I used to find it embarrassing, and a bit difficult to explain, that my all-time favorite fandom is Stargate SG-1.  It’s an action show without a shred of intellectual cachet, but from the moment I was forced – forced! – to watch it, it’s been the one media property I can go back to again and again, the fandom whose fic I’m most drawn to.

As Henry Jenkins describes it in Textual Poachers, quoting Bourdieu, “The most intolerable thing for those who regard themselves as the possessors of legitimate culture is the sacrilegious reuniting of tastes which taste dictates shall be separated.” Jenkins argues that fan culture is mixiness, applying the analytical tools of the literary academy to popular works, taking seriously that which should not be regarded as serious, “perversely misappl[ying]” “high culture” tools to “low culture” work.

The same distinctions too often get made within fandom, so that I could see idea-driven science fiction like Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica as a legitimate object of fandom while raising an eyebrow at the action-adventure SG-1 (though, ok, I loved Xena like a mad thing, and that show was my gateway to online fandom and devoted fic reading).

Part of SG-1‘s appeal was that Daniel Jackson is the fictional character I identify with most (along with Captain Sisko, as I described last time, with Tim Drake and Bren Cameron as runners-up, and there’s probably far too much insight into my psyche!). But I think the core is that the eponymous team of SG-1 is a mixy insurgency within a modernist framework.

Parenthetically, this is also an explanation for why SG-1 ran for ten seasons and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles only lasted a season and a  half: SG-1 was able to appeal to a modernist audience while presenting, or enabling, a fannish subversive amodern reading; while SCC, once it hit its stride, was so resolutely amodern that it alienated an audience that might tune in to see modernist humans laying the smackdown on evil robots.

I recently watched the SG-1 pilot again, in a week where Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern and Jenkins’ Textual Poachers were marinating in my brain. It amazed me how quickly and clearly that episode sketched out the series themes, creating some truly remarkable characters within the action-adventure context.

Jack O’Neill is a cold warrior, an old-school snake-eater. His superiors order him to nuke a village in order to prevent any prospect of an alien invasion – and he flat-out refuses. Instead, he evaluates the situation personally, and is captured trying to free two villager hostages. He engineers an escape, and then does something truly remarkable: he invites his captor to join him! That’s my true-love fannish moment, akin to (hmm….) two symbolic haircuts, one in SCC and one in DS9, where the main characters embrace a mixy destiny in the face of modernist-separatist expectations.

The episode ends with O’Neill requesting the alien, Teal’c, be assigned to his team. In a subsequent episode, O’Neill defends Teal’c, with an extraordinary mix of biting sarcasm and unabashed idealism, from interrogation and dissection by the military. The team coalesces as a very mixy thing: O’Neill, a quintessentially high-modern warrior with an amodern soul, Teal’c, himself a synthesis of human and animal, human and alien; Carter, the science chick, the crack-shot geek; and Daniel, the anthropologist who starts by seeing all cultures, including his own, as equal blends of familiar and alien and who becomes combat archaeologist, ruthless diplomat, a blur of alive, dead and transcendant.

The team spends nearly as much time in conflict with their military-political leadership, which is struggling to keep everything neatly in its modernist boxes, denying there are aliens, denying they’re involved in a galactic war, denying the creative freedom that would enable effective use of captured technologies, as they do fighting the modernist Goa’uld, carefully keeping separate slaves and masters, material and spiritual.  Carter’s father, a hardcore by-the-book general, becomes a hybrid and a mediator, part Goa’uld and part human. Daniel erases the binary of death repeatedly. The team laughs in the face of notions of linear time so essential to modernism, as it blurs the modernist distinctions between sacred and profane, temporal and transcendent.

And yet, it continues to do so within the modernist framework of the US military and political establishment, never calling for revolution (Daniel’s journey through and around secrecy and authority is a mixy mess all its own) but rarely obedient, guided by a moral compass that becomes the product of a synthesis of Jack’s black-ops sneakiness, Daniel’s militant compassion, Carter’s technological optimism and Teal’c's ruthless serenity.  Interestingly, I never really liked Carter, who’s pretty much an unreconstructed modernist, despite the mixiness of being woman/soldier/scientist.

