III/1/A The Digital Archive

In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault retroactively sets out the methodology that shapes his early work, which excavates discursive formations that he here idiosyncratically terms "the archive," defined as:

first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events... [that] are grouped together in distinct figures, composed together in accordance with multiple relations, maintained or blurred in accordance with specific regularities; ...it is that which, at the very root of the statement-event, and in that which embodies it, defines at the outset the system of its enunciability (129)

Rendering the archive as a the structuring apparatus for "statements," the historically contingent framework of what can be conceived and articulated, may seem like a counterintuitive reappropriation of a commonsense expression. In its colloquial usage, "archive" denotes a localized arrangement of files, "a place in which public records or other important historic documents are kept," according to the OED (my emphasis). For Foucault, however, the material dimension is not absent – "statements" only exist as "events," inscribed in a particular time and space – it is folded into the systematicity that is also a defining characteristic of archives, which require a rubric for indexing and retrieval to be anything more than a meaningless accumulation. Another dimension that might seem underrepresented in Foucault's Archaeology is subjectivity: who is generating these statements, and by what mechanism? I would propose that Foucault is not excluding subjectivity from his account, but rather repudiating a specific model of the transcendental subject: "the promise that one day the subject... will once again be able to appropriate, to bring back under his sway, all those things that are kept at a distance by difference, and find in them what might be called his abode'' (12). While conventional wisdom marks a break in Foucault's work between the archaeologies and the subsequent genealogies, which theorize the subject much more concertedly, in The Archaeology of Knowledge (as the above passage demonstrates) he is already conceptualizing subjectivity as dispersed, discontinuous, heteronymous (all the characteristics he claims more explicitly for discourse). Archaeology arguably depends on this poststructuralist model of subjectivity for its coherence, and thus it's not purely due to a coincidence or rupture that it is Foucault (eminent theorist of sexuality) who founds archaeology as a discipline. Foucault does diverge openly from psychoanalysis, most crucially in understanding subjectivity as an exteriority materialized in bodily practices and disciplines (like speech acts, sex, or punishment), rather than as an interiority (the depth model of the unconscious, repression and so on). Nonetheless, his work in this area depends fundamentally on psychoanalysis as the first field to posit that subjects are necessarily fragmentary and self-absent (which is precisely why they invent compensatory fantasies of plenitude like transcendental subjectivity). At its inception, the archaeological method searches for the intersection of discursive regularities and material bodies, while insisting on the irreducibility of difference and desire.

In his book Archive Fever, Derrida more fully unravels the theory of the archive, including the subjective and political strata that remain more submerged in Foucault. Psychoanalysis as an archival framework is Derrida's starting point, in its constitutive reliance on "representational models of the psychic apparatus as an apparatus for perception, for printing, for recording, for topic distribution of places of inscription, of ciphering" (15). Just as, for Lacan, subjectivity is a radical exteriority, produced in a heteronomous relation with what is irreducibly outside the subject and yet most intimate to him, "[the archive] is entrusted to the outside, to an external substrate" (8) — elementally, "there is no archive without consignation in an external place which assures the possibility of memorization, of repetition, of reproduction, or of reimpression" (11). Thus, media technologies and the mechanism of desire are irrevocably linked, in that both require inscription in a substrate which in turn necessitates absence and deferral. The archive, as the fulcrum between discursive organization and embodied record, also articulates both media and the psyche with systems of power. As Derrida explains, etymologically the word references the house of the superior magistrates: the place itself, but also and unavoidably the site of their ideologically constructed institutional sovereignty. This is why Derrida can posit that archives are located at the "intersection of the topological and the nomologicial, of the place and the law, of the substrate and the authority" (2-3) – I would call this locus hybrid. In keeping with both psychoanalytic and Foucauldian theories of resistance, and with the operation of hybrids at large, the archive as pivot, as boundary or "passage," as "the unstable limit between public and private, between the family, the society, and the State... between oneself and oneself" (90), unhinges such oppositions even as it constitutes them. As precisely the possibility of repeating, recalling, recording (and thus externalizing, distancing, deferring) knowledge, the archive "always works, and a priori, against itself" (12). Archaeology thus mobilizes the archive not to impose order or transparency, but as a technology of theory, to cross-index media, discourse, and subjectivity. It is one approach to reconciling the structuring economies of domination with deconstruction's challenge to any absolute arrival or fixity.

I am setting aside, for the moment, more granular debates about whether particular new media formations qualify as reconfigured archives or whether, rather, they constitute a radical transformation in the relationship of information with power. Certainly there is much to be gained by enumerating historical and formal specificities, but from this vantage on the archive as a fantasmatic topology, I am skeptical of claims that the internet (for example) is a more perfect, more complete, more enduring archive, as if the former deficiencies were incidental rather than intrinsic. I also remain unconvinced by Wolfgang Ernst's contrasting proposition that computer networks open up certain liberatory possibilities, since the virtualization of archival space does away with barriers to access, which depend on the literal sequestering of knowledge, and the fluidity of digital information thwarts methods of capturing it in static hierarchies. Ernst suggests that if we can extricate ourselves from the nostalgic "metaphor of archival spatial order" (109) to which internet discourse clings, we have the opportunity of "dealing with the virtual an-archive of multi-media in a way beyond the conservative desire of reducing it to classificatory order again" (120). He offers a detailed diagnosis of the internet's qualities: the ecumenical capacity of multimedia, which "emulates" any medium (words, sounds, images) in code; the shift from fixed, "space-based" material storage to dynamic, "time-based" streaming storage; rhizomatic, interactive, ephemeral memory; a decentralized, non-hierarchical "machinic net of finite automata... defined rather by the circulation of discrete states" (119). This catalogue problematically minimizes the importance of physical hardware to both storage and access, and moreover even Ernst notes that "although the Internet still orders knowledge apparently without providing it with irreversible hierarchies (on the visible surface), the authoritative archive of protocols is more rigid than any traditional archive has ever been" (120). It is not so easy to transcend the strictures of substrates and regularities embodied in the archive.

Alexander Galloway offers another fruitful blueprint for the architecture of the internet in his book Protocol, a term he defines as "conventional rules that govern the set of possible behavior patterns within a heterogeneous system... [and] a technique for achieving voluntary regulation within a contingent environment" (7), which "facilitates peer-to-peer relationships between autonomous entities... engenders localized decision making, not centralized... is robust, flexible, and universal" (82) and "operates largely outside institutional, governmental, and corporate power" (244). This technique is not merely technological, but describes a new configuration of control that is characteristic of late capitalism at large, one which is just as horizontal, localized, and networked as the field of production on which it operates. Rather than enforcing prohibitions, it organizes possibilities and enables free movement within them -- often mobilizing technology to do so. Galloway suggests that today we commonly experience hybrid grids of control, and offers the anatomy of the internet an as example: governed by a "dialectical tension" wherein "one machine [exemplified by TCP/IP] radically distributes control into autonomous locales, [and] the other machine [exemplified by DNS] focuses control into rigidly defined hierarchies" (8). Protocol, then, is radically effective in a postmodern environment not because it fully supplants vertical models of discipline with horizontal and flexible management, but because it marries them in a composite system in which their contradiction is precisely what is most productive – again, my definition of hybridity. We could identify an analogous strategy at work in BitTorrent, for example, which compromises between contrasting trends -- indexing hubs allow for cooperative moderation of submissions, which ensures their accuracy and quality, but are also vulnerable to downtime from system failures or legal crackdowns, whereas distributed networks are resilient and adaptive but provide no guarantees of reliability -- by combining centralized (torrent sites and trackers) and decentralized (collective uploading of fragmented files) elements. Likewise, in proprietary fan-driven content initiatives, top-down and bottom-up tactics are combined when the constraining threat of legal muscle is overlaid on a structured platform for creative license.

