“The cris were loud advertisements called out by the Paris street vendors, and composed according to a certain versified form; each cry had four lines offering and praising a certain merchandise…We must recall that not only was all advertising oral and loud in those days, actually a cry, but that all announcements, orders, and laws were made in this loud oral form…This fact should not be ignored when studying the style of the sixteenth century and especially the style of Rabelais” (The Bakhtin Reader, 218).

Like the street vendor, Rabelais in his authorial introductions is loud and boastful, as quick to praise the (wise) reader who has bought his book as condemn the (stupid) reader who has not. “Shit on them,” as Rabelais says. Can you imagine Mary Higgins Clark saying such a thing? I can’t.

Textile display, 1972, Eaton's Department Store

There are, it would seem, two kinds of novelty: the one that breaks from tradition, ushering in a new order, and the one that perpetuates the same under the guise of change. The latter, associated with fads and trends, marks the logic of consumption, whereas the former, querying the new and indeterminate, suggests a revolutionary break from the status quo. Distinguishing the two may, however, prove more difficult than the language suggests. Even for Adorno, the first to really bracket-off the commodity in this fashion, breaks from tradition dangerously compare to the logic of tradition itself:

“It (the concept of Modernism) does not negate earlier artistic exercises as styles have always done; however it negates tradition as such. To that extent, it ratifies the bourgeois principle in art. Its abstractness is linked to the commodity character of art.” (Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. (Frankfurt, 1970), 38; quoted in Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, tr. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 59.)

The “abstractness” common to the negation of tradition and the bourgeois principle of art is the ‘questioning’ integral to tradition itself – which appears, in retrospect, as a succession of fads, styles, aesthetics. Peter Bürger, the philosopher of the avant-garde, so too defers to Adorno’s claim that “In an essentially non-traditionalist society (the bourgeois), esthetic tradition is a priori questionable. The authority of the new is that of the historically ineluctable” (Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 38; quoted in Bürger, 59). Distinguishing the commodity-novelty from the emancipatory-novelty becomes accordingly difficult, if not categorically impossible. Which is to say, if art, too, is driven by a need for “newness”, then the commodity (in this regard at least) may not fundamentally, only substantially, differ from the artwork.

Bürger, for his part, notes this in passing – “It must be remembered that where art does in fact submit to the coercion to bring what is new, it can hardly be distinguished from a fad” – but goes on to accredit the ‘fad effect’ solely to projections of “the person who wants to see it there” (Bürger, 61). Here, in a sharp change of direction, the failing of the artwork is attributed to its apparent over-openness to interpretation, which is to say, the viewer’s appropriation of the work toward ‘whatever’ end. The work as fad – Warhol’s 100 Campbell soup cans, he gives as an example – serves as a projection screen for the subject’s specifically consumerist desires. So, it would seem, novelty is really a function of interpretation and falls squarely on the side of the subject, not the work. (But if it’s only a problem of interpretation, then how is it that certain works are regularly susceptible to this subjective error?)

Bürger moreover attribrutes this form of meaninglessness to the Neo-avant-garde in particular, “which stages for a second time the avant-gardiste break with tradition [and] becomes a manifestation that is void of sense and that permits the positing of any meaning whatever” (61). It is in this sense that the historical avant-garde is perceived as itself sliding into novelty; even the name, neo avant-garde, is designed to mark this empty repetition. The concept of the new, he adds, is “too general and nonspecific [… and] provides no criteria for distinguishing between faddish (arbitrary) and historically necessary newness” (63). Indeed, for Bürger the concept of the new can only fail to adequately “designate what is decisive in such a break with tradition”; it hence remains on the side of “the means of artistic representation” (63).

Bürger’s attitude toward the question of newness in avant-garde works here approaches Gianni Vattimo’s oft-quoted condemnation of the commodity character of the new:

“in a consumer society continual renewal (of clothes, tools, buildings) is already required physiologically for the system simply to survive. What is new is not in the least ‘revolutionary’ or subversive; it is what allows things to stay the same.” (Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 7; quoted in Leslie Paul Thiele, “Postmodernity and the Routinization of Novelty: Heidegger on Boredom and Technology,” Polity 29, no. 4 (1997): 511.)

Vattimo, in this way, extends something of a ‘traditional’ view of novelty, stressing sameness and continuity across non-revolutionary, non-decisive innovations, thus posing a definite choice between a newness that renews and a newness that breaks. Indeed, it is only on account of novelty’s failure to measure up to the absolute break (which never comes) that it is able to appear as a ruse, simulation, or superficiality. Very much in keeping with the Frankfurt School strain that defines as the “surface” of culture that which, with respect to the “objective structure,” appears only as an “expression” of it (–to the extent where, for instance, Adorno can observe that “Baudelaire’s relationship to Wagner is as dialectical as his association with a prostitute” [1]), Vattimo’s position seems to return us to an absolute distinction between surface and structure, sameness and revolution.

Change, however, never comes, and anything that does is, by definition and ‘in advance’, ‘commodified’, ‘absorbed’, ‘appropriated’. This general schema itself seems to have changed very little since Adorno. Nina Power recently summarized Alain Badiou’s opening remarks, for the Communism conference at Birkbeck, as holding-out for just this kind of revolution:

“Nobody represents a party at the conference, everyone is representing his or herself. No party/power. No Kim Jong-Il, no Fidel Castro. There is a collective search for new use of the word communism after terrible experiences of the last century. Collection of phil/pol singularities – we are on the side of novelty, creativity. We are on the side of communism in its newness.” (”on the idea of communism, birkbeck, 13-15 March 2009“, IT 18 March 2009)

This position of course goes hand in hand with a total disavowal of capitalism, the ’surface’ of culture, the actual, day to day events (with a small ‘e’) ’sustaining’ the ’system’. Steven Shaviro captures well this pseudo-libertarian denunciation – of ‘the State’, political economy, economics — that continues to paralyze this region of the Left.

In particular, not only did Badiou leave out political economy from his descriptions of how the revolutionary event might challenge the capitalist status quo; but also, when questioned on this score, he explicitly denounced any attention to political economy as being the sin of “economism”. All this is caaptured in the video here. Badiou claims that economics can only be part of “the situation” which it is the business of a new “truth,” produced in an event and by fidelity to that event, to disrupt. Badiou shows his Maoist pedigree (as Ken Wark remarked to me) in this insistence on politics as the ultimate ruling instance. Instead of engaging in the critique of political economy, and seeing the political as so intimately intertwined with the economic as to makie any separation of them impossible, Badiou relegates economy, in a nearly Gnostic sort of way, to the realm of the irretrievably fallen. His notion of a pure politics (and a pure philosophy) unsullied by any contact with, or ‘contamination’ by, the economic, is really the mirror image of today’s neoclassical economics which imagines itself to be value-neutral and apolitical. What this comes down to is that Badiou is a Maoist without the Marxism — a stance that I find rather terrifying.

At his best, Badiou is a kind of no-Kantian — this is an appelation that he would reject, of course, and one that most contemporary philosophers would find damning (though I mean it as a sort of praise). What I mean by Badiou’s neo-Kantianism is that his whole notion of the event, and of the ethics of remaining loyal to the event, is something like a late-modernist version of the categorical imperative. The event is singular, and yet of absolutely universal import — it commands our obedience, regardless of our merely personal, “pathological” implications. Badiou even defines the event, and the way we are called to be faithful to it, in entirely “formalist” terms — we are commanded by the very form of the event, rather than by anything having to do with its specific content. (Steven Shaviro, “Communism at Birkbeck“, The Pinocchio Theory 17 March 2009)

This attitude would be harmless enough on its own, but to the extent that it necessitates a kind of blanket rejection of, and accompanying disdain for, the world, its effects can be drastic, sweeping. Alex of Splintering Bone Ashes for his part takes the Badiouean line to its conclusion. Since everything that comes into existence is ‘new’, and since there is no intrinsic worth to ‘newness’ per se, everything under the sun is a pointed agent of specifically-capitalist subjectivation — even Badiou’s Event, it would seem.

