I'm inexpressibly lucky to have found a way to turn my obsessions into my work. What follows are my drafts of panel and paper abstracts about Battlestar Galactica for MiT @ MIT (feedback welcome -- I hope they take them).

TV 2.0: Remixing Battlestar Galactica (panel with _mesk, alistern, and theorynut)
The SciFi Channel’s critically acclaimed hit series Battlestar Galactica has been heralded as the rebirth of TV’s science fiction genre. As a reimagination of the short-lived late 70’s show of the same name, it has one foot in the historical tradition of cult television, but as an innovator in media convergence and diffusion through its extensive web and behind-the-scenes content, it is also at the vanguard of television’s futures. This panel takes the program as a case study for how television is evolving by remixing its texts, technological forms, and social contexts, and by opening these opportunities for collaborative engagement to its viewers as well. Topics include: how TV narrative reworks sociopolitical themes, and how this relationship changes with the times; how TV negotiates and mobilizes its own history and the longstanding investments of its fans; how TV increasingly recycles its material for transmedia channels, rendering its properties ever more promiscuous and communicable; and how TV solicits and relies on the libidinal labor of its fans, inciting dynamic and sometimes uneasy networks of participation.

Labors of Love: Capitalizing on Fan Economies
Television reproduces itself by yoking the libidinal economy of audiences to the financial economy of the entertainment industry. The debate about whether this ability to generate desire for knowledge, contact, and participation is a progressive ground for subcultural expression or an ideological engine of consumer capitalism is particularly vital today. In our contemporary climate of accelerated media change, it has become all but mandatory for popular TV series to appeal to viewers with extra-broadcast content, offering television new opportunities to intensify its intercourse with fans and the proliferation of its texts. At the same time, these new media forms have encouraged unofficial fan activities to proliferate, amplifying tensions over property and labor in an increasingly unstable consumer/producer opposition. Taking Battlestar Galactica as a case study, this paper explores the interrelationship between collaboration and reappropriation in TV production – as the show is recycled and diffused in a smorgasbord of official tie-ins like blogs, podcasts, webisodes, deleted scenes, interviews and trailers – and collaboration and reappropriation in fan production, which (further) explodes reliable boundaries and hierarchies. Overall, I will argue that attempts to harness and contain fans’ passion within the circuit of capitalism remain riven with productive pitfalls and contradictions.

ljconscript and I wrote an awesome BSG workshop proposal too, on the theme of reproduction (informal version :P) -- but I haven't gotten her permission to post it.

I have indeed been accepted to SCMS. actually this makes me kind of cranky because it's not at all a time of year when I should be traveling. oh, however did I get talked into sumbitting, against my better judgement? -- peer pressure, I think.

*

plus, not unrelatedly, a slight update of last year's very schematic outline of the Big D:

I. The Exploding Text (Grey's Anatomy?? or whatever else catches my fancy)
queer readings: instability of sexual/textual knowledge; RPF, celebrity and "privacy"

II. Labors of Love (Battlestar Galactica) [or some other clever name, if I take Labors of Love as the title of the whole project]
negotiations and disintegrations of of the consumer/producer opposition; economic and legal questions of private property + ownership; tensions of mass media vs. distributed media consumption, viral marketing; cylons: reproduction, archives

III. Desiring Justice (L&O:SVU)
lesbian subcultures; sex/identity as ground for political awareness action; question of visibility (http://afterellen.com); "real" people -- Oliska Hargeson; virtual identity/virtual sexuality of fans

that's three case studies, and I'm thinking of dividing each of them into three parallel sub-chapters: textual themes; politics of production; fan economies. plus there will be an intro and conclusion. (and if I decide to be sassy, metafic interludes.)

* attributed to leavethesky

_plasticity_ and I had a great conversation on the way home (also sparked by _mesk, but unfortunately she walks in the oppositite direction). let me see how much I can reconstruct (drat, should have phoneposted it!) (probably I've jotted this down elsewhere before, but it gets more cohesive every time):

I had my moment (my undergrad thesis) to be all optimistic and utopian and argue for fan production as a form of political resistance. OK, I'm reformed. the problem with this claim is that fan labor is precisely the sort of labor on which the post-industrial capitalist economy depends: value and profit derive not from any material properties of the commoditity (use value -- i.e. I buy a car because I need to get around), but rather from the meanings that can be extracted from it (i.e. brand -- I want to buy an Audi and not a Kia). reading (construed broadly) is thus the engine of immaterial capitalism; consumption and production converge. the production of meaning (i.e. Goblet of Fire is omgsoGAY!) that the so-called active audience is doing feeds right back into the circuit of capitalism: reading is pleasurable, we want to consume more of the text so we can produce more readings (i.e. let's go see Goblet of Fire over and over and squee and make icons and write Harry/Cedric etc. etc. -- and let me make it clear that I myself did exactly this [well, except the Harry/Cedric part -- I'm rather obsessed with partial to Rita Skeeter]) -- voila, the hegemony of the media industry is perpetuated.

