The logic of the remix has made its way into consumer culture – we know that. But what we haven’t yet identified is how to integrate that logic into the university (what I wrote about in my ctheory article). It took hundreds of years before the university completely adopted the logic of print as an organizing principle, and only in the late 1800s did the composition program evolve out of this logic. We can imagine assignments and pedagogy based on the remix (“adding a different and unique spin” to previously constructed arguments, writings, images, etc.). But what about the entire composition curriculum? How would a remix composition program function? What would it look like? How would students become remixologists instead of “precise” and “identifiable” figures (products of topic sentences and linear argument)? –Jeff Rice —Sprite Remix (Yellow Dog)
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I'm looking to remix music but enjoy your literary take on remixing.
Brilliant quote! I can see that as a pull quote in the next handout I create... (I'll cite you properly, of course.)
Well...yes and no. The act of organizing ideas is what writers do, true, so it doesn't matter if it's 'original' (which I agree is often a misnomer) or a remix. But remixology as a practice is reliant upon a musical metaphor...and I think remixing is not quite the same thing as composing. One uses symbols at their most basic level (the note/the language); the other uses the composed notes of others (the sound byte/the sentence), typically in order to make an extratextual appeal of some kind (an allusion to an older song/an appeal to authority). Remixing also is a matter of technological automatism -- the machine splices the sounds together, sometimes on its own accord, and the 'writer' has less 'control' or 'mastery' over what sounds are produced (even if I agree that 'mastery' like 'originality' is a specious term). But as in rap music, the play of influences more often becomes a pastiche and sources are rarely, if ever, directly sourced. I think our culture already trains our students in remixology; my job is to get them to think for themselves and so I don't think Rice's theories are pragmatic or useful as a philosophical approach to teaching composition. The theorist in me would love to embrace it (and I no doubt would be singing its praises if I were a grad student), but the longer I teach, the more pragmatic I get. Of course, I say this now in a defensive way, but I bet next year I'll probably tell students that research is like a rap song and it'll work and I'll take it all back.
The plagia-plagia-plagiarists in my classe-asse-asses are already-ready suc-successful remixologists, mixologists, mixo-mixo-mixo-mixologists. (Source: Dr. Dre Arnzen)
Hmm... it seems that even when papers aren't plagiarized, at the undergraduate level and even at the professorial level, a certain amount of what we're doing is remixing what we find in our research... there is nothing new under the sun, as the philosopher quoth (probably plagiarizing from someone else). So acknowledging that up front and simply getting students to attribute the sources they use when they copy and paste is probably a good step.
The plagiarists in my classes are already successful remixologists.