“But this has further implications, that there is no necessary reason that music for example should change at such rates, that there is no intrinsic moral worth in “the new” per se in the slightest. Pop music is entirely a creature made possible by capitalism. For many thousands of years folk and Art musics likewise changed only very slowly, but since the economic systems built around them (localist minstrels or music for ritual, or the institutional support of wealthy patrons) did not demand endless novelty this was entirely unproblematic. This is a point upon which I believe we might wish to take Badiou to task, (and perhaps modernism as a whole). The valorisation of the new seems to be an artifact of a certain kind of capitalistic subjectivation, and as Nick Srnicek of Accursed Share pointed out here, why change at all? Why not slow emergence instead of rapid revolutionary change? Why not absolute stasis? Why valorise the new? Capitalism’s endless turn-over of products and services serves an obvious purpose within its own terms, but the claim towards inherent worth (whether capitalistic or modernist) is on shaky ground (i.e.- is a massively under-theorized discursive a priori).” (Alex, “Rupturing as foundation“, Splintering Bone Ashes 20 February 2009)

"Ads" (Antje Peters, 2008) refers to typical advertisement compositions. "Through not showing actual brands the focus is on stereotypic style elements and color."

The commodity, in this view, is but a form or function whose content by definition lacks importance or revolutionary relevance. Which brings to the fore a number of easily-debunked assumptions about the commodity, the first being that the folk arts, by contrast, ”changed only very slowly”. No matter that this assertion is, for all intents and purposes, immeasurable, not to mention speculative, it is a myth necessary for the Badiouean blanket rejection to operate. But if the folk arts could be shown to change rapidly all the same, the thesis that capitalism is at heart an engine of constant change, for change’s sake, would begin to fall apart. After all, isn’t the ‘demand for endless novelty’ a feature of art, and culture, that literally predates capitalism? (To take just one example, Francis Bacon wrote of this problem well before capitalism, much less commodity capitalism, existed.) Which is why, to prevent these kinds of objections from being raised, the ’surface’ of culture must be constantly separated-out from the structure beneath it, lest the ‘contents’ of the commodity, or the actual succession of changes, start to matter. Nick of The Accursed Share expresses this necessity succinctly:

“It is a common place today to note that capitalism is more than capable of integrating any culturally revolutionary subjects - in many cases, it even produces them, or at least actively incites novelty. So a resistance to capitalism and a viable alternative can’t be found on a cultural level — it needs to operate on the economic structures of modern capitalism.” (Nick, “Crisis and Change“, The Accursed Share 26 September 2008)

Voidmanufacturing, for their part, breaks-down the Platonic assumptions lurking behind this surface-structure binary, which is indeed derived from Adorno. Though the structure is supposed to be invisible or non-manifest (otherwise it would just be part of the surface), for the culture industry to be described or assigned some kind of a power dynamic, the structure must eventually be associated with a real-world practice, with authorities and institutions. And when this is invariably achieved through a characterization of the corporation, a strictly top-down, hierarchical process is described, one in which a “smooth supply” runs downward, with total determination.

“A constant sameness governs the relationship to the past as well. What is new about the phase of mass culture compared with the late liberal stage is the exclusion of the new. The machine rotates on the same spot. While determining consumption it excludes the untried as a risk. The movie-makers distrust any manuscript which is not reassuringly backed by a bestseller. Yet for this very reason there is never-ending talk of ideas, novelty, and surprise, of what is taken for granted but has never existed. Tempo and dynamics serve this trend. Nothing remains as of old; everything has to run incessantly, to keep moving. For only the universal triumph of the rhythm of mechanical production and reproduction promises that nothing changes, and nothing unsuitable will appear. Any additions to the well-proven culture inventory are too much of a speculation. The ossified forms – such as the sketch, short story, problem film, or hit song – are the standardised average of late liberal taste, dictated with threats from above. The people at the top in the culture agencies, who work in harmony as only one manager can with another, whether he comes from the rag trade or from college, have long since reorganised and rationalised the objective spirit. One might think that an omnipresent authority had sifted the material and drawn up an official catalogue of cultural commodities to provide a smooth supply of available mass-produced lines. The ideas are written in the cultural firmament where they had already been numbered by Plato – and were indeed numbers, incapable of increase and immutable.” (voidmanufacturing, “Adorno and Horkheimer’s classic essay on bullshit“, Void Manufacturing 8 September 2008)

Though Adorno’s (and Badiou’s) model is problematic at best, paralyzing at worst, we are still left with the problem of capitalist appropriation, the general theoretical contours of which I remain largely unconvinced. Or, to put it differently, I don’t see this phenomena as by any means exclusive to capitalism. Is it heightened through a certain market logic? Probably. But, again, I don’t see how ‘appropriation’ is not a constant, and therefore highly ambiguous (perhaps unhelpful), dynamic of history in general. Pre-capitalist medieval art, for example, could easily be described in terms of aesthetic appropriations governed by various cultural dominances. Resistances of all kinds — heretical sects, say, throughout the pre-Protestant era – have always been strategically, and unstrategically, incorporated into the institution resisted, be it through deliberate tactics or sustained interaction. To describe capitalist appropriation is only to describe a species thereof, provided that we even want to maintain the theoretical predominance of this concept. Why is this distinction so important? Because without it resistance to capitalist systems in particular would seem dramatically, perhaps programmatically, futile. Furthermore, to confine the powers of ‘appropriation’ to late capitalism alone would give it an almost metaphysical power – according to which everything in resistance is ‘absorbed’ ‘in advance’ – that inflates its already formidable capacity to crush opposition.

The ongoing debates over the difference between immaterial production and classic industrial capitalism have in many ways made these conclusions inevitable, if only because ‘continual structural features’ have to be discerned across more and more diverse historical periods, which can suggest that perhaps some of the features we thought were strictly capitalist are in fact more general. Steven Shaviro thus finds the language of ‘novelty or reversion’ somewhat inappropriate, if only because neither can account for ’structural features’ that persist across each:

“Now, I am largely in agreement with Hardt (and Negri, and some of the economists associated with their position, like Marazzi and even to some extent Moulier Boutang) about the transformations in capitalism over the last fifty years, and especially since the 1970s. But I am not sure I entirely accept the framework through which Hardt interprets these developments. In particular, I do not think that immaterial production involves a more “direct” expropriation of the common than was the case when industrial capitalism extracted value. It is true, as I have already said, that a lot of this new source of capital appropriation comes from a kind of “primitive accumulation” — corporations are now appropriating the commons in the form of things like genomes and songs and procedures of working, in the same way that landlords appropriated the commons of land at the time of the enclosures. But I don’t think that this is either a novelty or a reversion. It is rather the case that “primitive accumulation” never went away; it is a continual structural feature of capitalism, and was at work in the industrial age as much as it was in the agricultural stage, and as much as it is still today. Capitalism always both appropriates to itself things that it didn’t produce — and this precisely by “privatizing” them — and extracts a surplus from the processes of production that it directly initiates and supervises” (Steven Shaviro, “Communism conference — Michael Hardt,” The Pinochio Theory 16 march 2009)

In this regard, the ‘direct expropriation of the common’ starts to seem a lot more diverse in site and mechanism than current theories of capitalist appropriation allow. To be sure, the market’s absorption of presumably revolutionary practices goes hand in hand with its opposite: the political redressing of the same in the guise of the new, which is by no means a strictly capitalist mechanism. Maximilian Forte’s cutting analysis of the rhetoric of novelty where there is none is just one certain example:

“On what basis do we call it a “radical new experiment,” when there is a long history of anthropological service to imperialism, a fact promoted by Montgomery McFate in her own writing? Anyone who knows anything at all about anthropology in the last 30 years would know that we have had these debates before, and anthropologists have served in counterinsurgency programs long before now. So why feign such ignorance, or is it real ignorance? Why the preposterous claims to “novelty” when there is nothing new here? Why the foolish appropriation of the term “radical” in connection with an ideologically reactionary stance and imperial militarism? How many more times will the degraded salesmen pitch their product in such hackneyed terms? Why not just stand for what you mean to say, and what you mean to think, instead of couching it in such awfully banal language of “NEW!”, “experimental!”, “applied!” and “radical!”?” (Maximilian Forte, “A ‘Radical New Experiment’ in ‘Anthropology’? What HTS is NOT“, Open Anthropology 27 August 2008)

The goal here isn’t to argue for some kind of universal notion of appropriation, novelty, absorption, and so forth, though I do find the current theory of the commodity just as totalizing (across geographies, markets, populations, and objects). One proof of this is to be found not in Badiou’s books, but in their market existence. Surely even he must consider the ‘contents’ of his own published commodities relevant, if not transcendent of their commercial ‘form’. This is no small matter. If his works are not just commodities, then perhaps similar things could be said for other commodities or for the revolutionary possibilities for the commodity. And this is precisely where I would like this argument to take us: to the commodity, not away from it. Still reeling from a Marxism that privleges the ‘moment’ of production over consumption, leftist thought is now discernibly lagging behind shifts in other domains — design, for instance.

