that makes the info world go around, and as an artist you’re only as good as your archive - it’s that minimalist, and that simple. That’s what makes it deeply

Think of city streets as routes of movement in a landscape made of roads and

complex.

manifolds. These roads convey people, goods, and so on through a densely inhabited urban landscape held together by consensus. It’s like James Howard

Think then of search engines as scouts or guides for the semantic web; a category

Kunstler said in his book The City in Mind (Free Press, 2002): these streets, like

that also includes (among other things) software agents that can negotiate and

the cities he loves to write about, are “as broad as civilization itself”. Look at the

collect information, markup languages that can tag many more types of informa-

role of the search engine in Web culture as a new kind of thoroughfare, and that

tion in a document, and knowledge systems that enable machines to read Web

role is expanded a million-fold. The information and goods are out there, but

pages and determine their reliability. But it goes still further: the truly interdis-

you stay in one place; the civilization comes to you.

ciplinary semantic web guide combines aspects of artificial intelligence, markup languages, natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge rep-

Today, when we browse and search, we invoke a series of chance operations - we

resentation, intelligent agents, and databases. Taken together, it all resembles a

use interfaces, icons, and text as a flexible set of languages and tools. Our se-

good DJ, who has a lot of records and files, and knows exactly where to filter the

mantic web is a remix of all available information - display elements, metadata,

mix. They don’t call the process online “collaborative filtering” for nothing.

Software swing

and manifests some deep elements of our being.

Again and again, one of the main things I hear people asking when I travel is: “What software do you use?”

The point of all this? To remind us that, like Duke Ellington and so many other musicians said so long ago, “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.”

Today’s computer networks are built on software protocols that are fundamen-

As the information age moves into full gear, it would be wise to remember the

tally textual. Paradoxically, this linguistic medium of software isn’t only nearly

cautionary tales of shades and shadows; to recall and remix the tale of a bored

undecipherable to the layperson, but it has created radical, material transforma-

billionaire living in a dream world in Don Delillo’s Cosmopolis, who said:

tions through these linguistic means (eg, computers and networks as forces of globalization). As Henri Lefebvre said so long ago in his classic 1974 essay The

It was shallow thinking to maintain that numbers and charts were the cold

Production of Space: “The body’s inventiveness needs no demonstration, for the

compression of unruly human energies, every sort of yearning and midnight

body itself reveals it, and deploys it in space. Rhythms in all their multiplic-

sweat reduced to lucid units in the financial markets. In fact data itself was

ity interpenetrate one another. In the body and around it, as on the surface of

soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process. This was the eloquence

a body of water, rhythms are forever crossing and recrossing, superimposing

of alphabets and numeric systems, now fully realized in electronic form, in the

themselves upon each other, always bound to space.”2

zero-oneness of the world, the digital imperative that defined every breath of the planet’s living billions. Here was the heave of the biosphere. Our bodies and

The semantic web is an intangible sculptural body that exists only in the virtual

oceans were here, knowable and whole.3

space between you and the information you perceive. It’s all in continuous transformation, and to look for anything to really stay the same is to be caught in a time warp to another era, another place when things stood still and didn’t change so much. But if this essay has done one thing, then I hope it has been to move us to think as the objects move: to make us remember that we are warm-blooded mammals, and that the cold information we generate is a product of our desires,

Sample away!

Paul D. Miller is a conceptual artist, writer, and musician working in New York City. His written work has appeared in The Village Voice, Artforum, Raygun, and a host of other publications. He is co-publisher of the multicultural magazine A Gathering of the Tribes, and has just started the online new media magazine www.21cmagazine.com. Miller is perhaps best known under the moniker of his “constructed persona”, DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, whose recent aural efforts have included the cds “Optometry” and “Modern Mantra”, and “Not in Our Name”, a remix collaboration with Saul Williams and Coldcut. His most recent art project is Errata Erratum, created for L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art. This is a Net-based remix of Marcel Duchamp’s artworks errata musical and sculpture musical.

Notes : 1. Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music, with notes and commentary by Richard Leppert, translated by Susan H. Gillespie and others (University of California Press, 2002).

2. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicholson Smith (Blackwell Publishing, 1974).

3. Don Delillo, Cosmopolis: A Novel (Scribner, 2003).

10.

DELEUZE/GUATTARI: REMIX CULTURE, PAUL D. MILLER INTERVIEWS CARLO SIMULA 1) You’ve often referred in your interviews to how much contemporary philosophy has influenced your work. Foucault said “Un jour, peut-être, le siècle sera deleuzien”, how much and in which way Deleuze and Guattari influenced you?

And what you feel is interesting in their work?

Image source: Dusty Groove Text source: Nettime.org and Djspooky.com November 20, 2005 The following is an interview with Carlo Simula for his book MILLESUONI. OMAGGIO A DELEUZE E GUATTARI (Cronopio Edizioni) Contributions will include Guy-Marc Hinant (Sub Rosa), Philippe Franck (transcultures, le maubege), Bernhard Lang, Tim Murphy, Achim Szepanski - and many others. I think it’s an update on some issues that have been percolating.

Smell the brew.

Paul, Tunis, Tunisia 11/20/05

The idea of the “remix” is pretty trendy these days - as usual people tend to “script” over the multi-cultural links: the economics of “re-purposing,” “outsourcing” and above all, of living in an “experience economy” - these are things that fuel African American culture, and it’s active dissemination in all of the diaspora of Afro-Modernity. My take on Deleuze and Guattari is to apply a “logic of the particular” to the concept of contemporary art. Basically it’s to say that software has undermined all of the categories of previous production models, and in turn, molded the “computational models” of how “cultural capital,” as Pierre Bourdieu coined it, mirrors various kinds of production models in a world where “sampling” (mathematical and musical), has become the global language of urban youth culture. Eduoard Glissant, the Afro-Caribbean philosopher/linguist liked to call this “creolization” - I like to call it “the remix.” Philosophy is basically a reflective activity. It always requires a surface to bounce off of. We don’t exist in a cultural vacuum.

