Hybridity: Decoding the Recombinant DNA of Contemporary Culture

Is there a common driver for all the new forms of cultural expression, media, and technology today?

Globalization networks and cross-national, cross-cultural, cross-ethnic boundaries

• What is the (minimal) unit of analysis for cultural hybridity?
• Common and shared digital platform for image and sound remixing: the remix is happens in global cities.
• Distinguishing hybrid cultures, technologies, media.
• How can arguments for "cultural authenticity" be maintained today? Who owns authentic culture? Does it exist?

The Internet and the ongoing global digital media platform reveal how "the new" in culture is usually the result of new hybrids

• merging technologies into new platforms or means of transmission and distribution (iPhone, digital cable).
• combining existing "popular" and/or "high" culture genres into new forms (almost everything happening that's interesting in photography, film, music, art)
• image saturation across all media platforms, high art and popular culture are now more and more each other's source material
• bringing a previously excluded "outside" or "marginal" cultural element "inside"
• now the making of new post-globalization cultural forms that are post-colonial, distributed, rooted in global urban culture transcending many prior boundaries of nationality, language, ethnicity, gender
• new emerging cultural economies that "remix" the economics of ownership, production, distribution, and consumer rights (Cultural Commons movements [see Creative Commons website and Ars Electronica 2008]; direct music distribution via the Web).

DJ and Music Producer: Icon of Remix Culture

• DJ, hip hop remix, and electronic dub studios as icons of the mix: sampling, sourcing, mixing, combining, appropriating, crossing boundaries and categories, collapsing or expanding history and memory.
• Grandmaster Flash site (first DJ to combine turntables and cross cut mixes in live performance) | Wikipedia info.
• Idea of Recombinant Culture: The new emerges in the complexity of the mix, seeing the whole of culture and technology as an encyclopedia to be mined, sampled, pillaged, referenced, parodied, transgressed, disrupted, reinterpreted.
• Nicholas Bourriaud, Postproduction (2002): much new creative work involves remixing, re-contextualizing, re-interpreting what has already been "produced" in another or earlier form.

Four Central Concepts for the Seminar
From the Repertoire of Cultural and Social Theory

• 1. Dialogism / Intertextuality / Intermediality:
  understanding new cultural forms through new interpretations of a cultural archive or encyclopedia of references and codes;
  culture is an ongoing dialog of statement and response, incorporating past and current conversations into new statements and expressions.
• 2. Postmodernism and Post-postmodernism:
  the remix of high and low cultural forms; breakdown of totalizing “master narratives” of cultural identity, unity, purity, progress;
  remix starts from mixing what what already the product of suppressed/repressed remixing and impurity.
  
• 3. Globalization and Postcolonial theory:
  cultural diasporas, hybrid identities, collapse of localization boundaries, global exchange, global industries. No origins, only sources.
• 4. Media and technology convergence:
  historical examples of new technologies occasioning new forms to today’s globally networked digital technology as the platform for cultural creativity and production.

Concept 1: Hybridization as a reflection of an ongoing cultural dialogism:
Bakhtin's theory of "dialogism" and "intertextuality"

• "Dialogism" and "Intertextuality" is one of the most powerful concepts developed in semiotics and post-structuralist cultural theory: it's an idea that keeps on giving, a heuristic concept that allows new discoveries to be made in domains never anticipated by the originators of the concept. [See Key Concepts]
• The first insight: every living language and culture is formed through an interplay or dialogue of identities, dialects, a mix "official" culture and cultural "others." Ideology works to create the illusion of "monological" culture, a unified totality without differences. But the illusion can only be maintained by the suppression, repression, or control of "other" ways of speaking.
  • "[Dialogism] is a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation, or by some other factor. (M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination. Texas: University of Texas Press, 1981: 358)
• The grammar and logic of intertextuality and dialogism: new forms presuppose a context of knowledge and possible moves in the ongoing dialogue.
• The theory of intertextuality now morphs into intermediality (interdependence, cross-mediation, presupposition of prior and contemporary media already pre-existing for the new to appear).
• We can experience "the same" media fragment across multiple platforms and devices: movie or video in a theater, on TV, DVD, web-video streaming, iPod or hand-held player. Promiscuity of the digital media object.
• Today, cultural participation depends on a shared, learned "library" or "encyclopedia" of cultural knowledge acquired from multiple media technology sources: intermediality.
• Foucault on the function of commentary; Derrida on the supplement; Lotman on the incompleteness of culture: always ongoing (re)interpretations, new appropriations, new expressions that presuppose and incorporate the old.

Concept 2: Hybridity and Post-Postmodernism / Post-postmodernism

• Postmodern theory began with seeing high and low culture boundaries becoming blurred or overturned, and the world moving toward a globally networked information and consumer society. [See PO-MO page for overview.]
• Now the lessons of postmodernism are just presupposed in everything else. Recognition across many disciplines that new social and cultural forms are the results of hybridization, mixing pre-existing forms into a new entity--in all media, art, popular culture, music, writing, sexuality, social identities.
• Hybridization as an idea is embedded in a network of discourses--cultural theory, sociology, globalization theory, post-colonial theory, identity theory, sexuality, technology theory.
• Today, new hybrids are forming at an accelerated pace from interconnected networks: social and economic, communications and media, globalization and internationalization.
• Cultures are always already hybrids with no pure states. Getting this is a difficult step for some, since it clashes with beliefs about authenticity, identity, origins.
• Hybridity through all cultural levels, sources, and media technologies produces new genres.

