Across the Whoniverse

How do serial narratives create a non-linear subjectivity?

Fanart by Mstymay

Kara Thrace and her special destiny.

A territory can be thought of as a space with boundaries. These boundaries are not permanent, but can be changed. Deterritorialisation reconfigures the boundaries of a territory. Reterritorialisation moves these boundaries and borders again – not to where they were originally, but often back in that direction. Furthermore, a territory is “inseparable from the vectors of deterritorialisation working it from within”, and these vectors are “always multiple and composite” (Guattari and Deleuze, 1987:509). Therefore a territory is defined through mutliple layers of de/reterritorialisation.

I think we can illustrate this difficult concept through looking at the character of Starbuck in the new series of Battlestar Galactica. The character of Starbuck was male in the original 1970s series, but is female in the current series, with the new name of Kara Thrace. Hence the character of Starbuck has been deterritorialised into a woman – the boundaries of the Starbuck-territory have been moved and remade. But a reterritorialisation occurs at the same time. Despite being a woman now, Starbuck has many masculine characteristics – she drinks, smokes, gets into brawls and is rebellious. Hence she is reterritorialised back towards the original male character, through the characteristics she shares with him. The Starbuck-territory is defined through these very processes of de/reterritorialisation, and cannot be seen as separate from them.

However, this is not only the only territorialisation process that makes up the character of Starbuck – as Guattari says, deterritorialisation is “always multiple”. Hence the female nature of the current incarnation of Starbuck is deterritorialised throughout the series, such as in her attitude to relationships. She takes a traditionally masculine, commitment-fearing and powerful approach to romance. However, she is again reterritorialised back towards her female nature, particularly through her relationship with the cylon Leoben. Rather than the strong figure she was before, Leoben reduces her to an insecure woman trying to win the approval of her dying mother.

Therefore the territory of the Starbuck character is a complex, never-ending process of de/reterritorialisation between Starbuck and Kara, and between masculine and feminine. She would not be the character she is without this interplay between the two – the territory is inseparable from de/reterritorialisation.

Guys…where are we?

Guattari’s concept of de/reterritorialisation made so much more sense to me when I looked at it in the context of the opening credits of television series. Credits aim to introduce the universe of the series to the audience, and hence opens the territory of that series (thanks to screenmachine). We are introduced to the major characters, the atmosphere of the series’ universes, dominant themes and concerns, timescapes (including the construction of time and the history of the series so far) and also the basic premise.

The opening credits for The OC demonstrates this particularly well.

I found the concept particularly fascinating when looking at the credits for Lost. They are the most simple credits I have ever seen, but at the same time speak volumes about the series. Everything about the credits reflects the very essence of the series – ‘lost’. There are no actors, no images, no subtitles, and no names – there is simply a spinning title – “LOST” – on a black background, with a eerie synthesiser tone as a musical accompaniment. Because we are accustomed to the standards of conventional credits, we have difficulty situating ourselves in the universe of Lost.

The opening titles appear to offer no clue to the nature of the series. But in fact, it is this apparent lack that holds the key to understanding the show, and to its overarching themes. We are introduced to the universe of the series – it’s a universe that’s lost. We are effectively ‘lost’ in the titles, as we have no conventional signifiers on which to ground ourselves. The characters are ‘lost’ – absent from their usual positions in a musical montage. The setting is ‘lost’ – there are no images to introduce the environment and the temporalities. It is through absence that Lost creates its territory. The opening credits function as an opening in every sense – they open us up to the disorientation and confusion that define the universe of Lost.

Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey.

“People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect… but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly…. timey-wimey…. stuff.”

  – The Doctor, ‘Blink’.

A polyphony of polyphonies.

To reiterate what I said a few posts back, television is a mass of different Universes, of different machines, all put together in a being that is constantly changing and mutating. In other words, a ‘chaotic multiplicity’ or a ‘chaosmosis’, as Deleuze and Guattari respectively see it. Deleuze also sees events as arising from this chaos, ‘under the condition that a sort of screen intervenes’. In this case, these screen is the televisual screen, and thus the television series itself becomes an ‘event’.

To illustrate this way of looking a television series, I want to look at what might be my favourite promotional clip ever. This was an advertisement for the final season of Battlestar Galactica.

The TV series can never be regarded as a fixed entity, but is always in a state of flux, always being altered and always without end. The characters in this clip are altered as the light moves across their faces. They mutate through the course of the clip just as they do through the course of the series. They don’t have a fixed, innate self, but are forever caught in process.

