Aside from that, I can think of no way that an artist could more effectively serve the interests of late capitalism than by jettisoning the idea of meaning and mandating the real work of
"recycling, rearranging, reprocessing and reusing of multiplicity of cultural signs."Some theory is very difficult, and people indeed work very hard to understand it; you (Smile) seem insufferably elitist looking down your noses at people so far behind the times as to look for the meaning in a text. I thought one of the characteristics of postmodern thinking was creation without the imposition of rules? Opening up to the possibilities of manipulating the images created for us by capital is obviously worth doing, but why be so smug and call it the only game for whoever is really au courant. That's the real bullshit in postmodernism.
Michael McColl.
(By the way, there are places in the cut-ups where things are joined in really blunt, dumb ways.) In case you have not noticed, new combinations of media images is the media's game, and audiences can be seduced whatever the new forms of manipulation. Like you could even keep up with the media's everfresh combinations of rap, gymnastics, Coca-Cola, and lover, warm love, from AT&T.
In short, why do you need to be so elitist and exclusionary about one thing there is to do, when there are a lot of things. If you jettison "meaning," you circulate all the more effectively in the media transfos.
Michael McColl
Date: Sat, 1 Aug 92 20:58:15 EDT