Of Remixology by Gunkel David J.;

Author:Gunkel, David J.; [Gunkel, David J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2016-06-14T00:00:00+00:00

4.1.2 Remix Theory

The term “remix theory” may be understood in a number of different but related ways. First, it can be used to signify the application of theory to the object, phenomenon, or practice of remix. This is already operative and evident in the way we have applied the writings of Plato, Baudrillard, and now Deleuze to explain and understand remix. Second, the term can be understood as describing the development of new theoretical perspectives unique to and derived from the experience of remix. This is Lessig’s approach in Remix (2008) where he uses the current read/write culture to propose and elaborate a new way to think about and formulate intellectual property law. Finally, Remix Theory is the title employed by Eduardo Navas (2012) for a book about remix that proposes to accomplish both these things, applying contemporary theory to understand remix and using remix to generate new theoretical possibilities. No matter how it is formulated, however, “remix theory” remains within the orbit of Platonism and Deleuze’s first order of repetition.

Navas frames and explains “remix theory” in terms of the difference between “representation” and “repetition” (Navas 2012, 5). His source material for this, however, is not Deleuze but Jacques Attali, specifically the book Noise (2003). In fact, Remix Theory, as Navas characterizes it in the book’s introduction, is composed by appropriating and repeating Attali’s “theory of noise”: “I approach Remix as Attali approaches Music. He considers music the result of the domestication of noise; I consider Remix to be the result of the domestication of noise on a meta-level of power and control, as simulacrum and spectacle” (Navas 2012, 6). For Navas, what is important about Attali’s consideration of “the political economy of music” (and therefore bears repeating) is the difference between two kinds of reproducibility: representation and repetition:

Stated very simply, representation in the system of commerce is that which arises from a singular act; repetition is that which is mass produced. Thus, a concert is representation, but also a meal à la carte in a restaurant; a phonographic record or a can of food is repetition. Other examples of representation are a custom-made piece of furniture or a tailored dress; and of repetition, ready-made clothing and mass-produced furniture. One provides a use-value tied to the human quality of the production; the other allows for stockpiling, easy accessibility, and repetition. In representation, a work is generally heard only once—it is a unique moment; in repetition, potential hearings are stockpiled. (Attali 2003, 41)

For Attali, representation is that form of musical replication made possible by the “popularization of the score during the enlightenment” (Navas 2012, 90). With the advent of the score, “music could,” Navas explains, “be ‘presented’ anywhere since all anyone needed was the score and the proper instrument to perform the composition with great precision” (90). Although it is a form of reproducibility, Attali associates this mode of representation with human qualities and the uniqueness of the moment. Like a work of art, the representation of music retains its connection to aura.

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