46 thoughts on “Remix Culture is a Myth”

1. Despite the argumentative tone of my first responses (I think I misread what Adam said) I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff to think about when talking about remixing as a particular kind of consumption. Thanks for compiling this, Adam, warts and all!

2. This discussion reminds me a little of one that took place a few years ago regarding Wikipedia: whether all the content was created by a small user elite, or whether lots of small contributions by individuals added up to a significant contribution by the masses, which were then simply edited by the “user elite.”

3. Warts and all indeed! Golly I need to proofread even my Facebook contribs…

   To be really horrible, is there some sort of a suggestion of a Pareto’s law on the internet? Or are the interactions more complex as Kerim’s second link suggests?

   Has anyone done ethnography of this? It seems to ring some sort of Media Anthro bell.

4. Seems like it’s the metrics that are confusing this issue. Keen says 99% of illegal downloads are for consumption….heck, I’d expect more. Remixing goes against pure volume downloads because it takes time to remix….a lot more time than just watching once or twice. I have friends that spend days/weeks creating vids and other remix content…it’s time consuming.

   Looking at the 99% in terms of population — saying 1% of the population is doing remix / creative stuff….that seems in the general ballpark. Studies of online sites where end users contribute content shows <10% of site visitors are contributors. When I think of the people in media fandom who are involved in creative remixes (from vids to visual art to fanfic)…there's more in some demographics than others…but overall it's a small fraction out of total population (so definitely <1% I'd guess….Henry J & the other media researchers would have the research to back up a #).

   That said: doesn't mean that remixing is a myth, esp when we look at cultural / social impact. First off there are many more people consuming remixed content than creating it….also the grassroots nature of the remix plus the global reach of online technologies plus ever-cheaper tools — means there's a lot of interesting stuff bubbling around this issue. We're just beginning to see how this will evolve.

   Oh and per Daniel's question, of "has anybody run the numbers on what copyright model provides best aggregate benefit" — yeah, Larry Lessig & his crew have done tons of work in this area. That kind of analysis isn't the obstacle…it's the entrenched larger owners of content (movie studios, music labels) that have the deep pockets & concentrated power to block any changes. It's an issue of diffused benefits across a large# of diffused beneficiaries versus a small # of highly concentrated, highly motivated opponents who have a lot to lose.

5. Yeah, of course far more people illegally download for their personal consumption than engage in active remixing. That is kind of stating the obvious. Sure, the significance and especially the novelty of remix culture are often overstated, but not usually to the point where it is supposed to make up more than a minority of uses. I’m guessing that the ‘99%’ is just rhetorical, because if as many as 1% of illegal downloads are used for remixing, that is way more than I would have thought. Seriously, that would be a massively significant cultural phenomenon that would justify a lot of the ‘remix culture’ hype.

   I can also think of a few fairly sensible reasons for the (possibly excessive) prominence of remix in arguments for copyleft, creative commons, copyright reform, etc. Arguing from remix can more readily tap into some widely accepted liberal democratic values—freedom of expression, innovation and enterprise, etc—compared to arguing on the basis of widespread media piracy and filesharing. Also, remixers are much more likely to actually run into problems with copyright law and experience it as a significant barrier, compared to downloaders/filesharers. While a few high-profile targets have been taken down, and some random users victimised, current copyright regimes have pretty much failed to obstruct filesharing to any significant degree, but they have been somewhat more successful at restricting creative re-use.

   Now, these are not arguments that I tend to make myself, but they are not totally ridiculous. If anything they are far too ‘reasonable’—for the most part they are arguments for reform within current legal and economic systems, that assume a basically liberal capitalist framework of property rights.

   Ultimately, neither ‘remix is the future!’ nor ‘remix is a myth!’ seem like particularly useful ways of approaching the issue.

6. What the hell is remix culture?

   As for Fish, statements like this are why I hate seeing his posts:

   “This is a Tweet/quote from the self-confessed Anti-Christ of Silicon Valley. I follow him on Twitter as a gnawing antidote to the breathless Web 2.0 enthusiasm that props up investments in infantilizing social media systems. Infantilization, illiteracy, amateurization these are the apocalyptic results according to Keen of Web 2.0 consumer ‘prod-usage.’ Partner this against the wisdom of the crowds, fan-fiction, citizen journalism, and social production of the Shirkey, Benkler, Jenkins breed of techno-optimism and we’ve got the making of a distorting debate certain to totally miss the ethnographic details of real life practice.”

7. Nobody likes a hater, Samuel.

8. “Remix is important, hybridity is a source of innovation,”
   Could someone please explain the relation of “innovation” to culture?
   The two have no relation beyond that fantasized by celebrants of instrumentalism.
   We look at art in retrospect because it describes.