Even as Galloway continually asserts the "special existence of protocol in the 'privileged' physical media of bodies" (12), though, the status of this materiality in his text remains, in my opinion, ambiguous. Because protocols "encapsulate information inside a technically defined wrapper, while remaining relatively indifferent to the content of information" (7), they veer perilously toward information theory's symptomatic indifference to medium in favor of aspects that can be modeled as universal. Galloway seems far more interested in protocol's cross-platform facility across heterogeneous components than in the vagaries of this hardware, whether technological or organic -- it's hard to grasp how, when he claims that "the key to protocol's formal relations is in the realm of the immaterial software" (72), he isn't contradicting his insistence on materiality elsewhere. Ultimately, Galloway tries to steer a hybrid course here too, concluding that "protocol is not a theory of mind. Nor... is protocol a theory of the body... protocol is a theory of confluence of life and matter" (103). What the body of work on archives, as I've glossed it here, suggests is that materiality will always appear as a more or less overdetermined, slippery, and highly compromised category in studies of media. As such, Galloway's equivocation may be a constructive move, akin to the difficulty of holding the statement-event in focus in Foucault's account of the archive as "the law of what can be said" (as, dare I say, a protocol). This semiotic heritage leads us toward discursive hybrids that are crucial to understanding media reproduction as a complex system.

III/1/B Telecommunicating

With protocol, Galloway assembles a theory of power within networks, as both the technical organization of linked computer systems and the more intangible diagram of late capitalism's horizontal flows and affinities. Networks have also been a figure in semiotics, at least since Barthes mobilized the term in S/Z, writing, in a striking evocation of the distributed model, that in his "ideal text, the networks are many and interact... this text is a galaxy of signifiers... it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances" (5). What a large body of Derrida's work elaborates are the distances inherent to this configuration, the gaps between any possible moments of intelligibility, which render all signification perpetually in transit through some technological apparatus. The primary apparatus, for Derrida, is writing itself: the necessary absence of a message's receiver from the site of its sending, the necessary inscription of signs in an iterable form, the necessary reproduction of the play of meaning through this distance-spanning repetition. As Richard Dienst points out, in his deconstructionist meditation on television, this constitutes a critique of "the ideal of the perfectly functioning writing machine [that] is the ideal of all communications theory" (131). Dienst is precise about how power is deployed within this schema, suggesting that, despite its irreducible excess and mobility, and like archives or protocols, textuality is structured by "the contingent disposition of signifying forces" such that any inscription is "a transaction in a specific signifying economy" (132). He brings his discussion around to particular media, rather than writing in the abstract, by positing that "different arrangements of senders in general and receivers in general will produce specific kinds of representations, built to endure different kinds of absence" (134). For Dienst, television (rather than digital media, as the inheritance is more often traced) is an exemplar of a Derridian economy of telecommunication.

Dienst implies that television participates in the same challenge to or compromise of the ideology of the unified, bounded, self-present work as poststructuralism by literalizing the notion of perpetual transmission (television, in fact, requires no substrate more fixed than the pulse of electrons in a continually scanning beam, though today it is more often digital ). This property was inaugurated theoretically by Raymond Williams, who called it "flow," which for Dienst names TV as "an entire network of transmissions, both linear and erratic, humming with excess representational power and clattering with unfinished representational frames" (137). In a lengthy critique, however, Dienst observes that flow doesn't necessarily live up to its deconstructive potential in either theory or experience. For Williams, flow is a strategy of domination more than of resistance: the seamless and never-ending succession of fragments offers a mesmerizingly rootless immediacy that serves to "capture an audience." Jane Feuer builds on this work with a parallel claim for "liveness," which she identifies as a fantasy of transparency and co-presence that sutures over television's formal and ideological disjunctures. The technical capability for live broadcast, though it is very rarely utilized, acts as an alibi for television's (and telecommunication's) fundamental disunity. Television's capacity to represent itself as unmediated – a desire that Derrida traces to the dawn of Western thought, but which nonetheless has its historical contingencies as it cycles – relies on the articulation of its physical form with a discursive scaffolding, a structuring archive that activates the whole gendered, classed, raced organization of the socioeconomic field.

As a historically postmodern telecommunication, however, television doesn't enforce its illusion of immediacy with the same tactics or rigidity as classical or modernist modes. It fails, as any writing machine must, to close the gaps between senders and receivers, but incorporates these failures into its signifying economy. TV doesn't depend for its value on originality or origins, instead embracing repetition, artificiality, and transmission as its basis. This is what enables Dienst to hold television up as a deconstructive formation, despite the persistence of desires for unmediated plenitude. The cultural studies approach to television, which emerged in the vicinity of Williams, likewise celebrates television's open, mobile textuality, often in terms reminiscent of Barthes' "writerly text": "a perpetual present... before the infinite play of the world (the world as function) is traversed, intersected, plasticized... which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages" (5). Dienst cautions against the stance of the "semiotic libertine" who, exemplified by John Fiske, assumes that "viewers are free to make 'meanings' and 'pleasures'" from amongst television's "rich morsels of indeterminate meaning, waiting to be brought home and blended into each viewer's polysemic, kaleidoscopic experience" (31). While the so-called "active audience" model may certainly lack some of the complexity and scope of poststructuralist and media theory – taking refuge in moments of both undue fluidity (a diluted patina of "resistance") and undue stability (the viewer as a site of full legibility) – I am not convinced that it is either so simplistic or so irreconcilable with deconstruction as Dienst indicates.

Television stakes its economic, cultural, psychic preeminence on its technological and discursive capacity to inhabit mobile flows, continually reproducing an inexhaustible intertextual economy that teeters precariously on the historical scaffold of artist, work, and reader. Audience studies, at its best, has mapped new, networked interactions between representation, signification, production, and domination with the subtlety merited by this postmodern mediascape. Just as methodologies forged in the context of print may be inadequate to broadcast and digital media, ideologies and other hegemonic systems, such as the mechanism of ownership and intellectual property, may find themselves inadequate to the problems of televisual control. I'd venture that it's no accident that, among its potential web of connotations, Barthes's title S/Z refers to the queerly gendered and sexed cathexis between male protagonist Sarrasine and the castrato La Zambinella, using the format now conventional for slash pairings. Irrepressible homoeroticism is only one collateral of the unruly "writerly" possibilities of media in transmission, and their fertility gathers new richness as texts are materialized in new media forms. TV telecommunicates between subjects, codes, technology and power with a complexity that is irreducible, and this complexity continues to evolve and emerge. Tara McPherson, for example, insightfully excavates the imbrication of television and internet discourses. She argues that the web annexes familiar ideologies like "liveness," reconfiguring televisual fantasies to promise more perfect immediacy and mobility while insidiously porting over mass media's dominations and limits as well. McPherson encourages us, in archaeological fashion, to "think of these modes as both specific to the medium of the web itself, as related to its materiality and, in some ways, independent from content, and also as ideologies packaged and promoted within certain websites, that is, as corporate strategies" (460 [VCR]). This demonstrates one approach to the problem of how the expansive media economy, already a massively interdependent nexus of technology, discourse, and subjectivity, develops and morphs over time – a question that is crucial to the future of television as we know it. In the next section, I explore several archaeological models of the process of media hybridization, which remains circumscribed by the archival bounds of protocol while blooming with excess reproductive possibilities.

III/1/C Media Hybrids

For a nuanced theory of media development, we could certainly do worse than Raymond Williams's critique of facile notions of both fully determined and determining technology in Television: Technology and Cultural Form. We wouldn't want to dispute, surely, his proposal that media form and social context are mutually constitutive. But while Williams takes Marshall McLuhan as his techno-determinist straw man, this formalist method is not necessarily so far removed from the acuity that Williams advocates. McLuhan's aphoristic pronouncement that "the medium is the message" is a ready scapegoat but, in keeping with Hayles' emphasis on "embodiment" as the effect of fusing content and its pathways, McLuhan is signaling his more rarefied idea that all media are prosthetic amplifications of the human body – placing him in the orbit of poststructuralist connections between inscription, substrate, and subjectivity. McLuhan’s theory of media thereby raises the question of evolution, coupling its biological and historical permutations. His insistence on the determining influence of technologies on the reproduction of their corresponding individual and social formations appears to leave little room for reciprocity: media "alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance," until "we become what we behold" (18-19). If man [sic] is "the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image" (41), it is the copy (or at the very least, the prosthesis) that replicates the original, raising the question of how man "finds ever new ways of modifying his technology" (46). McLuhan answers with recourse to a medical model of bio-equilibrium: "In the physical stress of superstimulation of various kinds, the central nervous system acts to protect itself by a strategy of amputation or isolation of the offending organ, sense, or function. Thus, the stimulus to new invention is the stress of acceleration of pace and increase of load" (42). For example, it was "the pressure of new burdens resulting from the acceleration of exchange by written and monetary media" that led to the innovation of the wheel (42). That is, cultural formations like capitalism are yoked to physiology through technology, and their co-evolution is driven by the tensions and excesses they generate, which necessitate the constant adaptation of the (perceptive and social) body. Reproduction is therefore a dynamic rather than a linear procedure, far more complex in McLuhan's view than his totalizing catchphrases evince out of context.

