Friday, November 14, 2008

Remixology (The Prequel)

Debord wrote in his "Methods of Détournement"
Any elements, no matter where they are taken from, can serve in making new combinations. The discoveries of modern poetry regarding the analogical structure of images demonstrate that when two objects are brought together, no matter how far apart their original contexts may be, a relationship is always formed.
Contemporary remixologists play on Debordian détournement
by détourning lifestyle situations that feed into
their ongoing satisfaction as artist-agents
intervening in the creative process using whatever
inherited filters and processural residues they have stored
inside their image-making body/brain apparatus

Though Debord appears to not be having as much fun
as the contemporary remixologists his work inevitably informs
he still challenges them to take hold of the available source material
so that one can then manipulate it to their heart's content
as a way of leaving the propaganda machine behind
or at least creating a counterpropaganda force
that will lead to more dynamic COMPOSITION BY FIELD

But can this propaganda machine ever truly be left behind?

Debord outlines methods of détournement
and in so doing suggests that
"only extremist innovation is historically justified"

Like Whitehead's "concrescence of prehensions"
but filtered through a radical anti-art political ideology
that at once feels belligerent and anachronistic
in its never ending "upsetness"

Debord informs the contemporary remixologist that
Restricting oneself to a personal arrangement of words is mere convention. The mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the bringing together of two independent expressions, supersedes the original elements and produces a synthetic organization of greater efficacy. Anything can be used.
Well, Debord
to paraphrase a quote from a famous law and order TV show
"Anything can and will be used against you."

For example
Alfred North Whitehead

Mashing up the process theology of Whitehead
where he writes in his "Theory of Feelings"
A feeling is a component in the concrescence of a novel actual entity […] The process of the concrescence is a progressive integration of feelings controlled by their subjective forms [...] feelings of an earlier phase sink into the components of some more complex feeling of a later phase [...] each phase adds its element of novelty.
with the quotes from the proto-typically materialist Debord above

I tweak my own processual filters and release
my latest micro-track of DIY philosophy
that reads in part:
A feeling is an expression in the concrescence of a remixologically inhabited language space. The process of the concrescence can serve in making new combinations of aesthetic experience forming an ongoing and progressive integration of feelings that supersede the original expression of an earlier phase producing a synthetic organization of greater efficacy. Each expression of feeling sinks into the components of some more complex feeling of a later phase and each phase adds its element of novelty. If the production of novel togetherness is to be historically justified at all, then it will occur in the extreme reaches of remixological practice.
While articulating his methods of détournement
Debord turns to Lautréamont as the most advanced
early practitioner of these interventionist strategies
and writes that the controversies that have surrounded
his seminal works of pla(y)giarism
"only testifies to the intellectual debilitation"
of "these camps of dotards in combat with each other."

For Debord as for Whitehead
the premonitory proposition of the remixological act
is what's of utmost concern

and if cultural critics or connoisseurs
cannot just get over it
then that's their problem

The bottom line for Debord is that this is the direction
contemporary practice is heading and we better get used to it:
For the moment we will limit ourselves to showing a few concrete possibilities starting from various current sectors of communication -- it being understood that these separate sectors are significant only in relation to present-day techniques, and are all tending to merge into superior syntheses with the advance of these techniques.
Of course Debord and Whitehead before him
could have never seen the Internet coming
(although Nicolas Tesla may have)


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