In Roland Barthes' essay 'Death of the Author', he argues that for a piece of work or the 'text' to be appreciated properly it must be considered in itself, completely separate from when, where and by whom it was created. We shouldn't have any knowledge of the author’s identity, their history, class, race, religion and political preferences, because these lead to preconceptions about the writing. To know the author is to know the source of the text and therefore expect a single definitive interpretation: “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.” (pg.147). Our Western mind-set desires clarification of one ultimate and ‘correct’ meaning, for the sake of believability. But without assumptions on the writing’s origin, we're left to our own devices to create meaning entirely. For Barthes, the meaning of a work depends on how it is received rather than how it is intended. The view of a text’s unity “lies not in its origin but in its destination” (pg.148), implying that we the reader, are in complete control.
This idea, over four decades old, seems to hold even more relevance now than it did then. We live in the age of digital revolution and my young adult culture is a hyper-real mash-up of all those that precede it. I land in the demographic of Generation Y, who are generally thought to be anyone born after 1980 and often derogatorily labeled Generation Whine. We are the most molly-coddled, protected and marketed to generation to date, yet we have little to offer in the way of cultural contributions. Our main conduit to information, entertainment and communication is the internet. We consume our cultural tid-bits in cyber space, the hyper-mediated terrain of the world wide web that combines all previous generation's media; such as radio, television and film. Slowly society has moved from an industrial civilisation to an information civilisation and so Generation Y enjoys instant gratification via powerful computer processors, file sharing and high speed broadband. Generation X had MTV, brands and excess. The Beat Generation had Jack Kerouac, jazz and the open road. What do we have? We have no revolution, no real struggle, and so it would seem no originality. Generation Y is the Remix Generation.
"The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture." In 2009 what do the young adults have for an excuse of culture? Disillusioned B-boys who weren't even born when the movement had already lost momentum. Or the hipster, playing with their iPhone while wearing an unsuitably warm wooly hat indoors. Maybe the freakish young entrepreneurs so ahead of their time that their parents haven't even met yet.
We're new-rave punks, dance-pop crunkers and landfill emo-goths. No mods and rockers, hippies and yuppies. We're post-postmodern, neo-modern, meta-modern, whatever idiosyncratic portmanteau you want to use to label our epoch. The internet super-highway is our playground. The current accessibility and scale of information technology allows anyone to be a bedroom DJ, designer, or director. The advance in technology has allowed consumers to become producers and Generation Y is at the heart of this prosumer culture. As the states of author and reader overlap and interchange Barthes' 'Death of the Author' is truly realised. But when the author dies, what happens to their culture?
This blurring of authorship has been made possible by the proliferation of digital technologies but the trends of the virtual world have very real world consequences on our culture. In 'The Myth of Interactivity' Lev Manovich comments, "As we shift from an industrial society to an information society, from old media to new media, the overlap between producers and users becomes significantly larger." In our current digital era, work and leisure overlap and this is why one of Generation Y's cultural traits is our disregard is renowned for it's disregard for soulless work. We have been brought up to believe that we can achieve our dreams and get paid, so not only do we want job satisfaction but we don't feel the same sense of loyalty to our employers as previous generations did. Fuck a job, we're art-school dropouts. Before us the industrial revolution was typified by mechanical reproduction and a time when art was one of the defining points of high culture. Now the information revolution is typified by the remix of data rather than just physical material, and so art is considered less precious and denounced to low culture. In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin suggests that original art works project a sense of aura upon the viewer. This aura would instill the audience with awe and admiration as they observed the unique piece of art and this is exactly what made it high culture because art was far more special. However, aura was subsequently diminished when said piece of art was reproduced. “That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art." (Benjamin 215)
This sense of aura was attributed by a number of external attributes; the art works cultural heritage and its history of ownership. As well as the works traditional value considering the skill of the artisan and the expense of the materials used. Previous to the 18th Century blue was a costly colour to mix and produce, therefore paintings with an abundance of blue would socially signify prestige on the part of the artist and in turn would signify wealth on the part of the owner. These ostensive characteristics limited art to the bourgeois and therefore heralded it as high culture, property of high society. But no quality surpassed the importance of its time and place of origin. This is the quintessential essence that makes an original work unique and exactly what a reproduction or a remix lacks, this is where aura is fundamentally lost. “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element; its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be." (Benjamin 214)