Hybridization figures in this matrix as the coupling of divergent media, which "interact and spawn new progeny" (49): "The hybrid or the meeting of two media," McLuhan writes, "is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born" (55). Since "it is from such intensive hybrid exchange and strife of ideas and forms that the greatest social energies are released, and from which arise the greatest technologies" (47), this generative process is associated with historical development and transformation, linking hybridity to global temporality and geography. McLuhan is concerned, in particular, with the contemporary "electric age" as a radical break from the previous era, wherein "all such extension of our bodies, including cities, will be translated into information systems" (57). As a further instantiation of this shift to late capitalism that McLuhan grasped in 1964, digital networks are hybrid in at least two senses: 1) Like cyborgs, they merge human and machine components into a composite artifact. Hayles, for example, maintains that the internet severs the bodies "enacted" as material on one side of the screen and "represented" as information on the other, only to rejoin them via the technological interface (Posthuman). 2) They are one pivotal site where hybrid intercourse among media themselves is reshaping our subjective and social landscapes.

Several recent works have revisited the theoretical question of media hybridization as a historical process, within a framework more thoroughly informed by the methodologies of poststructuralism and archaeology than McLuhan's visionary fancies. In Remediation, Bolter and Grusin return to the scene of the Williams-McLuhan dispute, stating that "to avoid both technological determinism and determined technology, we propose to treat social forces and technical forms as two aspects of the same phenomenon: to explore digital technologies themselves as hybrids of technical, material, social, and economic facets" (77). This reiterates the negotiated materialist stance I established above, formulating the interpenetration of substrates and discourses explicitly as hybridity. Bolter and Grusin convincingly inhabit this terrain via their signature term "remediation," or "the representation of one medium in another" (45). In fact, all media operate by remediation, since a medium is, by definition, "that which appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real" (65). Remediation relies on a particular hybrid pairing, as interdependent and contradictory as all such duos: that of "immediacy" (the inclination to efface the interface) and "hypermediacy" (the inclination to valorize the interface). These poles "oscillate" as each claim to a more transparent and authentic representation calls attention to the apparatus of media form (19). While Bolter and Grusin observe that the two tendencies are in conflict throughout the history of media, they suggest that this interplay is especially acute and significant in the digital age, and a number of their examples detail ways that television and the internet, specifically, remediate each other. Transmedia franchising, or "pouring a familiar content into another media form... to spread the content over as many markets as possible," is one instance of remediation by "repurposing" and this strategy's tensions: "Each of those forms takes part of its meaning from the other products in a process of honorific remediation and at the same time makes a tacit claim to offer an experience that the other forms cannot" (68). Such endemic variances among desires, ideologies, technologies and profit models that work at cross-purposes to each other account for some of the vertigo that accompanies convergence. Bolter and Grusin themselves propose that these transactions can be read as queer: "hypermediacy is multiple and deviant in its suggestion of multiplicity," and following Judith Butler, "as the sum of all unnatural modes of representation... [it] always reemerges in every era, no matter how rigorously technologies of transparency may try to exclude it. Transparency needs hypermediacy" (84) in order to appear natural. Thus, Bolter and Grusin have again outlined a scenario that posits irrepressible deviance as inherent to the turbulent network of mediation, creating problems of control that erupt with particular urgency in today's convergent formations.

In Media Ecologies, Fuller offers an analogous rendering of the centrality of queer orientations to media economies, though more obliquely. He asserts that "'hidden' dimensions of invention and combination are embedded and implicit in particular dynamics and affordances of media systems and their parts" (8). These deviant vectors grapple with the mass reproduction of the "standard object... a mode of knowing and producing that effects limitations on other forms of understanding and use," that is nonetheless only a precarious "'settlement' of powers, affordances, and interpretations" (9). While Fuller's configuration is more inclined to the perils of "subtext" than Bolter and Grusin's – with the scare-quoted "hidden" submerged within a provisionally stable hegemony, in contrast to the parallel status of "unnatural" hypermedia – both accounts maintain that non-normative movement is integral to representational flows, and must always be negotiated in the operation of any nexus of power. Fuller adopts the term "ecology," which is deliberately overdetermined, to "indicate the massive and dynamic interrelation of processes and objects, being and things, patterns and matter" (2). From an ecological vantage, "the only way to find things out about what happens when complex objects such as media systems interact is to carry out such interactions... Every element is an explosion, a passion or capacity settled temporarily into what passes for a stable state" (1). Because of this complexity, Fuller's theory remains intentionally inchoate, performed rather than stated in a series of case studies. This simulation approach is engaging and exemplary of the networked relations I'm trying to activate here, but restricts the transferability of his model.

The simulation of complex systems is precisely the ecology that N. Katherine Hayles surveys more expansively in My Mother Was a Computer, which founds a theory of media, in the broadest sense, on principles ported from the scientific study of emergence. In the field, this term refers to "properties [that] come about from interactions between components... [and that] typically cannot be predicted because [of] the complex feedback loops that develop" (25). Hayles recognizes a kinship between her project and Bolter and Grusin's "remediation," wherein the dynamic interaction between immediacy and hypermediacy represents a "coevolution of apparently opposed trends... characteristic of complex systems with multiple feedback loops" (32). She argues, however, that their label (with the re- prefix implying an origin, even as they insist that "all mediation is remediation") is limited by "locating the starting point for the cycles in a particular locality and medium" rather than in "multiple causality," and by "the specific connotation of applying [only] to immediate/hypermediate strategies" (33). Hayles ventures a more sweeping intervention with her term "intermediation," repurposed from scientist Nicholas Gessler and elsewhere. Intermediation refers to "multicausal and multilayered hierarchical systems, which entail distributed agency, emergent processes, unpredictable coevolutions, and seemingly paradoxical interactions between convergent and divergent processes" (31). These systems function by generating what are known scientifically as "dynamic hierarchies" (Hayles later redefines them as "heterarchies"): massively emergent networks wherein the complexity precipitated at one level becomes the raw material for further levels, producing even greater complexity. Thus, intermediation is characterized by the confluence of the following conditions (SLSA Code conference, 02 November 2007):

1. Different systems of increasing complexity
2. Different media
3. Results of lower-level system(s) re-represented in higher-level system(s)
4. Heterarchical dynamics (feedback/forward loops interconnect media)
5. Emergent complexity

As Hayles amply demonstrates, this constitutes a rich and versatile framework for conceptualizing a wide range of reproductive and evolutionary phenomena. I'd contend that it is the most rigorous heir to McLuhan's reveries about media hybridization.

