He says that in this utopian imaginaries “progress has stopped, perfection has been reached, it is the end of history” (174).  But he highlights another definition of utopia, one that harkens back to the original meaning of the Greek ou-topos: no-place, and in this vein poet Eduardo Galeano writes of utopia in Palabras Andantes:

She’s on the horizon. . . . I go two steps, she moves two steps away. I walk ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps ahead. No matter how much I walk, I’ll never reach her. What good is utopia? That’s what: it’s good for walking. 

Duncombe, S. (2007). Dream: Re-imagining progressive politics in an age of fantasy. New Press.

This model has also been taken by artists such as Beatriz Da Costa and Kavita Phillip, who use “Tactical biopolitics” as “a creative terminological misappropriation”, drawing inspiration from “the assembly of resistant cultural practices referred to as tactical media, and the intellectual ferment around the history of biopolitics”. This intersection traces creative practices from technoscience, art, and activism, to combines it with the history of biopolitics. In their writings, Beatriz Da Costa and Kavita Phillip claim that the strongest possible aspect of tactical media is the “inter/un-disciplinary” exchanges among practitioners and theorists from various backgrounds. This attribute always privileges collaboration and coordination with larger strategy-based movements of resistance against hegemonic forces with inclusion and cooperation of the scientific community. They also refer to the notion of public amateurism as a task which a number of artists have undertaken in recent years which allows them to “rather than attempting to achieve expert status within the sciences, artists have ventured to find help in the realm of hobbyism and do-it-yourself home recipes for conducting scientific experiments” (Da Costa & Phillip 2010: 373).

Da Costa, Beatriz and Kavita Philip. 2008. Tactical biopolitics: Art, activism, and technoscience. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Transmedia practices may expand the audiences by creating different points of entry for different audience segments. Ideally, each “episode” must be accessible on its own terms even as it makes a unique contribution to the narrative system as a whole. With “additive comprehension,” we understand more of the whole by adding a little piece of information.  According to Jenkins, this is the ideal aesthetic form for an era of collective intelligence, to refer to new social structures that enable the production and circulation of knowledge within a networked society. Participants pool information and tap each other expertise as they work together to solve problems, think through concepts. Transmedia narratives also function as textual activators – setting into motion the production, assessment, and archiving information.

A transmedia text does not simply disperse information: it provides a set of roles and goals which readers can assume as they enact aspects of the story through their everyday life. The encyclopedic ambitions of transmedia texts often results in what might be seen as gaps or excesses in the unfolding of the story: that is, they introduce potential plots which can not be fully told or extra details which hint at more than can be revealed. Readers, thus, have a strong incentive to continue to elaborate on these story elements, working them over through their speculations, until they take on a life of their own. Fan fiction can be seen as an unauthorized expansion of these media franchises into new directions which reflect the reader’s desire to “fill in the gaps” they have discovered in the commercially produced material. This is also presented in Barthes stating “the reader has never been the concern of classical criticism; for it, there is no other man in literature but the one who writes. We are now beginning to be the dupes no longer of such antiphrases, by which our society proudly champions precisely what it dismisses, ignores, smothers or destroys; we know that to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author”.