   Remix culture is crap because its a culture of reference not invention and observation.
   The fact of reference is small beer. “Look Ma! I compared an apple to an orange!”
   “I wrote a paper about Nietzsche” But Arthur Baker and Afrika Bambaataa didn’t borrow from Kraftwerk they stole. Google “Trans-Europe Express and Planet Rock.”
   More important that the Grey Album on an exponential scale.
   Bricolage isn’t about proving your worth through reference to your superiors it’s about indifference to them. It’s about their defeat.
   Bad artists borrow. Good artists steal.

   http://blog.edenbaumstudio.com/2010/03/teaching-young-but-art-is-not.html

9. T.S. Eliot, quoted by Clifford Geertz, “Bad poets borrow. Good poets steal.”

10. “Bad artists borrow. Good artists steal.”

    is Picasso

11. Geertz says, my memory say, Eliot. But, hey, no big deal if it were Picasso, instead. The point, that authenticity lies in naked genius confronting bare reality is a pipe dream, a bit of Romantic blasphemy equating the artist with God.

12. Damn, I hate this site not allowing five minutes to edit. Corrected version follows.

    —–

    Geertz says, my memory say, Eliot. But, hey, no big deal if it were Picasso, instead. The point, that authenticity lies in naked genius confronting bare reality is a pipe dream, a bit of Romantic blasphemy equating the artist with God, is sound.

13. Your response is hard to follow. Do you agree, or no?
    My point was that a culture that defines itself on its own terms, by whatever means, is more interesting, and more successful (at self-description, which is the point-yes?) than one that defines itself as daddy’s offspring.
    The culture that said “nobody will play at our parties so we’ll do it on our own, originating DJ culture (gay downtown manhattan, but also uptown black NYC) is more interesting than the later culture that says “Hey! I’m daddy’s bitch!” You might also want to look up Thomas Mann on Kafka: to define yourself as critical response is to define yourself as shadow.
    “Planet Rock” is primary text not secondary. “Daddy who?” vs. “Look who my daddy is!”
    The third option: “I killed my Daddy!” is closer to the second in the same sense that a self-described “angry nigger” is not the same as an angry black man: independence is key (even allowing for reference.) This is something I should have gotten into with John Comaroff 20 years ago, but I didn’t. My mistake.

14. Just the observation that however great the genius, he or she is always standing on the shoulders of predecessors. The cult of originality and associated intellectual property claims is one of those things that deserves reassessment from a broader historical and ethnographic perspective.

15. Actually the (alleged) Picasso quote is “GOOD artists borrow, GREAT artists steal. T.S Eliot said “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” Each is using the term ‘steal’ to refer to making something your own, rather than simply imitating.

    Neither Picasso nor Eliot were engaged in remix culture. And wider reference to the general processes of cultural transmission, iterative copying etc. are also somewhat tangential. Remix is not copying, replication, imitation etc – it is the use of existing materials as in collage, as in sampling. If I take the actual Mona Lisa and put in in the formaldehyde tank with the shark and call it “The physical impossibility of death in the mind of Mona Lisa” then I have done a remix. When you take the narrow view like that you see why the 99% vs. 1% figure. You also see why it is relevant to copyright. So I think these later comments are kind of missing the point.

    Funny that these debates always circle around art and music. What about technology and patents? That’s where the larger economy of copyright lies. Members of the public as well as large manufacturers remix parts of cars all the time, but they pay for those parts.

16. “Neither Picasso nor Eliot were engaged in remix culture.”
    Picasso and Braque are the founding artists of modern collage. One of them coined the term.
    And Eliot made use of the the equivalent in using bits of overheard bar talk. “Hurry up please, it’s time.” He used parody as well of Rossetti and others. Historical reference was a central theme of everything he wrote, to the point of decadence Modern collage culture begins with Lautréamont’s “…as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and umbrella on a dissecting table” which isn’t good poetry but encouraged others. Shook them awake.

    In the long run all culture is remix culture in the sense that culture is fluid but it takes time for a medium to mature. You can say that there is such a thing as progress in a culture to the extent that people become more and more articulate in a given manner or medium, but after a time increased articulation brings diminishing returns. Bernini is a better technician than Michelangelo but not a better sculptor. At some point techniques used by people to describe themselves and “their” world to one another become second nature and lose their edge, so people crank up the volume and the extravagance to force the same communicative effect.
    Then maybe a new language or medium appears, more vulgar but also more powerful as a representative engine. Of course the world had changes too and the old culture will not represent that change. Culture as representation becomes culture as fantasy: as lie. Rachmaninoff is kitsch compared to Ellington. The French chose to fade gently by comparison. Debussy chose light and smart over grand and stupid.

    “Funny that these debates always circle around art and music. What about technology and patents?” For technology in general the fights are more between individuals. Downloading is seen as a form of popular corruption, as a matter of policing vice.

    The moral defenses of downloading always struck me as silly. People want to find a way to defend the ubiquitous: we all do it so it can’t be wrong. But the fact is that it is ubiquitous so in the long run the economic model has to change. Realism says shrug and move on, but idealist defenders of downloading can’t accept those terms so they lie to themselves.

