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• 1 2016-06-20T19:46:30-07:00 Remix After "Remix" 11 plain 2017-11-30T14:39:54-08:00

  By Michael O'Krent

  By attempting to understand the nature of the remix, I fear that Viriginia Kuhn has destroyed part of the unclassifiability that seems to define remixes for her.  It reminds me of a quote from Faust:

  When scholars study a thing, they strive to kill it first, if it's alive; then they have the parts and the'be lost the whole, for the link that's missing was the living soul.

  --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Kuhn seems to be enamored of remix's ability to exist outside of genre and convention.  Yet, by writing her article, Kuhn defined the boundaries of the genre she calls "remix."  Classification and analysis are exactly the sorts of things that Goethe would consider "killing" a work.  While it may be an exaggeration to say that Kuhn has killed the remix, the act of writing about the remix in a systematic way undermines the significance of that writing itself.
  This connection goes a step farther.  Another virtue of the remix, according to Kuhn, is its ability to challenge logocentrism by reintroducing aural, visual, and affective elements into the domain of argumentation.  Kuhn's article stresses that the reduction of any work, for example the Iliad, to text from a more expansive form results in some kind of loss.  By close reading remixes as if they were books, Kuhn engages in that exact process, pinning down the remix to a set of defined functions and re-inventing its meanings through text.  Kuhn, after all, is right that the remix's strength is its ability to be simultaneously clear and ambiguous, to be as many things at once as it wishes to be.  An example:
  
  I have my own thoughts about this piece, but it is more in line with Kuhn's position to simply preserve the remix as-is and let you, the viewer, think about it on your own through the original medium of the remix.
  
  Archiving is a sort of remixing, remixing reality.  Now that I've places this video alongside my comments on Kuhn, it has been archived.  I've "remixed" my own histories and experiences to create a different snapshot of a common experience -- reading Kuhn's article.  But I dare not tell you what that "remix" means.
  And since I've now undertaken the task of archiving this year's political weirdness, a moment of silence for this memory, please, to complete a brief remix of 2016: