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An example from art history in which key codes of the Selective Remix are at play is Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917)

First of all, discourses are objects of appropriation.

authors became subject to punishment

discourse was not originally a product, a thing, a kind of goods; it was essentially an act

The author function does not affect all discourses in a universal and constant way, however. This is its second characteristic

it has not always been the same types of texts which have required attribution to an author

There was a time when the texts that we today call 'literary' (narratives, stories, epics, tragedies, comedies) were accepted, put into circulation, and valorized without any question about the identity of their author; their anonymity caused no difficulties since their ancientness, whether real or imagined, was regarded as a sufficient guarantee of their status

Scientific discourses began to be received for themselves, in the anonymity of an established or always re-demonstrable truth; their membership in a systematic ensemble, and not the reference to the individual who produced them, stood as their guarantee

literary discourses came to be accepted only when endowed with the author function

literary anonymity is not tolerable

The third characteristic of this author function is that it does not develop spontaneously as the attribution of a discourse to an individual.

It is, rather, the result of a complex operation which constructs a certain rational being that we call 'author'.

directly derived from the manner in which Christian tradition authenticated (or rejected) the texts at its disposal

trying to prove the value of a text by its author's saintliness

the author is therefore defined as a constant level of value

the author is thus defined as a field of conceptual or theoretical coherence

the author is here conceived as a stylistic unity

the author is here seen as a historical figure at the crossroads of a certain number of events)

The author is also the principle of a certain unity of writing

The author also serves to neutralize the contradictions that may emerge in a series of texts

signs referring to the author. These signs, well known to grammarians, are personal pronouns, adverbs of time and place, and verb conjugation. Such elements do not play the same role in discourses provided with the author function as in those lacking it

Everyone knows that, in a novel narrated in the first person, neither the first-person pronoun nor the present indicative refers exactly either to the writer or to the moment in which he writes, but rather to an alter ego whose distance from the author varies, often changing in the course of the work. It would be just as wrong to equate the author with the real writer as to equate him with the fictitious speaker; the author function is carried out and operates in the scission itself, in this division and this distance.

all discourses endowed with the author function do possess this plurality of self.

(1) the author function is linked to the juridical and institutional system that compasses, determines, and articulates the universe of discourses; (2) it does not affect all discourses in the same way at all times and in all types of civilization; (3) it is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a discourse to its producer, but rather by a series of specific and complex operations; (4) it does not refer purely and simply to a real individual, since it can give rise simultaneously to several selves, to several subjects - positions that can be occupied by different classes of individuals.

in the sphere of discourse one can be the author of much more than a book - one can be the author of a theory, tradition, or discipline in which other books and authors will in their turn find a place

transdiscursive

'founders of discursivity

They have produced something else: the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other texts.

The relationship (or non-relationship) with an author and the different forms this relationship takes, constitute - in a quite visible manner - one of these discursive properties.

First, there are theoretical reasons. On the one hand, an analysis in the direction that I have outlined might provide for an approach to a typology of discourse.

an introduction to the historical analysis of discourse

modes existence

re-examine the privileges of the subject

Second, there are reasons dealing with the 'ideological' status of the author

How can one reduce the great peril, the great danger with which fiction threatens our world? The answer is: one can reduce it with the author. The author allows a limitation of the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of significations within a world where one is thrifty not only with one's resources and riches, but also with one's discourses and their significations. The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning.

the author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill a work; the author does not precede the works; he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and re-composition of fiction

It would be pure romanticism, however, to imagine a culture in which the fictive would operate in an absolutely free state, in which fiction would be put at the disposal of everyone and would develop without passing through something like a necessary or constraining figure

I think that, as our society changes, at the very moment when it is in the process of changing, the author function will disappear, and in such a manner that fiction and its polysemous texts will once again function according to another mode, but still with a system of constraint -one which will no longer be the author, but which will have to be determined or, perhaps, experienced.

We would no longer hear the questions that have been rehashed for so long: Who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else? With what authenticity or originality? And what part of his deepest self did he express in his discourse?

What are the modes of existence this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects? Who can assume these various subject functions? And behind all these questions, we would hear hardly anything but the stirring of an indifference: What difference does it make who is speaking?

The other older term commonly used across media is “quoting” but I see it as describing a very different logic than remixing. If remixing implies systematically rearranging the whole text, quoting refers inserting some fragments from old text(s) into the new one.

“montage” and “collage”

three differences.

we can say that if modernist collage always involved a “clash” of element, electronic and software collage also allows for “blend.

database of culture

Remixing originally had a precise and a narrow meaning that gradually became diffused

If post-modernism defined 1980s, remix definitely dominates 2000s

Wired magazine devoted its July 2005 issue to the theme Remix Planet.

In his book DJ Culture Ulf Poschardt singles out different stages in the evolution of remixing practice

Around the turn of the century (20tth to 21st) people started to apply the term “remix” to other media besides music: visual projects, software, literary texts

linguistically, the author is never anything more than the man who writes, just as I is no more than the man who says I: language knows a "subject," not a "person,"

once the Author is discovered, the text is "explained:

Once the Author is gone, the claim to "decipher" a text becomes quite useless.

To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing

utterly transforms the modern text

he reign of the Author should also have been that of the Critic,

by refusing to assign to the text (and to the world as text) a "secret:'

no one (that is, no "person") utters it:

he true locus of writing is reading.

the reader is a man without history, without biography, without psychology; he is only that someone who holds gathered into a single field all the paths of which the text is constituted.