Key sites of intermediation in Hayles's schema include the co-evolution of language and code, of humans and machines, and of analog and digital (which, in practice, always appear in combination). I propose that intermediation is also a fruitful model for analyzing transmedia formations as mobilized in today's entertainment industry. One of Hayles's aims is to reconfigure the typical understanding of textuality, which remains largely a relic of literature even as works move online: "rather than holding up as an ideal a unitary convergent work to which variants can be subordinated," she urges, "we should conceptualize texts as clustered in assemblages whose dynamics emerge from all the texts participating in the cluster " (9). She applies this topography explicitly to transmedia, if only in passing, when she mentions the constellation of novels, promotional web pages, fan web pages, and other official and unofficial material surrounding many computer games or feature films as an example of such a "Work as Assemblage" (105-106). Analogous to Foucault's move in The Archaeology of Knowledge, Hayles's methodology requires reconceiving subjectivity and authorship as "dispersed, fragmented, and heterogeneous... multiple in many senses, both because they are collectivities in and among themselves, and also because they include nonhuman as well as human actors" (106-107). This enmeshing within and between the variegated levels of a dynamic heterarchy (people and computers, television and the internet, corporations and fans) also leads Hayles to reiterate that the WaA's "components take forms distinctive to the media in which they flourish, so the specificities of media are essential to understanding its morphing configurations," and that "a robust account of materiality focusing on the recursive loops between physicality and textuality is essential" (107). Intermediation thus incorporates the vital theoretical vistas I've attempted to bring into focus here, taking a hybrid outlook on the constitution, propagation, and interpenetration of discursivity, subjectivity, technology, and materiality. Implicit in Hayles's account is a critique of "convergence" as the buzzword is sometimes rendered: "the current tendency to regard the computer as the ultimate solvent that is dissolving all other media into itself" (31). The critics discussed in this section reject the notion that a formerly discrete assortment of media (computation, print, television, telephony, etc.) are converging into a digital alignment wherein they are unified or interchangeable. Instead, as archaeologists, they excavate the protean, embodied networks through which media constantly re-represent each other, and seek to chart the unpredictable and irreducible complexity of these economies. In this methodological spirit, I now turn to question of how a particular transmedia brood reproduces itself as a dynamic heterarchy, with attention to its protocols and other mechanisms of control, and to their junctions of excess stress and potential failure.

III/2/A Be Fruitful

Battlestar Galactica's narratives often revolve around the problem of reproduction, in multiple literal and figurative senses. Its very premise, a machine uprising, is an object lesson about reproduction gone runaway: any attempt to contain the propagation of a dynamic system, any attempt (whether heteronormative or human-normative) to limit its development into greater degrees of complexity and hybridity, is likely to go awry. The program's ardent audience suggests a similar moral about the fragility of technological control and corresponding survival tactics. While the Colonial Fleet adopts a restrictive scheme, forbidding computer networks because they're vulnerable to Cylon hacks, Battlestar Galactica's Powers That Be open their textual networks to fandom's hive mind, harnessing its procreative excess to drive a web of modes and sites of engagement. Diegetically, BSG struggles with this as yet unsettled interplay between conventional discipline and more fluid strategies of mediation. In terms of reproduction itself, the program has certainly been criticized for a reactionary fixation on the heterosexual couple and its procreative potential. Weighed down by President Laura Roslin's running whiteboard tally of humanity's remaining numbers, the Colonials adopt a recognizably conservative reproductive politics in their post-apocalyptic desperation to make the total go up rather than down (going so far as to ban abortion, for example). Cylons, for their part, as monotheistic religious fundamentalists, believe their god has commanded them to "be fruitful," a conviction that inspires various initiatives to birth a Cylon-human hybrid heir, from nightmarish "farms" where humans are held captive for breeding purposes to a ploy to ensnare Karl "Helo" Agathon (a Fleet officer) in a loving relationship with Sharon (a Model Eight) to make a baby the old fashioned way. However, these orthodox diagrams inevitably unravel into far more complex and ambiguous familial networks: Sharon falls in love with Helo in earnest and defects from the Cylon cause to be with him; Lieutenant Kara "Starbuck" Thrace must grapple with her role in the life of a toddler the Cylons claim is her daughter, whether the baby is the product of her violation in the farms or of a ruse that leaves them with no blood ties; even the most traditional family -- Specialist Cally, Chief Tyrol, and their son Nicky -- are revealed to be part Cylon when the Chief is outed at the end of season three. Thus, the predicament the program raises -- how to evolve while controlling runaway reproductive energies -- remains unresolved, as familiar hierarchies of containment are challenged while the outcome of the heterarchies that multiply in their place remains to be seen. And the same could be said for the developing system of televisual reproduction, Battlestar Galactica's extratextual ecology, as it attempts to spawn hybrid offspring which could lead television to a new homeland or to a final apocalypse.

Reproduction is a question of media technology: to make a copy requires a means of transmitting an encoded identity from the old body to the new. As with any transmission or iteration, this gap is dangerous to fantasies of presence or unity. BSG's Colonial Fleet contends with problems of inscription and deciphering: how to maintain historical memory and records after the holocaust; how to legitimize and register one true account of guilt and innocence; how to translate the map to their promised land which is coded in myths and oracles, in holy texts, and in the stars themselves. If the Cylons appear as a mortal threat to humanity, it is perhaps because of their superhuman facility at copying: like fans, who can interface with and share a vast digital archive at will, Cylons can jack into their machines and "download" their consciousness upon death. The heart of their ships is a "Hybrid": an ethereally beautiful humanform biomass integrated into its data conduits. While the human leaders are attempting to interpret sacred stories, Cylon gurus are listening for prophetic messages that might be encrypted in the Hybrid's babble, the nonsensical stream-of-consciousness of the computer itself. And yet these advanced technologies are not without their limitations: from what we know of them, Cylons have no "live" linkup with each other that would allow them to communicate wirelessly and in realtime. As per the stipulations of the archival mechanism, information must always be embodied -- literally, here, in a humanform body (while there are many copies of each model, a unique identity can be materialized in only one copy at a time). Violence is indelible, its memory transmitted from one painful download to the next like trauma inscribed on the unconscious (Freud's "mystic writing pad"). The Cylon body is itself a medium, and to network with each other Cylons seem to operate by touch, placing their hands into a liquid datastream to communicate. This corporeal intimacy can evidently bring pleasure as well as agony, judging from the Hybrid's orgasmic expression when instructed to initiate the ship's faster-than-light jump; it is a small step from haptics to erotics. The deferral inherent to mediation structurally mirrors the deferral inherent to desire, and the necessary intercession of a material substrate means that desire will always be reaching through bodies when it yearns to touch unmediated information (Three kills herself repeatedly as a spiritual journey, in hopes that in the instant of disembodiment between one form and the next she will see truth). In this yearning, in their vain quests to find stable meanings, identities, and lineages, humans and Cylons come to share common ground. Industry and fans likewise cohabit the conditions of embodied media formations, with their circulatory passages where promiscuous relations, mongrels, and runaways can germinate, but their reproductive doctrines and tactics may still be at war.

III/2/B Skin Jobs

Since these negotiations of reproduction and desire are rooted in media technologies, it is fitting that, in Battlestar Galactica's symbology, most figures of danger and deviance are displaced onto the mediated bodies of the Cylons. We could view Cylons through the lens of technicity, which references taxonomies that are analogous to ethnicity, but derived based on technological variations. This move operates bilaterally, reconfiguring historically anterior categories of racial and ethnic otherness in terms of technological difference (this is a typical procedure in science fiction), as well as overlaying emerging technological threats and anxieties with familiar racial and ethnic discourses. Because race (as opposed to, say, sexual orientation) is traditionally rendered as natural, physical, or essential, it has been difficult (though certainly not impossible) to reconcile with a postmodern model of identity as fluid, performative, and socially constructed. The intervention of technicity enables the Cylons to stand in for this tension within a world that diegetically excludes racial inequality proper. They are explicitly racialized (when Six denounces "toaster" as a "racist" epithet, for instance, or when their vulnerability to a machine virus biologizes their absolute difference from humans), but at the same time attempts to stabilize the categorical distinction between human and Cylon continually break down, compromising the purity of any such demarcation. The Cylons are thus a paradigmatic example of the economy of technicity, and the program carries the concept even further by exploring inter-technic relationships and offspring, such as the Agathon family (Helo, Sharon, and their hybrid child Hera). Now, the conversion from ethnicity to technicity is never complete, and the persistence of racial vision means that troubling ideologies surface across BSG's multiethnic cast and often symptomatic mise-en-scene. Nonetheless, the overdetermined soup of symbolic material on offer sets us afloat on a rich reservoir of telling and ambivalent affinities.

