Theorizing Hybridity

Hybridizing Theory

Creating a Hybrid Transdisciplinary Theory Model for Today’s “Post-Everything” Culture

[Image: Ars Electronica conference, 2005]

Universe of Discourse:

Terms and Concepts Trying to Name the Idea of “Hybridity” in All the Contexts

Hybridity Dilemmas

Understanding and interpreting today’s cultural and media complexity: ongoing mixing, appropriating, cultural interdependence without a fixed or privileged position.

How can this be done?

• Lessons of cultural studies, post-colonial theory, but new lessons of practice: media, art, music, photography, film.

• Our own cultural and social embeddedness, positioned points of view, identities, assumptions, presuppositions.

• One option: self-reflexive and heuristic theoretical ways of thinking

Hybrid Theory for Thinking about Hybridity

Appropriate the theory traditions that have preceded us for doing new cultural work, but don’t get stuck in any one tradition.

But work with theory self-reflexively and heuristically

Self-reflexive theory: question the grounds and presuppositions of the theories we work with; nothing accepted as orthodoxy to be reproduced.

Heuristic method in theory: theory as connected concepts to think with and through to lead to discoveries that we wouldn’t see without actively thinking with the ideas. (All artists use a heuristic method even if they don’t call it that.)

Four Central Concepts for the SeminarFrom 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.

2. Postmodernism and Post-postmodernism: the remix of high and low cultural forms; breakdown of repressive “master narratives” of cultural identity, unity, purity, progress.

3. Globalization and Postcolonial theory: cultural diasporas, hybrid identities, collapse of localization boundaries, global exchange, global industries.

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.

Hybridity Theory Nodes: The “High Theory” Traditions

An Interdisciplinary, Heuristic Modelfor Interpreting

Cultural Hybridity

Globalization theories:transnational border crossings,urban concentrations & flows

Network theory:nodal theory,

urban agglomeration

Post-Colonial &Social Diaspora Theories:

appropriation and hybridization

Cultural theory:deconstructing high/low culture,

identities, theories of subcultures

Semiotics:codes, code-mixing,

intertextuality, cultural encyclopedia

Postmodernism:core theories

Benjamin, Debord,Lyotard, Baudrillard, Deleuze

and Guattari, Jameson

Global economics,international markets

Queer Theory& Camp

Mediology:media institutions,

cultural transmission

Linguistics:structuralism,

creolization theories,discourse/dialogue

Dialogism, Heteroglossia,Carnivalesque, Intertextuality

Bakhtin

Post-structuralist core theories:textuality, discourse, semiotics,

ideologyBarthes, Foucault, Derrida

Post-DigitalMedia Theory:

hypermedia, role-playing

Theory in Practice: Postmodern to Contemporary Art, Music, Media, Photography, Film

Some of the greatest statements of “theory” are embedded in the artistic practices. No cultural works that get noticed without an implied theory of how to make the work and how it’s positioned as a new work among everything else.

The greatest artists, photographers, film makers, musicians don’t (usually) write discursive essays and books about what they do, they just do it from a set of learned rules and codes, appropriating new methods, styles, and technologies.

Examples: Warhol, Sherman, Hip Hop sampling, cutting, performing, Blade Runner, Matrix series, digital mixing and editing of all media, iPhone, W magazine.

The Post-Postmodern

What was new, learned, or intentional in modes of postmodernism is now just accepted as “part of the mix.”

Appropriating and multi-sourcing for new cultural works is assumed as method and practice. Not a break with “modernity” or fixed tradition.

High and low culture are treated as cross-cultural source material, boundaries are understood to be institutional and political-economic, not hierarchical values or built-in properties of the cultural productions.

Jonathan Lethem’s argument in “The Ecstasy of Influence” (Harpers, 2007)

Blues and jazz musicians have long been enabled by a kind of “open source” culture, in which pre-existing melodic fragments and larger musical frameworks are freely reworked. Technology has only multiplied the possibilities; musicians have gained the power to duplicate sounds literally rather than simply approximate them through allusion. In Seventies Jamaica, King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry deconstructed recorded music, using astonishingly primitive pre-digital hardware, creating what they called “versions.” The recombinant nature of their means of production quickly spread to DJs in New York and London. Today an endless, gloriously impure, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of music.

