IV/3/A Antagonism

The emerging struggles of late capitalism, including fans' negotiations over compensation and ownership in the context of convergence, bear little resemblance to the class struggles of traditional Marxism. For what was once a revolutionary theory, the disintegration of any effective framework for mass resistance has been conspicuous, and today Marx's predictions that capitalism would inevitably collapse under the strain of its own contradictions ring hollow. Autonomist Marxism relocates resistance in the constitutive autonomy of the immaterial laborer, who works within collective networks and through subjective communication that cannot be fully rationalized or contained. We might envisage fan communities, for instance, in Negri's assurance that "during the course of capitalist development, there have always existed gaps -- partially in the sphere of circulation -- which are independent of direct capitalist control. In these gaps, certain use-values have been defined, and sometimes, communities which are rooted in such values have come into existence" (98). Today, workers' "antagonism which has never ceased to exist" (84) gathers new intensity "by virtue of the socialized worker's independence" and "capacity to reappropriate control of the labour process" (85). Moulier's introduction to Negri's book summarizes the fundamental doctrine of Autonomism, which harmonizes with other post-structuralist formulations of resistance from within: "On a theoretical level operaismo affirms the internal and structural limits of capitalism's capacity for integration. For operaismo in fact, the working class must certainly be within capital, but above all against it, otherwise capital could no longer function. Therefore the unilateral domination of capitalist control can never obtain. Subversion and revolution constitute a permanent possibility which lies at the very heart of the system" (25). This viewpoint is conceptually seductive, but suffers some of the same difficulties as Marx's original hypothesis, in that it seems to assume subversion as an automatic function of immaterial labor, with little attention to the specific praxis that might constitute cohesive antagonism as opposed to reincorporation. In his analysis of Lazzarato, Antonio Toscano suggests that the reconstitution of the idea of a general intellect "is in a sense an attempt to prolong the autonomist belief in the priority of productive or constructive resistance over its capture by the mechanisms of power and its reproduction, a way of thinking cooperation as prior to and relatively independent from capitalist self-valorization... it might be worth pausing to question the almost unbridled optimism of this thesis" (79). In answer to this provocation, I pause here to scrutinize the Autonomist concept of antagonism more closely.

I turn to Jason Read for the most trenchant and measured synthesis of this position, which effectively mediates between the optimistic and pessimistic poles of the Marxist continuum. Read opens with an acknowledgement that, today, "it is more and more clear that world is made and transformed by the immense productive powers of labor, which produce not only the wealth of objects but also the knowledge, affects, and desires that constitute the lived world, and yet capital's domination of the productive power seems to me more and more entrenched" (15). His book is an attempt to puzzle out this apparent contradiction between intensifying "subjectification" and "subjection," that is, "between the total subjection of sociality and subjectivity to capital and the concomitant development of a subjective and social power irreducible to abstract labor" (119). Read argues that we should understand the antagonism intrinsic to this contradiction not as a by-product of capitalist domination, but as the very productive force driving capitalist development toward real subsumption, as Marx chronicled in his account in Capital of the proletarian struggle to shorten the length of the working day. Following Marx, Read theorizes that "the technological and social transformations of the capitalist mode of production are neither the pure product of capitalism nor of resistance to capitalism but rather are formed by the antagonistic interplay of the competing strategies: capitalist strategies to expand surplus value and the workers' strategies to expand needs and desires" (111). He thus posits the coextensivity of expanding techniques of both domination and resistance as a defining characteristic of the capitalist system.