Concept 3: Cultural Hybridity, Globalization, Post-Post-Colonialism, Post-Postmodernism, Diasporic cultures

• Cultural hybridity has been a key concept in post-colonial studies, and has been revised in the context of globalization. Now, there is a sense that cultures are always already hybrid, involving mixed histories and influences. [Excellent bibliography for colonial and post-colonial studies.]
• In the era of post-colonialism around the world, neither the colonized or the colonizers represent unified, total, or pure cultures. Cultures are viewed as neither monolithic or totalizing, regardless of internal cultural ideologies that attempt to create totalities and exclusions.
• Identity politics often begins from a presupposition of ethnic, national, or sexual identity based on essential unities at the origin of things. Today, there is a growing sense that any quest for purity in identity is based on false assumptions and is doomed to failure.
• Hybridization theory also discloses the ongoing mixing of cultures before the postmodern and globalized era. There are no pure origins; today we only experiences sources, which are always already mixed.
• Eduardo Portella, "Cultural Cloning or Hybrid Cultures." [Statement by Brazilian writer and former Deputy General of UNESCO, 1999]

Concept 4: Media Convergence: Hybridity in media and technology,
the age of promiscuous devices, networks, software, cross-mediation, ephemeral digital objects

• Hybridity also follows media technologies: from printing press to digital movies and music, technological shifts create convergence in media forms and new devices, each with prior histories fused, integrated, or lost:
• Stabilized script + moveable type + paper + modified wine press = first printing press and first printed books.
• Standardized computing and display devices + packet networking tech + digital media = Web integrated media platform.
• Movies: all digitally edited (convergence of prior histories of film technologies).
• Music: modern music through phases of recording technology, 8 to multitrack recording, studio electronics, looping and sequencing, drum machines, digital recording, editing, mastering. Analog and digital hybridity the norm.
• Cell phone and iPhone: what is a cell phone now? A hybrid device for all media.
• What is the post-Internet computer interface? A structure for integrating the display and and presentation of all digital media.
• Define the following:
  iPod | iPhone | Internet "radio stations" | streaming music, audio, and video sites (Google video, YouTube) | Social networking, filesharing sites (MySpace, Flickr, etc.)

Concluding Theoretical Statement:
Hybridity in Contemporary Art

Nicolas Bourriaud and Bennett Simpson on the implications of art practice after digital media (interview in Artforum, April, 2001):

Bennett Simpson: It's easy to be cynical about the idea of relationality and connectivity because we heard it so often in the rhetoric of the dot-coms. Do you really think '90s artists had an answer to the "What for?"?

Nicolas Bourriaud: Because many artists in the '90s dealt with or used some of the crasser aspects of capitalism--Maurizio Cattelan renting his space at the '93 Venice Biennale, Jason Rhoades working from a Ferrari--the question of motivation is confusing. But I think that there's no point in trying to hide behind a romantic or heroic notion of the artist. In my upcoming book Post-Production, the idea is that art has definitively reached the tertiary sector--the service industry--and that art's current function is to deal with things that were created elsewhere, to recycle and duplicate culture. Art production now indexes the service industry and immaterial economy more than heavy industry (as it did with Minimalism). Artists provide access to certain regions of the visible, and the objects they make become more and more secondary. They don't really "create" anymore, they reorganize. There are two dominant figures in today's culture: the DJ and the programmer. Both deal with things that are already produced. The common point between relational aesthetics and Post-Production is this idea that to communicate or have relations with other people, you need tools. Culture is this box of tools.

BS: "Culture as communication" is a long-standing idea from social anthropology, cybernetics, and semiotics. Culture is always a mediating set of relations. Are these artists doing anything besides pushing at an open door? How is the model of the DJ any different from the familiar models of postmodern pastiche or the tired avant-gardisms of the bricoleur?

NB: I think quotation is no longer an operative value. Quotation only submits one's work to the authority of History and its "masters." A DJ doesn't "quote," per se. He or she wanders into History and uses previous works according to his or her own needs. This method might be similar to past ones, but the set of values that organizes it has changed: Nobody cares anymore about signatures as authority markers, we now live in a cultural space of increasingly fluid circulations of signs.

BS: If art relies on the same rhetoric of interactive experience and connectivity as commercial culture, can it expect to be received any differently? Does it forfeit its capacity to be distinct? One wants to maintain some specificity.

NB: Commerce, trading, the market, is a much more important metaphor for art than we like to believe. For my part, I tend to think well of metaphors of commerce and trading. In early civilization, the trader or the merchant was always bringing things from outside culture, from other cultures, into the market at the center of the city. Traders disrupted things, they brought disharmony, difference, new objects and ideas. It's no coincidence that art is dealing with this complex at this point. We have a global culture, dominated by exchange. The problem arises when the market becomes abstract, when you feel that you can have no control over it. This abstraction of the market is something that artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija and Sylvie Fleury and Gabriel Orozco address in very specific ways.

BS: Of course, the '90s also saw the rise of new media and digital art. Do you see a relationship between this and the more "traditional" kinds of interactive art practice you mention above? Does the former make the latter seem anachronistic?

NB: The indirectness of this correspondence is very important to consider when you think about art's relation to technology. Think about the beginnings of photography. Photography started as something very documentary and academic when it tried to be artistic. The first photographs were still lifes or portraits. This new technique of representation only began to get interesting with the advent of Impressionism. Photography allowed Impressionism to exist, but totally indirectly, by creating a new frame of thought: Suddenly, it was possible to use light, luminous impact, to define forms and represent reality. Today, the way that the Internet changes our frame of mind is not only felt on the Web. Most Internet art is superacademic at this point. At the same time, indirectly, this new technology is what has allowed a Rirkrit Tiravanija to think the way he does.