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.
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.
