Remix

Just quickly read David Shield’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. Quickly—because the book strikes me as an over-long and tedious elaboration of Jonthan Lethem’s brilliant essay on “The Ecstasy of Influence.” Shields uses the same method as Lethem: Most of his book is a collage of quotations, loosely documented and often tweaked slightly, with some of his own prose added as connective tissue. His argument is also the same as Lethem’s: Creativity has become remix. We no longer look for the utterly new, original, and authentic—but for the inspired reuse of found materials, texts, and ideas. (It can be no coincidence that the book’s cover features a blurb from Lethem.) The artist becomes, in a sense, less a composer than an editor or curator—whose point-of view emerges out of her arrangement or design of the materials of the culture.

I agree. But I’m getting bored with hearing the same argument over and over—and I suspect that most of the people likely to get this particular  joke are those who’ve already heard it several times before. Instead of a manifesto—in either short form (Lethem) or long (Shields)—I’d be more interested in a remix that was about something other than, well, remixing.We’ve seen this aesthetic in practice in some of the greatest works of our culture:  In Cold Blood, The Executioner’s Song, Alias Grace, Transformations—heck, The Wasteland, and most of Shakespeare’s plays. I’m not sure why it needs to be re-argued for at such length.

And, actually, I think there’s a significant point on which Shields and Lethem differ—and that has to do with their attitude towards their sources. Although Lethem is not conventional in documenting his sources, he does strike me as open and generous in recognizing them. Almost half of his brief article is in fact devoted to a kind of bibliographic mini-essay, a “key” in which he:

names the source of every line I stole, warped, and cobbled together (except, alas, those sources I forgot along the way). (68)

He does much more, really, talking about the circumstance in which he encountered many of the texts and their importance to him. Lethem even includes a “key to the key” in which he acknowledges friends (including David Shields!) and other writers who’ve influenced his work on this essay. The impression I’m given is of someone who freely acknowledges that he is composed of multitudes and who feels honest gratitude towards those who’ve shaped his writing.

On the other hand, Shields informs us, at the end of his book, that “Random House lawyers determined that it was necessary for me to provide a complete list of citations” (209)—which he seems to interpret as meaning a list (8 pages out of 219 in his book) of the authors, and only sometimes titles, of the works he’s recycled. But before meeting this legal obligation, Shields declaims:

If you would like to restore this book to the form in which I intended it to be read, simply grab a sharp pair of scissors or a razor blade or box cutter and remove pages 210-218 . . . . Who owns the words?  . . . Stop, don’t read any farther. (209)

It’s as if Shields feels that, by virtue of re-using them in his book, the work of others now belongs to him. He appropriates but only grudgingly acknowledges. This mean-spiritedness diminishes his work.

References

Lethem, Jonathan. 2007. The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism. Harper’s (Feb): 59-71.

Shields, David. 2010. Reality hunger: A manifesto. New York: Knopf.