17. Funny that these debates always circle around art and music.

    It may just be that for most people things artistic are good–or at least easy–to think when attempting to grasp the topic. For example, when you state that “members of the public as well as large manufacturers remix parts of cars all the time, but they pay for those parts” I think it is fairly easy to tease out that there are two senses of the word in play. Broadly speaking the mechanic who replaced my truck’s heater core put a component which was previously not there into the mix of things which is my truck. But I don’t think anyone would argue that he made something new in the sense that the customizers on Pimp My Ride do.

18. Been a little busy so coming back to this discussion to find a lot of comments. A few thoughts:

    First, I find it odd to say that Eliot or Picasso weren’t involved in “remix culture” — their near-constant stream of reference to work external to theirs is not, I think, formally distinguishable from the sampling of other’s work in hip-hop. Eliot borrowed language and whole narrative structures from the Bible (and elsewhere) as well as (as someone noted) everyday speech around him; Picasso not only referenced other painters (like Goya) when necessary to make the statements he wanted to make, he also used collage extensively, literally crafting new works out of other people’s work. Granted, they weren’t so straight-forward as a DJ Danger Mouse, saying “here are my two sources, I shall now mash them up” but they certainly drew liberally, and often quite openly, from the culture around them to create their “new” works.

    In response to seth edenbaum, I would say that, as anthropologists, it really isn’t our job to focus on what we think is “interesting” but on what people actually do. The crap as well as the highest brilliance are both necessary sources for an adequate picture of culture.

    For me, the questions here are tied primarily to consumption as cultural practice and to corporate control over consumption. Copyright law as it stands treats consumption as simple and entirely one-way: I produce, you consume. Doc Searls likens it to a pipe; at one end is me loading my product into the pipe, and at the other end is “the public”, merely a bunch of open mouths sucking down whatever comes through the pipe. Remix culture assumes a more active engagement with the products that we consume, a view which I think is more anthropologically realistic.

    Someone asked why we focus on art and music, and I think it’s merely the most present and obvious example, But to extend the thinking here into another domain, I’m reminded of the argument in “Shop Class as Soulcraft”, which advocates a more active engagement with the products that make up our material world, and bemoans the increasing lockdown on products from toasters to automobile engines. For example, where there used to a be a rich car culture in which enthusiasts spent hours tinkering with their engines and car bodies, today’s engines are locked down inside literal black boxes whose innards can only be modified by computer engineers, and buyers are offered a range of factory-approved customization options that forestall the kind of after-market modifications that used to give enthusiast’s cars so much character. “Remixing” our cars is no longer the option it once was — there are cars that don’t even have dipsticks, so you can’t even check the oil, let alone tinker with the air-fuel mixture “just to see”.

19. “My point was that a culture that defines itself on its own terms, by whatever means, is more interesting, and more successful (at self-description, which is the point-yes?) than one that defines itself as daddy’s offspring.”

    That entire comment destroys itself with the slightest examination. What you are basically saying is that it is better when something comes from nothing, then when it comes from something else. This is an impossible ontogeny. Nothing comes from nothing, never has.

    Culture can never be based on itself, because that would directly imply that a culture has an essential nature (a solid, static nature), which is both causal and somehow preexisting to have caused it. How does something come from itself?

    I think you might be trying to refer to the old anth. debate about diffusion versus insitu cultural change. The exact same debate was made about rock-n-roll. “There’s nothing new under the sun,” as it were.

    As a person I don’t really care one way or another, because I dig the music. Distinctions have to be made between those like Biz Markee who was successfully sued for simply playing back another song behind his rap, and those like MF Doom who have so significantly changed the music that the original can no longer be recognized by the ordinary untrained ear.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewc1hixzYPY

    This is substantially no different than someone moving a few notes around on a sheet of music in order to slightly change a very common musical pattern for a new song. That is, basically every song you hear on the radio.

    That’s as a regular joe. As an anthropologist I’d want to look at this from two angles. One, biologically. What makes something good to hear? Many have proposed that our brains are hardwired to enjoy certain rhythms, beats, and patterns of sound in a way similar to language. All 6,000 languages can be deconstructed using the exact same linguistic techniques, and music is probably no different.

    Then, I’d use technology. I’d look for some kind of pattern recognition software, or have it written, that can detect differences in the patterns, tone, melodies, etc… of different songs in the same style and those from different styles to give a standardized metric of differences. I would then compare the overall significance of the difference between samples and the tunes sampled from, in comparison from songs produced traditionally within the same genre. I don’t think this would be much different than a t-test.

    Either way, I don’t think there’s a place for so easily dismissing the products of cultural, and rendering them irrelevant in anth. The mind must be open to understand.

20. I think its important to educate oneself in the history of subjects:

    http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93844583

    History of sampling on NPR.

21. In the NPR story, and this important for the legality of the issue, intellectual patent laws allow for remixing of music for free. The modern court case that decided much of this was based on a legal decision by a judge that did not refer to the actual law, but quoted the bible and said, “thou salt not steal.” That is not a sound legal opinion, based on legal statutes.

    Academia is a completely remixed culture. You don’t pay, you cite. This would mean that those that remix would be ok, if samplers simply cited the music a track was based on.

    Also, it is a poor argument to say that giving an art form or cultural product a new name makes it wholesale original. Academic theory, likewise does not somehow spontaneously erupt from nowhere in a person’s mind because they gave it a name. Theories have lineages, musics, technology, everything is the same in this respect.

    As for cars, that’s a bad argument as well. I promise you that Buick didn’t pay a dime to Lexus for making their new cars look a hell of a lot like Lexuses.

22. “I think its important to educate oneself in the history of subjects:”
    Which is why I mentioned Kraftwerk. Look up Liquid Liquid, who sued and won against Sugarhill Records for “White Lines”

    Stein got his start by entering a remix contest.
    DJ culture as I said, began in the 70’s in downtown gay clubs and uptown house parties with one thing in common: they couldn’t get bands to play live music.

    Modern remix begins with scratching and DJ Kool Herc.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kool_Herc

23. “That entire comment destroys itself with the slightest examination. What you are basically saying is that it is better when something comes from nothing”

    No. My point was that in art as in culture you have to become independent of your references.
    If the choice is to kill your daddy or be killed by him, you better be strong enough to do the latter. Kafka’s “Go jump in a lake.” An adult needs to define his or her own reality. A classical violinist is going lose out if he ends up playing as in imitation of his teacher. That’s not the same as refusing to acknowledge that he had one.

    The criticism of Gansta Rap and other forms of rhetoric that indulge violence is that they reinforce it. The culture of permanent revolution denies not just present normative relations but the desire for any normative relations of any sort. That’s the problem of vanguardism and the tragedy of Modernism.

    Oneman: “In response to seth edenbaum, I would say that, as anthropologists, it really isn’t our job to focus on what we think is “interesting” but on what people actually do. The crap as well as the highest brilliance are both necessary sources for an adequate picture of culture.”

    That’s the equivalent of saying that the writings of Clifford Geertz are no more or less worthy of study (by someone interested in systems) than the papers of a timemaking schlub struggling to make tenure in a 3rd tier school. The other way I’d put it is to say that studying the cultural life of 16 c. Florence without reference to its brightest lights is like studying the 20th century intellectual life by reading nothing but unpublished Ph.D manuscripts.

    Another problem is that it’s refusing to reflect on yourself as a product and producer of your own culture/system, of imagining yourself and your perspective as universal or frameless. That logic has its uses but they are very limited both intellectually and morally. As I said elsewhere: we are observers observing and being observed. Intellectual reciprocity is the highest form of intellectual life, and that does not apply only to reciprocity among members of the same tribe academic or otherwise.

24. First, I find it odd to say that Eliot or Picasso weren’t involved in “remix culture”—their near-constant stream of reference to work external to theirs is not, I think, formally distinguishable from the sampling of other’s work in hip-hop.

    Maybe not as a process. Eliot and Picasso as they worked away in their studies/studios certainly would seem to be not totally unlike a DJ working a party. But then again you have to ask what the ultimate product for each is meant to be. Eliot and Picasso were crafting artifacts while the DJ is crafting an event.

    I am less sympathetic to the comparison of the references present in finished works by Eliot or Picasso to the samples present in hip-hop recordings. I don’t think hip-hop has ever put much emphasis on originality in terms of instrumentation. The originality comes—ideally, at least—via the rap (as my Theory 101 professor told a student who said Tupac was his favorite musician, “He can’t be because you can’t call what he did music. It was poetry, so he can be your favorite poet.”). What Danger Mouse did with The Beatles and Jay-Z in making The Grey Album really is a deviant case. Much more common is what Jay-Z et al. did in turning M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” into “Swagga Like Us” or what Snoop Dogg did in turning Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock’s “It Takes Two” into “I Wanna Rock”—both are so derivative that I almost wonder if the intent was to spur coinage of the term ‘value subtracted.’

25. “That’s the equivalent of saying that the writings of Clifford Geertz are no more or less worthy of study (by someone interested in systems) than the papers of a timemaking schlub struggling to make tenure in a 3rd tier school.”

    No, that’s like my undergrad. mythology prof. saying that only Greek and Roman mythology could be called “Classical,” whereas the mythology of other cultures could not be compared to Classical mythology. Needless to say that I took issue with that.

    This is all about personal opinion and visceral likes and dislikes, and nothing to do with anthropology. Oneman is correct, we study what people do, not what we think they should do. There is that difference. I have no problem as an individual in saying that the way women are treated in Saudi Arabia is wrong, but I could never say that as an anthropologist. These are relative concepts, not ultimate ones. In an ultimate sense there is no difference between Geertz and a 3rd grader, only in a relative sense.

    You are confusing many different things here. Personal opinion, and science, as well as relative and ultimate. I love punk rock, and it’s basically 3 chords played over and over with new words. There’s some nuance to it, but that’s basically it. I would much rather listen to punk or hip-hop than opera, which I think is boring shit, regardless of the genius that went into it.

26. “Oneman is correct, we study what people do, not what we think they should do. ”
    Value free observation is impossible. You’re trying to render yourself neutral and I’m saying it’s impossible. In your relativism you’re defending your own superiority.

