Out of Cacophony : Majestic Travesty of Storytelling from Darkness (part 2/4)

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.