The Death of the Audience...

Gibson

I found the most compelling part of Gibson's "God's Little Toys" to be his argument that audience, like record, is an artifact of the past, and that we are moving away from the idea that we are passive recipients of media and, instead, are becoming active participants in its creation.  I am a big fan of King Tubby, of the idea (if seldom the reality) of fanfic creations, of machicema, and the transgressive beauty of "soulless corporate units" transformed into works of art by individual intervention.  I would like to believe Gibson's vision is a true one.

But it begs the question, as did much of DJ Spooky's work for me, about how we generate new source material in a world in which art is primarily done through remixing.  There is a vast catalogue, of course, of cultural material to draw from at what Gibson calls this "peculiar junctire, one in which the record (an object) and the recombinant (a process) still, however briefly, coexist."  But what happens to the process when the object ceases to exist?  What is it's base, where is the shared cultural knowledge that allows us to understand the meaning of the pieces that have been pasted together?  Is there a danger here that, to borrow from They Might Be Giants, art will become "a snake head eating the head on the opposite side?"

Doesn't the recombinant need the record as a place from which to start?  And if the process never stops long enough to generate an object, how do we communicate meaning to one another?

Goldsmith

I have a hard time reconciling Goldsmith and Gibson.  Goldsmith seems to be saying that sampling is an unexplored literary practice, and yet we have Gibson's wonderful examples.  We have appropriation of Greek myth by the Romans--maybe the ultimate literary remix--and we have Jerome Rothenberg's "Horse Songs."  We have the allusion, that limited borrowing of phrase or image meant to infuse our reading of a new work with our reading of an older one.  And we have all those reimagined texts-- Mary Reilly as a take on Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, Wicked as a remix of The Wizard of Oz.  I don't see the hole in literary practice that Goldsmith is suggesting.

Nor did I ever fully grasp the point of his exercise, and I was a little troubled by its elitist overtones.  He spent a year ridding himself of all creativity by doing exactly what the hordes of workers (mostly women) who earned their living in typing pools used to do all day every day:  retyping text that had little or no value, certainly as creative capital, and largely even as corporate record.  This is evidenced in how little they were paid.  In what way does his exercise render their work even more meaningless?  Is he suggesting that this work also somehow "cleansed" them of all creativity?  What does this suggest for the people in similar jobs today:  data entry clerks, for instance, who type meaningless strings of numbers into spread sheets day in and day out.  

What makes the retyping of the New York Times any different than that, except for the self-congratulatory tone of Goldsmith's own writing about the typing?  I fail to see the difference, and thus also fail to see the point.