In where-good-ideas-come-from, Steven Johnson cites Robert Darnton's account of how early modern readers in England didn’t simply consume ideas. They remixed them in their commonplace books and engaged with them by writing about them and recontextualizing them against information from other sources.
The idea of creativity and innovation as "remix" seems to be a popular metaphor after postmodernity; in contrast to "pastiche" it is usually used in a positive sense to describe how ideas structure themselves around the de- and re-contextualization of other interpreted ideas.