Our contemporary circumstances are no different, and "subjection too produces, or at least makes possible, its own resistances... The subjection/subjectification of living labor does not resolve the basic antagonism of living labor but, rather, displaces it" (144). Late capitalism brings an amplification of this dynamic, however, because "as real subsumption penetrates all social relations, it increasingly puts to work forms of social knowledge that it neither owns nor directly controls" (133). Building on the Autonomist assessment of today's configuration of immaterial laborers in the social factory, Read observes that, "in continually stressing the active participation of living labor and of cooperative networks" (149), industry "produces fixed capital not as machinery but in the subjectivity of the worker... [which] exists and is produced outside of the temporal and spatial control of the capitalist" (130). In other words, as subjection under capitalism escalates, so too does the capacity of subjectification to subvert and exceed its limits. Read's analysis doesn't solve the crisis of advanced Marxism by offering a coherent revolutionary program: his instantiation of resistance remains rather abstract. But we must acknowledge that his teleology is different from Marx's -- at issue is not the overthrow of capitalism, but collective interventions in its evolution that wrest control of greater degrees of freedom, creativity, and justice. By continuing to pry open the cracks in capitalism's containment of labor power, we can pressure capitalism to innovate toward increasing accommodation of autonomous subjectivities. The concept of antagonism frames laborers, including fans, as a collectivity whose desires are not commensurate with those of a corporate system, and this alone is a crucial corrective to the prevailing understanding of convergence culture.

At this point it may seem warranted to investigate another axis of antagonism that is often absent from studies of fan production, namely queer theories of political action. I view sexuality as integral to the femslash fandoms that I'm concerned with in this project, and admittedly, the aspiration to preserve such queer subcultures in the midst of transformations in our media economies animates my inquiry. Many scholars have analyzed the homonormativity at work in constituting the ideal gay (as opposed to queer) consumer for neoliberal capitalism, most notably Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, and mounting a critique of The L Word on this front is a worthy endeavor. Within a framework that claims subjectivity and collectivity as productive for capitalism, however, I am not convinced that queerness is the sine qua non of resistance, despite my own emphasis on the potential of open erotic fan communities. On the side of skepticism, Rosemary Hennessy conducts a trenchant indictment of a trend she calls "avant-garde queer theory," exemplified by such thinkers as Michael Warner, Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, Gayle Rubin, and David Halperin (54). In Profit and Pleasure, she positions this nexus as part of the intellectual heritage of a "pervasive ideological mandate to disconnect sexuality from capitalist production" (37) that has plagued Marxist thought since Engels's "historical inability to understand the role of domestic labor in capitalist production" (41) in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. This blind spot was exacerbated by psychoanalytic attempts to materialize sexuality, beginning with Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, who ultimately "contend that sexuality originates in innate instinctual drives... [so it] remains in fundamental ways outside the social order" (42). After "a short-lived but vital willingness to make use of Marxism as a critical framework to link sexual oppression to global capitalism" (45-46) on the part of the Gay Left in the 1970's was frustrated by "the intractable refusal of many of the existing socialist groups to meaningfully address sexuality" (49), the rise of cultural studies meant that the "retreat from Marxism and alternative rush to Foucauldian materialism virtually dominated the analysis of sexuality" (49). This paved the way for the maturation of queer theory in the 1990's which, following the early prominence of a "textual approach to identity as signification" (53), came of age with a turn to cultural materialism, most significantly by the "avant-garde" theorists listed above.

Hennessey makes a crucial distinction between these resolutely post-marxist cultural materialists and Marxist historical materialists: the former, while they may discuss capitalism and class relations, are finally "founding their conceptions of materiality only in symbolic processes [which] means that social struggle, or what they call antagonism, is anchored only in the sign" (61). This school of thought unfairly rejects the Marxist approach as necessarily totalizing, when in fact "historical materialism understands social life to be historically and materially produced through relations of labor... [but not] without the ways of making sense, normative practices (culture-ideology), and the laws (state organization) that are part of the material production of social life" (59). The danger of the cultural materialist orientation, according to Hennessy, is that its political program will amount to "a left sexual politics" that focuses on "civil rights within capitalism" (67). A case in point is that the "porous, gender-flexible, and playful subjects" celebrated by avant-garde queer theory are easily adapted to "postindustrial economies [that] increasingly require a high-tech systems management consciousness that knows that identity, like knowledge, is performative" (68). Given that "since the late nineteenth century the growth of consumer culture has depended on the formation and continual retooling of a desiring subject" (69), desire does not stand outside capitalism and ground resistance in and of itself. Instead of a politics of perversions, performance and polysemy, Hennessey calls for "a ruthless interruption of the often less visible relations of labor that have made use of dominant as well as counter-hegemonic sexual identities" (68). On this basis, I will set aside, for the purposes of this chapter, queer theory's analyses of how particular normative subjectivities (including heterosexuality and homosexuality) are constructed by capitalism in opposition to queer counterpublics, and ask rather how queer forms of desire sustain the economy of immaterial labor while also exceeding its bounds.

