I'll be presenting a version of this work at PCA/ACA 2006

excerpt

In a recent online column, Mark Pesce wrote that "October 18th, 2004 is the day TV died. That evening, British satellite broadcaster SkyOne... ran the premiere episode of the re-visioned 70s camp classic Battlestar Galactica... a few hours after airing on SkyOne, '33' was available for Internet download" (http://www.mindjack.com/feature/piracy051305.html). Placing a contemporary sci-fi sensation and a contemporary technology of distribution alongside each other, this paper explores both through the theoretical concept of hybridity. The hybrid — whether a human+machine organism or a broadcast+networked medium — as the provisional fusion of two into one, always leaves a gap where the intended and anticipated operation of the system can and does run amok. The contradiction between reinscribing binary difference and erasing it is evoked in every hybrid, and I am interested in the way it plays out across the diagetic narratives of the television series Battlestar Galactica and the technical and legal frameworks of the peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol BitTorrent.

Battlestar Galactica presents the status of its central cylon characters as decidedly indeterminate, both in terms of their bodily constitution and in terms of their individuality and autonomy. The show thus illustrates the instability that the hybrid introduces into supposedly fixed categories like human and machine. This tension — between the militaristic imperative to divide and demarcate friend from foe, and the treacherous ecology of hybridity that inevitably undermines it — fuels the narrative engine that made for an underground television hit. If mimicking humans was simply subordinate OR equivalent to being human, the series would lose a powerful instrument of its own perpetuation — the one composed, quite ingeniously, of the hybrid as a nexus of suspended questions.

Meanwhile, the Internet facilitates a global TV fan culture, inciting viewers overseas to follow U.S. programs before they are syndicated abroad. As media that “institute new ratios... when they interact among themselves” (53), in McLuhan’s words, neither television nor the web are left unchanged by their encounter in BitTorrent and their other hybrid progeny. One commentator on BitTorrent’s copyright skirmishes remarks that “unsurprisingly this high-tech larceny has a strong sci-fi bent, betraying the geeky culprits, with two Stargate shows, one Star Trek show and Battlestar Galactica in the top 10” (Sturgeon) — if Battlestar Galactica is among the most popular TV downloads, that is, this status is tied to the intercourse of audiences, technologies, and narratives, each of which works through and by the tensions of the others. Hybridity is an evocative mode of conceptualizing these contacts and interminglings, and this paper argues that it is a crucial terrain of contestation both on and for television.

Given my goal of brevity, I didn't attempt to explore Galloway's book in my paper about media and cyborg hybrids, but certainly it has relevance to such a project. So I'd like to frame my discussion of Protocol here as a sort of postscript to my work. Most literally, I refer to the BitTorrent architecture as a protocol, and I use this word rigorously: BitTorrent is protocol in Galloway's sense, and his theory of protocol can help to explain why BitTorrent is being heralded by some as a transformative technology of distribution, rather than simply another peer-to-peer program that floats on the application layer. Galloway defines protocol as "conventional rules that govern the set of possible behavior patterns within a heterogeneous system... 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... [and] is robust, flexible, and universal" (82). These are precisely BitTorrent's strengths as a technical specification: it is designed to simultaneously and horizontally connect multiplicitous members of a "swarm" in a distributed meshwork (to use Galloway's word); while tracking is typically (though not necessarily) centralized, each peer is locally responsible for negotiating for pieces of the target file and maximizing its own download rates, under encoded etiquette that maximizes the swarm's collective speed and performance; it can accommodate any type of file and (theoretically) any number of peers, and will continue to run as individual clients enter and drop out of the swarm in whatever configuration.

[4:42:45] [Distributed DB] Control:dht=93462, Database:keys=3,vals=1,loc=4,dir=0,ind=0,div_f=0,div_s=0

[4:42:46] Peer connection [{disconnected} []] closed: failed to establish outgoing connection: Connection attempt aborted: timed out after 30sec

[4:42:48] Received message [BT_PIECE data for #1138: 98304->114687] from L: 68.148.239.210: 6881 [Azureus 2.3.0.0]

[4:42:48] Sent BT_REQUEST piece #1138: 131072->147455 message to L: 68.148.239.210: 6881 [Azureus 2.3.0.0]

[4:42:53] Received message [BT_KEEP_ALIVE] from L: 70.67.3.161: 45015 [BitTornado 0.3.7]

[4:43:02] Tracker Announcer is sending an update Request

[4:43:02] Tracker Announcer is Requesting : http:[]tracker.prq.to/announce?info_hash=%F6G%9CTs%C0JP%0AP%8At%00%22C%FEl%C3%0F%85&peer_id=-AZ2302-Eem4bhX7uawn&port=6882&uploaded=606689&downloaded=590498[...]

