Compost is a way to take things and return them to the soil to grow the next thing. Even human shit can be done into soil. Why do this? consider the natural state of things; a plant draws up the nutrients from the ground to fuel growth. The deer comes and eats the plant, then shits out the things it cannot use. This shit ends up on the ground, rather than a sewage or septic container. Small, minuscule creatures as well as natural processes return those nutrients into the soil in a form usable by the plants. The deer then continues to feed.
Eventually the deer itself dies and is incorporated for the next generation of plants and creatures. This is a semi-closed system (Sunlight is the main source of the plants after all, and also the elements that were placed here many billions of years ago from wherever) and it has stabilized into a process that reuses everything that it can (this is why the human garbage does not always breakdown; creatures did not evolve with plastics and other products. If we don't succeed to wiping out of the entire biosphere, it is likely that more plasto-vores will evolve over the coming eons). It recycles by necessity and these processes can be exploited by the gardener or the farmer to always keep the soil fecund and healthy. (there are many other things that go on that make composting beneficial as a way to create healthy soil and to reduce garbage but this is far enough for our purposes today).
We can, similarly, do this with cultural ephemera and artefacts. Songs, advertisements, writing, images, film. We can take them and break them down into varying degrees of granularity for reuse for new cultural fruits to be grown. Collage, remix, sampling, cut-up, etc. Now this is a process that has some antecedent in the way that culture naturally evolves, building on previous things, but the advent of methods of recording those things means we aren't limited to mere "inspiration" by copying a folk melody or taking influence from Cervantes. We can take an actual thing, place it into our cultural composting methodology and turn it into material for a new cultural crop.
I can find the newspaper clipping and re-arrange the thing and turn it into a piece of new fiction. And with the continuing destruction of tangible cultural artefacts and movement to digital simulacra of objects, creating through the re-use of digital ephemera becomes a nearly costless endeavor at the level of the individual composter (the society-level cost of cyberspace is a different matter).
Today's culture continues to eat itself; most culture of the modern capitalist era is merely assembly line clones. it is not so much that the things are being recycled as it is that they are like a miscoded genetic machine that continues to produce teratogenic copies of itself with an increasingly grotesque visage. This is not the primitive reuse and evolution of earlier eras, these are tumors and cancerous growths. Like inbreeding, the cultural gene pool eventually becomes so withered it produces infertile sports incapable of basic functions necessary for life.
We can subvert this process by composting the mutant detritus for the creation of truly new things that are nutritious and tasteful rather than bland paste that has been a melanoma extruded from a nozzle into the always open mouth of the consumer. It is the only way in the days of wallowing in mountains of the past to create anew.
GOBACK