Frankenstein’s Monster Comes Home: The ‘Two Cultures’ in Remix

Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley (1818) is the starting point for this reading of remix in relation to authorship and its implications for creative work. The monster in Frankenstein has no single author, or father, and is damned by his mixed parentage as much as by his inability to recreate himself. Alone, he falls into the waste as a product of the divide between poetry and science. The ‘two cultures’ coined by C. P. Snow (1956) address this same divide and lament its dominance in mid twentieth-century intellectual life. But contemporary remix culture that relies on digital media closes this gap as poets now write code and artists are technicians. In my close reading of five remixes I show that origin is no longer relevant in the mixed material realization of processes that are performed or ‘re-authored’ in reception. In these remixes the creator reinterprets by changing the context of remixed elements in the works. The result is textual hybrids that are remixed further in reception. Contributor: James Barrett is an adjunct and PhD candidate in the Department of Language Studies and HUMlab at Umeå University in Sweden. Barrett’s PhD thesis (to be defended in the Fall 2013) is entitled "The Ergodic Revisited: Spatiality as a Governing Principle of Reading Digital Narrative", which examines how reading is governed by the spatial in four works of digital literature. Barrett teaches and has published on digital interaction, cultural studies, literature and narrative design in 2D and 3D media. His blog is http://www.soulsphincter.com/ One text that shows the disaster of the divorce between science and poetry would be the one by Mary Shelley whose name is Frankenstein. Avital Ronell, Body/No Body (in conversation with Werner Herzog) Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley (1818) is an early critical and artistic portrayal of the cultural divergence between the poetic and the technical, and is today recognised as a significant reaction against this split as part of English Romanticism.1 The disaster of Frankenstein, recently characterized by the philosopher Avital Ronell as the ‘divorce between science and poetry,’ can be read as an early commentary on the separation between literature and the physical sciences. However, Frankenstein is more than a Romantic novel that laments this division, and it is more than a historical point in literature. Frankenstein considers origin and creativity in the contexts of emerging technologies and culture. The torment of the monster in Frankenstein is the rejection by its creator and the subsequent banishment from its desired ‘nature’, that of human society and culture, into the loneliness and inhumanity of the natural world where "Nature decayed around me, and the sun became heatless" (Shelley 207). In this sense Frankenstein considers the destruction of craft, or of 1 I avoid the classifications of Gothic and proto-science fiction in relation to Frankenstein, concentrating on the philosophical aspects of the work in relation to the creative act and technological science.