[4:43:02] Received message [BT_REQUEST piece #1053: 212992->229375] from L: 70.67.3.161: 45015 [BitTornado 0.3.7]

[4:43:02] Sent BT_PIECE data for #1053: 212992->212991 message to L: 70.67.3.161: 45015 [BitTornado 0.3.7]

[4:43:04] Received message [BT_REQUEST piece #1053: 229376->245759] from L: 70.67.3.161: 45015 [BitTornado 0.3.7]

[4:43:05] Sent BT_PIECE data for #1053: 229376->229375 message to L: 70.67.3.161: 45015 [BitTornado 0.3.7]

[4:43:06] Exception while processing the Tracker Request : ConnectException:Connection refused

[4:43:06] Tracker Announcer is Requesting : http:[]f6479c5473c04a500a508a74002243fe6cc30f85.bthub.com:80/announce?info_hash=%F6G%9CTs%C0JP%0AP%8At%00%22C%FEl%C3%0F%85&peer_id=-AZ2302-Eem4bhX7uawn&port=6882&uploaded=639483&downloaded=598368[...]

[4:43:07] Received message [BT_PIECE data for #143: 180224->196607] from L: 70.67.3.161: 45015 [BitTornado 0.3.7]
[Azureus (BitTorrent client) log, excerpt]

Galloway situates the importance of these characteristics in a sweeping historical shift (from the modern to the postmodern, discipline to control, decentralized to distributed). Given that "protocol is a type of controlling logic that operates largely outside institutional, governmental, and corporate power" (244), it is unsurprising that BitTorrent finds itself in a position of acute tension with (formerly?) hegemonic hierarchical economic and juridical systems.

In a deeper sense, Galloway's account aligns with my own in that he theorizes protocol as hybrid. This is to say that, as he writes, "protocol is based on a contradiction between two opposing machines: One machine [exemplified by TCP/IP] radically distributes control into autonomous locales, the other machine [exemplified by DNS] focuses control into rigidly defined hierarchies. The tension between these two machines -- a dialectical tension -- creates a hospitable climate for protocological control" (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 -- my definition of hybridity. While his broad intervention may be similar to mine, though, Galloway's interpretation of the periodization at work here is slightly different. He evinces equal skepticism about utopian narratives of postmodernism's technological advances: "Critics love to exclaim that 'everything has changed!'... The Web is described as a free, structureless network. Yet the rhizome is clearly not the absence of structure... So to equate the Web with the rhizome, one must argue against those who describe the Web as a free, structureless network, and argue for a certain kind of rhizomatic protocol on the Web" (60-64). Nevertheless, as is evident here, where I've understood this as a moment suspended on the cusp of two eras, Galloway more penetratingly refigures postmodernism proper as more complex than its vulgar apologists would have us believe. (He also gives Deleuze and Guattari more credit than I do for describing and inhabiting this hybrid complexity.) To give an example of how Galloway's perspective can be more convincing, take my rather clumsy reading of BitTorrent as a media hybrid: "BitTorrent negotiates this tension by combining centralized (torrent sites and trackers) and decentralized (collective uploading of fragmented files) elements, representing a hybrid system within what is often (prematurely) thought of as the fully self-organizing, emergent topology of peer-to-peer" (6). For Galloway, the idea that peer-to-peer (the distributed network) represents a clean break with previous modes (such as broadcasting) is a naive misinterpretation, and it is precisely the unification of divergent control strategies in technologies like BitTorrent (and the internet more generally) that makes them quintessentially postmodern protocols.

