For a nuanced theory of media development, we could certainly do worse than Raymond Williams's critique of facile notions of both fully determined and determining technology in Television: Technology and Cultural Form. We wouldn't want to dispute, surely, his proposal that media form and social context are mutually constitutive. But while Williams takes Marshall McLuhan as his techno-determinist straw man, this formalist method is not necessarily so far removed from the acuity that Williams advocates. McLuhan's aphoristic pronouncement that "the medium is the message" is a ready scapegoat but, in keeping with Hayles' emphasis on "embodiment" as the effect of fusing content and its pathways, McLuhan is signaling his more rarefied idea that all media are prosthetic amplifications of the human body – placing him in the orbit of poststructuralist connections between inscription, substrate, and subjectivity. McLuhan’s theory of media thereby raises the question of evolution, coupling its biological and historical permutations. His insistence on the determining influence of technologies on the reproduction of their corresponding individual and social formations appears to leave little room for reciprocity: media "alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance," until "we become what we behold" (18-19). If man [sic] is "the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image" (41), it is the copy (or at the very least, the prosthesis) that replicates the original, raising the question of how man "finds ever new ways of modifying his technology" (46). McLuhan answers with recourse to a medical model of bio-equilibrium: "In the physical stress of superstimulation of various kinds, the central nervous system acts to protect itself by a strategy of amputation or isolation of the offending organ, sense, or function. Thus, the stimulus to new invention is the stress of acceleration of pace and increase of load" (42). For example, it was "the pressure of new burdens resulting from the acceleration of exchange by written and monetary media" that led to the innovation of the wheel (42). That is, cultural formations like capitalism are yoked to physiology through technology, and their co-evolution is driven by the tensions and excesses they generate, which necessitate the constant adaptation of the (perceptive and social) body. Reproduction is therefore a dynamic rather than a linear procedure, far more complex in McLuhan's view than his totalizing catchphrases evince out of context.
Hybridization figures in this matrix as the coupling of divergent media, which "interact and spawn new progeny" (49): "The hybrid or the meeting of two media," McLuhan writes, "is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born" (55). Since "it is from such intensive hybrid exchange and strife of ideas and forms that the greatest social energies are released, and from which arise the greatest technologies" (47), this generative process is associated with historical development and transformation, linking hybridity to global temporality and geography. McLuhan is concerned, in particular, with the contemporary "electric age" as a radical break from the previous era, wherein "all such extension of our bodies, including cities, will be translated into information systems" (57). As a further instantiation of this shift to late capitalism that McLuhan grasped in 1964, digital networks are hybrid in at least two senses: 1) Like cyborgs, they merge human and machine components into a composite artifact. Hayles, for example, maintains that the internet severs the bodies "enacted" as material on one side of the screen and "represented" as information on the other, only to rejoin them via the technological interface (Posthuman). 2) They are one pivotal site where hybrid intercourse among media themselves is reshaping our subjective and social landscapes.
Several recent works have revisited the theoretical question of media hybridization as a historical process, within a framework more thoroughly informed by the methodologies of poststructuralism and archaeology than McLuhan's visionary fancies. In Remediation, Bolter and Grusin return to the scene of the Williams-McLuhan dispute, stating that "to avoid both technological determinism and determined technology, we propose to treat social forces and technical forms as two aspects of the same phenomenon: to explore digital technologies themselves as hybrids of technical, material, social, and economic facets" (77). This reiterates the negotiated materialist stance I established above, formulating the interpenetration of substrates and discourses explicitly as hybridity. Bolter and Grusin convincingly inhabit this terrain via their signature term "remediation," or "the representation of one medium in another" (45). In fact, all media operate by remediation, since a medium is, by definition, "that which appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real" (65). Remediation relies on a particular hybrid pairing, as interdependent and contradictory as all such duos: that of "immediacy" (the inclination to efface the interface) and "hypermediacy" (the inclination to valorize the interface). These poles "oscillate" as each claim to a more transparent and authentic representation calls attention to the apparatus of media form (19). While Bolter and Grusin observe that the two tendencies are in conflict throughout the history of media, they suggest that this interplay is especially acute and significant in the digital age, and a number of their examples detail ways that television and the internet, specifically, remediate each other. Transmedia franchising, or "pouring a familiar content into another media form... to spread the content over as many markets as possible," is one instance of remediation by "repurposing" and this strategy's tensions: "Each of those forms takes part of its meaning from the other products in a process of honorific remediation and at the same time makes a tacit claim to offer an experience that the other forms cannot" (68). Such endemic variances among desires, ideologies, technologies and profit models that work at cross-purposes to each other account for some of the vertigo that accompanies convergence. Bolter and Grusin themselves propose that these transactions can be read as queer: "hypermediacy is multiple and deviant in its suggestion of multiplicity," and following Judith Butler, "as the sum of all unnatural modes of representation... [it] always reemerges in every era, no matter how rigorously technologies of transparency may try to exclude it. Transparency needs hypermediacy" (84) in order to appear natural. Thus, Bolter and Grusin have again outlined a scenario that posits irrepressible deviance as inherent to the turbulent network of mediation, creating problems of control that erupt with particular urgency in today's convergent formations.