Along these lines, the most obvious short-coming of the recent Communism conference (aside from its non-representation of the Global South) is its complete lack of interest in environmentalism and the green movement. Which is perhaps no coincidence, in that the green movement is consolidated largely around the commodity form, theoretically and practically. Green design and sustainability in general takes as its locus precisely what the Badiouean rejects — namely, the object, its construction, and its relation to the production process. Though it’s true that rethinking the commodity alone won’t do much for labor conditions or the distribution of wealth, at least not directly, it is nonetheless increasingly clear that a thorough reform of objects would entail the most fundamental, revolutionary reorganization of society. But to begin to tackle these questions, in a philosophical as well as practical manner, would require an interest in the very ‘contents’ of the forms we have been led to disavow.

Notes

[1] Theodor Adorno, “Letters to Walter Benjamin,” in Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor (New York: Verso, 2007), 119.

* CFP: “Novelty, Transformation and Change” Pli 21 [conference website]

MemeTracker for the Presidential Campaign '08

In a thought-provoking post on I cite, Jodi Dean describes the proliferation and popularity of ‘tag clouds’ as capturing “the shift from message to contribution characteristic of communicative capitalism”. That is, in place of meaning and context, which in actuality govern discourse, tag clouds display information in terms of repetition, frequency, and intensity.

“The meaning of words is not at stake in tag clouds. Meaning is replaced by frequency, proximity, and duration. Which words are repeated the most and in what combinations? The combination of these elements determine intensity–if something is only present once, it doesn’t count, isn’t counted. Words matter, words and themes. Not sentences and not stories or narratives. People always get the story wrong, anyway. Tag clouds exemplify this loss of a space of meaning, of a language constituted out of sentences that are uttered in contexts according to rules that can be discerned and contested“

While this is no doubt true of certain uses of tag clouds — when used to show, for example, the repetition of key terms in a speech, — other uses — as blog indexes, say — generally predominate. In my experience, tag clouds are used mostly to show, at a glance, the dominant themes or categories of a large, unwieldy database or collection of texts, and are not, generally speaking, used for summarizing or condensing a single text. In this sense, Dean’s claim that “Message force multipliers” — a rhetorical-metaphorical reference to the Pentagon’s embedding of ’specialists’ in mainstream news outlets — “are more important than the message” deserves qualification.

Even so, Dean’s greater point holds — namely, that the application of data visualization techniques to politics, especially, is problematic. The very mission of applications like MemeTracker  — i.e. the simplification of a large set of data, which in this case is political discourse, a domain of momentous proportions — remains dubious and theoretically suspect. What, exactly, is to be gained from charts like the one above — which, according to information aesthetics, “represents the daily news cycle of around 900,000 news stories and blog posts per day from 1 million online sources, ranging from mass media to personal blogs”?

Though graphs like the one above ultimately offer little more than an aesthetically pleasing expression of ‘data’, the kind of ‘analysis’ they promote is making a comeback. As Mark Lieberman of Language Log observed in a recent post that begins with a critique of Stanley Fish’s New York Times article on Obama’s inauguration speech, though Fish himself was once “known for attacking attempts to base literary analysis on counting things in texts (e.g. “What is stylistics and why are they saying such terrible things about it?“, in Essays in Modern Stylistics, 1981),” he is now praising “word-counting as a technique of rhetorical analysis (”Barack Obama’s Prose Style“):

One day after the occasion, USA Today offered as an analysis of [Obama's inaugural address] a list of the words most frequently used, words like America, common, generation, nation, people, today, world. This is exactly the right kind of analysis to perform, for it identifies the location of the speech’s energy in the repetition of key words and the associations forged among them by virtue of that repetition.

Dean, you will recall, specifically identified the ‘tag cloud’ with a determination of “intensity” — which, when applied to specifically political contexts indeed seems all the more crude an instrument of analysis. By focusing on repetition at the expense of context and meaning, the possibility of interpretation is automatically foreclosed. “Tag clouds,” she writes, “are indicative of secondary orality.

They are part of a post-literate age, the age of mass, participatory, contributory, combinatory media. They are closer to a podcast than they are to a written text: the conventions of oral speech require repetition, conventional phrases, opposition. Rather than a formation that relies on meaning, signification, and interpretation (and is hence available to deconstruction), secondary orality values the word as image. The image doesn’t stand in for or provide a prosthetic word. It marks a feeling, an intensity. It doesn’t ask that the viewer understand it. All the viewer is expected to do is register that the word has been, that it has appeared. The word become image is a feeling-impulse, like a badge. It’s identificatory, relying on an identity between word and object. The word-image is this impulse-identity.“

This strategy — of repetition, on the one hand, and the labeling of this repetition as the truth of the document, on the other — attempts to build around a word-image a specific bundle of associations, i.e. a feeling and an intensity. However, a second effect contingent to accepting the identification of repetitions as “the right kind of analysis” to perform (as Fish puts it) is not to be overlooked. In the MemeTracker graph, for instance, recent events are made to fall prematurely subject to a kind of flattening effect, a great leveling out, of the sort usually reserved for distant history. Applying the same weight to every instance, with the sole goal of finding identifying repetitions, has the counter-effect of drawing a general equivalence between all points.

From this methodological error, a number of false moves naturally follow. It would be a mistake, for instance, to interpret the pronounced repetition of recognizable phrases, which this graph succinctly discovers, as the caught reflection of a real world dissemination of ideas through the popular mind. The graph, it must be reminded, reveals an after-effect, not an underlying cause, of a political climate. The key phrases of the 2008 election are not some kind of x-ray image of the skeleton of a singular national consciousness; they are the symptoms of a much more lively struggle, which this graph is resolved to hide from view, as so much “noise”. It shows what we already know, without explaining the importance of why or how we know it.

But does the tag cloud or meme graph otherwise cultivate avant-garde impulses? Isn’t the word-image of today strangely comparable to surrealist experiments from the early twentieth century? Anticipating this objection, Dean takes care to distinguish, in a parenthetical aside, the contextual strategies of the surrealists from word-counting techniques uninterested in argument and “performative efficacy”.

“(This word-image was prefigured in the avant garde art from the late 19th and early 20th century. I have in mind the wonderful word-images of the Russian communist and Soviet revolutionary artists. On the one hand, this word-art was effective precisely because of its revolutionary impulse, its challenge to the status quo of late Russian painting. It performed the revolution, disrupting prior meanings. On the other, precisely because it depended on its context for its performative efficacy it reinforced the fact of symbolic meaning in order not just to disrupt it but to bring about a new meaning, a new world, a new man. The point wasn’t just to destroy meaning. It was to change it. Tag clouds aren’t revolutionary. They are elements of communicative capitalism, elements that reinforce the collapse of meaning and argument and thus hinder argument and opposition. Any words are part of a tag cloud. You can make a new one out of speeches from Kennedy and Khrushchev, Ann Coulter and Coretta Scott King.)”

The distinction is crucial. In one, repetition and juxtaposition are arbitrary, having little or no effect on the meaning of the terms involved; in the other, similar strategies are deployed, but with decisive effect. In a review of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz: Die Geschichte von Franz Biberkopf [Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf], Benjamin indeed made just this distinction.

“Petty-bourgeois printed matter, scandalmongering, stories of accidents, the sensational incidents of 1928, folk songs, and advertisements rain down in this text. The montage explodes the framework of the novel, bursts its limits both stylistically and structurally, and clears the way for new, epic possibilities. Formally, above all. The material of the montage is anything but arbitrary. Authentic montage is based on the document. In its fanatical struggle with the work of art, Dadaism used montage to turn daily life into its ally. It was the first to proclaim, somewhat uncertainly, the autocracy of the authentic. The film at its best moments made as if to accustom us to montage. Here, for the first time, it has been placed at the service of narrative. Biblical verses, statistics, and texts from hit songs are what Döblin uses to confer authenticity on the narrative. They correspond to the formulaic verse forms of the traditional epic.” (Benjamin “Crisis of the Novel” 301)

Word-counting procedures pursue the opposite effect. They eliminate subtlety, affection, irony — in short, the whole expressive and communicative dimension of discourse — for an inexplicable, mathematical reduction. Montage and remix works, by contrast, play upon the document and source to masterful effect. In this regard, if we are looking for contemporary counterparts to the Surrealist experiments with language, which were at once political and aesthetic, we should perhaps turn to net-artists like Christophe Bruno.