Galloway also orchestrates the convergence of my two hybrids, the sci-fi cyborg and peer-to-peer TV distribution, more seamlessly than I. He claims provocatively that, given "that for many years now matter has become life, this coinciding with the emergence of autonomous life forms both nonhuman and hybrid such as robots [and] cyborgs... [and that] because protocol is agent-specific, it must always be connected to the particular milieu inhabited by those agents -- their spaces and their own material bodies," "life, hitherto considered as an effuse, immaterial essence, has become matter, due to its increased imbrication with protocol forces" (82). More concisely, "This historical moment -- when life is defined no longer as essence, but as code -- is the moment when life becomes a medium" (111). Methodologically, this is a profound statement, because it engineers in one fell swoop the interface of two major bodies of work: theories of media and theories of bioinformatics and biopolitics -- I might venture to call it a sort of cybernetics of critical theory, in the sense that it posits the fundamental interchangeability of these objects. In this vein, however, this move is perhaps not immune to cybernetics-style pitfalls. Even as Galloway continually asserts the "special existence of protocol in the 'privileged' physical media of bodies" (12), the status of this materiality in his text remains, in my opinion, ambiguous. One of protocol's primary virtues is "pantheism[:] Accept everything, no matter what source, sender, or destination" (42). 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: "in order to initiate communication, the nodes must speak the same language. This is why protocol is important" (12). Galloway seems far more interested, for example, in protocol's cross-platform facility in operating across heterogeneous components than in the vagaries of this hardware, whether technological or organic -- it's hard to grasp how, when he asserts 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. These are perhaps a manifestation of the same tendency to efface bodily contingencies that Hayles critiques. 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... Indeed, protocol is a theory of confluence of life and matter" (103). Engaging in the humanities in a social context where the material realm is still "privileged," these questions about how to position physical existence (again, whether of organisms or technologies) within post-structuralist theory remain unresolved.

I'm not sure how I became quasi-Marxist, but I have been wondering how capitalism intersects with the questions we've been exploring of technology, information, media, bodies, control. Lyotard seems to raise this issue most tantalizingly, explicitly drawing the socioeconomic domain into his analysis without necessarily offering convincing conclusions or prescriptions. First of all, he traces a capitalist trajectory that is fully intertwined with his narrative of postmodern knowledge and legitimacy:

a) "The relationship of the suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledge they supply and use is now tending, and will increasingly tend, to assume the form already taken by the relationship of commodity producers and consumers to the commodities they produce and consume -- that is, the form of value... the goal is exchange" (4): as an opening axiom, the knowledge relation becomes fully correlative to and subsumed into market relations in the contemporary system. Indeed, this premise is basic to the sociopolitical definition of postmodernism.

b) "It is widely accepted that knowledge has become the principle force of production over the last few decades... The notion that learning falls within the purview of the State, as the brain or mind of society, will become more and more outdated... It is from this point of view that the problem of the relationship between economic and State powers threatens to arise with a new urgency" (5): not only is knowledge produced and consumed as a commodity, it is increasingly the privileged commodity with the greatest payload of surplus value. Within the context of a generalized crisis in the hegemony of the nation-state, demonstrated concretely by the rise of multinational corporations (5) under globalization and neoliberal privatization, the result is a mounting challenge from economic quarters to state control over learning and information. In the age of "computer technology and telematics... [and] data banks" (6), knowledge increasingly converges with capitalist production and distribution.

The above are is the crux of Lyotard's initial "working hypothesis," which he then disclaims as a "strategic" intervention in the language game he is engaged in, recommended by its "fine capacity for discrimination... [of] effects it would be difficult to perceive from other points of view" (7). As such, it "makes no claims of being original or even true," and Lyotard objects to it on the basis that "it fails to challenge the general paradigm of progress in science and technology" (7). Nevertheless, his hesitations aren't directed at the accuracy of his proposition, which has, he says, "strong credibility," as "there is a good chance that this scenario will come to pass" (7). Therefore, I take it as part of the historical foundation of his account.

Later, socioeconomic concerns return as the pivot of Lyotard's thesis about postmodern scientific legitimacy:

c) "[technologies] for the purpose of producing proof require additional expenditures. No money, no proof... An equation between wealth, efficiency, and truth is thus established. What happened at the end of the eighteenth century, with the first industrial revolution, is that the reciprocal of this equation was discovered: no technology without wealth, but no wealth without technology... It is at this precise moment that science becomes a force of production, in other words, a moment in the circulation of capital" (44-5): this is essentially a more specific rendition of aspects of (a) and (b) -- very simply, contemporary science, and thus scientifically legitimate truth, is extremely expensive, necessarily yoking it to the capitalist regime. Moreover, it is these investments in science and technology that, in turn, drive innovation and profit, completing the circuit that weds knowledge and the market.