Kevin Floyd's work suggests one avenue for situating this virtual excess within the intrinsic contradictions of capitalism, while proposing (more magnanimously than Hennessy) a potential detente between Marxism and queer theory -- despite noting, once again, that the former has been notoriously insensate to issues of sexuality. While their theory is deeply involved with subjectivity and the economic role of reproductive labor, the Autonomists have hardly been an exception in this regard, despite interventions in the 1970s by important but largely peripheral Italian feminist Marxists Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Leopoldina Fortunati. In his book The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism, Floyd argues that we could read recent developments in queer theory, characterized by intersectionality and a refusal to particularize and compartmentalize sexuality from other dimensions of cultural experience, as converging with Marxism on the basis of a shared concern with social totality. He posits that today, "the ever more complex internal differentiation of capitalist social relations, in particular a reification of sexual desire" (197) has paradoxically set the stage for new forms of "queer worldmaking," or, "the production of historically and socially situated, bounded totalities of queer praxis inherently critical of the ultimately global horizon of neoliberalized capital" (199). Floyd observes that political economists (including Harvey) describe capitalism as a system constantly troping toward crisis due to its "constant tendency to undermine the very institutional preconditions that ensure the prospects for additional accumulation" (34). Given this "fundamental social volatility that capital's objective contradictions consistently produce... socially broad, historically conditioned strategies [are] necessary to keep crisis at bay" (34). While Fordism, he claims, was "highly dependent on the corporate and governmental construction of a certain kind of social stability... the breakup of Fordism... makes accumulation increasingly dependent on social instability" (195). This instability can furnish the conditions of possibility for "socially subordinate, historically conditioned publics defined by critical practices and knowledges inseparable from the labor of sustaining these publics" (208). However, Floyd also sees in this transition a worrying "dispersal of a queer population... as part of a more general strategy of population dispersal, a strategy that has among its objectives neutralizing the forms of collective praxis of which such populations are capable, privatizing collectivity itself out of existence" (204). Now, Autonomist Marxism would assert precisely the opposite, emphasizing that late capitalism's labor regime requires communicative networks and autonomous collective action. Without necessarily embracing this optimism, queer Marxisms would benefit from an engagement with Autonomism's sophisticated account of subjectivity's intimate relation to capitalism, particularly its framing of antagonism as constitutive of this relation. Like queer desires, antagonism is situated inside the horizon of capitalism, and I propose that queer desires can in fact be an aspect of antagonism.

IV/3/B You Write It!

The media industry's emerging strategies to valorize an established reservoir of fan labor perfectly complement their late capitalist context. However, the subsumption of subjectivities and communities with autonomous traditions under a corporate regime generates new antagonisms that demand delicate control. In the case of The L Word, the most heavily engineered expropriation of fan production was a series of user-generated writing contests. Showtime launched this marketing campaign in 2006 with a scheme to prompt a complete "fanisode" (faux television script), contracting the company FanLib to design and run the web-based competition as one of the start-up's earliest projects {http://web.archive.org/web/20060831222949/http://lword.fanlib.com/}. For this initial contest, a member of The L Word's creative team prepared a storyboard that filled in a diegetic gap of several months between the events of seasons 3 and 4, providing descriptions of the individual scenes that would make up an imaginary episode. Participants then voted for their favorite of the user submissions that realized each segment, and finally the winners were awarded prizes and their scenes were assembled into a downloadable PDF version of the final script (Figure 9). This successful venture garnered a mention in The Wall Street Journal's article about the transformation of fan fiction from a "fringe pursuit" to one that "helps unknown authors find mainstream success" (Jurgensen). FanLib shares this assumption that fans' labors of love have the same goals, motivations, standards and economies as professional authorship -- although in their business model, it is the corporation rather than the creators who will reap the profits. Since the "fanisode" wasn't intended for production, we might speculate that it was organized in script format (as opposed to inviting more familiar prose fan fiction) precisely to appeal to aspiring screenwriters with polished skills.