A case in point being the ways that, given how Cylons encode all vectors of difference on the program, various dimensions of ambiguity have a tendency to coincide and blend in fan interpretations. One example is Felix Gaeta, a young and handsome tactical officer who has inexplicably never been drawn into the soap operatic sexual networks that drive many of his peers' storylines; he is portrayed by Alessandro Juliani, who is reportedly of Italian and Chinese descent, and within our extratextual context appears decidedly on the outskirts of whiteness. Fans have long speculated that Gaeta is one of the unrevealed Cylon models, no doubt in part because there is no diegetic framework for his distinctiveness except technicity; meanwhile, his queerness has become such an open secret that even other BSG actors will joke that Gaeta is gay (both these readings play out in large part via Gaeta's highly charged relationship with effete Cylon-lover Gaius Baltar). Hermeneutic outbreaks like these highlight the absurdity of Ron Moore's apologia, when asked about the program's conspicuous dearth of gay characters: "I think homosexuality definitely exists in the world of Galactica, but I frankly haven't found a way to portray it yet" (27 July 2006) -- as if Moore could assert his authority over the excess transmissibility of texts, as if he could possibly avoid portraying the non-normative desires that erupt at every turn. Galactica accommodates a military culture that is relentlessly egalitarian, complete with co-ed uniforms, quarters, and washrooms, while the civilian government is plagued by controversial sexual politics (such as abortion) familiar to US audiences from our own anti-gay "religious right." Nonetheless, among BSG's humans, these gendered elements seem only ever explicitly to resolve into heterosexual romances and conflicts. The Cylons, as a mechanism for mediating all forms of otherness, provide a ready enclave for representing deviance.

On one hand, Battlestar Galactica makes a good faith essay at offering, through its elaboration of Cylon society and subjectivity, a queer phantasmagoria that calls hegemonic mores into question. Lucy Lawless (who plays Model Three) described her character's liberated perspective: "Cylons haven't attached some sort of morality to nudity and sexuality and all that stuff, and they're extremely experimental" (ComicCon). On the other hand, this move marks sexual "experimentation" as categorically alien, confined to the program's presumptive "bad guys." In the battle that ends the Cylon occupation of New Caprica, this perverse collective takes custody of baby Hera: found by her supposed spiritual parents Six and Gaius amidst the carnage, she is handed off to Three, who was linked to her in dreams and by a human prophecy that the child will teach her love, and subsequently Boomer (another Model Eight, like Sharon Agathon, Hera's birth mother) becomes her primary caretaker. This unconventional kinship network sets the stage for an onscreen manifestation of lesbian desire in the form of a triadic romance between Three, Six, and Gaius. While the three are scandalously shown sleeping naked together, and while Six is eventually dumped by both partners, Six and Three express meaningful intimacies that take this plot beyond cliché titillation. However, such non-procreative relations trouble reproduction even within the unrepressed Cylon family. Three's desires for corporeal and divine communion threaten the replication of Cylon-kind enough that she is condemned to their version of death for her depravity. The Cylons' organic breeding project is equally flummoxed by the multiplication of mothers, as evidenced when Hera falls ill under their care, and only a return to her biological parents offers hope for a cure. So, while the fluid and prolific resonances of technicity open the Cylon narrative to alternative passions and bonds, heteronormative containment is also in operation. Queer representation thus resembles a protocological negotiation, circumscribed by discursive and material affordances but tested by excess vitality, and, as with all emergent systems, its ultimate complexities cannot be predicted in advance.

III/2/C Hera Has Six Mommies

The alternative families that self-organize around Hera are one example of how normative reproductive schemas (among the synthetic Cylons, who are plagued by infertility, only a man and a woman in a loving relationship are able to bear children) can unravel into multiply cathected webs. Cylons Six, Three, Boomer and Sharon aren't Hera's only mothers; preceding their guardianship, before she is even born, this messianic baby is tied by blood to President Laura Roslin, who is miraculously cured of cancer on her deathbed by a transfusion of hybrid fetal cells. This is to say that the synergies of mediation work in reverse as well: if information is embodied, than biology is also a code, and one more transmissible between species than either humans or Cylons might like to admit. When blood becomes a life-giving inoculation, Hera's hybridity is rendered backwards compatible, diffusing retroactively into the older generation. Like this somatic vitality, love circulates increasingly across boundaries, complete with its own technologies of dissemination. For instance, Six and Gaius, another Cylon-human couple, turn to theological texts, symptomatic visions, and the Hybrid's raw data to interpret the place of their bond in the cosmic ecology, as Six tries to inculcate the humans with her newfound credo of peace. Fans' passion for Battlestar Galactica is analogously inter-species, and likewise its promiscuous propagation transgresses borders, capacitated by a distinctive media apparatus.

In the previous chapter, I explored epistemological procedures for investigating undisclosed desires. Here, my focus is a technology in the fan's toolkit: a spectatorial mechanism known colloquially as "slash goggles." This witticism evoking specialized eyewear (mine are always big, round, and pink) is a metaphor for a queer mode of viewing that interfaces with television's contradictions, excesses, gaps, and fragments – the orphans of its reproductive overabundance. Like Hera, who gains many more mothers when her parents lose her, these remnants often end up with a surplus rather than a dearth of willing guardians. The rich residue can take a number of forms, mobilized in erratic combinations and not limited to:

• characterization: including the overdetermined cultural codes that we all use, however unjustifiably, to read the stereotypical markers of sexuality in appearance, accessories, and mannerisms
• mise-en-scene: how characters are shot, framed, lit, scored, etc.
• performance: the wealth of non-verbal information loosely gathered under the umbrella of "subtext" (how close a duo stand together, the duration and the weight of their gazes...)
• narrative: the explicit plot and dialogue elements, especially intrigue or emotion that is not fully elaborated, and extending to the more indirect connections between characters, which may remain vital even when shared screentime is limited (the love triangle being a classic example of a geometry that often links characters of the same gender)
• metatext: the whole constellation of extra-diegetic minutia and speculation that permeates interpretive communities (as only one of the infinite details: the fact that Lucy Lawless is best known for her role as the eponymous lesbian icon in Xena: Warrior Princess, rendering her BSG character Three to some degree pre-queered)

Such free-flowing bounty is endemic to media's volatile passages of transmission, and it is impossible to arrest the non-normative currents within a massively intricate discursive network. While different sources offer different figures to the dynamic feedback loops between text and audience, accounting for some of the obvious variation in popularity among slash fandoms, the requisite components are idiosyncratic and highly variable. While slash goggles, an ocular prosthesis that mediates the proliferation of fans' desires, aren't necessarily at odds with the industry's economy, there is no guarantee that these bespectacled cyborgs won't rise up against their masters.

Hera is herself at the heart of a multivalent matrix of affinities that is the battleground for a campaign to populate the future. President Roslin ordains the genesis of a new family for Hera when she secrets the newborn away from Helo and Sharon and gives custody to a foster mother, Maya, with the collusion of Roslin's trusted advisor Tory Foster. This arrangement is thus authorized under presidential control, while nonetheless venturing outside the control of closed lineages of biology and parentage; it's already, in this sense, a queer family. To look at one similarly non-linear narrative orphan through our (girl)slash goggles: season two of Battlestar Galactica closed with a disconnected 20-minute segment previewing life on the New Caprica settlement "one year later" in the program's timeline. With explanation of the political and interpersonal configurations implied here deferred over the summer hiatus, this stray scenario offered a fertile medium for the cultivation of fans' desires, and for their preemptive reimaginings of the lost year. A 90-second scene of Roslin and Maya co-teaching and, as many conjectured, co-parenting at the settlement's school is a case in point. This quasi-domestic tableau is ripe with disproportionate intimacy, in large part because, instead of the typical shot-reverse-shot structure, the conversation is edited with both women in the frame, standing close and touching easily. The triangulation of this familiarity through their concurrent kinship with Hera, even or especially in such a minute installment, spawned a full-blown and deeply invested maternal lesbian romance between Roslin and Maya – in the vision of certain fans.