d) "Capitalism solves the scientific problem of research funding in its own way... Nation-states, especially in their Keynesian period, follow the same rule: applied research on the one hand, basic research on the other. They collaborate with corporations through an array of agencies" (45): I include this to emphasize again, along with Lyotard, that the State, the corporation, and the university and other institutions are learning are in more and more convoluted and contested relations with each other.

e) "the goal is no longer truth, but performativity -- that is, the best possible input/output equation. The State and/or company must abandon the idealist and humanist narratives of legitimation in order to justify a new goal: in the discourse of today's financial backers of research, the only credible goal is power... The question is to determine what the discourse of power consists of and if it can constitute a legitimation" (46): here we arrive at the punchline of this thread of Lyotard's analysis -- given the convergence of knowledge and economics with its technological/performative logics, as detailed in (a)-(d), we have reached a point where narratives of legitimacy that don't align with capitalism are no longer effective. The remainder of his discussion concerns the nature of an alternative, postmodern legitimacy.

f) "By reinforcing technology, one 'reinforces' reality, and one's chances of being right increase accordingly. Reciprocally, technology is reinforced all the more effectively if one has access to scientific knowledge and decision-making authority... Thus the growth of power, and its self-legitimation, are now taking the route of data storage and accessibility, and the operativity of information... Research funds are allocated by States in accordance with this logic of power growth" (47): this is Lyotard's answer to the above question. As per (c), there is a powerful complementarity of technology and capital, which translates into a horizon of mutual legitimation. Because, under this scheme, information is the key to performativity, information technologies become the hub toward which nation-states, institutions, and corporations all direct their energies. This points toward the computer age, which is the ever-present context of Lyotard's book.

Alongside this historical outline, Lyotard touches on a methodological critique of Marxist interpretive rubrics. In his foreword, Jameson notes "the difficulty of articulating cultural and informational commodities with the labor theory of value, the methodological problem of reconciling an analysis in terms of quantity and in particular of labor time (or of the sale of labor power in so many units) with the nature of 'mental' work and of nonphysical and nonmeasurable 'commodities' of the type of informational bits or indeed of media or entertainment 'products'" (xv). Certainly, Lyotard is cognizant of this implication of the postmodern junction of knowledge and capital that he details, and he expresses a corresponding critique of the waning effectiveness of Marxist thought: "everywhere, the Critique of political economy (the subtitle of Marx's Capital) and its correlate, the critique of alienated society, are used in one way or another as aids in programming the system" (13). Jameson also suggests, however, that Lyotard doesn't address this methodological impasse successfully: "to avoid one possible and even logical resolution to the dilemma, which would consist in becoming, like Daniel Bell, an ideologue of technocracy and an apologist for the system itself... [Lyotard] transfers the older ideologies of aesthetic high modernism, the celebration of its revolutionary power, to science and scientific research proper... The dynamic of perpetual change is, as Marx showed in the Manifesto, not some alien rhythm within capital... but rather is the very 'permanent revolution' of capitalism itself" (xx). In other words, Lyotard's purported political challenge is in fact easily incorporated into the vitality of the hegemonic regime itself.

This identifies precisely a personal and, I think, widespread anxiety that goes along with doing postmodern criticism: given what we now understand to be the intense flexibility of capitalism, its ability to adapt to and encompass any friction, its lack of an 'outside,' what would constitute meaningful resistance and meaningful theorization of resistance? Lyotard may recognize that "there is no question here of proposing a 'pure' alternative to the system: we all now know, as the 1970s come to a close, that an attempt at an alternative of that kind would end up resembling the system it was meant to replace" (66), but it's then not clear that he manages to propose any coherent alternative at all. Jameson, as well, remarks that the "global private monopoly of information... can be challenged only by genuinely political (and not symbolic or protopolitical) action" (xx) -- but leaves the definition (much less materialization) of said action entirely mysterious. The fact that Lyotard's concluding prescription -- that we should "give the public free access to the memory and data banks" so that we might have "[language] games of perfect information" (67) -- seems to fall back on the rhetoric of communicational transparency (albeit in the context of agonistic games rather than Habermasian consensus) is symptomatic of the lingering tangles in the analysis and critique of information capitalism.