Basically I look at Deleuze/Guattari as two figures who act as translators of European philosophy and aesthetics into some kind of exit for people who are concerned with humanism. Think: Frantz Fanon wrote about this as a kind of update on Existentialism - the “gaze” that defines the world today is “brown” - but it is contained in a strange cadence. It’s a visual rhythm that extended the idea of philosophy into spectrums that have yet to be mapped out. European philosophy has usually been totally eurocentric for the last several centuries, and Deleuze and Guattari are the two philosophers who have taken the idea of philosophy past the limits of previous thinkers. Aristotle created the idea of taxonomy for the West several thousand years ago. Deleuze and Guattari have taught us to move beyond the categories he defined, and have helped create tools for analyzing

how complex out mediated lives have become. I think of their concepts like the “Abstract machine,” the “body without organs,” and the “immanent plane” of action/realization as almost beyond the categories of European philosophy. They are humanists who look for meaning beyond the norms. That’s where my music and their thoughts intersect.

Essentially, for me, music is a metaphor, a tool for reflection. We need to think of music as information, not simply as rhythms, but as codes for aesthetic translation between blurred categories that have slowly become more and more obsolete. For me, the Dj metaphor is about thinking around the concept of collage and its place in the everyday world of information, computational modelling, and conceptual art. All of them offer exits from the tired realms of Euro-centric philosophy into some kind of pan humanism. That’s why I like Deleuze and Guattari’s work. Other figures from the European aesthetic realm like Ludwig Feuerbach (who promoted the idea of “humanism” in his works of the mid 19th century), Spinoza, and Giordano Bruno’s exploration of Semiotics are also influences, but the basic sense of “rhizomatic” thought - thinking in meshworks, in nets that extend to other nets - it’s the driving force of my music and art. I think it’s a great place to start thinking about a philosophy of “the remix.” The “remix” is about certain kinds of polyphony - it’s about making multiple rhythms work together, synchronized, cut, pasted, and collaged. That’s the real “abstract machine” - cross reference that with James Brown, think Garrett A. Morgan (the African American inventor of the street light - the choreography on every street corner of the global megalopolis), think Duke Ellington with his “Afro-Eurasian Eclipse” jazz modernity, think Albert Murray’s essay “Spyglass Tree”, think Detroit’s underground forerunners, stuff like Drexciya... the list goes on. etc etc 2) I see many analogies between your work and Deleuze and Guattari’s, especially when they talk about the “concept” as a way to define the world, defining it as an “event.” The production of a concept is therefore the way philosophy builds the understanding of the real world. It seems to me that in Rhythm Science you talk a lot about sampling and the figure of the DJ as a manipulator of images, sounds,

technologies used to create, exactly, “concepts.” What do you think about it?

One of my favorite books of the last several years, African Philosophy: An Anthology edited by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, explores this kind of thing: how do we re-map the scripted territories of Eurocentric thought to create new tools, new ways of thinking about the multi-plex scenario any idealist will find at the end of any investigation of philosophy in the 21st century. For Deleuze and Guattari, and for me, the idea is always an “event” - it presupposes a kind of frame of reference that closes one action and starts another - they overlap and blur. For me “sampling” is the same thing: thought event, sound event.

Computers generate algorithms that create tableaux of continuous uncertainty - the screen is not a locked space. My work asks about how the networks of creativity that we have inherited from the “bricks and mortar” world of the 20th century, have imploded, evolved and accelerated the “im-material” networks of the frequencies, fiber optic networks, and mathematically driven world of the 21st century. That’s the real “dematerialization of the art object” - it becomes patterns meshed, working between the spaces of pre-scripted behavior. My book Rhythm Science looked at foundations of contemporary thinking from the viewpoint of “how do we make art out of patterns of culture?” It was meant to ask more questions, not offer answers to contexts that are continually changing. The landscape of contemporary digital media is undefined. Anything that tells you it is “defined” is pretty much making a false observation. The undefined defined?

Heraclitus said something like this years ago - dj culture tells us it has become the way we organize information in a media ecology of unstable subjectivity. My take on this is basically “pro-active” - for me, music is all about creating tools for thinking - about giving people systems to organize information outside of the European categories of “rationality” and “universal subjectivity” that drove the Enlightenment. That is what I learned from them. Abstraction is the ultimate weapon. Multiculturalism is the ultimate destabilizing category because, like sampling, it can absorb anything. It defies limits, and posits “the subject” as an imploded category - one that is, and always has been, basically a construct.

What other constructs - the nation state, the idea of the “self” etc - are linked to

this category that is slowly being pulled apart by the centrifugal forces of digital media? Deleuze and Guattari give us tools to think about this kind of stuff - they posit these as fictions holding together other fictions. The mirror is held up to another mirror, and we can see an infinite corridor in either direction. I kind of want to break the mirror. Warhol’s “From A to B and Back Again” drifted as word dust through the fiber optic cables and satellite transmissions of a world of invisible meshworks. Stuff like that.

want to make sure to remind people, that yes, I’m an artist... It’s really weird how much people are set against the idea of existing in multiple contexts. Monoreality... something like that. It’s boring. Again, the D & G connection about multiple situations occurring simultaneously - reflects the “post post modern” scenario - it’s not about “deconstruction,” but reconstruction - of building a new vision of how we can live and think in the info ecology we’ve built for ourselves.

And so on, and so on, and so on...

3) Among other things the cd inside the book Rhythm Science is a concentrated “improvisation” of the Subrosa archive, a label which more than others promoted a certain genre of music connected to art.. It reminded me, with the proper differences, John Oswald’s “Greyfolded”, where he ends up building a version of Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star” from hundreds of live versions. Thoughts?

4) I find very interesting that in “Cinema 1-Movement and image” Deleuze talks about D.W.Griffith cinema, referring to image-action (the example he refers to in particular is “Intolerance”), and Griffith’s articulation of the narration, that offers two examples of “civilization”: (black people/white people). It almost seemed to me that your remix of “Birth of a nation”, especially when played live, originates, with the obvious differences, from Deleuze’s same critical ground... your opinion on that..