    You think I’m talking morality but all I’m interested in is articulated structure.
    “Great” art is definable as produced by small groups of individuals within sophisticated states. If only in the interest of studying systems it makes sense to understand Shakespeare and Elizabethan theater as describing the beginnings of modern forms of consciousness and as therefore of primary intellectual importance. I do not separate esthetics from ethics because I think they’re inseparable. You claim to separate them renders the category “academia” a priori.

    I could be a strict materialist determinist denying free will in any form and I would still observe different forms of articulated construction and their function and note them as such

27. Lots of comments since I wrote my last one. I buy some of the critiques of what I said, but not others. Particularly, I forgot about Picasso’s collages. But still I don’t think Eliot or Picasso were broadly engaged in remix in the narrow sense. My point was really about definitions. You can broaden remix to include all of culture if you want – the book you are writing, the way you wear your jeans, Pizza, Francis Bacon’s versions of Innocent X – and this might be a useful way of critiquing the foundations of the rules of copyright. But by broadening the concept you lose focus and obfuscate what copyright really tries to control – which is the unauthorised use of actual works and identical replicas of those works. It doesn’t really control copying (i.e. observing something and making your own version) for the very reason that this is part of how all culture works and is thus uncontrollable. You can’t sue Buick for making a car that copies a Lexus, because it doesn’t steal Lexus parts to do so.

    Well OK, the boundary that I am trying to draw is really fuzzy. And there are a lot of lawsuits that argue over the boundaries. And sometimes the boundary is drawn by who chooses to sue and who doesn’t. But whatever, if you observe the broad definition of remix the 99% vs. 1% figure makes no sense, but if you observe the narrow definition it seems ok.

    Regarding cars, Oneman is probably right that they are getting more locked down. That’s partly my point about the wider economy of copyright, but on the other hand I wouldn’t underestimate the mad skillz of boy racers. Really though I was thinking of mainstream manufacturers as much as hot-rodders and the like. So many cars are built with the engines, chassis, drivechain, gearbox etc. of other models/manufacturers – a remixed assemblage of licensed or outsourced parts: the sports car becomes an SUV. Same with your computer. Not really any different from dance music that consists of an assemblage of bought parts arranged to support a vocal track. Is the problem that when you pay for it it’s manufactured, but when you steal it is edgy?

28. “Is the problem that when you pay for it it’s manufactured, but when you steal it is edgy?”

    There is still the legal “fair use” statute that applies in the U.S. As someone else talked about if you mention Danger Mouse then the music industry gets nervous, because the final product it so different than the original that it is hard to get past fair use regulations in court. I think we have to take a page from legal anthropology and see how these things are actually enforced, because that is what we are talking about. It has to do with power. I mean the people that basically stole American music from a Black American culture, and others, and “invented” Rock-n-Roll didn’t have to pay the people they stole from, but they can charge people now. This begs the question of who it is ok to steal from, and who it isn’t?

    That sounds like a much more anthropological question, which is a question of meaning, sanction, and power.

    If you are Jay-Z and you are sampling one famous song and remixing it a little behind your rap, then paying a royalty makes sense. If however, your an underground, poor artist, as most of these guys are, then having to pay what Jay-Z pays for what could be 30 or more samples (some samples are mere seconds), is so cost prohibitive that it effectively stops creative expression and makes it the sole enterprise of the wealthy.

    I mean it can take more time and talent to make a really good collage of sounds, than it does to write a crappy song based on a well worn formula. Legal culture makes these things very hard to deal with, because you have to basically make something a black or white issue. How much is too much? How much do you pay if someone can’t even recognize the original in the remixed collage?

    There are guys out there that basically say they’ll pay if you can catch them; if you can even recognize all the tracks in there. At the end of the day this is all about money. You can take anything and put it together in pretty much any other medium and it’s legally fine.
    You can take any two objects and nail them together and sell it as original art and no one can sue you. You can make a program that looks, acts, behaves, etc.. identical to windows, as long as it isn’t based on the same kind of code. A drug manufacturer can usually copy any drug they want, because it isn’t the actual formula that’s patented sometimes, but the process that makes the chemicals.

    For example, genes cannot be patented, but the process used to make them usable or visible are. If you could develop a process that was sufficiently different then you’ll be fine.

29. Allow me to suggest an oldie but goodie

    http://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Executive-Harlan-Cleveland/dp/0525484345

    Cleveland’s premise is that existing property law is, fundamentally, a law of things, where a thing is something such that if I have it, you don’t. It is, thus, not good at coping with knowledge (or what we nowadays would call intellectual property), since if I give or sell information to you, you have it but so do I.

    Cleveland, by the way, was a fascinating guy. Imagine being in your 30s and in charge of trying to arrange an equitable split of U.S.-supplied relief goods to the Communists and Nationalists during China’s war against Japan.

30. Cleveland, by the way, was a fascinating guy. Imagine being in your 30s and in charge of trying to arrange an equitable split of U.S.-supplied relief goods to the Communists and Nationalists during China’s war against Japan.