This dyad was amplified in season three by equally fleeting scenes that projected Tory into Roslin's inner circle during the missing year planet-side and thereafter, and this storyline bred its own orphans in turn. In the podcast for the episode "Collaborators," for example, producer Ron Moore describes shooting a subplot wherein Tory betrays Roslin politically, feeding information to her rival that results in underground executions. When these events were cut during the production process, the remaining interactions between Roslin and Tory were sutured back together around the death of Maya and the loss of Hera, whose escape Tory was supposed to help orchestrate. The fervor of Tory's emotional apology exceeds the pared down narrative basis of its reorganized timeline, and this overflowing intensity, screened by the goggles' optical algorithm, materializes as love -- the love of these women for the child, for her adoptive mother, and for each other. Fostering this prophetic and apocalyptic baby, outside the bounds of an authorized origin story, is what brings Roslin, Maya, and Tory together within the program. In parallel, this frayed maternal thread provides the seam for similarly unauthorized modes of seeing and desiring among queer fan families. Tory's status as a conduit for unnatural passions then reverberates further when she is outed as one of the final five Cylons at the end of season three, in keeping with technicity's queer resonances. Thus, as I hope I've demonstrated, the implications of such formations aren't confined to the diegesis: the narratives of Battlestar Galactica are one dimension in a dynamic heterarchy that embodies an interactive struggle among industry and fan producers over the evolution of television.

III/3/A "Toaster Lover"

Videomaker Toolkit is a fan-driven promotion that's heavily advertised on the official site. Its instructions {http://scifi.com/battlestar/videomaker/instructions/} invite us to "be a part of Battlestar Galactica" by creating a four minute tribute film, the best of which will be selected to air on television. In order to "help give your videos the Battlestar look and sound," a menu of downloadable audio and video clips is provided, while the rules place a premium on an archaic "ex nihilo" model of originality by stipulating that the only additional material permitted is that which "you created." Moreover, these "tools" are limited to less than 40 short CGI-based establishment and action sequences (divided into "land" and "space" and including mostly ships, architecture, and explosions), plus a number of signature sound effects and only seven partial music tracks (also included is the show's logo image and a required ending clip plugging "new episodes of Battlestar Galactica" and Videomaker itself). That is, Videomaker's conception of sanctioned derivative filmmaking is extremely narrow, notably excluding the character-based dramatic scenes that make up the majority of the show. This constriction is a by-product of at least two larger contradictions in which the project is embroiled: first, its conflicting creative and promotional imperatives to pay homage to the show thematically and formally (using its "look and sound"), while nonetheless generating a work that is otherwise wholly original and non-infringing; second, television and the internet's conflicting regimes of distribution and value, wherein the existence of a fanbase skilled in internet video production is assumed, while it is simultaneously assumed that recognition by and on television is incentive enough to channel this artistic labor out of the internet at large and into SciFi's walled garden.

Given the over 100 approved Videomaker submissions, these contradictions don't seem to be crippling, but neither are they likely to be easily expelled from the burgeoning brood of fan-driven promotions. Delving into the contest's Terms and Conditions {http://scifi.com/battlestar/videomaker/terms/}, it becomes evident how entrenched these two conflicts are in the Byzantine folly of current intellectual property law. The former, here most succinctly stated "SCI FI is only interested in your original work," simply ports over copyright's founding ideology of self-contained artistic production. Notably, SciFi claims only non-exclusive rights to Videomaker submissions (outside of Toolkit materials); the imperative, in the instructions, to "not post your film on other sites, such as YouTube, MySpace, Google, etc." is thus more polite request than binding condition. This slight loosening of SciFi's juridical border patrol can also serve to remind us that Battlestar Galactica's production team is far from equivalent to NBC legal (as Ron Moore suggests in his schizophrenic disclaimer about fanfic, quoted above), and their untenable position between a creative rock and a legal hard place may be similar to that of fans. Copyright is equally entangled with the latter issue: changing architectures of digital distribution. The lawyers have come up with a remarkable catalogue of verbs enumerating everything that can or conceivably could be done to a media object, one practically worthy of science fiction itself:

you are granting SCI FI, its licensees, successor and assigns, the perpetual and irrevocable, non-exclusive right and license to (a) reproduce, distribute, display, exhibit, host, cache, store, archive, index, categorize, comment on, tag, transmit, broadcast, stream, edit, alter, modify, synchronize with visual material, create algorithms based thereon, and transcode the Submission to appropriate media formats, standards or mediums... throughout the world in perpetuity, in any and all media, whether now existing or hereafter devised...

The legal terms must here contend not only with present-day conditions of media reproduction, but with the futures and fantasies of remediation. These fantasies of transcoding media "hereafter devised" are not unrelated to BSG's Cylons' fantasies of hybrid offspring, and pose similar challenges of containment to their more hierarchical human counterparts.

If both Colonial and corporate authorities respond to runaway procreation with a combination of force and subterfuge, both also recognize that it would be a death sentence to shut out the possibilities of hybridity entirely. While Videomaker attempts to carefully channel and circumscribe audience labor, it has nonetheless become a vibrant occasion for and celebration of fan creativity. Unlike many internet promotions, this project assumes and allows a broad technical latitude among its participants, who are expected to use their own video equipment, software, and expertise (rather than a "user-friendly" web-based interface) to produce their submissions. This expectation demonstrates an understanding of and respect for the community of science fiction fans, who historically tend to be aficionados of real-world as well as imagined technologies. In Jenkins' chapter on fan filmmaking in Convergence Culture, he takes Star Wars as a case study, describing various films and several web sites that have collected them, including Lucasfilm's official clearinghouse Atomfilms.com (launched in 2000, and running contests in 2003 and 2005). Like Videomaker on a grander scale, Atomfilms attempts to draw bright lines around fan production, offering its stamp of approval (as well as a library of audio clips) in exchange for strict adherence to intellectual property law (parody and documentary only, no "attempts to expand on the Star Wars universe" [quoted in Jenkins, 154]). As Jenkins points out, "these rules are anything but gender-neutral" (155): the "original" (ostensibly materially and critically distanced) genres that enjoy legal and corporate sanction are disproportionately produced by men, while creative works that explore relationships between characters and "expand the universe" are the almost exclusive preserve of women. This schism is generated, perpetuated, and negotiated in complex ways, but it remains baldly entrenched: in the case of Videomaker, 81 of the authors listed for the first 100 submissions have typically male names, by my count (8 have typically female names, and 11 are indeterminate or collaborations). This gendered hierarchy is one example of the Gordian snarls of power that arise as media producers and fans (and their respective products) become increasingly interdependent and indistinguishable.

Take, for instance, one of the two initial sample videos posted in Videomaker Toolkit: "Toaster Lover" {http://video.scifi.com/player/?id=64712} (written, directed and edited by Margaux Luciano and Randy Giudice, who we might assume to be a male-female team). "Toaster Lover" takes the form of a fake movie trailer, a parodic genre recognizable from YouTube. Ordinarily, fake trailers combine an edited sequence of video clips with new or borrowed trailer audio to suggest a humorous reinterpretation of the source (one popular variant is the "Brokeback Mountain" spoof: these highlight the gay subtext between everyone from R2-D2 and C-3PO to He-Man and Man-at-Arms). As such, they are formally similar to fan videos, while differing greatly in tone and context. "Toaster Lover" obeys the contest's stipulation of originality by using homemade instead of appropriated video (adeptly integrated with stock establishing shots from the Toolkit), but includes the framing captions and voiceover of a trailer, as well as Brokeback Mountain's famous line "I wish I could quit you." Its imagined movie tells a tale of star-crossed love between a male pilot and a Centurion (the big metal "toasters" who were among the first Cylon models), with the tagline "for years they were enemies, until the day that chance brought two lonely souls together" (Figure 2). "Toaster Lover" thus showcases the ways that Videomaker can mobilize hybridity on multiple registers: it (like other "Brokeback" style trailers) combines the parodic distance typical of the male-dominated world of fan films with the focus on same-sex romance that is a signature of female vidding communities, and (like all Videomaker submissions) it toes the line between ostensibly original and derivative production.