The “fold” is about involution - it’s about taking multiple perspectives on an event - just like the “break” in hip-hop, it’s the break beat, the broken fragment of time recorded on the sample that gives the “flow” of discourse its meaning in this context. In dj culture, you create structure from sequences. My style is the sound track to urban sprawl. It’s my way to look at compositional strategy in the era of digital media. My favorite photographer, Etienne Jules Maret’s “stop motion photography” alludes to this kind of thing. The fragment is greater than the interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari was about, and if you look at John Cage’s idea of “indeterminancy” and it’s relationship to turntables - the concept fits solidly. Composers have been using the “fold” for many centuries - the main issue is that they haven’t had the tools to describe the process. D&G gave us those tools - I guess I look more to stuff like Grand Master Flash’s “Adventures on the Wheels of Steel,” Steinski and Double D’s “Hip-hop Lessons” than John Oswald, but we’re both driven by the same concept. The idea of collage drives my mixes that’s the point. Contemporary art - art that explores the economies of scale that software allows us to explore - points to the idea of the “input-output” schemata that Delueze and Guattari talked about with their concept of the body without organs. I think it’s a good analogy. I really want to set music up as a platform - I

Civilization, as Freud pointed out so long ago, is about rules and boundaries but it also inspires a kind of continuous renewal. At heart, civilizations are control mechanisms - they’re psychological more than they’re physical. They are meta-tools. For me, at the moment, it seems like the West is in a serious crisis of meaning. The Enlightenment went dark in the mass mechanized warfare of the two world wars, and the shattered remains were burned in the fire of Vietnam.

Pretty much nothing remains. My music asks: how do we create new forms of meaning from these hollow ideals? We’ve moved far past Plato’s Republic into a realm where the “civic” aspects of culture as software are the new frames of reference. Software (credit card debt, individual assigned names on line, domain names, DNS routers, encryption, computer aided design that builds airplanes, routes electricity, guides DNA analysis etc etc there’s alot more but you get the point) regulates individual behavior - both on and off line - in the post industrialized world. Software for thinking: it’s an invisibly coercive concept. I like Deleuze’s take on “Intolerance” but you have to remember that film acts as a crucial myth device for a world based on the consumption of images. I think that we

need to analyze film from the viewpoint of not only what the Situationists called “psycho-geography” - a place that posits movement between radically different environments as a causal principle in the way that we organize information, but what Deleuze and Guattari posit as “deterritorialization” is essentially a kind of nomadic response to media overload - finding ways through the information data-cloud. Griffith was essentially a propagandist for state repression - he created “cut-up” cinema as a tool to portray multiple situations - but exactly for the opposite of what Deleuze and Guattari would think about. He used it to lock down perception. They use it to open things up. Juxtapose the two, and you can see why two radically different thinkers like Sergei Eisenstein and Guy Debord liked to think of Griffith as the essence of American cinema. That’s the dj situation - origin, and destination blur: they become loops, cycles, patterns. The way to explore them is through the filter of woven meaning. Black culture has been the world’s “subconscious” for most of the last several centuries - it has been the operating system of a culture that refuses to realize that its ideals have died long ago. The threads of the fabric of contemporary 21st century culture, the media landscape of filaments, systems, fiber optic cables, satellite transmissions, and so on - these are all rhizomatic. They are relational architectures - the move in synchronization. The meshwork needs to be polyphonic. The gears move in different cadences, but they create movement. They need to be pulled apart so that we can break the loops holding the past and present together so that the future can leak through. Perhaps this is where we break with the old situation of “black” “white” - that stuff is really dumb any way. It’s all a lot more complex than that dualism. This is the new “operating system” I envisage when I remixed “Birth of a Nation” - the collapse of Wagner, the collapse of the Western scripts of linear progress, the renewal of a world where repetition is a kind of homage to the future by respecting the past.

Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid Tunis, Tunisia - 11/20/05

11.

WHAT COMES AFTER REMIX? BY LEV MANOVICH

It is a truism today that we live in a “remix culture.” Today, many of cultural and lifestyle arenas - music, fashion, design, art, web applications, user created media, food - are governed by remixes, fusions, collages, or mash-ups. If post-modernism defined 1980s, remix definitely dominates 2000s, and it will probably continue to rule the next decade as well. (For an expanding resource on remix culture, visit remixtheory.net by Eduardo Navas.) Here are just a few examples of how remix continues to expand. In his 2004/2005-winter collection John Galliano (a fashion designer for the house of Dior) mixed vagabond look, Yemenite traditions, East-European motifs, and other sources that he collects during his extensive travels around the world. DJ Spooky created a featureMixmaster Mike- photo by Chris Taylor

length remix of D.W. Griffith’s 1912 “Birth of a Nation” which he appropriately named “Rebirth of a Nation.” In April 2006 Annenberg Center at University of

Image source: Virtual DJ

Southern California ran a two-day conference on “Networked Politics” which

Text source: Manovich.net

had sessions and presentations about a variety of remix cultures on the Web:

winter 2007

political remix videos, anime music videos, machinima, alternative news, infrastructure hacks.[1] In addition to these cultures that remix media content, we also have a growing number of software applications that remix data - so called software “mash-ups.” Wikipedia defines a mash-up as “a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.”[2] At the moment of this writing (February 4, 2007), the web site

www.programmableweb.com listed the total of 1511 mash-ups, and it estimated

broad, today referring to any reworking of already existing cultural work(s).

that the average of 3 new mash-ups Web applications are being published every

In his book DJ Culture Ulf Poschardt singles out different stages in the evolution

day.[3]

of remixing practice. In 1972 DJ Tom Moulton made his first disco remixes; as Poschardt points out, they “show a very chaste treatment of the original song.