Each of the characters merges into the next one, reflecting the machinic-flow of televisual elements. None of them can be wholly separated out from the next, but rather exist alongside one another in the chaos of the text. Furthermore, the cycling of the characters creates a seemingly perpetual rhythm, which reflects the fact that the television narrative has no defined end. We could keep cycling through these characters, keep evolving with them, for an eternity.

        

Each characters’ evolution represents an event in itself, but these remain enclosed in the larger event of the series. Hence while the clip contains individual character-events, the overall series-event is still an overarching presence. The series-event is chaos. The characters’ are trapped in circles of becomings, undergoing alterations and mutations as the light illuminates a different part of them and creates something new. But out of this multiplicity emerges what is almost a unity – calmness through chaos, order in disorder – which becomes Battlestar Galactica. I don’t think you can watch that clip without getting a sense of the nature of the series. Thus the series-event is embodied in the short 30-second clip, and each of the elements, despite being chaotic events in themselves, come together to create it.

Fan-tastic!

Television, as a medium that surrounds us almost constantly, is a huge part of our everyday lives. We are as much a part of the machinic assemblage that is television as the characters themselves. Human and machines are linked – renewed and remade together (Guattari 1995, 41). In this sense, our subjectivities are also machinic, as we lose ourselves in the Universes of television (Guattari 1996, 101).

Therefore fandom is a key affect arising from television. Since we are so closely interwoven with television series, particularly when we watch a show over many years, it is no wonder that we begin to produce things from our encounters with television, rather than simply consuming texts. Fans tend to explore television texts more deeply, creating alternative meanings and responding to non-canonical events. Hence the televisual assemblage contains Universes that exist only in the minds of the audience – Universes that are proliferated through online communities. The typical example of this is the slash fiction, in which fans perceive romantic relationships between characters that aren’t supported by the canon of the television text.

Mohinder/Sylar (or Mylar) is a popular slash relationship in the Heroes fandom.

However, fandom is forever working against ‘dominant cultural hierarchies’ (Jenkins 1992, 17), which see producers and consumers as wholly separated. Hence regimes of capital and ownership underlie much of television. While some producers are happy for their fans to create their own texts from televisual assemblages, others are not.

Fan activities have escalated rapidly since the advent of the Internet. This leads us to consider whether capitalism will, (or possibly has already), absorb the practice of fans as well. For example, fans often fill in the gaps they perceive in storylines – expanding backstories, speculating on motivations and etc. The producers of Lost mimic this practice through their “Missing Pieces“, a series of 13 ‘mobisodes’ that filled in gaps in the narrative, and hence expanded the canon of the series.

These mobisodes were released weekly on Verizon mobile phones in America, and then uploaded to the ABC website. The producers take the practice of fans and incorporate it back into the capital-machine, by partnering with Verizon to gain a profit from the videos. However, I feel that the fact that we can still watch these clips on YouTube offers hope for salvaging fandom from the clutches of capitalism. Even though the regimes of capitalism may try and utilise fan activities for its own purposes, resistance is still possible.

Fanart by takmarierah.

Autopoietic universes

In Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm, Felix Guattari describes an “an autopoietic entity whose particles are constructed from galaxies” (1995, 52). To me this description is a beautiful way to think of television. Television series are machinic assemblages, constantly creating and re-creating themselves. Characters come and go and storylines are reused and reformed. A television series is always in a process of change, always “renew[ing]…its material components” (Guattari 1995, 41). In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the introduction of Dawn at the beginning of Season 5 completely rewrote the entire history of the show. The memories and histories of all the characters were modified to include the presence of Dawn. Hence the series was capable of completely regenerating itself, and so is Guattari’s ‘autopoietic entity’.

Machinic assemblages can be thought of as “constellations of incorporeal Universes of reference”, always plural and heterogeneous. A television series doesn’t stand on its own, but in reference to other machines and other series. Buffy exists at the intersection between the teen-machine, the horror-machine, the gothic-machine and the melodrama-machine. Furthermore, the show has always been renowned for its frequent referencing to other texts. For example, in the season three episode “The Prom”, the characters incorporate references to texts such as James Bond: “I bet you’d look way 007 in a tux” and Carrie: “Gotta stop a crazy from pulling a Carrie at the prom.” Hence television texts are “multireferential” and “multidimensional” (Guattari 1995, 50), and exist through “exterior elements” (Guattari 1995, 35). This brings us back to notion of the series-machine as constructed from galaxies – the ‘particles’ of a television series are made from countless other Universes. In this sense, the fan created terms referring to the canon of Buffy – the Buffyverse – or even the Jossverse or Whedonverse (which refers to all of Joss Whedon’s works), become ever the more fitting.