The age of mechanical reproduction was born of the bourgeois’ growing demand for such status symbols. This demand created a market for imitation art which was obviously cheaper to generate and naturally lacked aura. This situation continued for centuries until the industrial revolution occurred late in the 18 th Century which gave way to the era of the produced. Before mechanical reproduction, the imitation of art was a long and painstaking process, but industrialisation mechanized this process and freed art from the restraints of tradition and its intrinsic cultural value was freed from the bourgeois elite and distributed to the masses. This is the time Walter Benjamin is most concerned with, the age of mechanical reproduction which freed works of art from the shackles of ritual and place. “Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.” (Benjamin 218)
Now that art’s context was no longer centred on ritual and tradition the cultural connotations of wealth and power were seriously reduced. As a result the public’s appreciation of ritual and place diminished, as society moved into an industrial age the attention of the proletariat focused on the ownership of material goods which were valued by their consumer heritage rather than cultural tradition. In the era of production the distance between high and low art was drastically blurred because mechanical technology severely threatened aura by mass reproductions of copies of originals and arguably, aura was distinguished all together. But for the first time on a national and international scale art was made accessible to those other than the privileged classes. “The end of the obliged sign, reign of the emancipated sign, that all classes will partake equally of.” (Baudrillard 85)
Unfortunately for culture, art was now available to the proletariat and therefore it's significance was industrialised, moving it from the traditional sector to the cult and landing it in the arena of politics. Socially it depreciates to the essence of common culture but in this regard industrialisation now had the potential to democratise art and the exhibition of artistic artifacts and to further open up art's semiotics to the public’s critical attention. This situation is further accentuated by our current digital revolution as our global economy now revolves around the manipulation of data rather than the production and consumption of physical goods. Our digital culture is permeated with networks of information is not only based on remediation but society is now completely relient on digital technologies to maintain our millenial lifestyle. We have entered what Baudrillard called the era of simulation, the third order of simulacra. “Simulation, on the contrary, stems from the utopia of the principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as the reversion and death sentence of every reference.” (Baudrillard 6)
Our era of simulation is epitomised by Web 2.0 and user generated content, which exploits our narcissistic nature through social networks that encourage us to create, edit and broadcast ourselves using any multitude of Me Media tools, paeans of which include; YouTube, Wikipedia and FaceBook. These user-generated content sites, by encouraging us to provide their content they simultaneously give us an intrinsic investment in them, because they furnish the platforms on which our content is created and shared with the other members of the community. On the net, our culture comprises of fabricated web-pages with links to who we know, our associations and a range of other interests. People's online profiles are full of arbitrary links to similar pages of music, art, TV shows, cities, books, film and fashion. Here generation Y exists this is why our remix culture has little originality, we simply remediate previously existing substance and structure to craft new pieces of work and try to re-appropriate it as our own. And so it is for these reasons that Generation Y and our remix culture is considered inferior by our elders.
When Generation Y came into being the notion of the remix came to flourish. Remixing dates back to the early eighties when DJ's first started to ask other members of their musical community for remixes and the manipulation of original source material or the 'text' became more widespread and aggressive. Since then the phenomena has filtered into all mediums such as film, television and fashion. Take for example Kill Bill, Pimp My Ride and custom Nike trainers. Digital media and the internet super-highway was a catalyst for the remix culture, as they provided the instruments and exhibition space for the zeitgeist to manifest. In a time when function follows form, the youth of today are all style and no substance. The hyper-mediated terrain of the world wide web, where Generation Y spend most of their time, consists of application mash-ups, video collages and sonic remixes. If the eighties was defined by post-modernism then the millennia is definitely defined by meta-modernism.
