This is why it is important that online interpellation submits everyone—not just a particular subgroup—to the condition of having to pass; the generalization of this condition means in effect that the resulting abjection of the lived body from the space of intelligibility (visibility) can no longer be limited to certain subjects, but rather becomes a problem for all. If we all must imitate cultural images of how particular bodies should appear in order to acquire agency—if we must give up our singular bodily experiences to occupy a constituted textual body—then we all must live the erasure of our lived bodies.
We might say then that what is most significant about the transcendence of visibility in online interpellation is less the possibility it affords for new modes of represented agency than its exposure of the violence exerted on bodily life by generic categories of social intelligibility and by the politics of recognition—identity politics—that it subtends. By severing imitation from visual appearance, online passing allows cultural signifiers to appear as what they are: social codings that have no natural correlation to any particular body and that, for this reason, are and cannot avoid being profoundly reductive of bodily singularity.
- “CORPOREAL MALEDICTION”AND THE“RACIAL-EPIDERMAL SCHEMA"
In a manner not dissimilar from the deployment of virtual reality by Char Davies, cyberspace-the site of today's online identity play—comprises a kind of laboratory for testing the contribution of embodiment, in this case, to our experience of living our “self" as racially marked. By bracketing out the visual markers that have given content to the process of racialization in our culture, cyberspace would seem to provide a zero-degree" of racial identification, a certain universality rooted in the precariousness—what we have been analyzing under the concept of passing—of identity as a stabilization or fixation of embodied life (or, following Simondon, of individuation). So long as racialization proceeds automatically, as it were, from the availability of visual markers of race, it will perforce apply unequally to differently embodied individuals. However, as soon as this automaticity is interrupted—as I suggest it is by the generalization of passing requisite for agency in cyberspace—racialization is opened up for a certain exploration.
DIGITIZING THE RACIALIZED BODY
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