On Poster's account, online identity performance exemplifies a postideological and postsymbolic form of interpellation in which the artifactuality of identity is exposed by the technology that mediates it. Because it is effectuated by the machinic performativity of computer language, rather than the symbolic performativity of social institutions, online interpellation affords an unprecedented freedom to the digital author to invent herself, subject only to the constraints of the online medium.'
Despite its utter blindness to the social constraints that thoroughly permeate virtual spaces,vi Poster's analysis crucially foregrounds the experimental function of online identity play. If there is indeed a general awareness concerning the disjunction between online and actual identity, as he suggests,vii then what is at stake in online identity performance must be something quite different from the struggle for social recognition central to recent theories of performativity. Such a conclusion is implicit in Poster's definition of online interpellation as entirely borne by the words on the screenviii: so long as the body is entirely constituted from text, it can have no necessary analogical correlation with the flesh-and-blood body of the user outside the virtual space; put somewhat differently, it lacks all force to compel the subjection of this latter body.
Contextualized in relation to our concerns here, Poster's conception attains a crucial specificity: in materializing interpellation via a text-body, online identity performance does not bracket out the body per se so much as it suspends the constraint the body exercises as a visible signifier—as a receptive surface for the markings of racial (and gendered) particularity.
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