    This sounds like a Liz Lemon job if ever there were one.

    Cleveland’s premise is that existing property law is, fundamentally, a law of things, where a thing is something such that if I have it, you don’t. It is, thus, not good at coping with knowledge (or what we nowadays would call intellectual property), since if I give or sell information to you, you have it but so do I.

    This thread is begging for Michael Brown to join in.

31. I’m going to say that yes, the work of the schlub at the 3rd tier school is as important to study, if not more so, than Geertz. (Who, by the way, did not cite — he’s all remix, baby!)

    So that’s a meaningless statement, right? “As important to study” for what, exactly? For literary merit? For a picture of the political economics of American academia cica 2010? For theoretical insight into the workings of modernity? For an understanding of the cultural impact of the proposed two-lane widening of Highway 17?

    That’s what I meant when I said it’s not our job to figure out what people *should* do, but what they *do* do. I mightthink everyone should write like Geertz, but that doesn’t give me much anthropological insight into… well, anything. The fact that valueless research is impossible isn’t really relevant, unless “not Geertz” is considered a particularly engaging ethnography.

    I’ll say, and mean it this time, that all culture *is* remix, but more to the point, by limiting the discussion here o music, we’re getting all kinds of weird taste issues tied up with the questions raised here, so that it’s hard to say what “all culture is remix” might mean. The fact that one musician lays his rap over a more orless unmodified version of “Walk on the Wild Side” and another deconstructs and reassembles snippets of two or more albums into something unrecognizable as any of its sources is irrelevant — that’s a taste issue. What *is* relevant is that remixers of all sorts collate and assemble meanings to form new ones. Other people’s work is their medium, the same way a page of Proust might lend meaning to a collage or an artist might use black to signify death, borrowing the meaning-making apparatus of her audience to do some of the work for her.

    Culture works on that meaning-swapping, which is, I’d argue, why polysemy and ambiguity are everywhere and often seem to be *deliberately* everywhere. After all, why write a poem when you can just say “trees are lovely”? Well, for the multiplicity of interpretation, and for the way my borrowing of the meanings and sensibilities baked into the language and the imagery I evoke with it resonate and resolve into newness.

    There’s nothing in culture that can be used without imparting cultural meanings that are not intended by the creator — remix artists are both the beneficiaries of that (in that they pick up on the way new meanings emerge in relation to other elements of the culture) and creators of new unintended meanings (in that all purveyors of meaning are subject to reinterpretation).

32. “I’m going to say that yes, the work of the schlub at the 3rd tier school is as important to study, if not more so, than Geertz. (Who, by the way, did not cite — he’s all remix, baby!)

    So that’s a meaningless statement, right? “As important to study” for what, exactly? For literary merit? ”

    Great points. I was thinking about my last statement on this, and I think I need to qualify it in this same way. I’ll say Rappaport
    (because of my enviro. background) who also never cited anything, is as important as a book for a 3rd grader. That is, when it’s for a 3rd grader. Context is crucial. I have known a few anths. that went to Harvard, and they are usually not as competent as people coming from good state schools.

    I would also like to qualify the statement that all culture is remix. Culture is in continual flux, and really constitutes a human and biological creative process. So, while there is a lot of diffusion, there is also insitu cultural change over time. For this I like to think of culture change in both adaptive terms, but also in terms given by Chaos theory. Chaos theory shows us that within a closed system, there is infinite creativity and information production. Think the patterns of smoke coming off a cigarette, or the pattern of the eddies in tight river bends, or the Mandelbrot Set. We know that the closed system for culture is really just the earth, which is not really so closed.

    This infinite, creative, non-replicating process is a remix of a set of known variables. In the Mandelbrot Set, for example, it’s just one equation set in a feedback loop. It is remix, and out of it new patterns emerge. How can culture be any different so as to defy the known properties of the universe.

33. “Yes, remix exists but not in the meaningful volumes to warrant it the legal utility and scholarly attention it receives.” AF

    So I think a related but slight different question might be: why did it generate such excitement? What broad effects did it have? And what then was distorted as a result?

    Part of the early enthusiasm for Free Software was due to the fact that a legal counter power had been created, one whose power came from ignoring (though tweaking) state sanctioned power—copyright—and creating a viable alternative. This is what anarchists, for example, often advocate for, and yet in practice if effing hard to pull off.

    And this is one of the great ironies of Free Software: so much of this world is steeped in liberal ideologies (though very critical of others) and yet whose politics were not generated through traditional liberal means such as legal reform through the courts, but by turning away, by creating an alternative. This alternative became a mechanism, sometimes a moral foil, used to question long standing set of commitments about economic incentives and were also used to build similar endeavors, such as open access movement. Free Software was eventually used to conceptualize “remix” culture, which I would keep separate to some degree from free software, even if there is a relationship.