But what does all this Web 2.0 content imply on the part of the main contributors, the prosumers of Generation Y? When the user is also the producer then surveyors and purveyors of the material must appreciate that there is no interiority online. In our homogenous web culture it is vital to distinguish between what is connoted and what is denoted, and essential to understand the difference between the two.
Here Saussure's 'Course in General Linguistics' can help. In his study of semiotics Saussure argues that words are comprised of two elements, their sound and their idea and they only convey meaning because of their difference to other words with other sounds and other ideas within a language and a shared understanding of this between the participants, he says "Language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of others." (Saussure 114) So meaning is interpreted via differentiation and familiarization within a given system i.e. the language in question and in our case English. This structuralist approach to language and meaning can be applied to the signs of culture we are presented with online. The internet's subjugation of the science of signs employs a post‐structuralist idea that produces meaning from organising data into systems as an approach to understanding language, culture and society.
Due to the signs autonomy online the semiotics of any web page, especially that of the social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, through which much of Generation Y operates, must be questioned and not just taken at face value. Facebook describes itself as, “the social utility that connects you with those around you...” If we analyse a typical Facebook profile we are initially presented with a myriad of photography, images and personal information; all powerfully arbitrary signs operating within a stand alone model (the social network) while also having tangible effects in reality. But they are just signifiers pointing the audience to the signified, our deduction from the signifiers of who this person is, what they enjoy doing recreationally and professionally, their friends and their family. The resulting signification is the audience’s idea of the subject in physical reality, their actual presence and interaction and ultimately the voyeur’s gratification. And so the otherwise stagnant signs convey meaning through collective agreement and understanding on the part of the audience, and their value ripples from an online pool of simulacrum in which they originate into the real world into a culture also transfused with ubiquitous simulacra. Singularly all these signs are subjective and tyrannical; they hold no value of truth out of the system in which they exist – yet they have a profound effect on our real world culture. The virtual world is no more than a semantic system of simulacra, and this shallow web culture is bleeding increasingly into our real world.
"Linguistically, the author is never more than the instance writing, just as a i is nothing other than the instance saying i: language knows a 'subject', not a 'person', and this subject, empty outside of the very enunciation which defines it, suffices to make language 'hold together'." (Barthes 145)
As we have discussed in 'Death of the Author' Roland Barthes introduces the idea that for a text to be fully appreciated it must be considered completely within its own context, and without any knowledge of its origin or author, which is fine for the creator of the text but is highly detrimental to their surrounding culture. This essay has focused primarily on Barthes' statement "The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture." Now that this text has epitomised on the internet where the two states of author and reader have become synonymous, the Generation Y prosumer reigns down an eternally regurgitated aesthetic on its hapless culture.
Where previous generations had their movements and their counter-cultures which frequently challenged the status-quo of everyday society and in doing so revolutionized music, fashion and art, Generation Y are the first post-war epoch that has failed to so. Rather than expending the energy to be truly subversive we simply appropriate the different styles from past eras to create a highly superficial culture devoid of any real meaning or principles. However as Barthes argues, there is no such thing as originality and all creative works from any generation, are simply new remediations of old ideas.
"We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author‐God) but a multi‐dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash." (Barthes 146)
Generation Y prosumers are the Author-Gods here, delegating meaning or a lack of, in their user-generated culture of social networks, mash-up remixes and instant gratification. Our elders dismiss us for our lack of authenticity as we constantly appropriate whatever facets of past cultures we take a liking to. But is this our fault? It seems that Barthes' theory has been fully realised with the advent of the world wide web which has coincidentally come into fruition during Generation Y's time, therefore almost advocating our responsibility for this apparent cultural vacuum that is occurring. "The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture." This has always been true, unfortunately for Generation Y and I, it's truer now than it ever was.
