The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies

Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher, xtine burrough, Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher, xtine burrough

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781134748815
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Scienze della comunicazione

The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies comprises contemporary texts by key authors and artists who are active in the emerging field of remix studies. As an organic international movement, remix culture originated in the popular music culture of the 1970s, and has since grown into a rich cultural activity encompassing numerous forms of media.

The act of recombining pre-existing material brings up pressing questions of authenticity, reception, authorship, copyright, and the techno-politics of media activism. This book approaches remix studies from various angles, including sections on history, aesthetics, ethics, politics, and practice, and presents theoretical chapters alongside case studies of remix projects. The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies is a valuable resource for both researchers and remix practitioners, as well as a teaching tool for instructors using remix practices in the classroom.

Part I

HISTORY

1

REMIX AND THE DIALOGIC ENGINE OF CULTURE

A Model for Generative Combinatoriality

Martin Irvine

Is the cliché “everything is a Remix” more than trivially true? The terms Remix, appropriation, sampling, and mashup are used so generally, in so many contexts, and at different levels of description that they don’t provide a useful vocabulary for explanation.¹ “Remix” has become a convenient metaphor for a mode of production assumed (incorrectly) to be specific to our post-postmodern era and media technologies (though with some earlier “precursors”), and usually limited to describing features of cultural artifacts as “outputs” of software processes (especially in music, video, and photography). “Remix” and related terms are used for genres and techniques of composition (collage, assemblage, music Remix, appropriation), artistic practices (with a variety of self-reflexive, performative, and critical strategies), media and technology hybridization (new combinations of software functions, interfaces, and hardware implementations), and cultural processes (ongoing reinterpretation, repurposing, and global cross-cultural hybridization).² What connects all these manifestations of Remix, hybridity, and creative combinatoriality? What else is “Remix” telling us if we open up the cultural black box?

Riffing on the great, often-referenced, soul album by Marvin Gaye, What’s Going On (1971), we can say that there’s always been a “deep Remix” going on at multiple levels simultaneously, and we need to find ways of bringing these ordinarily unconscious and ubiquitous processes up for awareness and description.³ “Remix” in all of its manifestations needs to be turned inside out, reverse engineered, and de-black-boxed, so that it can reveal the dynamic, generative processes that make new (re)combinatorial expressions in any medium possible, understandable, and necessary.

See Chapter 32 for Nate Harrison’s “de-black-boxed” discussion of the Amen Break as it relates to Remix practice and culture.

Working toward this end, I will introduce a new synoptic view of concepts and research approaches for a more complete description of the generative dialogic principles behind Remix and all forms of hybrid combinatoriality. I will demonstrate how Remix, appropriation, and hybrid works implement the same normative processes that enable combinatoriality in all expression and are not special cases requiring genre- or medium-specific justification. Making these foundational processes understandable allows us to reposition Remix and hybrid works in the living continuum of culture, thus enabling this creative principle to do much more important critical work for us in an era of intense debates about the status of authors, artists, individual works, the cultural archive, intellectual property, and common culture.

My de-black-boxing of “Remix” draws from an interdisciplinary knowledge base with extensible methods for revealing how all works in a culture are necessarily constituted in ongoing dialogic chains and networks. The approach that I develop here expands on the concept of dialogism from Bakhtin, socio- and cognitive linguistics, generative models of meaning-making (semiosis) from Peircean foundations in semiotics and recent interdisciplinary work, and the generative-combinatorial-recursive models of language and symbolic cognition from linguistics and the cognitive sciences.⁴

Of course, all these fields have extensive bibliographies and complex histories of research and debate, and any summary of common areas of interest will risk eliding over intra- and interdisciplinary disputes and disagreements. I will only be able to outline a conceptual map of this interdisciplinary terrain here, and suggest some ways to mobilize these combined resources for new research. My approach is motivated by two central questions: (1) what makes dialogic, combinatorial expressions in any symbolic form possible, meaningful, and necessary in living cultures, and (2) how can we develop a fuller description of the generative-creative principles underlying Remix and hybrid works for more compelling arguments in the context of current debates?