"Toaster Lover" is particularly effective as a spoof and as an exemplary Videomaker film because it comments astutely on an aspect of Battlestar Galactica: the queerness that infuses its narratives of alternative relationships and families. Centurions are not explicitly gendered, and the fact that, with its quotations from stories of forbidden love, "Toaster Lover" draws a parallel between inter-technic and same-sex romance highlights the overarching queer subtext of human-Cylon connection and conflict. Beyond the diegetic parallels, I'm tempted to read "Toaster Lover" allegorically as a romance between big media producers and fanboys: the monstrous automaton and the scrappy softie who find true love as war between their kinds wages around them. Certainly this is the fantasy that Videomaker itself embodies, with its show of community participation in the "rate this video" stars, comment box, and "send to friend" button – while at the same time reinscribing normative boundaries through the control it exerts over the process (the viewer ratings, for example, have no discernable importance or effect). Given this allegory, we might ask whether derivative labor overall is metaphorically queer, since it's a form of reproduction that mates supposedly incompatible parents ("original" media source and "original" creativity) to spawn hybrid offspring. BSG, Videomaker, and "Toaster Lover" as it marries them foreground the way that mediation is itself a species of forbidden desire. Both Cylons and fans are threatening because they're in networked communication with technology, and because their desires to be mediated dispute sanctioned boundaries and generate rogue progeny. It remains to be seen whether the constraints of sponsored initiatives like Videomaker, with their intrinsic compromises and contradictions, can adequately channel these desires into one big happy capitalist family.

III/3/B And They Have a Plan

Videomaker represents only one possible familial and reproductive structure among many, however. We find another in the tradition of fan song videos: montages of visual material culled from mass media source texts and set to music. This underground art form, which has been part of media fandom since the mid-1970's, was inaugurated using slide projectors and has evolved through consumer VHS technology and into the era of ubiquitous digital video. For a more detailed historical analysis of vidding I refer you to the work of Francesca Coppa, who charts, among other things, how the technical hurdles involved in VCR editing encouraged artists to cluster into groups of enthusiasts and mentors, thereby developing distinct aesthetic conventions in turn. My concern is with the present-day evolution and hybridization of vidding as the maturation of internet video since the mid-2000's renders it more accessible and visible than ever before, both inside and outside its fannish milieu. The fact that Videomaker's fan films reference fake trailers and other YouTube genres attests to the riot of cross-pollination among moving image mashups that the code and infrastructure for web video sharing has enabled, including an undergrowth of "feral" fanvids that adopt the format without evincing strong ties to the customs and resources of the established vidding community.

Contrarily, this creative jungle has sprung some classic vids into the limelight while uprooting them from their interpretive landscape, most notably Killa and T. Jonsey's Kirk/Spock vid "Closer" {http://youtube.com/watch?v=1PwpcUawjK0} which took the blogosphere by storm in fall 2006. This is one test case for the ways in which the outbreak of viral video can generate problems as well as possibilities for grassroots art: in addition to the critical impoverishment that is a side-effect of "decoupling amateur media from its original contexts of production and consumption" (Jenkins, "How to Watch a Fan-Vid"), such mainstream attention (which went as far as "Closer" being quoted on television) can be directly threatening to creators because of the potential legal and personal repercussions of unauthorized and non-normative appropriations of proprietary media source. Killa took most of her work off the internet in response {http://seacouver.slashcity.net/vidland/vids.html}, and hers are not the only famous fanvids uploaded to YouTube without the artists' permission. Fan producers are thus no more able to control the dissemination of their texts than commercial producers (in fact they may be less able, since the derivative status of their oeuvre, not to mention their lack of corporation-sized resources, puts them in a weaker position with respect to copyright law). Such interplay and conflict is one instantiation of the vagaries of the digital archive, in both its technological and discursive dimensions: its oscillation of persistence and ephemerality, publicity and privacy, openness and closure structures the possibilities for fan engagement and production.

Vidders are avidly debating how to engage tactically on this uneven and shifting terrain. At Vividcon 2007, the sixth annual convention for and by the vidding community, a "Town Hall on Vidding and Visibility" panel explored the stakes of the customary closet, which offers safety, sisterhood and shared language while threatening fanvids with misunderstanding and marginalization. Concerns on both sides are fused with gender issues, as vids (like fan fiction) have been created almost exclusively by women throughout their history (an oft-repeated statistic is that the greatest number of men thus far at Vividcon, an event with over 100 attendees, has been five). The painstaking and meticulous labor vidding requires has been likened to traditional "women's work" such as quilting and needlepoint (not to mention early film cutting and computer programming). The technological mastery intrinsic to vidding and other media craft has gone largely unrecognized, however, because it is conducted out of view and contradicts ideological expectations for female behavior. It is only with the recent mainstreaming of various species of fan film online, and with advancements in the consumer apparatus that allow the best vids to look every bit as polished as professional music videos, that vidding may appear, within the overdetermined framework of gender stereotypes, to be taking on some of the "masculine" characteristics of other genres of DIY video. Concurrently, as influential sectors of the community have come to value a "shiny" aesthetic that emphasizes matching rhythm, motion, color, and other visual attributes to the music with increasingly elaborate and technical editing, vids that carry on a "feminine" tradition of melodramatic romance may now be relegated by some to the tongue-in-cheek category of "Lord King Bad Vids." While vids that privilege emotion and/or narrative are certainly presenting a critical interpretation, and while even more openly analytical vids don't necessarily adopt the same register of distance as fan parodies or critiques produced within male artistic conventions, the perceptible shift in tone away from the intimacy of traditional relationship-focused vids nonetheless raises questions about the implications of the changing technological, social, and economic environment for this women's subculture. The developments are complex and defy attempts to map them on binary axes, but they do indicate the array of hybridizations that are among the issue of digitally-enabled intermixtures of form and context, including (for better or worse) the possibility of layers of gender blending.

In her post "You Can't Stop the Signal" {http://community.livejournal.com/vidding/893694.html}, eminent vidder Laura Shapiro points out that under these circumstances, the debates about visibility are to some degree moot: "The minute we put our vids online, we expose ourselves to the world... We can't control the distribution of our own work in a viral medium." This pragmatism animates a collective campaign to stake out a consolidated public enclave for vidding – an opt-in archive calculated to support this family of practice. In the absence, for now, of a hosting infrastructure that is fan owned, vidders deliberately adopted the multimedia social networking site imeem.com en masse {http://community.livejournal.com/vidding/tag/imeem}. Imeem was judged to have a number of advantages over other video-sharing services (YouTube in particular) in terms of its mechanics, components, and policies: for example, its streaming quality is high, its feature set is rich (including group hubs, embeddable playlists, searchable tags, and customizable profiles), and according to its TOS {http://imeem.com/terms.aspx}, "imeem does not claim any ownership rights in any articles, information, materials, data, files, programs, photographs, concepts, communications, footage, ideas, opinions, and other materials ("Member Content") you post, store, or exchange through the imeem Site or Service; you continue to retain all ownership rights in such Member Content." And while these generous licensing terms technically apply only to "Member Content" that is within "appropriate rights," leaving derivative works vulnerable to unilateral suspension, enforcement still relies on copyright holders to flag potentially infringing cases, a far more forgiving system than SciFi.com's proprietary vetting (although imeem did recently implement a digital fingerprinting schema to track and protect audio files, and automated video monitoring may not be far behind). So, as the advent of digital and then internet video makes vidding both more accessible and more difficult for its practitioners to superintend, the architecture of imeem provides the ground for a tactical intervention: a hybrid position that gives vidding a public face while demarcating and reinforcing the community, that renders vids widely shareable while asserting their creators' authorship, that trades some loss of control for some gains in usability. In contradistinction to Videomaker Toolkit's top-down arrangement, which attempts through its interface and conditions to recontain excessive fan productivity within SciFi's exclusive perimeter, the distributed network of vidders on imeem (best indicated by the 200+ members of the vidding "meem") reproduces their fantext without a patriarchal center. Fanvids deploy love via the raw material of the show itself, fragmenting, recombining, and multiplying it with a fertility of which official transmedia can tap only a fraction. This propagation is still delimited by the archive, however, the lattice of power materialized in available technologies – of media, but also more broadly technologies of law, commerce, and desire.

