Before turning to this examination of Piper's digital practice, let me try to unpack and justify my claim that digital technics—here in the form of the Internet as the support for what is somewhat misleadingly called cyberspace—has, in some sense, prepared the way for a fundamentally different experience of racialization or, perhaps more accurately, for a new regime of individuation in which race matters differently.
To the extent that this new regime dethrones the image in favor of embodied excess, it might be helpful to conceptualize how race is lived at the level of embodiment. No critic has been more eloquent on this issue than Frantz Fanon, whose Black Skin, White Masks articulates a definitive critique of the neutrality underlying Sartre's theorization of anti-Semitism and, more generally, of the exploration of the body schema from Jean Lhermitte to (at least implicitly) Merleau-Ponty.
Fanon begins his analysis by foregrounding the specific difficulties black men and women encounter in their efforts to compose themselves as bodies: "In the white world," he writes, "the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his body schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness."7 The clear implication here is that black men and women experience their bodies not directly, or firsthand, but as objectifications, in the mode of third-person consciousness; in sum, because they experience their bodies indirectly through images created by others, they are unable to construct coherent bodily schemas.
As a consequence, black men and women are deprived of the resources of embodiment as a ground and medium for the coupling of body and world, of the "slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world" that “does not impose itself on me," but is rather “a definitive structuring of the self and of the world— definitive because it creates a real dialectic between my body and the world" (111). This deprivation of the resources afforded by a bodily schema is what Fanon refers to as "corporeal malediction," the estrangement of the self from itself, from its own constitutive embodiment.
DIGITIZING THE RACIALIZED BODY
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