[see also: David's response]

Instead of posting a singular, proprietary response this week, I've made small contributions to several other people's entries. I didn't mark what I added in the text, but it is of course possible to determine it through RecentChanges and revisions. I'm interested in how contemporary "cool" technologies -- like the internet and our wiki which is microcosm and part of it -- can be seen as bearing out (or not) McLuhan's framework. Moreover, especially in light of the fact that the wiki has not spontaneously developed into... something, I want to ask what elements shape our use of technologies, and to what degree we can interpret their effects (like McLuhan seems to) as a transparent function of their particular technical/media form.

David:

This past weekend, I learned how to post pictures with short messages to my blog from my cell phone, and have been doing so daily. This has changed the way I perceive the world, in that I must now parse what aspects of my experience would translate well into cameraphone photos, and what moments in its temporal rhythm are conducive to dashing off a post on the go. It has also obviously changed the way I interface with my favored prosthetic communications technologies. In other words, I can certainly imagine the kind of micro-accommodation that would (or does?) take place in human/machine symbiotic relationships as the technology is constantly in motion. What is not necessarily clear to me is at what point this process becomes the sort of crisis or radical break that McLuhan warns is immanent.

Marc:

In light of what seems an evident but not transparent correlation with postmodernism, it's interesting to note that (as professor Joyrich pointed out in MC44) McLuhan has been taken up as the poster child of both corporate interests (in that he argues that the content of the media is irrelevant) and leftist-intellectual politics. Is this in itself one of his postmodern qualities, or could it be symptomatic of some of the underlying contradictions or failings of his account?

Elan:

It's hard to get around the extreme technological determinism of McLuhan's theory. Up to a point, it sounds like familiar (post)structuralism, with its emphasis on form over content, how things are said rather than what is said. But according to semiotics, signifying conventions are produced by social systems, whereas in McLuhan this relationship is reversed. There's a fundamental (disciplinary? historical?) disconnect that makes it difficult to take his work seriously.

Lucy:

Moreover, if "the medium is the message," in what sense can McLuhan expect his text (notably presented in the print medium) -- or the intellectual understanding of media that is apparently its intended effect -- to interface with the reader in a way that will prepare us for the upcoming crisis in sensory perception? That is, if the vast social consequences of new technologies are fully determined by the essential qualities of the technologies themselves, how could understanding (in book form) intervene? Spencer quite reasonably suggests that McLuhan wants to include his own work in his broad definition of art -- but also raises questions about how this mode of engagement is then conceived.

Braxton:

In light of these problems, I'd like to question more broadly how we can or should read "primary" texts like McLuhan's book. It seems we could engage them in terms of understanding their internal logic, bracketing (at least initially) such reservations as are detailed above. Or we could bring methods of textual criticism to bear on them, revealing some of their underlying contradictions (as Spencer has done. Or we could, like Marc, situate them within their own historical context, in the interest of tracing the development of a kind of intellectual field. As contemporary readers, what can we get out of McLuhan?

The crossings or hybridizations of the media release great new force and energy... (48) The fact that they do interact and spawn new progeny has been a source of wonder over the ages... (49) The hybrid or the meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born. (55)

~ McLuhan

"Every major US television series is available for download as a video file," notes BBC technology correspondent Darren Waters. The article is about BitTorrent, an increasingly popular peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol. The primary differences between BitTorrent and other file-sharing software are as follows: speeds are typically curbed by the limited bandwidth allotted for uploading, where a single node is serving the file to multiple downloaders -- BitTorrent circumvents this one-to-many bottleneck by breaking a large file into tiny pieces which are downloaded and simultaneously uploaded by all members of the "swarm," thus aggregating their bandwidth (meanwhile, any user who has completed the download immediately functions as a "seeder" of the file); the functions of searching for files and downloading them are separated -- the latter is the role of a freeware program which executes the instructions encoded in "metainfo" (.torrent) files, collected at innumerable web sites that serve for the former. BitTorrent's capacity and appeal as a platform for sharing television shows and movies has not gone unremarked by the entertainment industry, which has begun targeting both BitTorrent web sites and individual users (via their ISPs) under copyright law.

