In Chapter I [coming Winter 2008], I surveyed important work on convergence as a technological, industrial, and cultural phenomenon, defined by both the increasing proliferation and interchangeability of consumer media devices and the increasing diffusion of commercial properties and narratives across multiple platforms. These analyses, for the most part, have been grounded in a tradition that can be loosely characterized as cultural studies, which draws on an interdisciplinary toolset that may incorporate elements from qualitative sociology, ethnography, political economy, and reception studies to formulate what Wendy Chun describes as an "insistence on technology as experienced by users [that] highlights the importance of economics, politics, and culture and relentlessly critiques technological determinism" (Chun 4). This skepticism of accounts centered on formal properties tends to divert cultural studies from a largely distinct tradition of media theory that springboards from continental poststructuralism and even sometimes from Marxism, and that focuses on the articulation of sensual things with discursive formations. "Media archaeology" is a methodological orientation most closely associated with Friedrich Kittler and a cluster of other German theorists, but it can be applied to any research (including a body of dynamic, theoretically adventurous revisionist media histories and an emerging field known as critical code studies) that "concentrate[s] on the logics and physics of hardware and software... [and] excavates the technological conditions of the sayable and the thinkable" (Chun 4) -- in keeping with Foucault's conception of the term in his monograph The Archaeology of Knowledge. As such, it could retroactively apply to thinkers from Jacques Derrida to Marshall McLuhan. While I wouldn't want to suggest that the charges of technological determinism and hardware fetishism often leveled at such work are invalid, they may overlook the complexity of the relations these models posit between media form and social and subjective contexts.
Muddying the debate are conflicting and increasingly compromised notions of materiality itself, the fraught benchmark which is frequently at the heart of attempts to arrive, via theoretical methodologies, at judgments relevant to the "real" world. It is the material fixation that enables Kittler to declare, in "There Is No Software," that "all code operations, despite their metaphoric faculties such as 'call' or 'return,' come down to absolutely local string manipulations and that is, I am afraid, to signifiers of voltage differences" (Kittler). Other scholars and approaches, however, have called into question such an easy dismissal of the effects of the discursive dimension on corporeal substance. N. Katherine Hayles, who insists on the importance of embodiment, nonetheless comes to the conclusion that materiality should be considered "an emergent property created through dynamic interactions between physical characteristics and signifying strategies" (Hayles Mother 3). Likewise, in his eponymously materialist account of new media, Matthew Fuller advocates a "materialism that acknowledges and takes delight in the conceptuality of real objects" (Fuller 1). We can trace a similar intellectual trajectory in the history of Marxist theory, wherein the original subordination of material base to ideological superstructure gradually disintegrates in its encounter with poststructuralism, until finally Laclau and Mouffe declare that "Our analysis rejects the distinction between discursive and non-discursive practices. It affirms a) that every object is constituted as an object of discourse... [and] (b) [...] the material character of every discursive structure... [and] the progressive affirmation, from Gramsci to Althusser, of the material character of ideologies" (Laclau 107-109). This is not even to mention Foucault, who, in his elaboration of the materiality of power, rejected the vexed notion of ideology out of hand. The most convincing media archaeologies focus not on the reduction of all discourse to sensual phenomena, but rather on the interdependence of technological form and social and subjective meanings.
A parallel conclusion could be drawn from the interventions of queer theory, which has staged a drama that is strangely analogous to the one Hayles charts in the technological imaginary, with its fantasies of disembodiment. While certain conceptions of queer sexuality, from Foucault to Berlant and Warner, have insisted on the actuality of bodies and acts, making sex in its carnality the ground for a politics, another strand exemplified by Butler and Sedgwick has articulated queerness as a structural property that tends to promiscuously infect a broad variety of discursive and political domains. There isn't an opposition within the field in the stark way I've posed it here, but this dialectical tension has been formative for several decades of queer criticism and activism. Queer as a theoretical mode within the orbit of poststructuralism may be accused of abstracting (or disembodying) the idea to a point that evacuates its connection to the experience of queer subjects and communities. Moreover, within these communities there isn't a consensus about whether the term is a synonym for the umbrella LGBT or whether it designates a radical approach to gender, sexuality, and identity that is not coextensive with or limited to same-sex relations. For me, these questions are contiguous with those surrounding new media because technology is inextricable from the issue of how bodies are articulated with information, and from the larger socioeconomic context of late capitalism within which both these theories and these subjectivities are forged. While I appreciate the importance of retaining some provisional stability in the definition of "queer" that links it to sexual practice, I still believe that this concept contains within itself its own incoherence, precisely because queerness marks the site of impurity, hybridity, affinity. In this sense, I find the boundaries that the label compromises much more productive than the boundaries it can maintain.
