technology through sampling and montage. According to the technooptimist, however, technology builds the world. The world as a whole seemed to be under construction. By using montage we could actively participate in building the world instead of having it built or rebuilt.

In contrast, with sampling such an illusion is more limited, limited to struggles for cultural hegemony in the spirit of Gramsci. None of the cultural players seriously imagined himself in a political reference of power to the world, not even symbolically. Instead, the paradigm valid at the time was still one of countercultures, subcultures, or one counter to the general public—and as we have seen, this is in fact what the two completely opposing conceptualizations of sampling have in common: they operated out of a subcultural and subculturalistic position. They were less, or not only, concerned with the players' relation to the world, rather only at the price of or to the degree to which it also produced a relation to their peer group, scene or minority.

However, this course of action is closer to a particular variation of aimless fiddling with things

Levi-Strauss described as bricolage than to the ‹sovereign› distance of the montage. It is not about a building designed for a particular purpose, but about a continued activity that can be interrupted and then taken up again at any time; in this it corresponds to the relation between a continuous, dramaturgically undefined evening of dance and a concert, or simply the relation between track and song.

What is more, there is still a further crucial difference: Per definition, one is more closely connected to the material; it has a totem-like meaning for the imaginary or the real community one is speaking on behalf of. They are not examples of external referents, rather they are internal documents. In this respect sampling—if one now considers not only the practice but also the aura of the term—is in some respects also still very close to receptive practices, which is not very surprising in view of its origin in putting records on the turntable. The boundary between producing sampling and mounting and zapping or other so-called interpassive practices at home in front of the television is often fluid. From a social point of view, sampling may often, but not always, stand for