Remix practice extends beyond culture and Internet. Wired magazine devoted

Moulton sought above all a different weighting of the various soundtracks,

its July 2005 issue to the theme Remix Planet. The introduction boldly stated:

and worked the rhythmic elements of the disco songs even more clearly and

“From Kill Bill to Gorillaz, from custom Nikes to Pimp My Ride, this is the

powerfully...Moulton used the various elements of the sixteen or twenty-four

age of the remix.”[4] Another top IT trend watcher in the world - the annual

track master tapes and remixed them.”[5] By 1987, “DJs started to ask other DJs

O’Reilly Emerging Technology conferences (ETECH) similarly adopted Remix

for remixes” and the treatment of the original material became much more ag-

as the theme for its 2005 conference. Attending the conference, I watched in

gressive. For example, “Coldcut used the vocals from Ofra Hanza’s ‘Im Nin Alu’

amazement how top executives from Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon, and other IT

and contrasted Rakim’s ultra-deep bass voice with her provocatively feminine

companies not precisely known for their avant-garde aspirations, described

voice. To this were added techno sounds and a house-inspired remix of a rhythm

their recent technologies and research projects using the concept of remixing.

section that loosened the heavy, sliding beat of the rap piece, making it sound

If I had any doubts that we are living not simply in Remix Culture but in a Remix

lighter and brighter.”[6]

Era, they disappeared right at that conference.

Around the turn of the century (20tth to 21st) people started to apply the term Remixing originally had a precise and a narrow meaning that gradually became

“remix” to other media besides music: visual projects, software, literary texts.

diffused. Although precedents of remixing can be found earlier, it was the intro-

Since, in my view, electronic music and software serve as the two key reservoirs

duction of multi-track mixers that made remixing a standard practice. With each

of new metaphors for the rest of culture today, this expansion of the term is

element of a song - vocals, drums, etc. - available for separate manipulation, it

inevitable; one can only wonder why it did no happen earlier. Yet we are left

became possible to “re-mix” the song: change the volume of some tracks or sub-

with an interesting paradox: while in the realm of commercial music remixing is

stitute new tracks for the old ounces. Gradually the term became more and more

officially accepted[7], in other cultural areas it is seen as violating the copyright

and therefore as stealing. So while filmmakers, visual artists, photographers,

old text(s) into the new one. Thus I think we should not see quoting as a histori-

architects and Web designers routinely remix already existing works, this is not

cal precedent for remixing. Rather, we can think of it as a precedent for another

openly admitted, and no proper terms equivalent to remixing in music exist to

new practice of authorship practice that, like remixing, was made possible by

describe these practices.

electronic and digital technology - sampling.

One term that is sometimes used to talk about these practices in non-music

Music critic Andrew Goodwin defined sampling as “the uninhibited use of

areas is “appropriation.” The term was first used to refer to certain New York-

digital sound recording as a central element of composition. Sampling thus

based post-modern artists of the early 1980s who re-worked older photographic

becomes an aesthetic programme.”[8] We can say that with sampling technol-

images - Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Barbara Kruger, and some others. But

ogy, the practices of montage and collage that were always central to twentieth

the term “appropriation” never achieved the same wide use as “remixing.” In

century culture, became industrialized. Yet we should be careful in applying the

fact, in contrast to “remix,” “appropriation” never completely left its original art

old terms to new technologically driven cultural practices. The terms “montage”

world context where it was coined. I think that “remixing” is a better term any-

and “collage” regularly pop up in the writings of music theorists from Poschardt

way because it suggests a systematic re-working of a source, the meaning which

to Kodwo Eshun and DJ Spooky who in 2004 published a brilliant book Rhythm

“appropriation” does not have. And indeed, the original “appropriation artists”

Science which ended up on a number of “best 10 books of 2004�� lists and

such as Richard Prince simply copied the existing image as a whole rather than

which put forward “unlimited remix” as The artistic and political technique of

re-mixing it. As in the case of Duchamp’s famous urinal, the aesthetic effect

our time.[9] In my view, these terms that come to us from literary and visual

here is the result of a transfer of a cultural sign from one sphere to another,

modernism of the early twentieth century - think for instance of works by

rather than any modification of a sign.

Moholy-Nagy, Hannah Höch or Raoul Hausmann - do not always adequately describe new electronic music. Let us note just three differences. Firstly, musical

The other older term commonly used across media is “quoting” but I see it as

samples are often arranged in loops. Secondly, the nature of sound allows musi-

describing a very different logic than remixing. If remixing implies systemati-

cians to mix pre-existent sounds in a variety of ways, from clearly differentiating

cally rearranging the whole text, quoting refers inserting some fragments from

and contrasting individual samples (thus following the traditional modernist

aesthetics of montage/collage), to mixing them into an organic and coherent

will it be still psychologically possible to create a new aesthetics that does not

whole;[10] To use the terms of Roland Barthes, we can say that if modernist

rely on excessive sampling? When I was emigrating from Russia to U.S. in 1981,

collage always involved a “clash” of element, electronic and software collage also

moving from grey and red communist Moscow to a vibrant and post-modern

allows for “blend.”[11] Thirdly, the electronic musicians now often conceive

New York, me and others living in Russia felt that Communist regime would last

their works beforehand as something that will be remixed, sampled, taken apart

for at least another 300 years. But already ten years later, Soviet Union ceased

and modified.

to exist. Similarly, in the middle of the 1990s the euphoria unleashed by the Web, collapse of Communist governments in Eastern Europe and early effects

It is relevant to note here that the revolution in electronic pop music that took

of globalization created an impression that we have finally Cold War culture

place in the second part of the 1980s was paralleled by similar developments

behind - its heavily armed borders, massive spying, and the military-industrial

in pop visual culture. The introduction of electronic editing equipment such as

complex. And once again, only ten years later we seem to be back in the darkest

switcher, keyer, paintbox, and image store made remixing and sampling a com-

years of Cold War, except that now we are being tracked with RFID chips, com-

mon practice in video production towards the end of the decade; first pioneered

puter vision surveillance systems, data mining and other new technologies of the

in music videos, it later took over the whole visual culture of TV. Other software

twenty first century. So it is very possible that the remix culture, which right now

tools such as Photoshop (1989) and After Effects (1993) had the same effect

appears to be so firmly in place that it can’t be challenged by any other cultural

on the fields of graphic design, motion graphics, commercial illustration and

logic, will morph into something else sooner than we think.

photography. And, a few years later, World Wide Web redefined an electronic document as a mix of other documents. Remix culture has arrived.

