My transformational engagement with race theory aims to redeem the generalization of passing on the Internet from the criticism that it functions negatively to erase the category of race. As I see it, the suspension of the social category of visibility in online environments transforms the experience of race in what is, potentially, a fundamental way: by suspending the automatic ascription of racial signifiers according to visible traits, online environments can, in a certain sense, be said to subject everyone to what I shall call a “zero degree" of racial difference. The certain universalization thereby effectuated, a universalization that certainly remains differential, divorces the image from the living body it would capture. It thereby exposes—in ways that are singular but somehow also common—the affective basis of racial signification and, more specifically, the radical disjunction between racial identity categories and the singularity of each body whose life is always in excess of any particular, fixed identity.
In two initial sections devoted to the phenomenon of online interpellation as a form of passing, I attempt to foreground the differences between raced and gendered interpellation in order to expose the bodily mediation that necessarily gives all interpellations their force. In a third section devoted to Frantz Fanon's analysis of racism as “corporeal malediction," I explore the crucial role that embodiment (specifically, the corporeal schema) plays as the root level where racism gains a foothold and also, necessarily, where racism must be universalized and attacked. Then, in two sections focused on the deployment of new media in the work of artist Keith Piper, I explore how race is experienced within a postbroadcast media environment and along a (potentially) universal continuum, first through the incommensurability of the static image of the black body and subsequently through the phenomenon of interpellative failure and the production of an affective bodily excess.
Finally, in a concluding section centered on the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, I link this postinterpellative, affective experience of the constraints of race with an ethics of singularity predicated on the bankruptcy of the stereotyped media image and the categories of identity through which it previously performed its reifying cultural work. By showing how new media potentially facilitate an experience of community rooted in the commonality of the improper, I hope to give a glimpse of the radical promise they may hold for radically reconfiguring the obsolescent categories that clearly still function to introduce inequalities of all kinds and, beyond that, to obscure our shared singularity, our common status as beings radically in excess of our selves.
DIGITIZING THE RACIALIZED BODY
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