Visual, sound, and text collage—which for many centuries were relatively fugitive traditions (a cento here, a folk pastiche there)—became explosively central to a series of movements in the twentieth century: futurism, cubism, Dada, musique concrète, situationism, pop art, and appropriationism. In fact, collage, the common denominator in that list, might be called the art form of the twentieth century, never mind the twenty-first. But forget, for the moment, chronologies, schools, or even centuries. As examples accumulate—Igor Stravinsky's music and Daniel Johnston's, Francis Bacon's paintings and Henry Darger's, the novels of the Oulipo group and of Hannah Crafts (the author who pillaged Dickens's Bleak House to write The Bondwoman's Narrative), as well as cherished texts that become troubling to their admirers after the discovery of their “plagiarized” elements, like Richard Condon's novels or Martin Luther King Jr.'s sermons—it becomes apparent that appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion, and sublimated collaboration consist of a kind of sine qua non of the creative act, cutting across all forms and genres in the realm of cultural production. ….The world of art and culture is a vast commons, one that is salted through with zones of utter commerce yet remains gloriously immune to any overall commodification. The closest resemblance is to the commons of a language: altered by every contributor, expanded by even the most passive user. That a language is a commons doesn't mean that the community owns it; rather it belongs between people, possessed by no one, not even by society as a whole.

Intextuality/Intermediality: presupposition, conditions of intelligibility and meaning

How/why do these artworks presuppose each other?

Frank Stella, Tomlinson Court Park 2, 1959.Enamel on canvas.

Andy Warhol, Lemon Marilyn. 1962. Silkscreen ink on canvas.

Hybridity in Contemporary Art

LONDON (Reuters) Aug. 30, 2007 – A diamond-encrusted platinum skull by artist Damien Hirst has been sold to an investment group for the asking price of $100 million, a spokeswoman for Hirst's London gallery White Cube said on Thursday.

The skull, cast from a 35-year-old 18th century European man but retaining the original teeth, is coated with 8,601 diamonds, including a large pink diamond worth more than four million pounds in the centre of its forehead.

Damien Hirst, For the Love of God, 2007

Hybridity is Found Playing with Codes“Reality” as a Code in Media Genres

“Reality” as Performative Code

Interactive, web media voyeuristic mass fantasy of “real” intimacy, performative immediacy, the code of reality in fake intimate performance.Proves that “reality” or “the real” is a learned code that we bring to signifiers, not a property of things in themselves.

Do you know this girl? Who doesn’t?

Shirin Neshat, Iranian-born artist, lives and works in NY major museum and gallery shows,from the series “Allah’s Women” [left, “I Am It’s Secret”]

How do we interpret these images?

Chuck Close, Self-Portrait, 1997

Deconstructing photographic space

An image resolving itselfthrough a grid

Hybrid image: An abstract painting of a photograph

References “Self-Portrait”Convention, but nowin an era of fragmented,multiple “selves”, or denial of an essential “self” that can“potraitized”.

Hybridity Mapping: Post-Postmodern MusicESL Studios Production: Case Study

El

ESL studios production mix

Common encyclopediaof blues, pop, rock, jazz,soul, funk,1950s-1980s

Studio recording and production technologies

Brazilian genresand styles, vocals

Reggae and Dubstudio techniques

late 1970s-90sEuropean techno

1980s-present

Indian tabla drums,sitar, other instruments

Middle eastern styles,instruments, voicing

Disco and dance musicrhythms, styles, 1970s-80s

Hip-hop, turntable DJ mixing, sampling

US urban dance music: styles, genres, sounds,

1990s-present

Introduction of drummachines, synthesizers,

sequencers

Japaneseelectronic and

pop styles

Prior histories,genealogies

Prior histories,genealogies

Prior histories,genealogies ofpopular music

Prior histories,genealogies

Prior histories,genealogies

Prior histories,genealogies

Main Western music theory,classical/orchestral

composition