I don’t know what comes after remix. But if we now try now to develop a better historical and theoretical understanding of remix era, we will be in a better posi-

The question that at this point is really hard to answer is what comes after remix?

tion to recognize and understand whatever new era which will replace it.

Will we get eventually tired of cultural objects - be they dresses by Alexander McQueen, motion graphics by MK12 or songs by Aphex Twin - made from

[1] http://netpublics.annenberg.edu/, accessed February 4, 2007.

samples which come from already existing database of culture? And if we do,

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_%28web_application_hybrid%29,

accessed February 4, 2007.

[3] http://www.programmableweb.com/mashups, accessed February 4, 2007.

[4] http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.07/intro.html, accessed February 4, 2007.

[5] Ulf Poschardt, DJ Culture, trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: Quartet Books Ltd, 1998), 123.

[6] Ibid, 271.

[7] Fro instance, Web users are invited to remix Madonna songs at http://madonna.acidplanet.com/default.asp?subsection=madonna.

[8] Ibid., 280.

[9] Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid. Rhythm Science. MIT Press, 2004.

[10] To use the term of Barthes’s quote above, we can say that if modernist collage always involved a “clash” of element, electronic and software collage also allows for “blend.”

[11] Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 146.

12.

THOUGHTS ON WEB 2.0 BY KAZYS VARNELIS | NETWORKED PUBLICS

October 6, 2005 - 6:34pm

around the model of consumers becoming active producers, not only creating their own content but actively remixing content themselves, Web 2.0 splendidly

Some 800 developers were in San Francisco at the sold out Web 2.0 conference,

embodies Roland Barthes’s concept of the writerly text replacing the readerly

paying $2,800 each to hear pundits and programmers discuss the emerging

text. Depending on your epistemological paradigm, the web has moved from the

radical transformation of the web from static, fixed pages to dynamic interfaces

classical era to the modern era, or from the modern to the postmodern. Sites

of interactive content, often generated by users not big media outlets. Already,

such as Flickr, Google video and del.icio.us permit users to upload, categorize,

skeptics have emerged to question Web 2.0’s true potential, but whether or not

manipulate, manage, share, and aggregate information. Sites with freely acces-

this is a new commercial boom for the Internet or merely a reprise of the Inter-

sible Application Programming Interfaces or APIs such as Google maps, Flickr,

net Bubble, I am convinced that things are indeed changing.

or Amazon.com, allow users to create their own interfaces to web services. New generation browsers like Flock aim to be more active tools in creating content

Web applications are becoming more accessible to users. A group of academ-

than first generation browsers such as Netscape and Explorer.

ics—even an admittedly computer savvy group of academics—can put together a web site that we can all post content too without the need for a large support staff.

Web 2.0 also moves away from earlier models of sites as—in Richard MacManus

Flickr, the Google Map APIs, blogs, all make the Internet of the 1990s seem pro-

and Joshua Porter’s succinct and biting description—”brochure-ware (static

foundly dated. If large media outlets still largely dominated the first generation

HTML pages with insipid content) or ... interactive in a flashy, animated, [w:

of the Web—be they Yahoo! or CNN.com—Web 2.0 is a vision of the Web in which

JavaScript] kind of way.” Instead, Web 2.0 is based on semantic content, markup

media is spread into a myriad of microcontent units. In this model, aggregators

that describes the content on a page effectively so that aggregators and other web

that can help users assemble these units from little building blocks into more

services can effectively interface with it. This is ultimately Web 2.0’s strength:

sophisticated wholes become more and more important.

Web 2.0 content can be reused endlessly, RSS feeds outputting the hard work of RSS aggregators parsing other RSS feeds which in turn are produced by other

Web 2.0 does help us realize the hypertextual dream of the 1990s, allowing

aggregators in a near endless cycle. To give an example, a few weeks ago I read

the web to finally realize its potential as an authoring tool. With Web 2.0 based

an item on a project at MIT on Archinect, forwarded it to Marc Tuters who in

turn posted it on the USC Interactive Media Division blog from where it was

heyday for national and international discussions—we don’t have to take the CBS

reblogged to Turbulence.org, Informationlab.org and Alt_Imagen and doubtless

newscaster’s word for what is happening in New Orleans or Iraq, we can go out

other venues (you can read it on this site too).

to search for ourselves—but newspapers did provide coverage of local issues at a level of depth that has not yet emerged online. I know plenty of people who read

But what of the broader social consequences beyond digital authorship and this

Apophenia or Daily Kos but few who read blogs about political issues in their

heady embrace of intertextuality? In her recent article Why Web 2.0 Matters:

neighborhood. Indeed, earlier tonight I struggled in vain to find any real sources

Preparing for Glocalization for her blog Apophenia, danah boyd’s argument is

of information as to what is happening in my neighborhood, besides the sites

that Web 2.0 will enable people to manipulate global information in a locally

of local politicians and, of course, that relic of old media, the LA Times. If the

meaningful fashion. By local, boyd suggests that she is referring not only to

predictions of some pundits are correct and newspapers are seemingly poised

geographical groups but also to interest and lifestyle communities united

for a disasterous death spiral, what will become of local information?

telematically.

It’s commonly said that Web 2.0 moves away from place to services or experiWhile it’s true that Web 2.0 will enable glocalization to a degree by providing

ence. No longer is the web a set of places to visit such as online shopping malls

powerful services that can be wrapped to the needs of local communities, I’d like

or portals—literally figured as pseudo-3d entities in some early and abortive

to suggest that it will also spawn ever more effective ways of disconnecting from

attempts to build the web. As MacManus and Porter suggest, Web 2.0 moves

the social localities that surround us physically. Anecdotally speaking, I see far

toward a model of Web Services. The familiar Froogle interface is an example

less locally-oriented online communities today per hour of browsing than I did

of this idea. For web retailers, being part of an easy to navigate system that aggre-

in the early days of the web or prior to that in the era of the BBS. Our desires to

gates large numbers of storefronts to huge numbers of customers may be more

connect to those like us seem to exceed our desires to connect to those near us.

effective as a business model than building an elaborate place. But this isn’t just

If the era of Web 2.0 is defined by microcontent, we have to recognize a downside

a question of simulated environments.

to that as well: microcontent is not, as currently figured, geographically local.