Whether we read this move as nurturing or mercenary, it follows that certain expectations for a lesbian community of creative professionals are part of the impetus for The L Word's FanLib promotions. In the introduction to the PDF 'zine that resulted from the "fanisode," Chaiken celebrated The L Word's fans, who "came at us enthusiastically with your reactions, your objections, your ideas, passions, preferences and opinions as to whether or not we were adequately and authentically representing the way that we live" ("The L Word: A Fanisode"). From the perspective of this politics of representation, encouraging involvement with corporate media-making among The L Word's presumptively lesbian audience is necessary to the project of lesbian visibility. However, as we've seen, the price of this brand of visibility is to render lesbian identity as a reified commodity that can be packaged and sold, not only by professionals but by each contest participant and each OurChart member. The feminist utopia of an "old girls network," wherein mentorship leads to success within mainstream industries, here butts up against the converse heritage of fans' non-commercial systems of value and recognition. Chaiken says that the writing competitions were inspired by the fact that "the fans of The L Word write a lot of fan fiction on their own" ("Meet Molly"), implying that submitting a scene in script form to a contest would have a comparable charm. But the majority of fan authors aren't professional hopefuls like The Wall Street Journal's winning interviewee (who was, incidentally, the only straight man to place in the "fanisode"). Chaiken's equivalence effaces the autonomous norms of fandom's gift economy, which cultivates alternative modes of sharing the characters and stories that originate in the corporate media. If, as The Wall Street Journal posits, "the rise of fan fiction is part of the spread of amateur-created content online... on sites such as YouTube and MySpace" (Jurgensen), we shouldn't expect ventures like FanLib's to negotiate the friction between capitalist mandates and "amateur" subcultures with any more consideration than these other commercial platforms.

Chaiken's statement is from a promotional video on Showtime's official website that presents a later FanLib installment (dubbed "You Write It!"), featuring the lucky winner Molly as she claims her prize -- a visit to the set to see her contribution filmed (Figure 10). "You Write It!" was structured similarly to the "fanisode," but its endgame made good on the promise of the script format by including the victorious submission in an actual television episode (much to the delight of Molly, who was indeed a screenwriting student). It also had more open-ended instructions: "Choose a scene from The L Word seasons 1 or 2 to rewrite as a scene from 'Lez Girls,' Jenny's thinly-veiled, fictional account of The L Word characters' lives." While inviting fan-written scripts may imply a breakdown of the distinction between amateurs and professionals, this video's rhetoric emphatically reasserts the ideological gulf between fans and producers, quashing any intimation that fans' unpaid work could be afforded equal respect. The comments addressed to Molly, while well-meaning, are starkly condescending, informing her of banal aspects of television production as if she didn't already have the knowledge to be a screenwriting success. The "You Write It!" contest was a perfect match with season 5's "Lez Girls," a movie-within-a-TV-show that campily remixed The L Word's early seasons. Molly's scene earned its winning vote tally by enhancing these self-reflexive layers with a Charlie's Angels mashup, alluding to the history of lesbian viewing. In contrast to the discourses of "we" and "our" that characterize much of The L Word's marketing, however, the turn to calling fans "you" highlights the limits of this openness to appropriation. Chaiken may profess an interest in "the way interactivity is taking over our lives" that is borne out in The L Word's cutting-edge online promotions, but this provocation extends only as far as fan labor channels value into the "lesbian" brand -- because "you" work for free. Chaiken's outlook on the FanLib project both reflects and forwards this strategy, and like Jenny, Alice or indeed Chaiken herself, Molly is an exemplar for fans' lessons in commodifying our passions.