In this project, I do use "queer" both as a descriptor for literally lesbian interpretations and subcultures and as a metaphor for the architecture that characterizes a menagerie of hybrid forms populating and copulating in today's convergent mediasphere – from the status of internet video (a "queer" intermixture of broadcast and broadband) to the position of the fan (a "queer" cyborg who inhabits the liminal spaces within texts and industry). I adopt this rhetoric advisedly, as a tactic in the larger field of discursive and material interpenetration. We can see the friction of queer theory as having made this same border challenge from a different direction: what it indicates is that the corporeal exercise of sexuality can never be disentangled from its discursive framework and social contexts, even when they seem distant from sex acts themselves. My attention here is to lesbian fandom, and I wouldn't want to imply that all convergent phenomena are equally queer, nor that all lesbian readings are equally convergent. I do hope to argue, however, that there is an affinity between more explicitly queer fan activities and the increasingly perverse and compound strategies of media reproduction, one that goes beyond the purely geometric homology of their shared hybridity. I make this argument through an analysis of how particular technologies facilitate particular modes of engagement – specifically, of how slash is one instantiation of an emergent technological configuration that makes it increasingly difficult to contain audience desire and use within economically and normatively dominant bounds. Thus, I turn to media archaeology as a methodology for investigating the structuring power of material technological form, while maintaining an understanding of materiality that does not take it as divorced from metaphor or imagination. Likewise, I approach my object, a localized interpretive community of lesbian viewership, with an expansive vantage on its interconnections with a virtual network of indirect discourses.
Muddying the debate are conflicting and increasingly compromised notions of materiality itself, the fraught benchmark which is frequently at the heart of attempts to arrive, via theoretical methodologies, at judgments relevant to the "real" world. It is the material fixation that enables Kittler to declare, in "There Is No Software," that "all code operations, despite their metaphoric faculties such as 'call' or 'return,' come down to absolutely local string manipulations and that is, I am afraid, to signifiers of voltage differences" (Kittler). Other scholars and approaches, however, have called into question such an easy dismissal of the effects of the discursive dimension on corporeal substance. N. Katherine Hayles, who insists on the importance of embodiment, nonetheless comes to the conclusion that materiality should be considered "an emergent property created through dynamic interactions between physical characteristics and signifying strategies" (Hayles Mother 3). Likewise, in his eponymously materialist account of new media, Matthew Fuller advocates a "materialism that acknowledges and takes delight in the conceptuality of real objects" (Fuller 1). We can trace a similar intellectual trajectory in the history of Marxist theory, wherein the original subordination of material base to ideological superstructure gradually disintegrates in its encounter with poststructuralism, until finally Laclau and Mouffe declare that "Our analysis rejects the distinction between discursive and non-discursive practices. It affirms a) that every object is constituted as an object of discourse... [and] (b) [...] the material character of every discursive structure... [and] the progressive affirmation, from Gramsci to Althusser, of the material character of ideologies" (Laclau 107-109). This is not even to mention Foucault, who, in his elaboration of the materiality of power, rejected the vexed notion of ideology out of hand. The most convincing media archaeologies focus not on the reduction of all discourse to sensual phenomena, but rather on the interdependence of technological form and social and subjective meanings.
A parallel conclusion could be drawn from the interventions of queer theory, which has staged a drama that is strangely analogous to the one Hayles charts in the technological imaginary, with its fantasies of disembodiment. While certain conceptions of queer sexuality, from Foucault to Berlant and Warner, have insisted on the actuality of bodies and acts, making sex in its carnality the ground for a politics, another strand exemplified by Butler and Sedgwick has articulated queerness as a structural property that tends to promiscuously infect a broad variety of discursive and political domains. There isn't an opposition within the field in the stark way I've posed it here, but this dialectical tension has been formative for several decades of queer criticism and activism. Queer as a theoretical mode within the orbit of poststructuralism may be accused of abstracting (or disembodying) the idea to a point that evacuates its connection to the experience of queer subjects and communities. Moreover, within these communities there isn't a consensus about whether the term is a synonym for the umbrella LGBT or whether it designates a radical approach to gender, sexuality, and identity that is not coextensive with or limited to same-sex relations. For me, these questions are contiguous with those surrounding new media because technology is inextricable from the issue of how bodies are articulated with information, and from the larger socioeconomic context of late capitalism within which both these theories and these subjectivities are forged. While I appreciate the importance of retaining some provisional stability in the definition of "queer" that links it to sexual practice, I still believe that this concept contains within itself its own incoherence, precisely because queerness marks the site of impurity, hybridity, affinity. In this sense, I find the boundaries that the label compromises much more productive than the boundaries it can maintain.
In this project, I do use "queer" both as a descriptor for literally lesbian interpretations and subcultures and as a metaphor for the architecture that characterizes a menagerie of hybrid forms populating and copulating in today's convergent mediasphere – from the status of internet video (a "queer" intermixture of broadcast and broadband) to the position of the fan (a "queer" cyborg who inhabits the liminal spaces within texts and industry). I adopt this rhetoric advisedly, as a tactic in the larger field of discursive and material interpenetration. We can see the friction of queer theory as having made this same border challenge from a different direction: what it indicates is that the corporeal exercise of sexuality can never be disentangled from its discursive framework and social contexts, even when they seem distant from sex acts themselves. My attention here is to lesbian fandom, and I wouldn't want to imply that all convergent phenomena are equally queer, nor that all lesbian readings are equally convergent. I do hope to argue, however, that there is an affinity between more explicitly queer fan activities and the increasingly perverse and compound strategies of media reproduction, one that goes beyond the purely geometric homology of their shared hybridity. I make this argument through an analysis of how particular technologies facilitate particular modes of engagement – specifically, of how slash is one instantiation of an emergent technological configuration that makes it increasingly difficult to contain audience desire and use within economically and normatively dominant bounds. Thus, I turn to media archaeology as a methodology for investigating the structuring power of material technological form, while maintaining an understanding of materiality that does not take it as divorced from metaphor or imagination. Likewise, I approach my object, a localized interpretive community of lesbian viewership, with an expansive vantage on its interconnections with a virtual network of indirect discourses.