In a recent interview with We-Make-Money-Not-Art, Bruno explained succinctly his work in relation to the commodification of language, as facilitated by Google AdSense and other web monetization practices. His “AdWords Happenings”, for instance, strategically disrupts, or inverts, the intended use of sponsored links. By writing little “spam poems” in the ad boxes that appear to users who search for his name, he was able to collect data from visitor clickthrus and “draw tables rendering the values of a number of keywords: their price relatively to their use (you click, he pays).” Once Google rebuked Bruno “for not playing the game of advertisement, [...] some of the rules of what he calls a ‘generalized semantic capitalism’” were revealed in a new, harsh light. Bruno, for his part, summed up this new economic reality perfectly:  “One of the most interesting fact is that we have reached a situation in which any word of any language has its price, fluctuating according to the laws of the market.”

Bruno's Spam Poems

“The alabaster bosom that seventeenth-century poets celebrated in their poems was to be found only in dolls, whose fragility often cost them their existence.”

Walter Benjamin, “Cultural History of Toys” 115

Taken together, three short essays by Walter Benjamin on the subject of toys outline a novel approach to the cultural meaning of toys, the forms of play they inculcate, and the imaginations and desires they help to shape.

In “Toys and Play”, the most provocative piece of the three, Benjamin begins by foregrounding the cultural process by which a child comes to understand that a given “cult implement” is to be regarded as a plaything. Which is not to say that the toy is strictly an imposed instrument of subjectification; on the contrary, it is the child’s imagination that does the work of ‘conversion’.

“For who gives the child his toys if not adults? And even if he retains a certain power to accept or reject them, a not insignificant proportion of the oldest toys (balls, hoops, tops, kites) are in a certain sense imposed on him as cult implements that became toys only afterward, partly through the child’s powers of imagination.” (Benjamin “Toys and Play” 118)

Benjamin, however, takes this one step further and posits that not only is the toy culturally constructed, but so is the child through the toy implement and the whole practice of playing. The concept of a child itself — of a child as fundamentally distinct from an adult — is relatively new, he reminds us, and did not emerge until the nineteenth century.

“It is well known that even children’s clothing became emancipated from that of adults only at a very late date. Not until the nineteenth century, in fact. It sometimes looks as if our century wishes to take this development one step further and, far from regarding children as little men and women, has reservations about thinking of them as human beings at all.” (Benjamin “Old Toys” 101)

The toy and the child who plays with it were not simply constructed out of thin air, however. Broad historical conditions prepared their emergence, directly and indirectly. The toy industry itself emerged, as it were, as a side-effect of the decline of the Church. The smaller art object — oddities, curiosities, toys, — themes which run throughout all of Benjamin’s work, was born from a displaced craft and artistry in search of employment. Benjamin describes this moment, in the wake of the Reformation, as preceding the separation of the adult curiosity from the child’s toy.

“At around the same time, the advance of the Reformation forced many artists who had formerly worked for the Church ‘to shift to the production of goods to satisfy the demand for craftwork, and to produce smaller art objects for domestic use, instead of large-scale works.’ This led to a huge upsurge in the production of the tiny objects that filled toy cupboards and gave such pleasure to children, as well as the collections of artworks and curiosities that gave such pleasure to adults. It was this that created the fame of Nuremberg and led to the hitherto unshaken dominance of German toys on the world market.” (Benjamin “Cultural History of Toys” 114)

Gradually, through a ‘process of emancipation’, the toy separated itself out from the crowd of small-works. This ‘emancipation’, however, was one of alienation and segmentation — for the culture and for the family. The nineteenth century saw the unassuming, tiny, playful object disappear, while, in tandem, the child came to have his own playroom; thus, the toys were able to grow in size, becoming his property of sorts. The family’s role in playing with the child receded accordingly, and an ‘indulgent sentimentality’ generally overtook the toy, play, and the child’s early development, especially with regards to books and reading.

“If we survey the entire history of toys, it becomes evident that the question of size has far greater importance than might have been supposed. In the second half of the nineteenth century, when the long-term decline in these things begins, we see toys becoming larger; the unassuming, the tiny, and the playful all slowly disappear. It was only then that children acquired a playroom of their own and a cupboard in which they could keep books separately from those of their parents. There can be no doubt that the older volumes with their small format called for the mother’s presence, whereas the modern quartos with their insipid and indulgent sentimentality are designed to enable children to disregard her absence. The process of emancipating the toy begins. The more industrialization penetrates, the more it decisively eludes the control of the family and becomes increasingly alien to children and also to parents.” (Benjamin “Cultural History of Toys” 114)

Even so, Benjamin reserves an aesthetic-cultural appreciation for the technology and techniques that produced the toy, presumably during the early stages of the Reformation and before the full penetration of industrialization. Through the Church artisans, he links the production of the ’small work’ to folk art, which is often “nothing more than the cultural goods of a ruling class that have trickled down and been given a new lease on life within the framework of a broad collective.” In this respect, the ‘trickle down’ of an aesthetic from high to low is the intact process that industrial forces will soon penetrate and break up. For Benjamin, the toy is an important site of confrontation between two different models for the circulation of aesthetic, technique, and technology through a given culture.

“In the same way, the genuine and self-evident simplicity of toys was a matter of technology, not formalist considerations. For a characteristic feature of folk art – the way in which primitive technology combined with cruder materials imitates sophisticated technology combined with expensive materials – can be seen with particular clarity in the world of toys. Porcelain from the great czarist factories in Russian villages provided the model for dolls and genre scenes carved in wood. More recent research into folk art has long since abandoned the belief that ‘primitive’ inevitably means ‘older.’ Frequently, so-called folk art is nothing more than the cultural goods of a ruling class that have trickled down and been given a new lease on life within the framework of a broad collective.” (Benjamin “Toys and Play” 119)

With that said, Benjamin turns to describing a more encompassing theory of play, as it relates not only to toys themselves but also to more general aspects of life, adult or otherwise. The first point he makes is that the toy itself is not what produces play — or at least it shouldn’t (though it can). Indeed, for Benjamin, the less directed, determined, and purposeful the toy, the more available it is to imaginative play. A good toy should be as open-ended and undefined as possible — “Because the more appealing toys are, in the ordinary sense of the term, the further they are from genuine playthings; the more they are based on imitation, the further away they lead us from real, living play.” (Benjamin “Cultural History of Toys” 115–116)

Instead of thinking of the toy as the ’cause’ of play, as what determines the game a child will play, Benjamin describes play as motivated first by actions and affects, of which specific toys are but the enablers or vehicles. This perhaps explains why children so frequently ‘misuse’ toys, on the one hand, and turn non-toys into playthings, on the other.

“Today we may perhaps hope that it will be possible to overcome the basic error – namely, the assumption that the imaginative content of a child’s toys is what determines his playing; whereas in reality the opposite is true. A child wants to pull something, and so he becomes a horse; he wants to play with sand, and so he turns into a baker; he wants to hide, and so he turns into a robber or a policeman.” (Benjamin  “Cultural History of Toys” 115)

Though scholars tend to focus on Benjamin’s characteristic mixture of materiality and spiritualism — by which he imbues the ’small work’, the popular, and the mundane with a spiritual force — what is discussed less often is the role of desire and affection in his theory of the subject, which comes to the fore in his theory of play. For Benjamin, what is most important about the toy is not the toy itself, its design and history, though these are of course central to his analysis, but the action and impulse to which they are lent, or which they block and delimit.

Indeed, in “Toys and Play” the theory of play and repetition that he outlines may be distinguished, in this respect, from some of the more predominant aesthetic theories of his time. In a paragraph rich with possibilities, he carefully distinguishes the child’s imaginative repetition from major theories of the day — the aesthetic theory of imitation, the Frankfurt School’s theory of escapism, the Freudian theory of trauma and melancholy — even as he links it up with an irreducible pleasure, affection, and sexuality. In contrast to reactive, therapeutic, and derivational theories of repetition, Benjamin’s is characteristically affirmative and closely allied with desire, intensity, and the body.