[ a condensed version of this section appeared as You Write It! Or, The L Word Is Labor at In Media Res ]

IV/3/C The Archive of Our Own

The cover of the "fanisode" 'zine features a photograph of The L Word's cast posed around a bed frame on a deserted beach, draped in satiny, revealing garments, and staring vacantly out at their assumed audience. We could take this image as a metaphorical portrait of the network's vision of fan community: a neatly assembled, perfectly groomed, politically isolated demographic frozen in their consumer rictus. In its online promotions, The L Word constantly reasserts its own simulacral portrayals as the coordinates of fan labor, demonstrating the limits of its gestures toward participatory engagement. Perhaps because of this insistent homology between purportedly lesbian diegetic, production, and audience worlds, The L Word fandom has a very different orientation from the two femslash fandoms discussed in previous chapters. While the program's viewers have been vocal in their celebrations, commentaries, and critiques, this productive expression seems to reverberate primarily within the closed circuit of Chaiken's authority, addressed hierarchically upward to its corporate pantheon. But as my other case studies have explored, media fandom manifests alternative aspirations to queer female community that more concertedly oppose schemes like the "official social network," which aim to corral desiring subjects in a virtual factory as immaterial workers. FanLib's gambit to harness creators' labor in a commercial archive foregrounded certain underlying constraints of online fandom, namely its reliance on websites and infrastructure controlled by corporations and on the tacit sanction of media conglomerates. As a response, a watershed post by Astolat called for "An Archive of One's Own" that could materialize fandom's values of autonomy, openness, collectivity and gifting in a platform owned and run by fans {http://astolat.livejournal.com/150556.html}. Her manifesto catalyzed a grassroots campaign to lay the groundwork for this project, headquartered in the LiveJournal community "fanarchive" (later renamed "otw_news"). This insurgency coalesced because it had become essential for the community to react not only to FanLib, but to more widespread pressures on fandom's labor relations prompted by the industrial innovations of convergence. Companies' escalating interest in exploiting productive subjectivities has met with resistance, that is, not necessarily to capitalism as a totality, but certainly to its unilateral imposition of new working conditions.

The consensus among fans active in the archive venture was that protecting their community's traditions of self-valorization would require a cultural and legal scaffold as well as a technological one. Barely a month after Astolat's provocation, a board of directors convened to plan the launch of a non-profit, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) {http://transformativeworks.org}, to advocate for the interests of fan producers. The OTW adopted a multi-pronged approach, wherein several distinct projects run by volunteer committees synergistically intervene in fandom's shift toward the mainstream, supporting established practices and representing them to outsiders. In addition to the archive itself, these projects comprise a wiki to chronicle subcultural lore {http://fanlore.org}, other efforts in historical preservation that include a partnership with Special Collections at the University of Iowa, a legal support network, and an academic journal, Transformative Works and Cultures (I served on the editorial team for its inaugural year). The organizing and unifying figure for these various stratagems is "legitimacy," as the opening of the OTW's mission statement pronounces: "We envision a future in which all fannish works are recognized as legal and transformative and are accepted as a legitimate creative activity" {http://transformativeworks.org/about/believe}. Legitimacy is an overdetermined ambition that permeates the undertaking on all levels, from the OTW's tactical emphasis on the legally defensible notion of transformation to its own bureaucratic structure, which furnishes the anarchic vastness of fandom with a reassuringly centralized facade. Alexis Lothian further observes that legitimacy motivates the OTW's resolute affirmation of the anticommercial model of fandom, noting that the organization "tries to protect fan communities by insisting that these are subcultural groupings constituted in support of capital... [and for] all its demonization of the for-profit fan archive sites, OTW is keen to point out how the fanworks they archive will continue to aid in others' profit" (Lothian). She is referring to passages from the Frequently Asked Questions, which states (under "Legal > Does the OTW support the commercialization of fanfic?") that the OTW aims "first and foremost to protect the fan creators who work purely for love and share their works for free within the fannish gift economy.... These fans create vibrant and active communities around the work they are celebrating, tend to spend heaps of money on the original work and associated merchandise, and encourage others to buy also. They are not competing with the original creator's work and if anything help to promote it" {http://transformativeworks.org/faq}. These assurances are strategically savvy on the part of a small-scale operation opposing corporate giants, but they demonstrate that the OTW's sphere of action is limited by its given economic conditions, and while it may confront many important injustices, capitalism is not among them.

