Recombinant Culture and Literary Remixes

In a short essay for Wired magazine, William Gibson characterizes our current historical moment as "a peculiar junction, one in which the record (an object) and the recombinant (a process) still, however briefly, coexist," although the latter is rapidly becoming the cultural dominant. Gibson's observation and his corresponding claim that our new recombinant technologies are redefining what it means to be human are, of course, familar assertions in postmodern and media studies.

I'm archiving this piece for future use in the classroom because it concisely introduces several ideas, not all of which I agree with entirely, in no-bullshit prose: (1) Burroughs' innovative cut-up method differs from plagiarism (2) from the perspective of a recombinant artist "[m]eaning...seemed a matter of adjacent data," and (3) the notion of copyright and intellectual property that developed in the 20th-century has become obsolete, a burden to new creativity.

Thanks largely to arguments presented by Walter Benn Michaels, I've come to believe that idea #2 is wrong because it confuses intentional meaning with signifying effects (see his The Shape of the Signifier). And as Burroughs' writing about his use of the cut-up method makes clear, the juxtapositioning and arranging different texts (or data) is an intentional act that is not purely random.