“Last, such a study would have to explore the great law that presides over the rules and rhythms of the entire world of play: the law of repetition. We know that for a child repetition is the soul of play, that nothing gives him greater pleasure than to ‘Do it again!’ The obscure urge to repeat things is scarcely less powerful in play, scarcely less cunning in its workings, than the sexual impulse in love. It is no accident that Freud has imagined he could detect an impulse ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ in it. And in fact, every profound experience longs to be insatiable, longs for return and repetition until the end of time, and for the reinstatement of an original condition from which it sprang. ‘All things would be resolved in a trice / If we could only do them twice.’ Children act on this proverb of Goethe’s. Except that the child is not satisfied with twice, but wants the same thing again and again, a hundred or even a thousand times. This is not only the way to master frightening fundamental experiences – by deadening one’s own response, by arbitrarily conjuring up experiences, or through parody; it also means enjoying one’s victories and triumphs over and over again, with total intensity. An adult relieves his heart from its terrors and doubles happiness by turning it into a story. A child creates the entire event anew and starts again right from the beginning. Here, perhaps, is the deepest explanation for the two meanings of the German word Spielen [which means 'to play' and 'games']: the element of repetition is what is actually common to them. Not a ‘doing as if’ but a ‘doing the same thing over and over again,’ the transformation of a shattering experience into habit – that is the essence of play.” (Benjamin “Toys and Play” 120)

From there, Benjamin joins the child’s love of repetition to habit and instruction, the basic processes by which a child is introduced to culture, routine, and the trials & tribulations of daily life.

“For play and nothing else is the mother of every habit. Eating, sleeping, getting dressed, washing have to be instilled into the struggling little brat in a playful way, following the rhythm of nursery rhymes. Habit enters life as a game, and in habit, even in its most sclerotic forms, an element of play survives to the end. Habits are the forms of our first happiness and our first horror that have congealed and become deformed to the point of being unrecognizable.” (Benjamin “Toys and Play” 120)

For Benjamin, play, which resists habit and routine, is also its ‘mother’ and its shepherd. Through even the most rigid habits of adult life, he writes, an element of play and innovation invariably lingers. –However, in a much darker sense, — and here Benjamin deviates sharply from the more jubilant character of Derrida’s ‘iteration’, — habits themselves are but the congealed, ossified forms of once-intense, almost-unrecognizable moments of intensity and feeling. If, for Benjamin, the most dreary habits of daily life must contain a smidgen of playfulness, its apparition is less the sign of a resilient subject than the haunting trace of a lost, remembered freedom.

References

Benjamin, Walter. “The Cultural History of Toys,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, part 1, 1927-1930 (Walter Benjamin). Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2005.

Benjamin, Walter. “Old Toys: The Toy Exhibition at the Märkisches Museum,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, part 1, 1927-1930 (Walter Benjamin). Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2005.

Benjamin, Walter. “Toys and Play: Marginal Notes on a Monumental Work,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, part 1, 1927-1930 (Walter Benjamin). Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2005.

Quotes of Note

“And it cannot be denied that we needed this encyclopedia of toys to revive discussion of the theory of play, which has not been treated in this context since Karl Groos published his important work Spiele der Menschen [People at Play] in 1899. Any novel theory would have to take account of the ‘Gestalt theory of play gestures’ – gestures of which Willy Haas recently listed (May 18, 1928) the three most important [cat and mouse, mother defending nest and young, struggle between animals].” (Benjamin “Toys and Play” 119)

“When the urge to play overcomes an adult, this is not simply a regression to childhood. To be sure, play is always liberating. Surrounded by a world of giants, children use play to create a world appropriate to their size. But the adult, who finds himself threatened by the real world and can find no escape, removes its sting by playing with its image in reduced form. The desire to make light of an unbearable life has been a major factor in the growing interest in children’s games and children’s books since the end of the war.” (Benjamin “Old Toys” 100)

Wraps Magazine

In a story related to yesterday’s post on the new NYC Transit window ads, it was noted that the semi-transparent film on which these ‘wrap ads’ are printed is manufactured by 3M for specifically that purpose.

Paul J. Fleuranges, a spokesman for New York City Transit, said the agency hoped that the film, called Scotchcal, would cut down on the frequency of scratchitti. The vinyl graphic film, made by 3M, is widely used to wrap buses, because a it allows a full image to be printed on the outside, while the little perforated holes allows people (in theory) to look outside.

As a technology, it solves a longstanding obstacle for advertisers: how to transform windows — the surfaces people look at the most — into surfaces for display. In this way, otherwise incompatible modes of perception are neatly synchronized with Scotchcal: from one side, up close, it preserves the transparency of the window, but from the other side, and farther away, an image is formed. One can look through or at the same surface.

As riders of public transit are finding, the power of this patent can hardly be overestimated. As the visual field becomes more and more cluttered and broken up with signs and solicitations, we can only expect attention-seeking strategies to become more sophisticated, if less subtle. The wrapped ad’s design, and the type of film on which they are printed, are already gaining in complexity. 3M now offers variations for acrylic, for glass, for short term and long term use, for backlit settings, for window displays, for buses and tractor trailers. A whole new industry is emerging to facilitate this expansion. Trade publications like Wraps Magazine (above) track industry developments and chart its growth, seeking new ways to wrap some overlooked object or site in ads and solicitations.

One can sense in these rapid developments the beginning of an almost metaphysical shift in the aspect of objects and the urban terrain they serve to multiply: advertising and the art of display have advanced one more step over the object and its materiality. Benjamin was perhaps more right than he could have possibly known when he said:

“Technology consigns the outer image of things to a long farewell, like banknotes that are bound to lose their value.” (3)

References

Benjamin, Walter. “Dream Kitsch: Gloss on Surrelism,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, part 1, 1927-1930 (Walter Benjamin). Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2005.

The new anti-scratchiti NYC subway ads

I’ve been racking my brain trying to recall other instances where advertising has been used as a crime deterrence strategy - or at least this is what NYC Transit authorities are giving as the reason behind their new ad policy. According to Jennifer 8. Lee of the New York Times:

“Despite the M.T.A. budget shortfall, transit officials say that advertising revenue is not the main motivation for the program. Instead, the sprawling ads have a practical purpose. The first is to reduce what officials call “scratchiti,” or scratched graffiti on the windows.”

The rationale to this decision is of course absurd. I, for one, would much rather look through scratchiti than at an ad. Indeed, according to the Gothamist, the full window ads

aren’t the kind that you can see clearly out of either, as one disgruntled straphanger noted: “outward visibility is significantly reduced in outdoor lighting, and severely reduced to totally eliminated at night or in low lighting.”

Aside from the obvious personal safety issues introduced by the ads’ placement, which transit officials continue to refute, there is the more philosophical question of why a paid solicitation that directly inconveniences the rider should be considered categorically preferable to the relatively noninvasive, and no less aesthetically offensive, scratchiti-work.

Whatever the case may be, the NYC Transit’s decision to extend ad creep to subway windows for, so they say, crime prevention purposes signals one more step in the expansion of a highly manipulable CPTED logic. As to whether ‘crime prevention through environmental design’ actually works, - and CPTED designs have been shown to be effective, under certain circumstances - is here besides the point: not only do the negative effects of the new ad policy far outweigh the benefits, but its rationale now even seems to primarily function as a ‘rhetoric’ with which to dress up otherwise outrageous, unacceptable measures.

A Kmart store layaway associate retrieves a package from a layaway storage area on November 17, 2008 in the Bronx borough of New York City. (Photo by Yvonne Hemsey/Getty Images)

Remember layaway? If you don’t, you will. With the credit crunch now in full swing, it’s making a comeback. Ben Popken over at The Consumerist summarizes its return:

Layaway is back this year. What’s that? It’s where you buy an item at a store, but don’t pay for it completely right away. The store puts the purchase item aside for you. You then make regular payments and once they add up to the full price tag, you get your item. Imagine that, saving up and only buying something once you can afford to pay for it in cash. Layaway plans used to be more popular but were overtaken by the ease and instant gratification of credit cards. Unlike credit cards, you don’t pay any interest, although sometimes there is a base fee. Now that credit lines are being cut and thrift is the new black, layaway is making a comeback. Kmart is featuring it in their Christmas ads, and Oprah talked about it on her show recently.

