extract from: "Remix: The Ethics of Modular Complexity in Sustainability", By Eduardo Navas which was published in the CSPA Quarterly, Spring 2010 Issue.
As I have discussed previously (in other texts),[4] Attali’s theory of repetition and representation can help us understand how culture is increasingly bound by technology that relies on the recycling of material in all forms possible. This technology also enabled institutions of the arts and sciences to develop autonomy based on specialized languages. More importantly, Attali provides a framework in which one can begin to understand how the symbolic is linked to the material. For Attali this is best manifested in the relation between repetition and representation. He argues that representation as a variable of cultural exchange became redefined by repetition when mechanical recording was introduced with the phonograph and similar early devices. Attali’s emphasis is on music because he believes that it is in music (the domestication of noise) where we can find the folly of humans, the roots of how knowledge becomes shaped in all forms of media bound by repetition:
It is thus necessary to imagine radically new theoretical forms, in order to speak to new realities. Music, the organization of noise, is one such form. It reflects the manufacture of society; it constitutes the audible waveband of the vibrations and signs that make up society. An instrument of understanding, it prompts us to decipher a sound form of knowledge.[5]
Attali’s methodology is dialectical. He foresees various stages in how sound plays an elemental role in the development of culture. He considers representation, as it developed in music during the eighteenth and nineteenth century, to have supported modernity in its early stages. According to him, this took place when representation was overshadowed by repetition. Representation for Attali is an act of communication that already exposes the future silencing of the individual (the one that enables the expert to demand that non-experts not opine, for they do not know the proper language). According to him, when a musician performs, the audience must be willing to listen in order to let the musician exert her unique interpretation of a piece of music. This activity is culturally specific, meaning that it must take place in a space where people come together deliberately to have an experience.[6]
The necessity to attend a specific event in order to experience a musical performance changed once the performer’s interpretation became recorded with mechanical devices. The result was that the musician’s unique performance was reproduced and could be played, repeatedly, in different contexts that may not be relevant to the original circumstances in which the performance took place. Once musical recordings began to be played on the radio, live musical performances began to be compared to the recorded material. The recording, then, becomes the paradigm, the primary form of reference, even though it is not an original but a record of an event that took place in real time at one point. This is a rupture in culture when the world is defined by means of repetitive presentations of material constantly out of context—so to speak, re-contextualized, and yes, even remixed for instances where repetition is the only means of having an experience. In the early days of the radio, when the concept of the “music star” developed, fans were eager to see live performances of the songs played on the airwaves.
Repetition entered a new level when some performers opted to combine pre-recorded material with live music. This is the rise of the DJ: the meta-musician, the celebrated post-modern sound collage artist. Once repetition becomes the default form of representation, recordings can be manipulated to create unique live experiences; in turn the live performance is recorded and recycled as a remixed production that can be bought as CDs or MP3 files. Repetition effectively recycles every moment of representation, especially when such moments are already dependent on repetition. Raves, for example, glorify the live manipulation of remixed recordings by DJ’s like Sasha, Paul Oakenfeld, and Timo Maas among many others. Their performances are then sold as recordings themselves. The names I mention, which are rave stars from the mid-nineties to the mid two thousands may sound dated, since DJ’s come and go, but the power of representation through the repetition of recordings is stable; it is a system of well-orchestrated recycling around which an entire industry is in place.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the ideology of repetition that is linked to music recording devices is extended to other areas of culture. The concept of repetition originally found in the domestication of noise has become an efficient means for mass media and the global market to thrive. Like domesticated sound, recorded material of all types, not just music, is distributed throughout the world repeatedly as data-packets, streamed live for the online user to experience in every possible situation, from the comfort of the home, to an airplane ride from one continent to another. Anyone can text a message, call a person across town or the continent, view a world cup game on a giant screen, iPhone or laptop because it is data that is exchanged via a global network. Information is distributed through repetitive algorithms that support a symbolic system that permeates every conceivable space reached by communication.
Once repetition becomes embedded in all aspects of culture, one is no longer bound to contextual understanding but rather modular reinterpretation of the same material according to the multiple contexts the recording attains through repetition. This is why the job of the social critic, more often than not, is to re-contextualize, to demystify and reassure that cultural exchange does not take place with misunderstandings or misrepresentations. In this regard, Remix, is a tool of the spectacle as well as of criticism. It can both present something as new to the uncritical audience, but also make available traces for anyone who is interested in understanding how things are constructed from recycled, recombined, and repurposed material.
The domestication of noise, when extended beyond music to culture, becomes a tool of massive control. Within this paradigm, aesthetics as a cultural binder is indifferent to immediate needs of the world. It is understood as part of a process of ongoing assimilation byway of decontextualized repetition of all material that is deemed of value under a discourse that demands the separation of cultural elements, not only for the sake of efficiency of the system itself, but for the purpose of supporting simultaneously otherwise obvious conflicts that would come forth if fields did not claim an autonomous place in culture at large. This is the contention at play within sustainability at the beginning of the twenty-first century: to be autonomous while also interrelated with other areas of production. The challenge, then, is how to promote socially conscious exchange within such an interconnected framework that is defined by specialized fields that strive for autonomy.
