Might virtual reality or computer simulation be harnessed for the purposes of multicultural or transnational pedagogy, in order to communicate, for example, what it feels like to be an illegal alien' pursued by the border police or a civil rights demonstrator feeling the lash of police brutality in the early 1960s? (166)
Despite a shared enthusiasm regarding the potentiality of new media, it is the differences between these two positions that help to foreground exactly what is new about new media and to specify ways in which it calls on us to transform our techniques of cultural analysis. Thus, Poster's sensitivity toward the materiality of new media gives the lie to Shohat and Stam's easy subordination of interactivity to the demands of contentbased practices of resistance; and his insightful (if ultimately insufficient) criticism of the concept of identity in the wake of digital mediation poses an insuperable obstacle for a media practice rooted in emancipative transformation via the category of identity. On both counts, I would suggest, Poster's analysis issues the challenge for any transformative media practice in the postbroadcast age: to find a way of conceptualizing and deploying media that does not subordinate them to preconstituted categories of identity and subjectivity and that exploits their capacity to bring the “preindividual” dimension (following Gilbert Simondon's conception) to bear on the ongoing process of individuation.
It is precisely this challenge I propose to take on in this chapter. My focus will be the performance of race and ethnicity in cyberspace—specifically, the difference (and the opportunity) that might be said to distinguish the category of race as it comes to be cyberized. Following those critics who have argued that online interactions generalize the condition of passing hitherto associated with racial performance, I shall deploy race as a privileged topos for experimenting with the radical potentialities afforded by new media for transforming how we conceptualize identity in general. Because race has always been plagued by a certain disembodiment (the fact that race is manifestly a construction at the level of the image because visible racial traits are in no way reducible to organic, i.e., genetic, organization), it will prove especially useful for exposing the limitations of the Internet as a new machinic assemblage for producing subjectivity. For the same reason, it will help us to grasp and potentially to deploy the possibilities new media offer for experiencing community beyond identity.
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