The decline of the credit card - which is to say, the decline of instant gratification - may sound like a silver lining - the comments to Popken’s article are full of people praising layaway for giving you time to really think about the purchase, - but in practice it can be yet another mechanism for penalizing the poor.

Though you may not have to pay interest on a layaway plan, the base fee can amount to the same or more. And since a lot of companies don’t offer layaway plans directly, a market has emerged for companies that do, often through partnerships with large retailers. A couple years back, Brendan Koerner of Wired described, on Gizmodo, how one of these rackets works:

Perhaps the most well-known—or infamous—of these ventures is Financing Alternatives Inc. of Chesapeake, Virginia.

On the surface, at least, the FAI business plan is really straight out of Merchants of Misery: Target customers with horrendous credit, then charge ‘em up the ying-yang with a weekly payment plan. Take this “small business desktop,” which is advertised as running a Celeron D processor and housing an 80-gig hard drive. The lowest advertised total price on this, at $35.99 per week for a year, comes out to $1,871.48. Meanwhile, Dell’s closest parallel, the decidedly low-end Dimension B110, now runs $299 (albeit sans printer). So, just because you have ghastly credit, you’re being forced to pay a minimum of $1,500 or so extra. Ouch.

With a time lag between payment and purchase, opportunities for consumer manipulation multiply. The product you eventually receive might not be the product you thought you were purchasing:

Though they depict cheap Dells on their website, FAI often builds their own systems. According to one RipOffReport.com correspondent, who identifies himself as a current employee of FAI, the company uses the cheapest components available on their homebrew models, often stuffing archaic EDO RAM or non-AGP video cards into the PCs. Obviously, this stuff ain’t so simpatico with today’s software; pity the kid who tries playing the new Half-Life title on his FAI box.

From product quality to price to customer service, layaway programs introduce new problems for the consumer - and to the extent that these payment plans are by definition designed for the poor, their effects can be all the more egregious. Though layway plans will no doubt be a convenience to many, for others they will be one more tax on an already over-stretched income.

Agency: Jung von Matt Zurich, Switzerland

The placement of the above anti-obesity ad - on the seats of swings in a children’s playground - is wholly inappropriate. Even if obesity is a problem amongst children, the last thing in the world you should be doing is putting signs where they play that say, in effect, ‘you are fat’. Eating disorders, after all, run both ways, effect girls and boys differently, and on the whole, with respect to children especially, are the effect of targeted media messages not unlike this one.

While adults may read that sign as a simple encouragement to a healthy diet, who’s to say what a child’s idea of obesity really is? Will children confuse this message with mass media representations of healthy bodies as overweight? Will every child who reads this feel that they’re the one out of five that’s obese? And why are children the target, in the first place? Shouldn’t the parents, who are responsible for their children’s diets, be the ones targeted?

And why put an anti-obesity ad on, of all things, a playground, the very place where children are actually exercising?

“This whole set-up allowed them to communicate their message in an interactive way, inviting children to become aware of the obesity issue while playing, and at the same time inviting their parents to deal with the problem as well.”

(h/t directdaily)

Advertising Agency: Germaine, Antwerp, Belgium
Creative Director: André Plaisier
Art Directors: Alexis Bellavoine, Jeroen Goossens
Copywriter: Pieter Claeys
Photographer: Kurt Stallaert
Retouching: Edwin Veer
Published: October 2008

Now I may be wrong about this but I don’t think the World Wildlife Fund explicitly promotes vegetarianism. (They were in fact recently caught selling fish sticks to raise money for fish conservation; but on the whole they are, I think, generally opposed to a meat diet.)

The message of the ad is just as unclear as their position. But to be fair, in the Dutch original, a commenter notes, the copy reads, “over-consuming the earth”, which is a little more coherent than the English version’s reprimand on consumption proper. But even so, the larger conflict between word and image remains: while the ad’s slogan discourages meat-eating as an environmentally unsustainable practice, the image introduces a somewhat unrelated moral dimension, and it is this conflict of message that seems to have caused most of the confusion in its reception (-see the comments).

But this confusion is no accident. The internal dissonance in the ad manifests perfectly, if unintentionally, the internal schism of the animal rights movement itself. The more mainstream-friendly ‘unsustainable’ argument against meat-eating here runs up against the ethical argument against the murder of animals — which is what makes this ad so unusual. The ideological ambivalence of the WWF can’t help but be reflected in its message to the public.

From Soviet montage to the Memorex mix tape, leftist Western thinkers have proudly declared their membership to a “sample culture.” Remix theory, the latest version, keeps the candle burning bright. Like its predecessors, it attempts to found an aesthetic regime on the claim that the explicit selection of texts – sampling in music, collage in art, montage in film, citation in literature – is political and disruptive (by virtue of breaking-up and recombining old, “reified” things), but unlike its forebears remix (or mashup) theory takes its inspiration from a digitized, musical (rather than pictorial, avant-garde) provenance.

As a formal technique first and foremost, “sampling” insists on discovering an intrinsic subversive effect in the re-contextualizing of other texts. In fact, this kind of operation increasingly defines “subversion” itself — which now means, simply, an ironic or against-the-grain “re-presentation” of something else.

But what, exactly, of sampling — as an operation or technique — is so disruptive (and therefore political)? (Or, for that matter, according to what criteria are disruptive effects political effects by default?) These questions appear all the more urgently in that, historically speaking, the mix (or collage or montage) has been known to surreptitiously alternate allegiance, so to speak — between the oppressive logic of the commodity, on the one hand, and a liberating, subversive ironism, on the other …

And yet, in spite of our culture’s having found the “fragment” a tired register for understanding the commodity or the artwork, new publications like Remix Theory and Vague Terrain Journal continue to promote this philosophy (in a novel way, admittedly), while a more general Surrealist inheritance maintains steady influence in academic circles, primarily through a Frankfurt School/Benjaminian tradition. Thus, in the following commentary, I will review Eduardo Navas’ “Regressive and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture,” a heavily-circulated semi-theoretical text that seems to unfold at the nexus of the major academic and popular strains of (what could be called) ‘montage politics’.

‘Sample Recognition’ in Remix Theory

According to Navas, there are three kinds of remixes: extended, selective, and reflexive. Each is anchored in the “original” work (off which it’s based): the extended remix is a “longer version of the original song,” the selective remix “consists of adding or subtracting material from the original song,” while the reflexive remix ‘maximizes and combines’ both strategies. Whereas the extended or selective remix is a “reinterpretation of a pre-existing song, meaning that the ‘aura’ of the original will be dominant in the remixed version,” the reflexive remix

“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. In Reflexive Remixes material is added or deleted, but the original tracks are largely left intact in order to be recognizable. An example of this is Mad Professor’s famous dub/trip hop album No Protection, 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. The fact that both albums were released at the same time in 1994 further complicates Mad Professor’s allegory. It is worth noting 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 autonomy.”

Navas’ unorthodox appropriation of Benjaminian concepts (aura, allegory, fragment) deserves pause here. For, while Benjamin refers to the aura — which he defines as the importance of “presence” to the traditional work of art, i.e. its actual, singular location (in a museum, for instance) — as precisely what is lost in the arts of ‘technological reproducibility’ (e.g. cinema, photography, radio, etc.), Navas suggests that the aura is increasingly dominant with each remix of the original fragment. Or rather by tearing a fragment out of an original work, and sampling it, the aura increases, “always maintaining the ‘essence’ of the song intact.” The reflexive remix, by contrast, challenges the “aura” by, in a sense, growing a second work off of the first and achieving relative autonomy ‘alongside’ the original.

As such, the reflexive remix — and its more sophisticated subspecies, the megamix — functions as the revolutionary turn in the mashup taxonomy, which ambitiously spans, as I further discuss below, all the arts, architecture, software, advertising — in short, all of culture. The reflexive remix is thus the privileged moment where the fragment, or sample, breaks away from the tradition to which it is otherwise attached and assumes contrary, politicized meaning. “The foundation of musical mashups can be found in a special kind of Reflexive Remix known as the megamix, which is composed of intricate music and sound samples.” The intricacy — which is at least partly an effect of the quantity of samples — produces a new text that is not simply a homage to, or affirmation of, other, prior tracks.

Now if it’s the quantity and complexity of samples that overcomes the aura of origins, then one would think that the megamix — and allegory itself — depends on a certain loss of recognition of the samples’ origins. (The megamix would thus fast approach a non-mixed, run-of-the-mill work, ripe with allusions but not explicitly composed from samples of the alluded.) Here, indeed, is where Navas’ methodology breaks down. For, if subversion depends on the subject’s recognition of the samples’ sources, then “intricacy” will necessarily or inevitably threaten this communication. Likewise (or conversely), if the logic of the commodity requires the subject to recognize mashup homages to other commodities, then how will this recognition be distinguished from its opposite, subversion?

On this difficult matter Navas expresses a clear ambivalence over the status of “recognition.” At one point, he claims that advanced reflexive remixes prevent recognition of the samples, with the exception of the title, while at another point he claims the exact opposite, namely that the megamix (which is a form of the reflexive remix) is founded on an extended, complex recognition of fragments.

• “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.”

• “The creative power of all these megamixes and mashups lies in the fact that even when they extend, select from, or reflect upon many recordings, much like the Extended, Selective and Reflexive Remixes, their authority is allegorical – their effectiveness depends on the recognition of pre-existing recordings.”

• “A megamix is built upon the same principle of the medley but instead of having a single band playing the compositions, the DJ producer relies strictly on sampling brief sections of songs (often just a few bars enough for the song to be recognized) that are sequenced to create what is in essence an extended collage: an electronic medley consisting of samples from pre-existing sources. Unlike the Extended or the Selective Remixes, the megamix does not allegorize one particular song but many. Its purpose is to present a musical collage riding on a uniting groove to create a type of pastiche that allows the listener to recall a whole time period and not necessarily one single artist or composition.”

How important is the moment of recognition to sampling? Further, would the “uniting groove” necessarily have to have a real-world thematic correlation — e.g. a time period — or could it conceivably sample, combine, produce along altogether different lines? Needless to say, I don’t think it would take us very long to find that neither the audience member’s recognition of the sample sources, nor the song’s fealty to a pregiven theme, are required for a work to be — intentionally or unintentionally — a “mashup”. Which leads us to the question: why take the sample — a literal replication from a song — as the aesthetic unit proper? Why take a fragment — or, rather, the intentional, perhaps manual citation of another work — as the most fundamental and effective unit of an artwork, especially when, technically speaking, in these cases the sample itself is not really even recognized by the audience member?

Let us, then, for a moment appreciate the mashup taxonomy’s accidental but inevitable production of this paradox: In taking the “sample” as the basic unit of meaning, “recognition” is paramount. Without it, the sample is only a sample in principle and not in practice: on the one hand, if the work’s reception is not as dependent on the sample as the artist’s is, then the sample devolves into an arbitrary stricture on creativity, but on the other hand, if the ideal remix work is simply a play or string of source recognitions then it can no longer be meaningfully distinguished from certain commodity forms — e.g. the promotional medley — and so would slide into the lowly genre of homage, virtuosity, and clever manipulation. (The megamix would here categorically approach the dangerous, border territory of the “novelty.”) Thus, to avoid this pitfall, the remix must be complex — a task that almost becomes a matter of quantity of sources — but not so complex as to lose audience recognition; although, again, the moment of recognition still depends on affirming rather than subverting the source, a possibility that likewise can only grow with the intricacy of sampling, an intricacy that at some point threatens to simply make use of sources for reasons that cannot be contained so easily.

The easiest way to rid ourselves of this paradox, while at the same time avoiding a tedious game of dialectics, is to simply dispose of (or at least severely limit) the concept “sample.” This move is perhaps already suggested by the taxonomy itself, which finds, within the category of the megamix, an exception to the aura and a hesitant departure from the importance of recognition. To be sure, if the manipulation of a sample is extreme enough, does it really matter if it was literally extracted? Navas’ vocabulary of manipulation — extend, add, subtract — will at some point have to become superfluous. Simple, if tedious, hypotheticals are easy to produce. For example, what if two artists, both working off the same original, produce an identical text, only the first artist begins with a copied sample, manipulating it beyond recognition, while the second artist works from ear or bar or by some other means: what purpose would be served by deeming one a “sample” and the other an “allusion”?

In fact, the closer we look at contemporary aesthetic usages of the “fragment,” the more its deployment seems designed to overtake the “allusion” as a critical referent. Where the latter remains a fairly open concept for describing intertextuality — it is as happily undefined as “trope” or “symbol” — the latter introduces a definite “unit” as the basis of textual relations. Functionalist and literalist in impulse, the fragment or sample in this sense insists on a finitude and exactitude that can all too easily become the crudest of critical instruments. Like the so-called “indexical image” in film studies, the sample attempts to ground the text in a relative faithfulness between documents, which, in this case, amounts to an arbitrary fetishizing of digital reproduction.

The first crudity of this dogma is perhaps measured by the disappearance of questions and textual forms it necessitates. For instance: what happened to the musical “cover”? –In not referencing or critiquing other texts “directly” (so to speak), with literal “samples” (although we have already determined that the qualification “literal” is problematic), are the songs that ‘merely’ engage in rich allusion, genre play, or “covering” all the less intertextual? Why is copying a text suddenly the only way to reference or engage with a text? This is, perhaps, an historical rather than analytic question, so, to answer it, we will have to take a short detour through the ‘totalizing character’ of Navas’ concept “mashup”.

“Mashups are everywhere”: “Sample Culture” as Zeitgeist

The first effect of a functionalist typology of “sampling” is to draw into proximity cultural practices that otherwise have little in common, or at least don’t intuitively bear the relations attributed to them by the taxonomy. Nothing could justify the comparison of music sampling and software mashups, or for that matter 2.0 mashups and RSS aggregators, other than a deeper, perhaps metaphysical concept of the fragment (which even finds a place for “cut/copy & paste”). But objections like these are accommodated in advance by the taxonomy form itself, which explicitly strives to establish a proper name and apply it to all of culture, across distant and highly specialized practices.

“Tall buildings in major cities are often covered with advertisements selling products from bubble gum to cell phone services, or promoting the latest blockbuster film. The building turns into a giant billboard: advertising is mashed up with architecture. A more specific example; cigarette companies in Santiago de Chile have been pushed to include on their cigarette packs images and statements of people who have cancer due to smoking: two cultural codes that in the past were separated on purpose are mashed up as a political compromise to try to keep people from smoking, while accommodating their desires. The Hulk and Spiderman have been smashed up to become the Spider-Hulk. In this case, the hybrid character has the shape of the Hulk with Spiderman’s costume on top. It is neither but both – simultaneously. Mashups are everywhere. They have moved beyond music to other areas of culture. Such move is dependent on running signifiers relying on the spectacular repetition of media. And repetition had meddled with computer culture since the middle of the twentieth century.”

A wild totalization. One would think there is a Platonic Form “Mashup”, a great combinatory power governing anything that can be forced to admit of at least one discernible accoutrement. But what holds these diverse examples together, as species of the same general operation, remains largely unclear.

It is thus important to attend to the distinctions between the examples Navas offers as self-evident: for example, the cigarettes and the hybrid. One invokes an image of grafting — e.g. two otherwise discrete forms suddenly attached to each other (the billboard and the building, the warning label and the cigarette pack) — while the other suggests a conflation of features within the same indivisible entity (Spider-Hulk). The former speaks well to the concept of mashup that Navas has so far described; but the latter, upon closer inspection, clearly undermines the functionalist, literalist impulse behind the fragment, the sample, and the “uniting groove”.

Let me explain: the megamix, which corresponds to the ‘inappropriate’ combination of billboard and building – “two cultural codes that in the past were separated on purpose are mashed up as a political compromise” — does not itself correspond to the hybrid, in that the latter is more an “admixture” — a single entity — than a collage or montage of discrete “samples”. The hybrid, in this sense, would correspond to a work of art – a song, say – that does not take as its project the manipulation of units, samples, or extractions of other works.