    While copyleft-like alternatives should not be treated as a universal solution (Kim’s work being key here), it is as important to recognize that enthusiasm was so great because of the state and directional of intellectual property law, which at the time was nothing but bleak. The politics of IP had reached a ludicrous state of overwhelming restriction that was problematic not only because its impact on the production of software, documentaries, certain forms of art or music but on human rights grounds. Lets not forget that the early nineties were the high water mark of neoliberal ideology whose vision of individualism denied the forms of non-economic sociality promulgated by Free Software This is easy to forget now that we have alternatives in place.

    Given the fact that political change can feel overwhelming at times, many folks, I think, were attracted to the politics of IP because it was domain where you could actually witness the fruits of your action. Where visible change was in motion. These spaces of hope are important, if not the political will will smolder… While I don’t believe in the Web 2.0 utopianism, for reasons I will get to in a moment, I am not willing to say that Free Software or all of remix culture is some simple political waste; it has yielded some laudable political dividends, so long as we keep our standard a bit lower and more modest that is usually the case. Certainly FLOSS did not revolutionize SOCIETY, nothing or very little does. It had a noticeable impact on some of the most noxious elements of IP law; in fact, part of the problem with the current pundits is they seem to assess the impact of digital technologies in terms of grand transformation, as opposed to smaller scale transformations.

    Finally, what I also find fascinating is that if this domain was given a lot of scholarly attention, some of the most interesting bits of this arena were overlooked or wholly distorted in the service of advocating a particular politics of freedom. For example, many virtual groups—Indymedia Centers, large Free Software projects—were already institutionalizing themselves by 1999 and by 2002 even Wikipedia was not some ad hoc decentralized crowd sourced haven, which is how it was routinely described.

    Most academic and especially journalistic literature could not, did not want to get their head around this social fact of routinization, that these groups had to institutionalize, had to create procedures and policies to grow and scale. Why? Well, it flew in the face of some of the naïve rhetorics of freedom they were advocating, although for me, and here I am talking more as activist, not an academic, the fact that developers were building new social institutions on-line was as exciting, as important as the legal alternatives being built. It is worth paying attention to why and how some groups have built viable institutions over time.

    I think one effect of this distortion was it helped facilitate the collapse between dissimilar domains: like “user generated production” on Facebook/Myspace with Wikipedia and Free Software, which are far too often all placed under the banner of web 2.0. Why the heck are these domains put under the same banner and moniker?

    I actually like the term crowd source when it comes to highly corporate and proprietary platforms as it captures quite nicely the abuses, such a gross privacy abuses, that come with mindless action, that can follow from the fact that there are no social ethics, norms and procedures, no social institutions, which guide action as there are in other domains. We need to pry these apart.

    So I agree that the scholarship and rhetoric on remix culture and user generated content are often quite off the empirical mark (and this requires more careful attention, which I feel has finally come into being since 2005 and especially the last 2 years, but wow, very late) but it is key to understand the enthusiasm the blanketed Free Software was due as much to the particular contemporary state of IP politics, which was dire and bleak–and I would rather not throw out the baby with the bathwater when trying to assess its historical and current importance.

34. “that’s a taste issue”
    But I’m not interested in tastes other than to acknowledge I have them. And for Geertz substitute Boas or any other figure in your field.

    I’m more interested in Michelangelo than I am in a minor 18th c. sculptor for the same reason I’m more interested in Aristotle than in a 13th c. scholastic. You can’t isolate taste for the purpose of ignoring it. It colors everything, including your writing style as a younger generation American academic in the early 21st century. Read your writing here for the analysis of style and give it historical context, or even synchronically in relation to various other forms of writing or behavior in our culture at this moment in time. You exhibit a sensibility in writing no less than Geertz or Proust or me or anyone else and that can be related to the history of articulated form. Levi-Strauss was paradigmatically French and that sensibility is foundational to his work. I know that “that sensibility” sounds too singular since all culture is remix, but he certainly wasn’t “German”. LS wrote from an esthetic and and ethic. He wrote being aware that to write about anything (to communicate at all) is to write from culture. You can’t write as if you have no tastes or as if they don’t affect your intellectual activity. You can’t separate your intellect and your imagination.
    People who refer to art as subjective would never say the same thing about justice. And yet we argue of justice without denying its importance.

35. Seth,

    I’m not quite sure exactly what you’re trying to say. You seem to be arguing a meta-level point about the issue of tastes in general, rather than tying into any specifics about remix culture that are being discussed in the blog. Or, about remixing as a quality of culture. I don’t think anyone is going to argue with anything in your last post, rather they take issue with saying one culturally relative thing is better than another in some official way, not just in your mind. I don’t think anyone made the former point.

    Also, art and justice are not equitable for many instances, unless one person’s art involved painting with your blood without your consent. There is a distinction between ethics and morality.