Fair and Balanced

The idea of disinformation is intriguing me at the moment. Are we really being lied to at every opportunity and at every moment? All the information we obtain is framed in specified ways. The day after Kevin Rudd’s formal apology to the Stolen Generations, I bought both The Age and The Australian newspapers to see the difference in the coverage. The Age framed Brendan Nelson’s speech in terms of the negative reaction it received, as when many turned their backs on the screen in Federation Square and outside Parliament House. The Australian, however, only mentioned this reaction briefly, and depicted the speech more as a centrist stance on the issue. It was a fascinating example of the effect that framing news stories in certain ways can have on our interpretation of world events.

This phenomenon is particularly evident in America. The excellent documentary Outfoxed looks at right-wing bias in America’s Fox News Channel, highlighting how the major mode of address in America at the moment is fear. When even the news is lying to us, where do we turn for the facts? In America’s case, it is to satire.

Many Americans, particularly young people, proclaim that they get all their news from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. And why not? In particular, Stephen Colbert functions as a spoof of right wing presenters such as Bill O’Reilly. Is it perhaps comforting for us to know outright that we are, to an extent, being lied to? Maybe we prefer to receive our news from someone who is essentially a character rather than a serious presenter. If the supposedly ‘real’ presenters only disinform us, then where else to turn for the truth than the ‘fake’ presenters?

However, this brings us back to what is ultimately an unanswerable question – what is real and what is fake, and what is truth and what are lies? Stephen Colbert attempts to answer this question in coining the term ‘wikiality‘ – reality through consensus. He states that ‘if enough [people] agree…it becomes true’. Such a hegemonic reality is undoubtedly what the culture industries are striving to create – ‘mould[ing] men as a type unfailingly reproduced in every product’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1944, 34).

But I think wikiality has an element of resistance to it. If enough people change Wikipedia entries, if enough people choose to watch The Colbert Report over Fox News, then maybe, just maybe, the power to disinform is weakened.

What are you looking at?

We’re looking at you, Madonna – exactly what you want.

Source: http://thephoenix.com

During Truth or Dare (Keshishian, 1991) Warren Beatty hit the nail on the head when talking about how Madonna didn’t want to live off-camera – “What point is there of existing?” This correlates exactly with the idea of machinic subjectivity as I put it a few posts back. As David Tetzlaff reiterates, “in postmodern culture, only a picture can testify that we exist, that we matter” (1993, p. 262).

In fact, could Madonna be the ultimate machinic junkie? She’s not just swept up in the televisual-machine, but also in the processes of capitalism itself – she absorbs all possibilities too, appropriating subcultures and symbols for her own economic gain. As a cog (or possibly more than one cog – she’s an icon, after all) in the capitalist machine, she loses her own individual identity. Perhaps this is one reason she constantly changes personas – she’s lost all sense of her own stable persona, and so has no choice but to cycle through others.

Source: http://www.madonnashots.com

Guattari and Deleuze write of machines that connect through flows – ‘there is always a flow-producing machine, and another machine connected to it that…draws off part of this flow’ (1983, p. 5). The style-machine and the celebrity-machine are connected to the capitalism-machine, which draws out the flow and uses it for its own purpose. And what of Madonna? She follows her own advice to ‘let your body go with the flow’, and moves between the machines, completely lost within them.

Commodity culture – pretty lame?

This article made me think more about teen becomings and the teen machine’s relationship to commodity culture. It describes youth subcultures as having their own “fashion and music signifiers”. However, it seems that the only way to obtain such signifiers is to purchase them. In the article, one of the girls interviewed estimates that she spends $50 a week on clothes, and also buys “at least one CD” each week. Capitalism, as a force that absorbs all possibilities (Adorno and Horkheimer 1944), effectively takes teen culture away from its creators, and sells it back to them. Teen becomings are controlled by the adult machine by being directed away into the controlled sphere of commodity culture. Teens are encouraged to express their inner energies through their choice of clothes, music, hairstyles and etc. Basically, the adult machine attempts to reduce the becomings of teens to commodity choice.

 

Source: http://www.cjs.co.uk

 However, the girls in the article, despite still being hopelessly entrenched in commodity culture, express some form of resistance. “We hate Supre and Jay Jays because it’s all mass-produced stuff, because everyone ends up with the same stuff, which is pretty lame.”

Here the girls recognise that commodity culture “impresses the same stamp on everything” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944, p.30) through mass-production, and are aware that it is “lame”. By refusing to buy clothes from major chain stores, the girls resist the homogenising nature of commodity culture. While this resistance is on a very small scale, it is still resistance. And in the end, micro-resistance can be more effective than macro-resistance, by weakening the structure of the system from the inside (Fiske, 1989, p.10-11).