It tends to be much broader in scope and opportunistic. Web 2.0 may be a new

Far from it, Web 2.0 continues a process of turning our lives toward a clustered world of networked but dispersed communities. Intense localisms may thrive, connected to other like localisms. But this intense networked localism may also border on xenophobia towards physically proximate neighbors. If we spend our time in the clutered world of the Web 2.0, what of our physical communities?

As new global publics are born, geographically local politics could well be left atomised into micro-constituencies, more homeowners groups and neighborhood associations than publics.

I make this argument not out of a lament for a lost Habermasian ‘Golden Age’— surely that never existed, even though the last four years have seemed unbearably dark—but to ask if, a decade after New Media first emerged in academe, the polarization of our readings of digital culture into technophile and technoskeptic isn’t in need of complication in order to allow us to move forward critically?

13.

THE WEB 2.0 MASHUP ECOSYSTEM RAMPS UP, BY DION HINCHCLIFFE Like Web 2.0 itself, mashups are a result of a set of significant new trends that are reinforcing and in turn magnifying each other. Not the least are dynamic, lightweight models for combining content. Growing awareness of the Ajax approach too has helped to create a simple mash-up reuse model. One that allows the creation of rich, interaction browser components that can be reused via a single snippet of Javascript, with Google Maps being a pre-eminent example.

But while there are numerous forces combining to make the mashup ecosystem “explode”, the combined effect is resulting in the creation of an online software environment which resembles a full blown operating system in virtually every way, and perhaps even more so.

Image and text source: Soa Web Services

The Mashup Ecosystem

4 February 2006

David Berlind has done an excellent job recently drawing the parallels between the modern Web and an operating system and I agree with him that the result

2.63 new mashups a day. That’s what John Musser’s terrific new Mashup Feed

is obvious: the ascendency of the Web as the first superplatform. A thing not

site says is current the creation rate. If that rate flattens out today, which isn’t

dissimilar to the political concept of a superpower in that nothing else can really

likely, that’s over 960 new mashups every year. Mashups, composite web appli-

compete. Yet this is a superplatform that is encompassing and embracing since

cations partially constructed from the services and content from other web sites,

anything you connect to it becomes a true part of the whole. And using Web 2.0

are taking off with an amazing speed. Yet they are a relatively new phenomenon

design patterns and business models, we have a relatively clear guide that shows

in terms of being this widespread and pervasive. All this even though mashups,

how to be a good citizen and contribute to the ecosystem for individual benefit.

like blogs and wikis, were actually possible from the creation date of the first

Yet everyone else benefits more overall, via something called a network effect.

forms-capable browser. So why the sudden widespread interest?

Some have noted recently that the democratization of content and services was

a stated goal of the Web from the beginning. But it wasn’t until now, where

next month, one of the hottest tickets in the IT conference circuit this year, and

aggregated services can become more valuable than the parts, where the effect

it’s all about the burgening remix culture that mashups are heralding. Microsoft

finally becomes pronounced.

has even been spotted recently connecting the dots in a larger perspective and trying to bridge the closely related techniques of Web 2.0 and service-

Part of it is that technology tends to get ahead of our uses for it. With Web 2.0

oriented architecture (SOA), something I’ve also talked about at length in the

and mashups in particular, there was a multi-year lag between what was possible

past. As many of you know, SOA is a popular model for creating an integrated

and when it actually happened. With pervasive and widespread connectivity,

architecture of systems within an organization, and then creating cross-cutting,

lots of bandwidth, growing comfort with creating and consuming user generated

composite applications out of the result. But the mashup ecosystem is poised

content (this being blogs in particular), the maturaton of online communities,

doing the exact same thing on a global scale with more verve, speed, efficiency,

rapidly improving Web skills, and awareness of what’s possible on the Web,

and the factor that really counts, success.

and you have a complex but potent recipe for the people side of the Web to drive major improvements in the way the its is used, on a massive scale.

But it’s not just a supply-side phenomenon or the purview of large software corporations. Not at all. Mashups are being driven in a very populist manner and

The technical side has improved recently too with lightweight service models

people are actually using them. I routinely see mash-up lists hitting the del.icio.

like RSS making it extremely easy to wire things together, the proliferation of

us popular page, for example. And great lists of Web 2.0 software like Fourio’s

lots and lots of good Web services (partially driven by Ajax and RIAs in general,

Web 2.0 Innovation Map, or Peter Cashmore’s enjoyable Mashable site, or

which demand pure services to function), and even tools and ready information

especially TechCrunch routinely highlight what is possible (and indeed, this lists

to support creating mash-ups, has led us to a place where everything seems just

are only falling behind). I’ve said recently that creating software from scratch

about perfect for mashups to take off.

is going away more and more, and all of this is further proof. So, this brave new world of software is certainly exciting and sometimes terrifying, but in the end,

And people are certainly noticing. You can find mention of mashups in the mainstream press all the time. And Microsoft is holding the MIX 06 conference

it is indeed a compelling new future for software.

Where do you think mashups are going? Are they a fad or a ďŹ nal shift to a successful model for reusing services and content?

Sidenote: We’re always looking for great content for the brand-new Web 2.0 Journal. If you are a capable author and want to write feature articles, interviews, product reviews on Web 2.0 topics, please drop me a line.

14.

MIX, MATCH, AND MUTATE. “MASH-UPS” — HOMESPUN COMBINATIONS OF MAINSTREAM SERVICES — ARE ALTERING THE NET, BY ROBERT D. HOF Looking for a place to live last year, Paul Rademacher pored over Silicon Valley rentals on craigslist, the popular online classified-ad site. But the 3D-software engineer grew frustrated that he couldn’t see the properties’ locations on one map. So Rademacher hacked his own solution — a Web site that combines craigslist rentals with search engine Google Inc.’s (GOOG ) map service. The listings on HousingMaps.com appear as virtual pushpins on maps of nearly three-dozen regions around the country. Click on one, and up pop the details. Since its public debut in April, the free site has drawn well over a half-million unique visitors.