In Media Ecologies, Fuller offers an analogous rendering of the centrality of queer orientations to media economies, though more obliquely. He asserts that "'hidden' dimensions of invention and combination are embedded and implicit in particular dynamics and affordances of media systems and their parts" (8). These deviant vectors grapple with the mass reproduction of the "standard object... a mode of knowing and producing that effects limitations on other forms of understanding and use," that is nonetheless only a precarious "'settlement' of powers, affordances, and interpretations" (9). While Fuller's configuration is more inclined to the perils of "subtext" than Bolter and Grusin's – with the scare-quoted "hidden" submerged within a provisionally stable hegemony, in contrast to the parallel status of "unnatural" hypermedia – both accounts maintain that non-normative movement is integral to representational flows, and must always be negotiated in the operation of any nexus of power. Fuller adopts the term "ecology," which is deliberately overdetermined, to "indicate the massive and dynamic interrelation of processes and objects, being and things, patterns and matter" (2). From an ecological vantage, "the only way to find things out about what happens when complex objects such as media systems interact is to carry out such interactions... Every element is an explosion, a passion or capacity settled temporarily into what passes for a stable state" (1). Because of this complexity, Fuller's theory remains intentionally inchoate, performed rather than stated in a series of case studies. This simulation approach is engaging and exemplary of the networked relations I'm trying to activate here, but restricts the transferability of his model.
The simulation of complex systems is precisely the ecology that N. Katherine Hayles surveys more expansively in My Mother Was a Computer, which founds a theory of media, in the broadest sense, on principles ported from the scientific study of emergence. In the field, this term refers to "properties [that] come about from interactions between components... [and that] typically cannot be predicted because [of] the complex feedback loops that develop" (25). Hayles recognizes a kinship between her project and Bolter and Grusin's "remediation," wherein the dynamic interaction between immediacy and hypermediacy represents a "coevolution of apparently opposed trends... characteristic of complex systems with multiple feedback loops" (32). She argues, however, that their label (with the re- prefix implying an origin, even as they insist that "all mediation is remediation") is limited by "locating the starting point for the cycles in a particular locality and medium" rather than in "multiple causality," and by "the specific connotation of applying [only] to immediate/hypermediate strategies" (33). Hayles ventures a more sweeping intervention with her term "intermediation," repurposed from scientist Nicholas Gessler and elsewhere. Intermediation refers to "multicausal and multilayered hierarchical systems, which entail distributed agency, emergent processes, unpredictable coevolutions, and seemingly paradoxical interactions between convergent and divergent processes" (31). These systems function by generating what are known scientifically as "dynamic hierarchies" (Hayles later redefines them as "heterarchies"): massively emergent networks wherein the complexity precipitated at one level becomes the raw material for further levels, producing even greater complexity. Thus, intermediation is characterized by the confluence of the following conditions (SLSA Code conference, 02 November 2007):
Key sites of intermediation in Hayles's schema include the co-evolution of language and code, of humans and machines, and of analog and digital (which, in practice, always appear in combination). I propose that intermediation is also a fruitful model for analyzing transmedia formations as mobilized in today's entertainment industry. One of Hayles's aims is to reconfigure the typical understanding of textuality, which remains largely a relic of literature even as works move online: "rather than holding up as an ideal a unitary convergent work to which variants can be subordinated," she urges, "we should conceptualize texts as clustered in assemblages whose dynamics emerge from all the texts participating in the cluster " (9). She applies this topography explicitly to transmedia, if only in passing, when she mentions the constellation of novels, promotional web pages, fan web pages, and other official and unofficial material surrounding many computer games or feature films as an example of such a "Work as Assemblage" (105-106). Analogous to Foucault's move in The Archaeology of Knowledge, Hayles's methodology requires reconceiving subjectivity and authorship as "dispersed, fragmented, and heterogeneous... multiple in many senses, both because they are collectivities in and among themselves, and also because they include nonhuman as well as human actors" (106-107). This enmeshing within and between the variegated levels of a dynamic heterarchy (people and computers, television and the internet, corporations and fans) also leads Hayles to reiterate that the WaA's "components take forms distinctive to the media in which they flourish, so the specificities of media are essential to understanding its morphing configurations," and that "a robust account of materiality focusing on the recursive loops between physicality and textuality is essential" (107). Intermediation thus incorporates the vital theoretical vistas I've attempted to bring into focus here, taking a hybrid outlook on the constitution, propagation, and interpenetration of discursivity, subjectivity, technology, and materiality. Implicit in Hayles's account is a critique of "convergence" as the buzzword is sometimes rendered: "the current tendency to regard the computer as the ultimate solvent that is dissolving all other media into itself" (31). The critics discussed in this section reject the notion that a formerly discrete assortment of media (computation, print, television, telephony, etc.) are converging into a digital alignment wherein they are unified or interchangeable. Instead, as archaeologists, they excavate the protean, embodied networks through which media constantly re-represent each other, and seek to chart the unpredictable and irreducible complexity of these economies. In this methodological spirit, I now turn to question of how a particular transmedia brood reproduces itself as a dynamic heterarchy, with attention to its protocols and other mechanisms of control, and to their junctions of excess stress and potential failure.