An Overview of the Conceptual Repertoire: Meaning Generation, Dialogism, Combinatoriality, and Recursion

The idea of culture as a process of reinterpreting and reusing inherited resources has often been noted and emphasized by many recent scholars:⁵ “[C]ulture is a complex process of sharing and signification. Meanings are exchanged, adopted, and adapted through acts of communication—acts that come into conflict with intellectual property law.”⁶

Although the general concept of new cultural expressions created in a continuum of interpretive responses is well recognized, the underlying normative and necessary generative principles for cultural expression remain vaguely understood and poorly defined.

The question of generativity in culture was usefully defined by Yuri Lotman, the founder of an important school of thought in cultural semiotics:

The main question of semiotics of culture is the problem of meaning generation. What we shall call meaning generation is the ability both of culture as a whole and of its parts to put out, in the “output,” nontrivial new texts. New texts are the texts that emerge as results of irreversible processes . . . , i.e. texts that are unpredictable.⁷

“Texts,” of course, designate any form of organized symbolic expression, and “nontrivial new texts” are those emerging from the generative dialogic process (nonrepetitive expression), expressions in any medium that expand into other networks of meaning in unanticipated ways.⁸

Finding adequate ways to describe the generative processes behind all the observable features of expression in a culture is difficult because we can’t catch ourselves in the routine and spontaneous process of making meaningful expressions because we produce them unconsciously and non-self-reflexively. Just as we are ordinarily unaware of the grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic rules and codes that allow us to generate new expressions in unforeseen new contexts of meaning in our own native language, “Remix” in all of its forms sits on top of ongoing, generative, dialogic, and combinatorial processes that make all our symbolic systems from language to multimedia possible but unobservable during the process of expression and understanding itself. We have to reverse-engineer the observable outputs and de-black-box the meaning processes that made the expressions possible.

The underlying dialogic and intersubjective processes are not visible as features of expressions because they form the grounds of their possibility per se. Consequently, we cannot account for how and why Remix and explicit combinatorial forms of expression are as recurrent, meaningful, and prominent as they are by merely describing observable, surface features (e.g., instances of expressions with “sources”). Thinking of relations among cultural expressions and artifacts in terms of itemizable sources usually devolves into making inventories of “originals,” “copies,” and “derivations.” Works become reified, productized totalities, outputs from cultural-technical black boxes with preprogrammed ownership labels.

Participating in this “sources and derivations” discourse, with the level of description it imposes as natural and obvious, is a form of what Pierre Bourdieu has termed “collective misrecognition.”⁹ We are continually socialized into maintaining—under heavy ideological pressure—ways of preserving the misrecognition of sources, authors, origins, works, and derivations in order to sustain these social categories as functions in the political economy and the intellectual property legal regime for cultural goods.¹⁰ We need to pry all this loose, breaking the cycle of misrecognition, with a different concept base for more useful levels of description and analysis.

A Generative Model of Meaning-Making

For all the meanings we use in seemingly transparent ways every day, our symbolic faculties use parallel architectures of rules and procedures for combining components into meaningful wholes. To understand the necessary processes in these combinatorial structures we need to start from an extensible model of meaning that usefully holds for descriptions across symbolic systems (like language, images, and musical sounds in their multiple genre-specific combinations). Students in the humanities and social sciences are familiar with the French poststructuralist schools of thought that work from Ferdinand de Saussure’s model of signification,¹¹ but a far more productive model is provided by C. S. Peirce. Peirce’s model for the generative meaning-making process, which he termed semiosis (symbolic productivity), continues to provide new insights in many fields of research.¹²

Peirce’s specialized terms are often a barrier to appreciating what he was...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I History
• Part II Aesthetics
• Part III Ethics
• Part IV Politics
• Part V Practice
• Index