Ben’s writing had a certain style. Were it music, we’d call it sampling. Were it painting, it would be called collage. Were it digital, we’d call it remix. Every paragraph was constructed through quotes. The essay might be about Hemingway or Proust. But he built the argument by clipping quotes from the authors he was discussing. Their words made his argument. And he was rewarded for it. Indeed, in the circles for which he was writing, the talent and care that his style evinced were a measure of his understanding. He succeeded not simply by stringing quotes together. He succeeded because the salience of the quotes, in context, made a point that his words alone would not. And his selection demonstrated knowledge beyond the message of the text. Only the most careful reader could construct from the text he read another text that explained it. Ben’s writing showed he was an insanely careful reader. His intensely careful reading made him a beautiful writer. Ben’s style is rewarded not just in English seminars. It is the essence of good writing in the law. A great brief seems to say nothing on its own. Everything is drawn from cases that went before, presented as if the argument now presented is in fact nothing new. Here again, the words of others are used to make a point the others didn’t directly make. Old cases are remixed. The remix is meant to do something new. (Appropriately enough, Ben is now a lawyer.)”
-Lawrence Lessig, Remix, 51
In the class, students are penalized for originality, sincerity, and creativity. What they’ve been surreptitiously doing throughout their academic career—patchwriting, cutting-and-pasting, lifting—must now be done in the open, where they are accountable for their decisions. Suddenly, new questions arise: What is it that I’m lifting? And why? What do my choices about what to appropriate tell me about myself? My emotions? My history? My biases and passions? The critiques turn toward formal improvement: Could I have swiped better material? Could my methods in constructing these texts have been better? Not surprisingly, they thrive. What I’ve learned from these years in the classroom is that no matter what we do, we can’t help but express ourselves.
-Kenneth Goldsmith, Why I Am Teaching a Course Called “Wasting Time on the Internet”
Isn’t that really the same as what happens when you begin to understand how to synthesize sounds, and on a sensory level when you’re making tracks, when you’ve spent 7 hours listening to the same samples over and over and shifting things millisecond by millisecond; or when you’ve been dancing all night and the music has got right inside you? You get a totally different sense of time, you hear things differently, you tune in to things on an unfamiliar level.”
-Lee Gamble, Sound and Concept
Peer- to- peer file sharing is the enemy in the “copyright wars.” Kids “stealing” stuff with a computer is the target. The war is not about new forms of creativity, not about artists making new art….
These creators are just one type of collateral damage from this war. The extreme of regulation that copyright law has become makes it difficult, and sometimes impossible, for a wide range of creativity that any free society— if it thought about it for just a second— would allow to exist, legally. In a state of war, however, we can’t be lax. We can’t forgive infractions that might at a different time not even be noticed…
I then want to spotlight the damage we’re not thinking enough about— the harm to a generation from rendering criminal what comes naturally to them. What does it do to them? What do they then do to us?”
-Lawrence Lessig, Remix, 18
And that’s just what they do. Well, more and more people have noticed a huge increase in the amount of people who just do remixes of songs. Every single Top 40 hit that comes on the radio, so many young kids are just grabbing it and doing a remix of it. The software is going to become more and more easy to use. It’s going to become more like Photoshop when it’s on every computer. Every single P. Diddy song that comes out, there’s going to be ten- year- old kids doing remixes and then putting them on the Internet.
“But why is this good?” I asked Gillis.
It’s good because it is, in essence, just free culture. Ideas impact data, manipulated and treated and passed along. I think it’s just great on a creative level that everyone is so involved with the music that they like. . . ”
-Lawrence Lessig, Remix, 14
A dynamic and fluid theory must place the meanings and vocabularies of the spectacle in a perspective which negates it, a dialectical totality in which the subversive qualities of ‘past critical judgements that have congealed into respectable truths’ are restored. Détournement, the ‘antithesis of quotation’, is the ‘fluid language of anti-ideology. It occurs within a type of communication aware of its inability to enshrine any inherent and definitive certainty.’
Even the style of exposition of dialectical theory is a scandal and an abomination to the canons of the prevailing language, and to sensibilities molded by those canons, because it includes in its positive use of existing concepts a simultaneous recognition of their rediscovered fluidity, of their inevitable destruction.“
-Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture, 88
With his self-titled debut LP last year, Burial established himself as an extraordinary sonic mythographer, a sound poet capable of articulating the existential malaise of an era and a place using only sampled voices, broken breakbeats and musique concrète sound effects. Burial was a vivid audio portrait of a wounded South London, a semi-abstract sound painting of a city’s disappointment and anguish. Burial’s was a sound saturated in dance music, but his unsequenced beats were too eccentric to dance to. His sound was too out of step to fit into dubstep, the genre his records were most likely to be filed under because they were released on Kode9’s Hyperdub label…
Burial makes the most convincing case that our zeitgeist is essentially hauntological. The power of Derrida’s concept lay in its idea of being haunted by events that had not actually happened, futures that failed to materialise and remained spectral.”
-Mark Fisher, Downcast Angel from The Wire: Issue 286 (December 2007)
“While 20th-century experimental culture was seized by a recombinatorial delirium, which made it feel as if newness was infinitely available, the 21st century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion. It doesn’t feel like the future. Or, alternatively, it doesn’t feel as if the 21st century has started yet…
Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia…
This raises the question of nostalgia again: is hauntology, as many of its critics have maintained, simply a name for nostalgia? Is it about pining for social democracy and its institutions? Given the ubiquity of the formal nostalgia I described above, the question has to be, nostalgia compared to what?
