How Modern Tradition Is : Sweet Music & the Remix
Low
Tech Poetics : re / con / sti / tute
Playfully, yet not
lacking in critical edginess, the remix focuses on resistance to noise &
worshipping the wholesome sound of creation. The idea and the practice of the
remix to a high degree relies on the disambiguation—disentangling-- of the
misconception about the totality of discourse. This implies a balanced dialogue
within a mutually conditioning relationship between the linguistic sphere and
cultural realities. Various components comprise the dialogue in question. Some
of them include aspects of culture such as education, knowledge, and the realm
of letters. They owe their discursively contested nature to being unified under
the common hub—language. As such, they share certain characteristics of it.
Language resists total verbalization. It is susceptible to imperfect
articulation. In a word, it is not omnipotent. By extension, neither is education,
nor knowledge, nor letters. This might create a sense of shortage in these
spheres. Rightly so. Further, it might indicate kindred weakness that humans
share. Thankfully so. It is precisely the humbleness enabling such an
acknowledgement that constitutes the source of reintegrating potential.
In Ian McEwan’s novel Sweet Tooth, these culturally
conditioned phenomena are interlaced on many levels. Serena obtains a degree in
mathematics from the University of Cambridge. However, during the college years
and onwards, she is dedicated to her passion for literature. It enables her engagement
in Sweet Tooth and brings her to the world of T.H. Haley, a Brighton based PhD
student whose dissertation looks at Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. His storytelling qualifies him for the Austen Prize
and funds provided via Sweet Tooth, thereby unburdening him from the drudgery
of college teaching, and, consequently, ensures his committing to writing. Ian
McEwan, Sweet Tooth: ”The Sweet Tooth
Faerie Queene had delivered Tom from academic struggle” (213).
The public and the
private in this novel meet under a shadow of highly suspicious production of
knowledge, intolerable ignoration of the critical distance between the object
and the meta levels, fabricated information at the obfuscating intersections
between mediation and the unmediated, and the role of public discourse in
mainstreaming distracting techniques generated through accentuating the
spectacular, vulgar, conspiratorial, controversial. The characters of Serena
and Tom in such a scenario merely keep the reader’s awareness of the
fallibility of cultural categories, thereby reconfirming the aforementioned
weakness of that what possibilizes their contested character in the first
place—language. Imperfect, erroneous, incomprehensive. Like humans. And yet,
abundant in the reconstituting potential. So is education. So is knowledge. So
is the realm of letters.
Ian McEwan empowers the
characters in the way and to an extent that reflect the dialectic in question.
The narrator is unreliable only to the point suggestive of the limits of both
storytelling and human power. This makes McEwan an antiromantic of the sort
that recuperates romanticist attributing a divinizing feature to poetry. In
accord with the parlance of Richard Rorty in Contingency, Irony, and
Solidarity (1989), it could be inferred that McEwan’s narrative technique
indicates a capacity romanticism overlooked. Not undervaluing either the
significance of poetry or of those who create it, the restraint Rorty requires
with regard to the proliferation of quasi divinities, and yet sustaining the
investment in the creative, is perhaps what makes Serena’s narration both
questionable and reliable. That’s probably a basis for the trickstery of the inexplicable and unutterable vacillating
trust between her and T.H. Haley.
A take on such sinuous,
yet profoundly stable, trustworthiness is marvelously articulated in Jeff
Noon’s piece “The Ghost on the B-Side” (metamorphiction)
offering a remixing narrative demonstrating the beauty of playfulness,
imaginative plenitude, and experimentation being no less joyful and inspiring
because of their limits and the quirky
power of weakness. Not only does he celebrate the legacy of literary cut-ups,
albeit in a slightly modified sense—attuned to the sound of modern day technologically
advanced context--but he primarily brings to awareness the possibilities of
play within the literary.
Given the prism through
which Noon filters literary experimentation, the textual meets audio and visual
expressive modes in the form of hybrid poetic imagery. What makes the remixing
device specific is the understanding of the remixed version: it can be
perceived either as a piece in its own right or an old-school, mirror image,
B-side ghost text of the source piece. He calls it dub fiction.
One cannot stress
enough Noon’s insistence on the correlation between the newly emerged remixes
and the source, since the nexus is vital for the nascent meaning arising out of
jumbled imagery and dub chunks. Out of cacophony—awashed in the glory of poetic
imagery, resistant to distracting messiness, a standalone piece, bearing
witness to the reintegrating potential of the fruitful dialogue between change
and preservation. Like low tech poetics.
To fine-tune the
stance, one might want to look at the verisimilitude of attempts to approach
the idea of remixing, as presented in Simon Reynold’s article “Versus: The
Science of Remixology” (1996). He detects the tendencies amongst the artists of
the period that spell out in monetary terms that what is salient in music. More
precisely, the “versus” approach to sampling from different sources implies an
adversarial attitude resulting in remixes that echo the source in a slightly
different fashion in comparison to Noon’s dub fiction. In the “versus” approach,
the relationship between the remixer and the remixee reflects the
competitiveness that plagues cultural realities. Its outcome are remixes that
focus on the economic aspects of copyrights and authorship, rather than the
playful side of remixing. In order to validate themselves, they rely on the
process that threatens the very idea of creativity within such endeavors and,
instead, operates within a very limited sphere of--dare one say--rather
mechanistic procedures aiming to generate songs. As Reynolds aptly observes, it
relocates music-making more into the realm of science and ignores the instinctive.
In a word, it is desensitized to a crucial ingredient of all dub.
The attitude that pays
little attention to the conjunction between the source code and the B-side
shadow piece reflects certain aspects of culture susceptible to distractions to
the point of oblivion. To fail to monetize one’s work might not be the
imperative, but to prioritize monetizing within a music-making process is a
slightly different matter. We don’t buy it. We prefer the fellowship of
learners firmly anchored in humbleness to a nihilo-cannibalist arena. We
celebrate genuine exchange between and among interlocutors. The remix resists
the treatment of samples that deconstruct the source to the point of
unrecognizability. Instead, it rejoices in playfulness. If for Joe Rose of Enduring Love part of it means to
indulge in the expression of genetically inscribed human emotions (4), then for
Theo of Saturday, it means to immerse
oneself in the sources of exchange that music offers:
But is there a
lifetime’s satisfaction in twelve bars of three obvious chords? Perhaps it’s
one of those cases of a microcosm giving you the whole world […] When player
and listener together know the route so well, the pleasure is in the deviation,
the unexpected turn against the grain. To see a world in a grain of sand. (27)
If the remix is the approach to and manifestation of
reading-writing, it is concerned with the mutually conditioning relationship
between the linguistic realm and cultural realities. If part of the thematic
regards the questions about the relationship between and among vocabularies,
then it tends to contextualize the debate with the interplay between tradition
and current idiosyncrasies. Neither nostalgia for a glamorizied, idealized
past, nor projection into a lionized, romanticized future, the approach renders
tradition remixable, just as
contemporary realities are. The remix focuses on hic & nunc / anticarpe
diem approach to the polemic : remapping the past, reimagining the future
& resurrecting the present.
