Planner Reads

[via - where you may also find the full lyrics]

This piece of recombinant awesomesness is just beautiful – and, importantly I think, NOT A REMIX.

See, recombinant compositions began as remixes, this is true. But increasingly I have come to think that recombinance is not the same as remixing and this is a lovely example of why.

This composition – and it is a composition – is created from fragments of culture, but is not a remix of any of the pieces.

It is rather something new, created from existing pieces.

[Of course, every new piece of culture is created from others, because culture is inherently recombinant.]

The difference, as I’ve said before, lies in the level of complexity – the signs being deployed have previously been deployed, and that deployment is being incorporated into the composition.

This is what’s known as meta-semotics: a secondary sign, where such is considered to be of a different quality than the meaning of a word in language. The reference of the one [secondary] sign is to another [primary] sign.

[You can argue, of course, that words are in some ways the same, that every word has the weight of all its uses built into its ...