In the Mix: The Potential Convergence of Literature and New Media in Jonathan Lethem's 'The Ecstasy of Influence'

Remix Culture In various theories, surveys, and critical readings of new media objects, the predominant focus tends to be the visual: digital film, net art, digital photography, video games.2 These are formed around multiple theories of the information age, including those that position digital objects as open processes rather than closed works.3 Discussions of digital texts specifically mostly concentrate on textual forms that are explicitly new media (such as electronic literature, hypertexts, and other forms of hyperlinked narratives) or on the materiality of both print and digital text objects in light of new media theory.4 This article in contrast will highlight works in the digital era from a more opaque vantage point, considering a text that is not necessarily a digital object but that uses modes of representation associated with new media. Lethem's essay "Ecstasy of Influence" conforms to the broad cultural dispensation toward the remix, for he manipulates others' material and reframes it in an alternative form. [...]as I will go on to discuss, he does so in a way that emphasizes the degree to which digital technology simplifies these processes; Lethem's success (his seamless reappropriations) are a kind of metaphor for how any text is produced through a medium where all information is, at base, abstract and equal (digitized data).