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)?