How might we theorize the urge to couple centralized broadcasting with the distributed potential of the internet? McLuhan posits a systems model, writing that "the stimulus to new invention is the stress of acceleration of pace and increase of load" (42). Is innovation non-volitional and automatic, a function of the inevitable escalation of any productive circuit? I'd like to explore the role of desire in the procreative "meeting" McLuhan describes between two different media, which therein "spawn" a "hybrid" form.

the posthuman implies not only a coupling with intelligent machines but a coupling so intense and multifaceted that it is no longer possible to distinguish meaningfully between the biological organism and the informational circuits in which the organism is enmeshed... flickering signification is the progeny of the fascinating and troubling coupling of language and machine. (35)

~ Hayles

N. Katherine Hayles (as well as Plant) discusses the "Turing test," which equates gender difference and human-machine difference by analogy. "The test," she writes, "puts you into a cybernetic circuit that splices your will, desire, and perception into a distributed cognitive system in which represented bodies are joined with enacted bodies through mutating and flexible machine interfaces" (xiv). But if, merely in the conception of the test, "you have already become" a hybrid of body, mind, and machine, "Central to the construction of the cyborg are informational pathways connecting the organic body to its prosthetic extensions. This presumes a conception of information as a (disembodied) entity that can flow between carbon-based organic components and silicon-based electronic components" (2). The cyborg is, in other words, a question of the medium, or more precisely of the erasure thereof: "a defining characteristic of the present cultural moment is the belief that information can circulate unchanged among different material substrates" (1). Hayles' project is "to entangle abstract form and material particularity such that the reader will find it increasingly difficult to maintain the perception that they are separate and discrete entities... the emphasis falls not on the separation of matter and information but on their inextricably complex compoundings and entwinings" (23). But if mind and body get together once and for all, what genus of (posthuman) hybrid do they give birth to?

only Eve of the One Woman can satisfy the desires of professors and male students, whereas the plurality of women students enter a domain of discourse that, since Edison, no longer knows love... Machines do away with polar sexual difference and its symbols. An apparatus that can replace Man or the symbol of masculine production is also accessible to women. (351-2)

~ Kittler

If McLuhan envisions two distinct media giving birth to a third, Sadie Plant muses that "what were once discreet [sic] media and separable senses have become promiscuous and intertwined" (255). I watched the first season of the new TV series Battlestar Galactica without ever turning on my television. The show begins from the familiar sci-fi archetype of the cataclysmic near-extermination of the human race by a race of robots they built to serve them. The twist is that the robots, mechanical metal zombies known as "cylons," infiltrated human defense systems by constructing their own bio-cylon replicants, who are virtually indistinguishable from humans. They are, if you will, the "progeny" of humans and their machines, and the genocidal desire animating this coupling is apparent. But the bio-cylons are compromised by other desires, which are at odds with their "programming": the romantic desire of one renegade cylon for the man she is sent to ensnare; the schizophrenic struggle of one cylon "sleeper agent" to cling to the human identity (and the boyfriend) she has always believed to be her own.

Plant theorizes that men have always wanted to conceptualize women as a variety of robot: "Women were supposed to be single-purpose systems, highly programmed, predetermined systems tooled up and fit for just one thing" (36), "merely the vehicles and media for the transmission of the male line” (222). But, like the typical sci-fi cyborg, like, in fact, the cybernetic systems that Wiener posited as universal (162), women have a tendency toward "runaway" processes which exceed the functions for which they were designed. For Plant, moreover, the hybridizations that produce cyborgs and those that produce, say, transsexuals are materially as well as metaphorically linked: "the boundaries between male and female, man and woman, have continued to blur in parallel with the erosion of the borders between man and machine" (210). Indeed, the constitutive ambivalences of gender difference are inscribed in the digits of computer code: "one and zero looked just right, made for each other: 1, the definite, upright line; and 0, the diagram of nothing at all: penis and vagina, thing and hole” (35) -- which is itself a hybrid "derived from two entirely different sources... pieces of eight [and] binary pairs" (50). But what happens with the offspring of a binary: do they retain as intermixture the two originary terms (X chromosome and Y chromosome, human and machine, broadcast and network)? Or do we reach a point where -- contrary to the efforts of the disciplinary forces of difference (humans who insist on denigrating the cylons as "toasters" and "machines," despite their lack of any discernible computer components; the entertainment industry who shackle media intercourse with a juridical chastity belt) -- "Differences between the sexes now bec[o]me matters of degree" (214), and "life and death [are] no longer absolute conditions, but interactive tendencies and processes, both of which are at work in both automatic machines and organisms" (161). If the latter, what becomes of sexual reproduction, and would we still assume it to be the difference across which desire germinates and the best chance for the survival of something like a species (220)?