I'd prefer to position fan production not as resistance to capitalism (_plasticity_ promises to kick my butt if I backslide), but as a limit case of capitalism. because what it highlights (as a marginal practice) by carrying productive consumption to its extreme is the inherent contradictions and instabilities of this economic system. a paradox: the only way for the entertainment industry to make money off the texts they supposedly own is to turn them over to their audience to make what they will of them, thus challenging this very conception of ownership. if canon/fantext, reality/fiction have no intelligible boundaries, how is it at all coherent to barricade off certain segments as copyrighted or trademarked (just to suggest one angle that fandom pushes). and I still maintain that fandom hacks the media industry by opening up alternative models for value (non-monetary/"gift" economy), distribution (broadband vs. broadcast), and community (perhaps even inadvertently). yes, as politics it's a highly contingent and compromised sort of space to carve out. but I'm a firm believer that there's no position outside the system from which to resist it -- resistance is cotextensive with domination, and as such will always be partially complicit with it.

eta: of course, capitalism also seems to have infinite potential to reincorporate the productivity of resistance into its circuit...

this could be a D chapter, right? am I still too optimistic?

the conversation continued from tonight's discussion of (really, tirade about -- but this is evidence that he can be useful despite his flaws) Wark's Hacker Manifesto, btw. I have no problem relating any of the readings for this course to fanfic :) (in this case, [342] was where I wrote "fanfic" in the margin).

much of this copied from the outsides of notebooks:

the Big D
it seems inevitable, at this point, that my diss is going to be structured around online fandom. a little backstory: when I was writing my undergrad thesis I felt like it wanted to be a book, but afterwards (2001) I also said I was DONE with fandom. hahaha. I plan to use the topic so near and dear to my heart as a springboard to a set of broader issues. the question is how exactly to do this coherently. the political angle is especially thorny, because I don't want to go anywhere near asserting that fandom is a radical or even progressive practice. so, by what tangent can I get to sex radical politics? I don't think it's as much of a longshot as it might sound -- but definitely tricky.

• public sex -- fan communities >> LJ; lesbian subcultures; sex/identity as ground for political awareness action; question of visibility (http://afterellen.com)
• "real" people -- Oliska Hargeson, RPF, "privacy"; virtual identity/virtual sexuality of fans; instability of sexual "knowledge" (as queer project?)
• private property + ownership -- legal issues of derivative writing; legal issues of TV downloading/P2P; theoretical issues of the boundaries (or lack thereof) of texts; tensions of mass media vs. distributed media consumption

I have this fantasy of launching each chaper from a single fanfic story -- it would be hard to find the ones, though, that are exactly perfect. maybe. harder still to write them.

it occurs to me that if I want to tie in radical sexual subcultures via LJ, I should really start following some related communities. oy, I tried that once, and it was tiresome. where oh where is my one really fantastic dyke/trans/queer sex community that I can write about?

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probably I'm also going with my original idea for a course: TV on the Internet. it has the advantages of being concrete and timely; I just have to figure out how to highlight the theoretical issues above (plus public/private spheres).

potential topics:
• what is a "medium"?
• other theoretical background, like liveness and "window on the world"
• bittorent vs. video iPod rumble! legal issues, intellectual property
• TV News vs. political bloggers rumble! who makes the news?
• TV shows/networks with web tie-ins:
- mega-media corporations like MSNBC.com
- interactive TV: shows with online voting or other components (Big Brother)
• independent web-based TV (existing and/or possible)
• online TV fan communities (TWoP, TV blogs, LJ)
• fan production (fiction, vids)

any further suggestions?

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my fields:
• politics of sexuality [theory area] (a hybrid of political theory and queer theory, focusing on public/private sphere)
• TV something-or-other [history area] (emphasis on reception/fandom)
• internet studies something-or-other (the media archaeology side is now covered, but I have to get up to speed on online communities/social software stuff)

The Plan for the Rest of My Life:

( xposted )