As the OTW was taking shape amidst a ferment of agitated fans, its commitment to legitimation was not uncontroversial, and its stance on media fandom's gender politics was likewise contentious. The FAQ ambivalently pledges that "OTW values all fans, and the contributions made by fans of all genders. As the Organization grew out of a practice of transformative fanwork historically rooted in a primarily female culture, we also specifically value that history of women's involvement, and the practices of fandom shaped by women's work" (under "Organization for Transformative Works > Why do the values and mission statements focus on female fans?"). This unique female-centric alignment was discordant with promises of "maximum inclusiveness" {http://archiveofourown.org/tos}, and predictably, it generated "wank," which Lothian defines as "online drama, arguments, and deeply silly conflicts that get out of control." She maintains that the slang term's more familiar connotation remains in play, though, because fandom's truculent wanking is enmeshed with its "sexualized exchange of explicit fiction among women that... not only resembles but often constitutes a kind of ephemeral sexual contact." The most notable aspect of the OTW's legitimation project is that, while it may willingly apply standards given by the law and the market to fan production, it refuses to concede to sexual normativity, insisting on the contrary that its archive and other endeavors provide a reliable and permissive venue for the full range of perversions exhibited in fan fiction. The Archive of Our Own (AO3) itself (which launched in October 2008 and reached open beta in November 2009) offers optional warnings that include "rape/non-con" and "underage" plus a myriad of user-driven tags such as "BDSM... crossdressing... incest... sex pollen... [and] tentacles" {http://archiveofourown.org/tos_faq#content_faq}. In response to incidents like omnibus site http://fanfiction.net's decision to stop hosting explicit stories in 2002 and LiveJournal's 2007 deletion of numerous journals and communities in Harry Potter fandom in a kiddie porn purge {http://fanlore.org/wiki/Strikethrough}, the AO3 vows to safeguard all fic without "illegal or inappropriate content" and never to remove it for "offensiveness" {http://archiveofourown.org/tos#content}. Thus, as Lothian implies, the archive's most vulnerable content (sexually graphic works) and its context (a collective of women) harmonize to constitute a queer female labor formation.

The Archive of Our Own realizes a very different "our" from the homogeneous community represented by OurChart, but both configurations intersect with a feminist attention to professionalization. The archive's open source software platform was coded from scratch by a predominantly female volunteer team, many of whom had no prior programming experience. The undertaking was therefore an opportunity for women to be mentored in skills with high value in the digital economy, much as the "You Write It!" contest positioned the unpaid labor of fan fiction as training for a writing career. Between its infrastructure and its content, the AO3 exhibits the abundance of productive work that sustains fan communities. But in contrast to FanLib and Showtime's outlook, which is formulated to monetize fan labor within a corporate framework, the AO3 acknowledges its implication in late capitalism while nonetheless insisting on the value of amateurism and autonomy. A "chart" of its network structure would reveal intimate ties between women articulated through creative and often erotic production. I contend that this system is queer, but in an admittedly amorphous sense that resists capture in a reified demographic like OurChart's commodity lesbianism. The AO3's refusal of certain capitalist dictates may seem like a nominal gesture, but it is precisely this divergence between some of the interests of fans and some of the interests of industry that generates antagonism. In this case, it is an antagonism on behalf of queer desires, and this vantage constitutes a demand that workers determine their own working conditions for the labor of subjectivity and sexuality. Even while arguing that the gift economy is integral to the capitalist economy, Terranova asserts that "free labour... is not necessarily exploited labour" (91); in its stand against exploitation, the Organization for Transformative works embodies a vital struggle within media convergence.