Such a possibility, however, is the unprecedented redemptive opportunity that, according to Agamben, must at all costs not be squandered:
Because if instead of continuing to search for a proper identity in the already improper and senseless form of individuality, humans were to succeed in belonging to this impropriety as such, in making of the proper being-thus not an identity and an individual property but a singularity without identity, a common and absolutely exposed singularity—if humans could, that is, not be-thus in this or that particular biography, but be only the thus, their singular exteriority and their face, then they would for the first time enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects, into a communication without the incommunicable. (65)
If the new media hold the potential to generate radically new forms of cultural existence, I would suggest that this is because and insofar as they facilitate this belonging to the improper, this process of forging the “whatever body." Where the society of the spectacle passively generates its own obsolescence—and thus functions as a precondition for the coming community"—the new media actively invest the dimension of the thus, the dimension of bodily life that exceeds concrete embodiment and thus (potentially) evades the grasp of capitalism's wholesale investment of the image.
In this sense, we might say that the Internet completes the positive movement beyond the spectacle and the trap of identity bound up with its (empty) promise. More specifically still, we might say that it suspends the force of the image, of capital's “becoming-image," which forms the precondition for a reinvestment of the body outside the image. What permits the Internet to perform this crucial function is, to return to Poster's terminology, its deployment of machinic means for facilitating the performance of identity beyond the constraints imposed by physical appearance:
The important question [in online communities] is the way identity is performed.... Participants are authors of themselves as characters, not simply by acts of consciousness, but by the interactions that take place on the screen. In these situations, ... mediated by the interface of computers and communications network, the body enters a new relation with the subject, a dissociated yet actual relation that opens identity to new degrees of flexible determination. The body no longer constrains the performativity of speech acts to the extent it does in face-to-face relations. These digital authors enact an unprecedented type of performative self-constitution in which the process ofinterpellation becomes an explicit question in the communication. Instead of the policeman-teacher-parent-boss hailing the individual in a manner that occludes the performative nature of the communication, in online communities one invents oneself and one knows that others also invent themselves, while each interpellates the others through those inventions. Unlike earlier forms of mediated communication, digital authorship is about the performance of self-constitution. (75, emphasis added)
DIGITIZING THE RACIALIZED BODY
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