[this section, especially the third paragraph, has been revised following an invaluable consultation with Francesca Coppa]

III/3/C I Think We re Alone Now

While there are debates about the degree to which predominantly female fan communities legitimately embody a queer experience, I'd like to honor the metaphorical affinities between Hera's cluster of lesbian mothers and the family of vidders, where love by women in collaboration is the genesis of a hybrid brood that, like Hera, is part of "the shape of things to come." Fanvids are one manifestation of the irrepressible excess of media reproduction in today's technological context: digital video, in particular, levels the barriers between television and the internet, between producers and consumers of entertainment, making commercial texts available as raw materials to anyone with computer file sharing and editing capabilities. With growing volume and diversity as their tools become increasingly accessible and sophisticated, vids capitalize on this condition to celebrate, critique, and de/reconstruct mass media in what Anne Kustritz calls a "genre commensurate form." This is to say that they engage the source via its own visual language, appropriating its images (along with their webs of intertextual connotation) and instilling coherence across a fragmented re-edit by means of the music and lyrics of a song. As such, there's an ongoing debate among fans and fan scholars about how to assess fanvids' "transformative" status in comparison to medium variant derivatives (such as fan fiction and fan films that use original video): on one hand, vids make something new out of the text itself, but for the same reason their divergence from it is often less stark. In addition to the ideological dimensions of this moral discourse, infused as it is with assumptions about what genders/races/classes/nationalities of people are creatively enabled, the question has concrete legal ramifications: "transformative" standing is a key axis of a fair use defense of appropriative art. Certainly vidding articulates very different evaluative criteria from orthodox IP law or from a project like Videomaker in its form, themes, and orientation. While fanvids proper span a growing range of distinct genres and approaches, they may appear overly formulaic to outsiders because they rarely deviate from the conventional music video format. This uniformity, however, is a technique for building an interpretive community, wherein what's privileged is not novelty and widespread appeal, but rather the ability to speak compellingly through and about media to an intimate audience within familiar constraints. What's "original" about vidding is a technology of seeing: it is a literalization of fans' ocular prosthetics (the girlslash goggles, for one), rendering as montage the strategies of active viewing that are animated by love.

While "meta" (critical) and "gen" (general, including character study) vids are garnering increasing attention and acclaim, relationship and slash vids (such as Killa and T. Jonsey's famously erotic "Closer") are still at the heart of the form. Here I'd like to look in detail at a vid that manifests the girlslash goggling of Battlestar Galactica directly: "Save Yourself," a Kara/Sharon vid by jarrow272 {http://jarrow272.imeem.com/video/0u5Jn951/bsg_saveyourselfrm/}.

This project is representative of an orthodox aesthetic within today's vidding community, and screened at Vividcon 2007; it simultaneously addresses the core vidding audience, who are familiar with the genre's conventions but not necessarily with the nuances of the source, the assemblage of BSG enthusiasts situated within online media fandom, and the more localized coterie of BSG femslashers (it implies a tragic amour as a preferred reading, although its tone is not overtly romantic). Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, the gender non-conforming and ambiguously saintlike hotshot pilot, and Sharon "Boomer" Valerii, the rogue "sleeper agent" persona of Cylon model Eight, had a history together serving on Galactica in Sharon's pre-activation past, but in the course of the show's canon their relationship has accumulated only a few isolated moments of shared screentime. These scenes are intensely charged with both characters' ambivalence about the contradiction between their human friendship and Sharon's newfound Cylonicity, but the rest of the available lesbian reading inheres in the gaps and latencies of BSG's multidirectional narrative. "Save Yourself" occupies these conditions strategically by highlighting and capitalizing on the fragmentation of television editing, which represents affect via shot-reverse-shot patterns that are replicated here (and in many slash vids) using originally unrelated close-ups to evoke mutual emotion and desire. It also encodes the thematic question of the degree of permeability and transmissibility between the consciousness of individual Sharons (plus the ramifications of that for Kara and the ways she can know and has known her) by indiscriminately mixing images of Boomer and the other important Sharon copy, later distinguished with the callsign Athena. A heartfelt conversation in the brig wherein the characters broach this issue explicitly is cited as a pivotal moment in the vid (this is its first clip of them together, and it occurs more than two minutes in). Outside such judicious glimpses of onscreen Kara/Sharon snippets, however, "Save Yourself" is primarily staked on paralleling these two across multiple registers: movement and gesture (pairing shots of their eyes, hands, and pacing feet, for example) as well as circumstance (pairing the women firing guns, captive in hospital beds, and so on), suggesting the similarities of their experiences despite the fact the one is human and the other Cylon. With the strident, angsty rhythm and lyrics {http://lyricwiki.org/Stabbing_Westward:Save_Yourself} as a unifying element, "Save Yourself" constructs a metatexual explanation in music video form for the conspicuous under-elaboration of Kara and Sharon's relationship in canon (a common necessity of femslash interpretations of BSG, given that, for its rich abundance of female characters, it portrays few interactions between women): their love for each other cannot transcend the brutality to which they are individually subjected.

Narratively, "Save Yourself" presents an impressionistic chronicle of violence, opening by introducing Kara and Sharon in close-ups and locating them within the apocalyptic context of space battles and explosions. The body sections are composed around occasions of trauma: Kara's intimate losses and crash landing and Sharon's dawning panic about her activities as a Cylon saboteur (season 1) in the first verse, their separate experiences of hospitalization and incarceration (season 2) in the second verse (though the topical segments don't break cleanly with the musical divisions, for the most part, fostering a seamless feel). While numerous physical assaults against Kara are included, her main thread in the vid is her terrifying detainment in a covert Cylon facility on Caprica after being shot (and, it is strongly hinted, having surgery performed on her ovary). The most concentrated and disturbing Sharon passage begins during the song's bridge, and incorporates her outing as a Cylon, her own horror and attempted suicide, the ensuing barbarity of her tenure in shackles and aborted rape, and the faked death of her child. Just as the vid touches visually on Kara and Sharon's relationship at the beginning ("searching for an angel") and middle (their scene in the brig) for emphasis, the fulcrum here (at 3:05) flashes back to the standoff involving the two of them upon their return from Caprica, leading into a fluid concluding section punctuated by Sharon's multiple shootings. At the end, Kara escapes from her Cylon captor, while the final image is of Boomer's dead body (though of course she survives by downloading, and both characters go on to have further near-death experiences in season 3).

"Save Yourself"'s panorama of physical and emotional abuse, inscribed across two interconnected women, evokes the specter of homophobic and/or racist violence as much as the recuperation of homosexual and/or interracial love. The pathos of the closet Cylon is unavoidably inflected as a queer allegory, and this dimension is even more strongly accented in the vid, wherein Sharon is kept from Kara by a catalogue of cruelty (from insults scrawled in her locker to punitive sexual assault). The conjectured relationship between Sharon and Kara is thus transgressive by virtue of being same-sex and of being inter-technic (human-Cylon), and the vid's tragic saga of forcible heartbreak yokes these two registers together. While "Save Yourself" is hardly a celebratory slash romance, in this sense, metatextually it gleefully exposes a submerged intimacy – its own existence as an artwork, that is, contradicts its pessimistic diegetic implication that Starbuck and Boomer will never be together. This buoyancy is perhaps most apparent in Jarrow's second-order mashup of the vid which, as per an informal divertissement among vidders, plays the existing video montage against a different audio track – a commentary in itself on the malleability of media in this technological context. The "I Think We're Alone Now" version {download}, which sets "Save Yourself" to Tiffany's classic anthem of forbidden love {http://lyricwiki.org/Tiffany:I_Think_We%27re_Alone_Now}, is exuberantly perverse in its juxtaposition of brutal images and candy pop, and features uncannily and hilariously perfect alignments at points between the vid's narrative and the song, between its images and the lyrics. "We gotta hide what we're doing / Cuz what would they say / If they ever knew," Tiffany sings, "And then you put your arms around me / ...I think we're alone now," and it sounds like a happy ending for Kara/Sharon and illicit couples everywhere (human-Cylon, girl-girl, and otherwise subtextual). Not to mention a happy ending for vidders and other creative fans themselves, running away from admonitions to "watch how you play" to tumble into their hideaway where they can be alone, "holding on to one another's hand," (re)producing to "the beating of our hearts." But reappropriating and remediating love undercover and on the run is only a provisional triumph, of course, easily evading vain attempts at enforced textual containment but not escaping normative and protocological hierarchies of power.

III/4/Z End Matter

The draft of Chapter III / The Shape of Things to Come is now complete! I've abandoned my ambition of adding hypertextual sidebar-notes, at least for the moment.

/ Illustrations

/ Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. S/Z: An Essay. Hill and Wang, 1975.

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. The MIT Press, 2000.
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