What they’re all seeing is nothing less than the future of the World Wide Web. Suddenly, hordes of volunteer programmers are taking it upon themselves to combine and remix the data and services of unrelated, even competing sites. The

Image source: Wired Archive

result: entirely new offerings they call “mash-ups.” They’re the Web versions of

Text source: businessweek.com

Reese’s (”Hey, you got peanut butter on my chocolate!”) Peanut Butter Cups.

JULY 25, 2005 “The Web was originally designed to be mashed up,” says Google Web developer Aaron Boodman, the 27-year-old creator of a program called Greasemonkey that makes it easy to create and use mash-ups. “The technology is finally growing up and making it possible.”

That’s why mash-ups, named after hip-hop mixes of two or more songs, are starting to rock. Chicagocrime.org overlays local crime stats onto Google Maps

so you can see what crimes were committed recently in your neighborhood.

At the same time, these bottom-up efforts present tough challenges for the

Another site syncs Yahoo! Inc.’s (YHOO ) real-time traffic data with Google

sites on which the new services are built. Mash-ups often use the data without

Maps. Book Burro notices when you’re shopping at an online bookstore such

asking first, then present it in unintended ways. Not surprisingly, some Web site

as Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN ), then taps into several other stores to show price

operators have bitten back. Yahoo initially blocked one mash-up site from using

comparisons.

its traffic data with Google Maps before relenting, and Amazon asked Amazon Light’s Taylor to change how it linked to potential rival sites. “All this definitely

WILD, WILD WEB

keeps us on our toes,” says Jeffrey S. Barr, Amazon’s Web services evangelist.

Mash-ups portend big changes for software companies, Web sites, and everyone online. No longer just a collection of pages, the Web is morphing into a sort of

Some mash-up software presents a potential danger to users as well. Grease-

global operating system, à la Microsoft Corp.’s (MSFT ) Windows. And now,

monkey, an add-on to the Firefox browser, allows the quick installation of soft-

people are learning to program Web 2.0 with much of the same innovative energy

ware “scripts” to customize the way a Web site works on a particular PC. Crooks

of the personal computer’s early days. “It’s the Wild West all over again,” says

could write malicious scripts — say, to secretly log keystrokes to steal financial

Alan Taylor, a Monster Worldwide Inc. Web developer who created Amazon

data, says Book Burro creator Jesse Andrews. But he thinks the threat can be

Light, a fast-loading version of Amazon’s site that also includes services from

minimized with software tweaks and peer review of scripts.

Google, Yahoo, and others.

INEXPENSIVE R&D The upshot: People are seizing far more control of what they do online. In

In any case, none of that has slowed the mash-up momentum. For one thing,

the process, those efforts are putting skin on the bones of Web services, the

Amazon and other Web giants are now embracing the mash-up movement by

long-delayed promise of software and services that can be tapped on demand.

offering developers easier access to their data and services. Moreover, they’re

“They’re taking little bits and pieces from a number of companies and stitching

programming their services so that more computing tasks, such as displaying

them together in some clever way,” Amazon Chief Executive Jeffrey P. Bezos

maps onscreen, get done on the users’ PCs rather than on their far-flung serv-

noted recently. “You’ll start to see the real power of Web services.”

ers. Besides speeding up the experience, the shift makes it easier for outsiders to

add their tweaks, says Google Maps product manager Bret Taylor.

Or Web sites may do their own mash-ups. Amazon’s A9.com search site is essentially a mash-up that can be customized by each user, who can query specific

The appeal for Web sites? Mash-ups offer a way for them to tap the creativity

sites such as The New York Times or NASA without leaving A9. If A9 can become

and hard work of the masses, who do the work and get out the word — and the

a mash-up middleman, empowering mere mortals to remix their Web, it could

software — through blogs and Web sites. “We want to encourage community par-

get a leg up on rivals. The idea may have corporate appeal, too: Startup Rearden

ticipation,” says Paul Levine, general manager of Yahoo! Local. “It’s essentially

Commerce Inc. aims to create a Web concierge that lets each user combine the

research and development and marketing for us.”

services of many sites.

The results are often remarkable. Chicagocrime.org, for instance, combines two

For now, most mash-ups remain high-tech versions of Tinker Toys. After all,

services — a Chicago Police Dept. crime Web site and Google Maps — and lets you

how seriously can you take “Google Map of the Stars,” which zooms in on sites

type in an address to see recent crimes nearby. The site attracted 1.2 million page

such as Neverland Ranch? But from such whimsical experimentation the next

views in just the first two weeks after it began in May. Creator Adrian Holovaty,

tech blockbuster often emerges.

a full-time Web developer at the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World’s online unit, thinks there may be a business in mash-up creation.

So far, mash-up business models don’t extend beyond running a few Google ads and collecting fees for sending buyers to e-commerce sites. One reason is that most Web sites don’t allow for-profit use of their data by outsiders. But as traffic to mash-ups grows, companies may cut deals — especially if mash-up sites spur new markets. Map-based mash-ups, for instance, might finally attract ultra-local businesses to advertise on the Web.

15. IS IBM MAKING ENTERPRISE MASHUPS RESPECTABLE? BY DION HINCHCLIFFE

ZDNet blog colleague Joe McKendrick beat me to the punch earlier this week with an excellent analysis of the fascinating ramifications of IBM’s recent statements at the New York PHP Conference aimed at mainstreaming mashups and Web 2.0 technologies. If IBM is getting seriously involved in this, there must be something to it, and certainly Rod Smith’s comments are receiving considerable attention.

Interestingly, most enterprises I talk to these days barely have mashups on their radar, yet I also continually hear from those same folks about how hard it is to create increasingly integrated business applications, as well as the slow pace of rolling out new functionality to users and customers. There indeed seems to be a rising corporate appetite for faster, more effective ways of building applications particularly when reusing existing IT software and information assets.

