« 106: The Slow Tread | Main | 108: The Tongue of One » December 08, 2004

107: Re con text

I've been using the phrase "the recontextualization of symbolism" a bit the last few weeks and maybe I ought to explain myself before I fall into some linguistic oubliette of my own making. "Recontextualization" is a word that I've lifted from Phil Easter's Stone Glass Steel project. As SGS, Easter builds dark ambient and noise tracks from the split and shattered remains of the musical work of others. This is sampling gone to an extreme end where everything is sourced from something else, mashed, mangled and molded until it forms something new. Easter's efforts are to bring a new "context" to the music, the revelation of a new facet of the old and stale. Easter's work isn't about playing sample-spotting, but rather about loosening our own self-created strangleholds on our brains. The past gives birth to the future by the machinations of the present.

In a textual world, in a religiously-charged world, we reinvent and recontextualize symbolism all the time. In fact, man's largest recontextualization project was the Catholic Church and its invention of Jesus. I read an interesting observation recently in Francis Wheen's How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World (it's a serious book with a big yellow duck on the cover) that opined that fear causes a reduction. If we are afraid, our first attempt is to leave the immediate area. If this fear exists on a cultural level (and we can't, obviously, all emmigrate), then the reaction is to turn back to a "simpler" time, a time when the world was less complex and more reliably black and white. Wheen was speaking of Iran and Britian at the end of the 1970s, but I think the statement applies just as readily today in the United States.

But you can't turn back the clock. Nations and political bodies around the world have been trying for decades to remake their world in a more idealized vision -- a vision warped by their belief that we can forget cultural evolution (or that we even want to). There is a concerted effort to bury one's head in the sand and ignore the mutability of symbolism, to mis-believe that nothing every changes. Everything we touch is altered by our perception -- by our presence, by our contact, by our interred history which is dug free again by connection with external stimulii -- and this extends to our "symbols."

All things evolve. Everything becomes new. And we aren't liberating ourselves from anything if we ignore the forward movement of our conscious and unconscious tools of communication.

Posted by Teppo at December 8, 2004 11:05 PM

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