Hybridization figures in this matrix as the coupling of divergent media, which "interact and spawn new progeny" (49): "The hybrid or the meeting of two media," McLuhan writes, "is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born" (55). Since "it is from such intensive hybrid exchange and strife of ideas and forms that the greatest social energies are released, and from which arise the greatest technologies" (47), this generative process is associated with historical development and transformation, linking hybridity to global temporality and geography. McLuhan is concerned, in particular, with the contemporary "electric age" as a radical break from the previous era, wherein "all such extension of our bodies, including cities, will be translated into information systems" (57). As a further instantiation of this shift to late capitalism that McLuhan grasped in 1964, digital networks are hybrid in at least two senses: 1) Like cyborgs, they merge human and machine components into a composite artifact. Hayles, for example, maintains that the internet severs the bodies "enacted" as material on one side of the screen and "represented" as information on the other, only to rejoin them via the technological interface (Posthuman). 2) They are one pivotal site where hybrid intercourse among media themselves is reshaping our subjective and social landscapes.
Several recent works have revisited the theoretical question of media hybridization as a historical process, within a framework more thoroughly informed by the methodologies of poststructuralism and archaeology than McLuhan's visionary fancies. In Remediation, Bolter and Grusin return to the scene of the Williams-McLuhan dispute, stating that "to avoid both technological determinism and determined technology, we propose to treat social forces and technical forms as two aspects of the same phenomenon: to explore digital technologies themselves as hybrids of technical, material, social, and economic facets" (77). This reiterates the negotiated materialist stance I established above, formulating the interpenetration of substrates and discourses explicitly as hybridity. Bolter and Grusin convincingly inhabit this terrain via their signature term "remediation," or "the representation of one medium in another" (45). In fact, all media operate by remediation, since a medium is, by definition, "that which appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real" (65). Remediation relies on a particular hybrid pairing, as interdependent and contradictory as all such duos: that of "immediacy" (the inclination to efface the interface) and "hypermediacy" (the inclination to valorize the interface). These poles "oscillate" as each claim to a more transparent and authentic representation calls attention to the apparatus of media form (19). While Bolter and Grusin observe that the two tendencies are in conflict throughout the history of media, they suggest that this interplay is especially acute and significant in the digital age, and a number of their examples detail ways that television and the internet, specifically, remediate each other. Transmedia franchising, or "pouring a familiar content into another media form... to spread the content over as many markets as possible," is one instance of remediation by "repurposing" and this strategy's tensions: "Each of those forms takes part of its meaning from the other products in a process of honorific remediation and at the same time makes a tacit claim to offer an experience that the other forms cannot" (68). Such endemic variances among desires, ideologies, technologies and profit models that work at cross-purposes to each other account for some of the vertigo that accompanies convergence. Bolter and Grusin themselves propose that these transactions can be read as queer: "hypermediacy is multiple and deviant in its suggestion of multiplicity," and following Judith Butler, "as the sum of all unnatural modes of representation... [it] always reemerges in every era, no matter how rigorously technologies of transparency may try to exclude it. Transparency needs hypermediacy" (84) in order to appear natural. Thus, Bolter and Grusin have again outlined a scenario that posits irrepressible deviance as inherent to the turbulent network of mediation, creating problems of control that erupt with particular urgency in today's convergent formations.
