After reading Lessig’s final chapters, I find myself still grappling with the issue of indebtedness, maybe now more than ever. Today in class we circled around several issues concerning remixes. Some of us were disinclined to call them essays as such, but I’m going to plunge out on a limb and claim that they are just that: “attempts” in Montaigne’s sense of the term. What they are attempting and what they actually accomplish aren’t necessarily congruent, but they attempt nonetheless. As I mentioned before on Tim’s blog this week, I found Lessig’s example (92) especially relevant.
If these “attempts” are being fielded, and they’re essays, they most probably have at least some shadow of a *perspective*. So who gets to take credit? In terms of copyright assignments, Lessig is critical of artists who allow remixers to use their original work, but fail to give those authors any sort of rights over their remixed creations. He’s especially critical of LucasFilm, who set up a fan-fiction web site, encouraging users to expand the Star Wars universe, but without retaining any creative rights (247). And why shouldn’t these remixers have rights? Weird Al (whose name keeps popping up tentatively during class discussions) seeks the appropriate permissions and is able to get royalties for his parodies.
But does Weird Al “do” Remix? Think I’ll ask him….
Sliding down this slippery slope, I wonder to what extent agency matters in constructing Remix AS Remix. Jessica and Rachel brought these questions up severally, so I’ll try to distill them into my own anxiety: Must we take agency and intention into account when discussing what we call “Remix?” We were talking about *10 Things I Hate About You.* Clearly, the film appreciates Shakespeare, but based on the vast majority of student papers I read, they were familiar with the Ledger-driven teen film prior to experiencing Shakespeare’s play. Can *10 Things* operate in a vacuum? Yes and no. If *10 Things* seeks to be in conversation with Shakespeare (or in conversation about him), then the “original” *Taming* context is necessary for a broader understanding of what the makers of *10 Things* are getting at. As much as I’ve been abused by *10 Things* references in a variety of ways, I would like to give the film makers the benefit of the doubt regarding intentionality. In other words, Shakespeare wasn’t incidental to their plot.
But is *10 things* a remix? What is a remix? Since Lessig came up with so many good things to say about particular remixes, I wonder what will happen should we extend that definition. Let’s try.
Language—as would be the case for all symbolic systems of communication—relies almost exclusively on its own solipsistic context. Languages eventually learn to talk to one another, but those normally form new languages, still based on symbols and still what most Anthropological linguists would call arbitrary (only in the sense that there’s nothing about the word “pen” that screams “call me pen!”). Languages recombine, sentences recombine, words recombine to form sentences, chords combine to form harmonies, notes combine to form chords and melodies—what we see as holistic (and rightly so) still must be composed of parts.
But those parts aren’t necessarily independent from the whole. Anyone who cooks knows that once you introduce a certain combination of ingredients into a mixture, you’ll end up with something that doesn’t necessarily reflect the discrete units of creation you put into it. The same phenomenon applies to Chemistry: take an “H” out of H2O, you don’t have anything remotely *close* to water. Not at all.
Bringing this insane garble back to the notion of Remix, can we call a REMIX something that forms a new whole—a piece of work that isn’t just the sum of its parts? Maybe that definition is problematic too, but if we find ourselves questioning whether a work is ‘original,’ maybe as an audience we exert our agency and decide, “NO, that certainly isn’t remix.” Somebody else may decide otherwise, however.
But who gets to take credit in R/W culture? I remember the Vanilla Ice *Under Pressure* controversy. We can safely say that those songs in question aren’t the same. And who was ultimately responsible for the playing of that background track, anyhow? Hard to say, even with ‘80s studio magic. Most probably, the parts in this case can’t be removed from the whole to show us just *who* is responsible.
Maybe if we can’t sort out the particulars, we can identify some kind of perspective. Maybe that perspective manifests from multiple authors, but it serves as an outlook, a kind of combined worldview. Remix texts, it seems, should be aware of each other. That’s the only way language works, so why shouldn’t it be the case for Remix, even if we decide *everything is Remix*?
Jacob,
ReplyDeleteI think the question of authorship falls to the determination of whether one views a given text/remix/readable product chiefly as a composite (as in a thing made up of many dissimilar parts) or a whole. Regardless of the origins of a text, if the reader chooses to view it as a product of numerous influences, then the reader cannot view the producer or compiler as a writer, or at least, as the sole creator. This thinking accommodates your point that "what we see as holistic (and rightly so) still must be composed of parts," for we cannot deny the origin and context of data, especially in cases where the purpose of a text hinges on its status as a compilation. Still, I feel like granting the argument for the perception of wholeness a mulligan here, not because I have faith in any sort of unmitigated creativity (or creative work), but because conceding to the universal treatment of texts as coming from somewhere other than their creator can serve indirectly as a defense for the reasoning that substantiates Lucasfilm's hybrid "[leveraging of] the work of thousands of kids to make [its] content more compelling" (Lessig 247). Yes, "creativity" is a fairly unrealistic concept, but if we reduce authorship to a particularly adept manipulation of things that already exist, rather than some kind of innovation, then we risk a diminution of the creative act, and an identification of certain texts as uncreative.
Of course, I'm approaching this topic with a head full of old-timey aesthetic predispositions, so my perspective might be skewed.
Jacob,
ReplyDeleteFirst, you mentioned my blog and maybe some of my thoughts. I will expect compensation.
Two, I still hold that remix is almost everything. I don't think it necessarily has to change meaning, though it invariably will. I am thinking about remixes that come out for special edition albums. The artist might take one of their songs and ask another artist to perform on the track. By the end, the track can be called a remix even though the only different is that there is an addition to the original. Regardless, what was is no longer. I think maybe I am in the minority on this in class, but it just feels like we are trying too hard to delineate what remix is. By doing so, we are in many ways aiding the process of the figuring out what has to cost money and what can be free. But that whole intellectual project feels a bit nefarious and artificial. Of all the examples you bring up and we as a class brought up on Tuesday, the differences seem small compared to the fundamental similarity: that through a process of change (large, small, etc) what was is no longer. Something new, whether totally new or only very tinily new, exists through a second party making a change. If definitions are always going to hover around ideas of meaning are we not always going to be left going in a circle? This process of wanting to categorize (this is remix, this is not remix) reminds of Kristeva in "Powers of Horror" who says that we are very scared of things that do not fit into categories (like Lobsters). We try to avoid that fear by categorizing. Is this like that?
Thanks for the blog,
Tim