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07/09/2004 Archived Entry: "Appropriation"
I enjoyed Will engaging me in yesterday's entry regarding new media literacy. Since I'm rewriting Chapter Three of my manuscript, I'll extend those thoughts briefly to the chapter's focus, appropriation.
The 1963 focus of the book finds appropriation in Amiri Baraka's definition of cool as an oppressive appropriation strategy for how it writes black cultural production in ways that undermine African American culture (credit not given where it's due). Baraka calls the response to this kind of appropriation cool, because dis-empowered people with no ability to respond can only be cool - not respondent, calm, detached.
My most immediate connection is Governor Granholm's Cool Cities plan for Detroit Metro- the appropriation of cool for urban planning - which attempts to equate the black city with hipness so that white professionals will return. This, too, is a powerful usage of appropriation (very much like Mailer’s own problematic concept of the White Negro).
Both could be easily read as appropriating signifiers (the city/dress/music) for purposes of theft - and that is Baraka's critique. But in '63, Burroughs argues that theft (as appropriation) is itself a new media practice (a point Ulmer makes in “The Object of Post-Criticism,” but regarding Cage). His character The Subliminal Kid represents a new media being who tape records conversations, ideas, thoughts, mixes them, remixes them, and "brought back street sound and talk and music and poured it into his recorder array so he set waves and eddies and tornadoes of sound down all your streets and by the river of all language. "
The Subliminal Kid is a media being who writes media. He is not a student writer, a placement test taker, a variable to be studied, etc. He doesn't have a thesis nor a conclusion. He is himself an appropriation as is the work he generates. The best example - which I am now getting to - we can find today to understand The Subliminal Kid's rhetoric is the DJ (or hip hop producer) who mixes and remixes culture into compositions. It just so happens that the sampler was invented in 1963 - the Mark I Mellotron. I use this moment to continue my choral thread of appropriation and show how this gesture makes up one part of the rhetoric of cool. While my book isn’t using the term “literacy” to describe any of this, all of these points lead to what I call something other than literacy.
Replies: 7 comments
Hi Alex. I'll probably teach Spooky's book in my graduate composition course next Spring. The only thing is, when I use "cool," I am, in effect, appropriating it as well - not concentrating on its popular meanings ("in the know") but rather the other means I appropriate from Baraka (who makes it as a term of appropriation), McLuhan, and Farris Thompson. This is the choral move - to compose with all meanings.
So, Spooky's stuff would be cool (under my definition) for how it mixes and appropriates, not for its popularity.
Posted by j @ 07/11/2004 11:35 AM EST
Thinking there are some useful connections between cool and secret codes/cryptography. Set aside the obvious (cool is a kind of cultural code; it's about being "in the know," and even the image of the hacker/cyberpunk as cool). I am thinking specifically about appropriation, which requires decoding and recoding. Perhaps not so coicidentally I have been mulling this issue while reading DJ Spooky's book, who names himself that Subliminal Kid after Burrough's novel.
Posted by Alex R. @ 07/11/2004 11:14 AM EST
Secret blogs? Secret electronic gardens? I've been exploring the garden metaphor, especially from Voltaire's Candide. Now you've got me thinking about bloggers having front yard blogs, and backyard blogs, and then secret garden blogs where you can go when the yards get too busy or weedy or something.
One of the paradoxes of blogging is the "private in public" phenomenon. Bloggers post personal revelations and then say "I hope my mom never sees this". Kids post critiques of teachers from their home computer (assuming a kind of limited audience) and then get busted at school for what they wrote.
"IRL" and "f2f" are terms that indicate an awareness of the social differences between virtual and embodied interactions, but norms are still developing, still emerging. When I mentioned to some students yesterday that I first met several comp bloggers in person at C & W in Hawaii (including Samantha), one student wrinkled his face and said, "That's like a blind date."
We're in a kind of John Dewey moment: we're learning by doing.
Posted by John @ 07/10/2004 02:51 PM EST
YEAH!!!! Now my life is complete. :-P
So what's up with the secret blog?
Posted by dr. b. @ 07/09/2004 07:46 PM EST
Should work now:
http://ydog.net/gm/weblog.rss
Posted by j @ 07/09/2004 03:20 PM EST
Yeah, I still have to check into whether Greymatter works with RSS...I'm not sure if it does...and I love Greymatter b/c it has none of the spam problmes MT generates (though I also once started a Wordpress version of this blog...but never posted where it is)
Posted by j @ 07/09/2004 02:52 PM EST
Ugh, I missed the fray yesterday and now I am sad. J, you ever considered an RSS or Atom feed? Pleeeeeze?
Posted by dr. b. @ 07/09/2004 02:48 PM EST