In Media Ecologies, Fuller offers an analogous rendering of the centrality of queer orientations to media economies, though more obliquely. He asserts that "'hidden' dimensions of invention and combination are embedded and implicit in particular dynamics and affordances of media systems and their parts" (8). These deviant vectors grapple with the mass reproduction of the "standard object... a mode of knowing and producing that effects limitations on other forms of understanding and use," that is nonetheless only a precarious "'settlement' of powers, affordances, and interpretations" (9). While Fuller's configuration is more inclined to the perils of "subtext" than Bolter and Grusin's – with the scare-quoted "hidden" submerged within a provisionally stable hegemony, in contrast to the parallel status of "unnatural" hypermedia – both accounts maintain that non-normative movement is integral to representational flows, and must always be negotiated in the operation of any nexus of power. Fuller adopts the term "ecology," which is deliberately overdetermined, to "indicate the massive and dynamic interrelation of processes and objects, being and things, patterns and matter" (2). From an ecological vantage, "the only way to find things out about what happens when complex objects such as media systems interact is to carry out such interactions... Every element is an explosion, a passion or capacity settled temporarily into what passes for a stable state" (1). Because of this complexity, Fuller's theory remains intentionally inchoate, performed rather than stated in a series of case studies. This simulation approach is engaging and exemplary of the networked relations I'm trying to activate here, but restricts the transferability of his model.
The simulation of complex systems is precisely the ecology that N. Katherine Hayles surveys more expansively in My Mother Was a Computer, which founds a theory of media, in the broadest sense, on principles ported from the scientific study of emergence. In the field, this term refers to "properties [that] come about from interactions between components... [and that] typically cannot be predicted because [of] the complex feedback loops that develop" (25). Hayles recognizes a kinship between her project and Bolter and Grusin's "remediation," wherein the dynamic interaction between immediacy and hypermediacy represents a "coevolution of apparently opposed trends... characteristic of complex systems with multiple feedback loops" (32). She argues, however, that their label (with the re- prefix implying an origin, even as they insist that "all mediation is remediation") is limited by "locating the starting point for the cycles in a particular locality and medium" rather than in "multiple causality," and by "the specific connotation of applying [only] to immediate/hypermediate strategies" (33). Hayles ventures a more sweeping intervention with her term "intermediation," repurposed from scientist Nicholas Gessler and elsewhere. Intermediation refers to "multicausal and multilayered hierarchical systems, which entail distributed agency, emergent processes, unpredictable coevolutions, and seemingly paradoxical interactions between convergent and divergent processes" (31). These systems function by generating what are known scientifically as "dynamic hierarchies" (Hayles later redefines them as "heterarchies"): massively emergent networks wherein the complexity precipitated at one level becomes the raw material for further levels, producing even greater complexity. Thus, intermediation is characterized by the confluence of the following conditions (SLSA Code conference, 02 November 2007):
- Different systems of increasing complexity
- Different media
- Results of lower-level system(s) re-represented in higher-level system(s)
- Heterarchical dynamics (feedback/forward loops interconnect media)
- Emergent complexity
Key sites of intermediation in Hayles's schema include the co-evolution of language and code, of humans and machines, and of analog and digital (which, in practice, always appear in combination). I propose that intermediation is also a fruitful model for analyzing transmedia formations as mobilized in today's entertainment industry. One of Hayles's aims is to reconfigure the typical understanding of textuality, which remains largely a relic of literature even as works move online: "rather than holding up as an ideal a unitary convergent work to which variants can be subordinated," she urges, "we should conceptualize texts as clustered in assemblages whose dynamics emerge from all the texts participating in the cluster " (9). She applies this topography explicitly to transmedia, if only in passing, when she mentions the constellation of novels, promotional web pages, fan web pages, and other official and unofficial material surrounding many computer games or feature films as an example of such a "Work as Assemblage" (105-106). Analogous to Foucault's move in The Archaeology of Knowledge, Hayles's methodology requires reconceiving subjectivity and authorship as "dispersed, fragmented, and heterogeneous... multiple in many senses, both because they are collectivities in and among themselves, and also because they include nonhuman as well as human actors" (106-107). This enmeshing within and between the variegated levels of a dynamic heterarchy (people and computers, television and the internet, corporations and fans) also leads Hayles to reiterate that the WaA's "components take forms distinctive to the media in which they flourish, so the specificities of media are essential to understanding its morphing configurations," and that "a robust account of materiality focusing on the recursive loops between physicality and textuality is essential" (107). Intermediation thus incorporates the vital theoretical vistas I've attempted to bring into focus here, taking a hybrid outlook on the constitution, propagation, and interpenetration of discursivity, subjectivity, technology, and materiality. Implicit in Hayles's account is a critique of "convergence" as the buzzword is sometimes rendered: "the current tendency to regard the computer as the ultimate solvent that is dissolving all other media into itself" (31). The critics discussed in this section reject the notion that a formerly discrete assortment of media (computation, print, television, telephony, etc.) are converging into a digital alignment wherein they are unified or interchangeable. Instead, as archaeologists, they excavate the protean, embodied networks through which media constantly re-represent each other, and seek to chart the unpredictable and irreducible complexity of these economies. In this methodological spirit, I now turn to question of how a particular transmedia brood reproduces itself as a dynamic heterarchy, with attention to its protocols and other mechanisms of control, and to their junctions of excess stress and potential failure.