…But we shouldn’t have to choose between, say, the internet and social security. One way of thinking about hauntology is that its lost futures do not force such false choices; instead, what haunts is the spectre of a world in which all the marvels of communicative technology could be combined with a sense of solidarity much stronger than anything social democracy could muster…
What should haunt us is not the no longer of actually existing social democracy, but the not yet of the futures that popular modernism trained us to expect, but which never materialised. These spectres – the spectres of lost futures – reproach the formal nostalgia of the capitalist realist world.”
-Mark Fisher, “The Slow Cancellation of the Future” from Ghosts of My Life
I still believe that there are important strategic ways in which government can do good. But the last few years have convinced me that we all must be less optimistic about the potential of government to do good… What reason was there to think that government power could succeed in occupying and remaking Iraqi society? I’m not talking about the invasion: that’s easy enough. Invasions are won with powerful tanks and well- placed bombs. I’m talking about everything that would obviously have to be done after the invasion…
In a democracy, more power does not translate into more success. Instead, like a car trying to free itself from a snowbank, in a democracy, more power is often self- defeating. There is a limit to what a government can do that can’t simply be overcome by adding power or resources to the problem. At some point, adding more regulation decreases the effective control over the target. This is not a book about Iraq. But I suggest we can apply the point about that war to the other wars we are waging. There are many such wars that would benefit from such consideration. But the one I want to return to is the war we are waging against our kids because of the way they use digital technology.”
-Lawrence Lessig, Remix, 14
Once pirate and mainstream culture enter this tighter symbiotic relationship of affective contagion, the distinction between pirate or DIY microcultures and a co- opting capitalism becomes flattened. Now a new problem emerges in relation to the possibility of identifying invention when it occurs. This problem of differentiating innovation from its capture is confounded by what Matt Mason has termed, in his book of the same name, the pirate’s dilemma. Mason, whose book often reads like an introduction to the youth culture of the past thirty years for corporate capitalists, is keen to sing the praises of the constructive power of cultural piracy in transforming capitalism to the point where we are all now, he claims, happy pirates…
Mason catalogs a long list of pirate invasions of media platforms, with innovative ideas and formats delivered in stealthy fashion, adopting various tactics of camouflage and anonymity. From the tidal waves of Schumpeterian creative destruction triggered by innovation in technology or technique, to the perpetual subversion, hacking, and remixing that the nonstandard use of these technologies facilitates, the law can only but lag behind. For Mason, this has signaled the end of top- down mass culture. Youth culture has reinvented, or rejuvenated, capitalism to the point that piracy has now become just another business model, a mutation from subversive cultural weapon to business plan; the situationist projection of art into the everyday becomes merely branding.”
Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare, 180-182
But it is my view that Congress needs to decriminalize file sharing, either by authorizing at least noncommercial file sharing with taxes to cover a reasonable royalty to the artists whose work is shared, or by authorizing a simple blanket licensing procedure, whereby users could, for a low fee, buy the right to freely file- share.”
-Lawrence Lessig, Remix, 271
Similarly, the music and tech industries have yet to really acknowledge the ways in which Spotify and playlist culture are unapologetically harming independent music: the pro-rata business model that favors no one but pop stars, yes, but also the ways in which playlisting waters down human relationship with music through cold and automated ways of programming, all in order to corporatize art and literally, literally, make music fit into Spotify (and Apple, and Deezer, and Google Play)’s tiny, square tinted boxes. Instead of pushing back on this reductive way of thinking, instead, thus far we have seen only a flurry of puff pieces about playlist curators as “secret hitmakers” and features praising them as “unsung heros”.
The commodification of social interaction is massive dilemma of our time. And one of the main ways in which music fits into that conundrum is emerging with playlists—the commodification of swapping mixtapes, long a cornerstone of music culture, possibly the most personal and emotionally resonant way to share songs.”
-Liz Pelly, The Secret Lives of Playlists
In the final phase of human history, markets and technics cross into interactive runaway, triggering chaos culture as a rapid response unit and converging on designer drugs with increasing speed and sophistication. Sampling, remixing, anonymous and inhuman sound, woman become cyborg and taken into insanity: wetware splices with techno.
Capitalism is not a human invention, but a viral contagion, replicated cyberpositively across post- human space. Self-designing processes are anastrophic and convergent: doing things before they make sense.”
– Sadie Plant and Nick Land, Cyberpositive
I had forgotten about some of these quotes (from Lessig) and your putting them in the patchwork with these other quotes created an interesting effect that was very powerful. Powerful I think in the way that Lessig, and you by your archiving and arrangement of the words, are talking about–really a kind of power by arrangement. I am behind on commenting and I’m glad, because I am glad to be commenting on this after we saw Ben Sisto’s presentation, where the power of that work comes from the reality rhizome of the making of “Who Let the Dogs Out” rearranged into a linear narrative, more or less. There’s a kind of ground zero event that kicks the hook into mainstream impact, in this case, major league baseball; at that point, the only way to recoup power for the creatives is to rearrange what is in plain sight, but refuses to be noticed by those with money and resources.