36. There’s been discussion over the past few years of what some have called the Weimarization of American political culture. Two points: the forms of Weimar culture are just as important as the ideas; and I think you can’t have such discussions without mention of value.
    .
    I think there was something “wrong” with Weimar culture and not because it was violent or simply immoral by whatever definition you might like, but because the various forces that culturally defined activities are meant to regulate were no longer being being regulated successfully. Society was “decaying.” Any culture can decay. A culture that includes incredibly violent rituals is not decadent until it begins to fall apart. I think there’s something “wrong” in culture today. I think there’s something “wrong” in what’s called remix culture, or in the fantasies of remix culture, and I opposed it to the remixes of 25 years ago by comparing theft to borrowing and “reference.” You can see the same relation in early hip hop and the high culture “Appropriation Art” that began being made in the same period: an art of commentary derivative of academia. But still you need to look at all these forms and ask “How do they function? How do they mean?”
    A culture of reference is fundamentally passive.
    I think there’s something “wrong” with contemporary academia. It’s citizens don’t seem to think that they’re members of a culture

37. What is relevant is that remixers of all sorts collate and assemble meanings to form new ones. Other people’s work is their medium, the same way a page of Proust might lend meaning to a collage or an artist might use black to signify death, borrowing the meaning-making apparatus of her audience to do some of the work for her.

    But are your students still expected to provide citations and a list of references?

38. But are your students still expected to provide citations and a list of references?

    Yeah, except for Geertz and Foucault. Who I really don’t think should be in 100-level courses, but they paid their tuition so my hands are tied.

    But it’s funny you should ask, since what I think we’re trying to do in liberal arts education is precisely what I’m talking about — teach students how to weave together scraps of their culture into some sort of coherent understanding. Forcing them to consciously indicate sources is part of that.

    Of course, for those bound for academic disciplines, it’s also good science. References provide one’s critics enough information to evaluate one’s findings, which is crucial for the development of an academic discipline. Foucault gets a pass since the French believe they only write Truth; Geertz doesn’t, though — I actually think it was fundamentally dishonest of him to use unidentified sources the way he did. Of course, the import of his ideas was enough that quite a few people traced those sources, but I’m not sure most of us can count on that kind of meta-analysis.

39. With a tip of the hat to neuroanthropology, the following discussion of Coleridge seems pertinent.

40. Don’t ask me why the standard command didn’t work. The reference is to

    http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/04/your-internet-brains-on-coleridge.html

41. My point concerned the difference between making use of references to build something independent and being subsumed by it. Isn’t a compliment even now to call someone’s work derivative. Mozart’s symphonies are not called “derivative” of Haydn’s but you wouldn’t have one without the other.
    I have a short memory, this came up elsewhere recently. The word I’m looking for is pastiche. Slavishly following one source or many, there’s not much of a difference.

42. “Adam Fish Yes, remix exists but not in the meaningful volumes to warrant it the legal utility and scholarly attention it receives. Where would H. Jenkins and Larry Lessig be without those few elite tools with the spare money and leisure to remix? By myth I mean a happy distortion and possible lie.”

    So my rights depend on “volume”?
    And whatever subject has to “deserve” being studied by those pesky scholars?
    And Afrika Bambaataa is a “elite tool” and is BFF with Larry Lessig?

    WOW!

43. “remix is a myth. Talk to the ISPs. 99% of illegal content is downloaded for consumption only. Barely anyone is remixing illegally.” Andrew Keen

    This “99%” is the same 99% of people that NEVER HEARD OF “REMIX CULTURE” BEFORE.

44. “Today a not insignificant number of people attach unlicensed music to their Youtube personal videos, but few really make the virtuosic remix of the Grey album or Kirby Dick’s pirated flick This Movie is Not Yet Rated. The influence these rogue artworks have can’t be measured on the subjectivity of the consumer–and that isn’t anthropology but 1960s communication studies.”

    Adam Fish must one of those guys that say that electronic music is not “real music” because they don’t play “real” instruments.

    And “virtuosic”. *snicker*

45. seth edenbaum:
    “…Oneman: “In response to seth edenbaum, I would say that, as anthropologists, it really isn’t our job to focus on what we think is “interesting” but on what people actually do. The crap as well as the highest brilliance are both necessary sources for an adequate picture of culture.”

    That’s the equivalent of saying that the writings of Clifford Geertz are no more or less worthy of study (by someone interested in systems) than the papers of a timemaking schlub struggling to make tenure in a 3rd tier school. The other way I’d put it is to say that studying the cultural life of 16 c. Florence without reference to its brightest lights is like studying the 20th century intellectual life by reading nothing but unpublished Ph.D manuscripts…”

    You switch from denying that culture X is as worthy of study as culture Y, to saying that scholar work X is more sound than “scholar” work Y, than jumps to an entirely different subject, the methodology of hypothetical studies on Florence and whatever.

    NICE TRICK, I SHALL USE IT IN THE FUTURE.

    YOU.
    HAVE.
    CREATED.
    A.
    MONSTER.

    BWAHAHAHAHAHA

46. BWAHAHAHAHAHA,

    No dear,
    I’m saying that in a culture where people sign their names to their works, those works that are called “scholarship” and those that are called “craftsmanship” should be treated in ways that overlap, rather than as entirely separate mutually exclusive categories.
    It’s pretty simple, but don’t worry you’re not the only one to miss the point.

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