In the second chapter of his essay, Regenerative Speech, Eduardo Navas claims that every language is a remix. As phonemes and words are not property that belongs to a specific person they function as basic building blocks for communication.
Classic sample material: Lego bricks. Photo: Flickr/Alan Chia.
Regenerative Speech
The practicality in the regenerative remix is not so different from the way we use words when we speak. There is an awareness of this relation among scholars who write about remix culture, specifically in how remixing functions in similar fashion to creating meaning with language. [1] What is important in this case is to understand the cultural implications of such relation, and how they formally appear to share an efficiency of production.
It is only prudent to revisit, granted at a very basic level, the basics of language acquisition. Before we are able to communicate effectively with oral language, we need to acquire (archive) a set of phonemes (basic sound units) – which in turn, when combined, become recognizable as words. All this information is kept in our memories, and eventually we learn to select and combine these building blocks in order to create sentences. We do this as we grow, while mimicking parents, members of our families, friends, and schoolmates. The oral acquisition of language, however, is eventually controlled by the act of writing, which turns it into an apparent static object, functioning more like a corpse to be studied carefully: one can go back to the written material as much as needed. Writing in effect becomes the elemental apparatus that anchors meaning once oral communication is perceived as an unstable way of sharing things that may have happened in the past or that are important for a community to function effectively. [2] It is this apparent stability found in writing—the ability to record things with some type of technology—that led to the eventual development of other ways of recording the flow of cultural exchange, such as sound and images.
Abstract picture of computer virus. Photo: Flickr/Yuri Samoilov.
Sound is Viral
We can then agree that words function as basic building blocks for communication. Based on this premise, phonemes (basic units of a language put together to create meaning), do not belong to a specific person, and are not considered property in any practical sense. Part of the reason behind this is that phonemes travel as sound waves that reverberate through space, and humans, as is commonly known, sense the vibrations and bring together the message in their minds. In the past, sound would only be heard, but could not be preserved for later access until the phonograph and similar devices were invented in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was beginning around this time that the recording of sound could be considered as a type of immaterial object, which eventually would be reconfigured as a commodity once the entertainment industry emerged.
This turned out to be a process of control. The process of recording sound in a sense is driven by the human interest to domesticate noise. Indeed, humans strive to domesticate everything around them, including the environment, plants, animals and viruses. And it is with viruses with which humans appear to keep a contentious relationship. [3] Sound, in its ephemeral form is viral. Sound and viruses can move in all directions, and keep challenging human control: viruses biologically, and sound culturally. These are the counter parts of resistance that push humans to evaluate their surroundings from a de-centered position, not from the view of the individual, but from the view of all things flowing, all things becoming. [4]
Cultural Antibiotics
Mechanical, electronic, and eventually digital recording are cultural antibiotics created by humans to control sound which otherwise would be noise in a domesticated environment. In effect, recording devices are designed to help us negotiate and control sound based on similar principles used to control viruses. In both cases, humans are not always successful in having complete control, and outbreaks do take place both biologically and culturally. Coincidentally, the Ebola outbreak took place while Isis became pervasive across the media with decapitations of international journalists. Isis as an ideology making use of online media, however, appears to have outlasted Ebola, as the latter is now almost under control in Liberia and other parts of Africa. [5] Sound that is considered noise might well be the more difficult of the two to control – and once we implement the aesthetics of sound to media at large, once media strives to flow in all directions, it appears to function more like a type of virus people then struggle to control or, if seen as a threat, eradicate. It’s no coincidence that the term “viral” is used whenever something reaches a large circulation across the Internet.
Mechanical, electronic and digital recording are cultural antibiotics created by humans to control language.