Jenkins quotes Umberto Eco, that “in order to transform a work into a cult object one must be able to break, dislocate, unhinge it so that one can remember only parts of it, irrespective of their original relationship with the whole.”  This is where SG-1 succeeds as a fannish object (along with the pre-2009 Star Treks) and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and, I think, Battlestar Galactica fail: the latter are two hermetic, too complete and integrated in their execution.

So, I can read SG-1 as the mutual redemption of three very broken people (O’Neill, Teal’c and Daniel), as a mixy insurgency, while others can read it as Jack/Daniel or Jack/Teal’c slash, as a triumph of personal integrity over institutional corruption – or as some really kickass explosions and cool military hardware (P90s! Air Force intergalactic battle cruisers!). Most of those readings don’t preclude the others -that’s what the mixiness of fandom is about.

Jenkins claims that the female fan blurs the boundary (not a border but la frontera, Patricia Nelson Limerick’s mixy space beyond the limits of modernism) “between fiction and experience, since their metatextual inferences relied upon personal experience as a means of expanding upon the information provided and since character identification became a means of self-analysis.”

This was in Textual Poachers, one of the first full-length academic studies of fandom, a very long time ago. What was gendered then is now more nearly universal, in part because “male fandom” has become an insignificantly small part of fandom even as fandom iteslf has mainstreamed: we all read for metatextual inferences now, and few are the remaining starship-measurers and stat-counters.

We are all fans now, and all turn to fandom for that metatextual bridge, that mixiness between the received text and personal significance, between our own critical interpretation and an “authorized” view ever more frequently the product of fans-turned-producers, who enable and encourage textual deconstruction, remixing and slash. We can’t see the modernist text through our slash goggles, and neither do the best producers anymore.

Jenkins also describes fandom as a mixy utopia, a community (a real, physical as well as mediated community, not an abstraction) profoundly apart from the modernist world, one run on the gift economy of fan production, “one defined by its refusal of mundane values and practices, its celebration of deeply held emotions and passionately embraced pleasures…. a space within which fans may articulate their specific concerns about sexuality, gender, racism, colonialism, militarism and forced conformity.” Fandom is “a poached culture, a nomadic culture… a patchwork culture, an impure culture.”

It’s my culture, from my production of Star Trek novelizations at age seven, to my recent rereading of synecdochic’s marvelous uber-mixy SG-1 fic this month. It’s a culture born, as Jenkins describes, out of a radical, if circumscribed, rejection of modernity.

It is utopian, and fan culture presents a genuine alternative to modernist political systems and ideologies. As SG-1 fought with wit and weapons against modernist political systems human and alien, so the fan creates an alternative political/cultural/technological space apart from the anti-mixiness of corporate copyright, of the cash economy, of institutions which lose truth and justice in procedural conformance, of a politics determined to pit us against them, to maintain purities which never were.

SG-1 is (in one reading, not in any way privileged above others) a parable of fandom, a radically synthetic Haraway-cyborg insurgency within the rotten system of modernism. The mixy, our SG-1, our fandom,  is subversive without being revolutionary, alternative without being oppositional, better, not triumphalist.

Jenkins claims this mixy space for fandom, James Paul Gee for learning, me for emergent political technoscience. La frontera, the land of kokopelli, of trickster gods and cyborgs, is the space of all those things and others, of the queer, the syncretic, the mashup, the remix. It has no border guards but it has its defenders and their heroes, Jack O’Neill, Daniel Jackson and John Connor among them.

Future Mixy Things: the Greco-Egyptian alternative to Augustus, the Byzantine Empire in “decline,” and hopefully some guest posts from technosage on Navajo and Japanese anime alternatives to modernism.