Anatomy of Web Mashup Styles Despite all the attention in leading edge tech circles, there is still a general lack of knowledge about what mashups are, never mind so-called enterprise mashups, the unique obstacles to which are articulated succinctly here by Phil Wainewright. The question I get asked most frequently about this space, however, is Image and text source: ZDnet June 18th, 2006

what the exact difference is between composite applications and mashups.

One big difference? Composite applications – those supposedly elegant

Like so many aspects of Web 2.0, the term “mashup” is poorly defined and a

marriages of the resources of a SOA into brand new software that is more an

generally accepted definition probably does not exist today. The term itself, as

assembly of existing components than “green field” development – don’t have to

applied to the informal fusion of Web services and browser-side Javascript, is

be Web-based. Mashups do. Then there is the increased formality of composite

so new that it only made it into Wikipedia in mid-September, 2005, less than a

applications, which are typically based on SOAP Web services and frequently wo-

year ago.

ven together with BPEL and developed by professional programmers. Composite applications also tend to use an older generation of programming languages

A question of what’s being mashed up

and technologies that have more overhead and ceremony. And, almost certainly

At the root of what a mashup is the the question of what’s being “mashed”

too much exposed plumbing and infrastructure.

together into something new. Is it data? Is it visual presentation? Is it the underlying functionality (code)?

Read IBM’s analysis of claims of 10-to-1 productivity improvements for Ruby on Rails over Java for developing Web-based software

The answer of course is that a mashup could be all of these things, or just one of them. In the end, mashups are intentionally loosely defined because of their

On the other hand, mashups use almost remkarably simple, basic techniques

very nature as ad hoc aggregations of whatever needs to be aggregated. Whether

for connecting things together. This includes guerilla-style development tech-

that is visuals, information, or working software is immaterial to the term’s

niques that deliver results in preference to formal, upfront engineering. This

application.

might mean using Javascript includes of another site’s software, straightforward Web services and feeds based directly on top of HTTP, and JSON for data re-

That most mashups today only make a couple of key connections between under-

trieval and remixing. And with initiatives like OpenAjax, we might get first real

lying services or software, such as Housingmaps, is besides the point; mashups

conventions for component interoperability in the browser.

are clearly useful but much of the work today still has to be done by hand (i.e. by developer.)

But this state of affairs seems to be sparking the imagination of entrepreneurs.

stood and used, and doesn’t control the conversation or require any complex

An increasing number of companies such as Bridgewerx, Kapow, Worcsnet, and

processing to interact with.

others are trying to solve (or partially solve) the problem of requiring programming skills to create mashups. This means mashups will become much more

The 5 styles of mashups

end-user directed in the near future as facilitation techniques become more

Accepting that information, visuals, and software can be remixed and combined

sophisticated. They will be created by almost anyone for just-in-time situations

at multiple levels in an application stack means that there are (at least) five

and projects, and even thrown away when their usefulness ends. This is a new

places that mashups can take place. These five styles are:

view of software that says that there is a long tail of demand for situational applications that just don’t warrant large investment. However, their cumulative

* Presentation Mashup: This is the shallowest form of mashup in the sense that

value could be quite considerable as they tap pent-up needs that could not be

underlying data and functionality don’t meet. Information and laout is retrieved

satisfied in a cost effective way until now.

and either remix or just placed next to each other. Many of the Ajax desktops today fall into this category and so do portals and other presentation mashup

This leads us to a key definitional point. Are mashups purely browser-based or

techniques.

are they fundamentally Web-based and could reside as easily in a Web browser

* Client-Side Data Mashup: A slight deeper form of mashup is the data mashup

or Web server?

which takes information from remote Web services, feeds, or even just plain HTML and combines it with data from another source. New information that

I would assert that this is manifestly the case; mashups can exist anywhere on the

didn’t exist before can result such as when addresses are geocoded and display

Web, either primarily on the server as Zillow or diggdot.us are or entirely on the

on a map to create a visualization that could exist without the underlying combi-

client side like so many of the Google Maps mashups are. Mashups connote a

nation of data.

mindset of informal techniques that just work by virtual of the concept of “small

* Client-Side Software Mashup: This is where code is integrated in the browser

pieces, loosely joined”. Examples of this include the unassuming RSS feed,

to result in a distinct new capability. While a component model for the browser

which provides essential yet very basic structure to data, is very widely under-

is only now being hashed out as part of Open Ajax, there is considerable poten-

tial in being able to easily wire together pieces of browser-based software into

And the reality is today that the infrastructure, both in terms of organizations

brand new functionality.

recognizing and support the value of this approach, as well as real tools for creat-

* Server-Side Software Mashup: Recombinant software is probably easier right

ing, deploying, and managing enterprise mashups are lacking. Despite this, he

now on the server since Web services can more easily use other Web services and

Global SOA is happening right in front of us, the question is how to deal with

there are less security restrictions and cross domain issues. As a result, server-

licensing, governance, and all the problems that SOA in the small has already

side mashups like those that in turn use things like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

taught us.

or any of the hundreds of open Web APIs currently available, are quite common. * Server-Side Data Mashup: Databases have been linking and connecting data for

Finally, like James Governer observed recently in response to IBM’s enthusiasm

decades, and as such, they have relatively powerful mechanisms to join or mash-

for this approach compared to older, more traditional middleware and EAI

up data under the covers, on the server-side. While it’s still harder to mashup

methods, “lightweight mashups on the other hand really do have potential to

up data across databases from different vendors, products like Microsoft SQL

allow business users to create interesting data and service manipulations.”

Server increasingly make it much easier to do. This points out that many applications we have today are early forms of mashups, despite the term. Of course,

Are you seriously considering ways of using increasingly rich landscape of Web

the more interesting and newer aspects of mashups happen above this level.

services and data in the Global SOA?

Of course, the real potential in all of this is as IBM’s Rod Smith says: [Mashups put] more capability into an individuals hands and gives them more freedom to innovate — and because Web 2.0 technologies are based on open standards, integrating them into an open business model is easy for end users and developers alike.