Or does it? Let us, for a moment, seriously entertain this idea. Does every work ultimately only sample, with or without the intention? Can one not help but be a megamixer? There is, of course, a long aesthetic history to this position — from the Stoics to the Scholastics (who perceived a ‘combinatory’ mental operation at the heart of imagination) to the British Empiricists, like Hume, who claimed there was no such thing as creation proper, only a creative combining of other things (through a variety of ’syntactic’ rules), to the early Modernists, who obviously took great interest in the fragment (Joyce, Benjamin, Picasso), and, finally, to Deleuze, who recovered something of this project with his concept of the “assemblage”. –Hume’s well-known example of the dragon perhaps best expresses this position. In his view, the fictional entity ‘dragon’ was not so much an ‘invention’ as it was an imaginative composition of different ‘real’ animal anatomies. Though clearly informed by a hard Epicurean epistemology that bases knowledge in “experience,” Hume’s argument nonetheless radically transformed or extended this notion, from the intellect to cultural forms themselves, and in this respect bears relevance to the art object that Navas seems to have in mind.

But is a hybrid a megamix? Is the distinction (if there is one) important?

What is at stake is nothing less than the possibility of a critical unit, a discrete ‘cultural atom’ of meaning. In this vein, there are at least two problems with the concept of “sample”. First, with respect to the hybrid, determining what actually qualifies as a sample quickly becomes problematic. What were once allegedly fragments are here characteristically conflated in a single feature; they are not ‘attached’ to each other — the model Navas’ architecture example is most available to — any more than they are sustained as distinct within their new, singular appearance. Second, what is to prevent the discovery, within a fragment, of still further fragments? Spider-Hulk is a succinct example of this problem, for isn’t the Hulk himself a hybrid of, say, Frankenstein and King Kong, morose Romantic monster and frightful oversized beast? The exactitude of the fragment quickly gives way to the ambiguity of the allusion.

In this sense, then, the concept of fragment attempts to put a stop — an arbitrary stop — to a potentially infinite regress (of features within features), the tracing of which would no doubt quickly require the abandoning of the unit itself, which automatically implies contour, edge, finitude, and a posterior combination (while somehow maintaining that contour through each subsequent remixing).

In this way, the fragment or sample becomes a structural instrument for discerning, but in fact drawing, all sorts of analogous relations. For Navas, the mashup indeed appears as a kind of contagious operation “moving” from one domain to another: “Mashups are everywhere. They have moved beyond music to other areas of culture.” Passing over the avant-garde movements that Benjamin often had in mind, Navas takes as his origin the early 1980s, no doubt to raise the remix genre to a spiritual locus for the age, and from there conceives of a kind of ‘nework cascade’ across the rest of culture. He includes the “desktop” as an early infection, although “This conceptual model has been extended to web application mashups.” Little wonder, then, that the management of historically disconnected phenomena becomes difficult without some serious revisions of definitions already in play.

“Mashups as a conceptual model, however, take on a different role in software. For example, the purpose of a typical Web 2.0 mashup is not to allegorize particular applications, but rather, by selectively sampling in dynamic fashion, to subvert applications to perform something they could not do otherwise by themselves. Such mashups are developed with an interest to extend the functionality of software for specific purposes. [...] What these examples show is that web application mashups function differently from music mashups. Music mashups are developed for entertainment; they are supposed to be consumed for pleasure, while web application mashups, like Pipes by Yahoo!, actually are validated if they have a practical purpose. This means that the concept and cultural role of mashups change drastically when they move from the music realm to a more open media space such as the Web. We must now examine this crucial difference. [...] As previously defined, the Reflexive Remix demands that the viewer or user question everything that is presented, but this questioning stays in the aesthetic realm. The notion of reflexivity in a mashup implies that the user must be aware as to why such mashup is being accessed. This reflexivity in action in web applications moves beyond basic sampling to find its most efficiency with constant updating . So a Reflexive Mashup does not necessarily demand critical reflection, but rather practical awareness.”

If the mashup functions completely differently between music and web 2.0 applications, then why compare them at all? If the purpose of the latter isn’t to allegorize the fragment, then how is it still a mashup? The use of the word “subvert” seems more than a little forced, as if Navas is struggling to maintain a revolutionary vocabulary that is already stretched thin. And yet, what we perceive as the problems, gaps, incongruities bound to bubble up from a broken method, for Navas becomes impetus to further explore — “We must now examine this crucial difference”. This kind of structural or structuring method produces problems and questions by default; it inaugurates a whole domain of thought simply by virtue of working within a technical, unitary register. Sample theory is in this sense closely affiliated with network theory, on account of its easy transformation of anything into nodes, units, loci, an operation that then invariably necessitates the question of what connects these points together other than the question itself.

The Consumer-Subject of “Sample Culture”

Having discussed the importance of “source recognition” to Navas’ concept of the sample, and having discussed the totalizing character of the fragment/sample/mashup methodology, we have to wonder where the subject fits into this expansive world view. For, on the one hand, the subject seems tightly defined — existing only to the extent that intertextual messages are recognized — but on the other hand seems universal and mindless, insofar as nearly everything is a mashup (copy & paste, desktop, web apps, music, architecture, product packaging). But, in either case, the subject is deeply associated with a capitalist, consumerist function — which, for Navas, becomes at certain points explicit.

“Let’s take the music mashups considered so far. Their power lies in their spectacular aura; meaning that they are not validated by a particular function that they are supposed to deliver, but rather by the desires and wants that are brought out of the consumer who loves to be reminded of two or more songs for his/her enjoyment in leisure. Music has this power because it is marketed as a form of mass escapism. According to political economist Jacques Attali, the average person consumes music in order to wind down and find delight in the few spare moments of the everyday.”

In this view, the mashup is a particular kind of nostalgiac event: that is, as a marketing program — the listener is in fact referred to as a “consumer” — the mashup recycles previous commodities and re-circulates them to emminently happy effect. Why this simple, formal operation should prove so effective or fundamental is left unexplained, but, either way, the commodity’s ‘fascination with itself’ is taken as not only ‘in itself’ disproportionately affective over the consumer — is this what, for Navas, makes the consumer a consumer and not, say, a subject? — but as also, and this point is expressed in the same move, programmatically satisfactory for the consumer’s “desires and wants”. Which is to say, when the commodity constitutes itself explicitly as a commodity, as composed of prior commodities — this whole model depends on the subject’s so-called nostalgiac “recognition” of the samples — then the subject’s desires achieve an exceptional, almost mystical fulfillment. Now, while Navas is certainly not saying that this is the only art and the only desire, it is nonetheless clear that this model is the dominant form of the age, extending itself across nearly every domain — architecture, computers, objects.

In any event, one would think that Navas is referring exclusively to “regressive remixes,” and not “reflexive remixes,” for while both depend on the recognition of the samples, only the former affirms the aura. But, again, we return to the double face of the concept “reflexive.” On the one hand, you will recall, it distinguishes musical from application mashups (referring to the latter), but on the other hand it appears as the third kind of remix within the Regressive category. It is thus both inside and outside the Regressive.

“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. In Reflexive Remixes material is added or deleted, but the original tracks are largely left intact in order to be recognizable. An example of this is Mad Professor’s famous dub/trip hop album No Protection, 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.”

What is remarkable about the reflexive remix is that it both replicates a former work and creates a new one. It is not only a sample. Which is to say, though it materially works on and off a fragment from a former work, the fragment’s status as fragment is compromised, or rendered incidental by, the radically new use or interpretation to which it is lent. This kink in Navas’ taxonomy likewise reveals the problematic notion of the aura at work in the piece; for, if the material fragment is just as present in the reflexive remix as in the extended remix, how could the aura be less (or, for that matter, more) dominant? Wouldn’t we then have to conclude that the aura is not in fact associated with a literal, material fragment in any instance? Either way, the escape from the aura in the reflexive remix is entirely ellided by Navas’ later need to associate the “recognition” of the sample with a deep, structuring commodity/consumer model. Now, rather suddenly, the “power” of the musical mashup lies — without exception — in the “spectacular aura” of the sample.

In theoretical terms, Navas is trying to circle back to a Frankfurt School-oriented concept of the culture industry, the commodity, “mass escapism,” entertainment as distraction, perhaps to underpin or legitimize so unwieldy and ambitious a taxonomy. The subject — or rather the consumer — is accordingly quickly disposed of: “their elation will help them cope with whatever stress they may have had throughout the day”. (Is it only a coincidence that Navas here refers to neo-liberal economist Jacques Attali?) The earlier references to allegory, with its hints of a revolutionary subjectivity, are here completely dispelled (as a parable, of sorts, warning against mixing Benjamin’s aesthetics with Adorno’s politics). Perhaps we would be better off returning to the “allusion,” as a critical concept, and restricting our notion of politics to explicit content (instead of ’syntactic operations’).