- BEYOND SYMBOLIC INTERPELLATION: UNDERSTANDING DIGITAL PERFORMATIVITY
Cultural criticism has already recognized the potential of the Internet to usher in a postidentitarian politics rooted in the obsolescence of racial and ethnic categorizations. In her discussion of cyberspace in Continental Drift, for example, Emily Apter suggestively positions the Internet as the natural extension of postcolonial theory's complexification of identity, embodiment, and community and as its (potential) salvation from its internal contradictions. Welcoming the cyborg as the "quintessential hybrid' postcolonial subject," Apter sees the fluidity of cyberidentity as a chance for postcolonial theory to sublate what she understands to be its historically specific (thus provisional) embrace of emancipatory identity politics.ii,3
Abstracted from its narrow concern with redeeming postcolonial criticism, Apter's analysis of cyberculture as the vehicle for an “ironic screening of the subject" helps to expose the bankruptcy of the image as a basis for any representational or performative politics of identity that would function by linking agency to transgression via the category of visibility and the visibly marked body. More than any other figure, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has explored this bankruptcy and its crucial position within the endgame of the society of the spectacle. For Agamben:
[T]he absurdity of individual existence ... has become ... so senseless that it has lost all pathos and been transformed, brought out into the open, into an everyday exhibition: Nothing resembles the life of this new humanity more than advertising footage from which every trace of the advertised product has been wiped out.4
This total cooptation of the category of the individual explains why images of the ethnic other can today be nothing but fantasy projections of the same. They might look like the other, but they work only to the extent that they speak and think just like us.iv
As a new phase in the apotheosis of the becoming-image of capital, the technologies of cyberspace and the new media simply take the logic of the spectacle one step beyond globalized advertising and cinema, in effect emptying the spectacle of all promise from the start. Because online identity and the cyborging of the body are constructions through and through, whatever allure they may hold simply cannot be that of a fetish masking difference, but must rather be something more like an unapologetic celebration of the simulacral.
BODIES IN CODE
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