Writing is our earliest and, in terms of economics, most efficient form of recording and control of language (due to its relative easiness to produce). With writing, an uttered statement deemed ephemeral, and therefore unstable, can be evaluated based on a set of symbols we call letters, which create words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, books, and eventually libraries. The sequence of this development, especially the last two stages took hundreds of years; and libraries are now turning into digital archives. [6] This was possible in part due to the concept of property. Intellectual property became crucial to the publishing and production of not only books, but also of music and the arts at large. Anything that would be produced with mechanical reproduction, which eventually turned into electronic and digital reproduction, has by default, at this point, a contention with copyright laws that remain unresolved. Thus, the aesthetics of sound, in term of the potential for free-flow which has been passed on to media at large, becomes a challenge to the control of property under capitalism. In short, while it is now accepted that we have always functioned as people who generate and regenerate meaning, what is different at the time of this writing as opposed to previous periods (particularly those before the rise of mechanical reproduction), [7] is that we function under a pervasive concept of intellectual ownership. In contemporary times, things archived become property or negotiated under such paradigm in some way.
Intellectual Ownership
The word as a building block of communication, then, once it is anchored in the written text leads to a state in which a person has to evaluate constantly what is “original,” because we come to view the composition of words in terms of writing as unique. It is with the combination of words that property becomes a form of intellectual dispute. The question is at what point does it become contested? At what point does a combination of words become someone’s property? How far does one have to go in terms of combinations before someone says that you are taking an excerpt from a text they wrote without proper permission? As noted above, elements in an archive currently function more like words in our memories. This may be a challenge to accept or even understand in part because it goes against the myth of a creative person being able to make things from apparently nothing. Economic factors also shape this myth because the concept of authorship turned out to be the foundation of creativity as generally understood. Such a concept in effect has influenced all forms of production, from scientific innovation to creativity in the fine arts – to this day, the author is still seen as important for validation of a work. The challenge in remix as a concept linked to this well established cultural paradigm is that the evaluation of sampling, and remixing from previous states of cultural production is continuously changing, and indeed we are entering, or arguably have already entered a stage where data, information, material in databases, whether they be video, sound, text or a combination of all types of media are developing a relation with us more like the use of words. We can then think of each pre-existing source as notes on a piano, ready to be played at the touch of one’s fingers. This argument is not speculative. How this functions can now be assessed in the common use of online search engines.
This is the second chapter of a five part essay. You can read the first part here.
References
[1] Martin Irvine as previously cited has developed a close reading of remixing in terms of semiosis. Manuel De Landa also shows an awareness of the process of recyclability in how he explains language consisting of «replicators». See Irvine, «Remix and the Dialogic Engine of Culture», 15 – 42; and De Landa“Linguistic History: 1000 – 1700 A.D.», 183 – 190.
[2] Poststructuralists have contested the apparent stability of the text, particularly Derrida, who is known for his theory of deconstruction. Derrida questions the privilege that the text holds as a stable/static object that one is able to revisit and study. This appearance is what in the end anchors oral language to its written form, and slows down the changes that would otherwise take shape in language. In the end, the written word is designed to try to control the free flow of communication, and Derrida’s argument proves that this is the role of written material. On the instability of the text see: Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1997). On Anchoring the text and slowing it down, see De Landa, «Linguistic History, 1000-1700 A.D.», 183-215.
[3] I borrow this idea on viruses from De Landa. The comparison to sound and noise is mine. See Manuel De Landa, “Flesh and Genes,” A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 103 – 179.
[4] This observation is made based on the reading of Manuel DeLanda (See A Thousand Years[…]) as well as Deleuze and Guatarri’s theories of becoming, particularly in terms of intensities. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri, «1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming Imperceptible…», «1837: Of the Refrain», A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 232 – 350.
[5] Sheri Fink, vLiberia Is Declared Free of Ebola, but Officials Sound Note of Caution,” The New York Times, last updated May 9, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/world/africa/liberia-is-free-of-ebola-world-health-organization-declares.html?_r=0
[6] A clear example of this is Google nGrams, accessed May 7, 2015, https://books.google.com/ngrams
[7] The difference between mechanical and electronic reproduction is analyzed in depth by John Mowitt. See: John Mowitt, «The Sound of Music in the Ear of its Electronic Reproducibility,” The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan Sterne (New York: Routledge, 2012), 213 – 224.