In Relocating the Remains, Keith Piper deploys new media technology as a means to effectuate—differentially, to be sure-the universalization of the violence imposed by the "racial epidermal schema." The common target of what I propose to call his politics of affectivity is the image of the black man (the black man become image), or rather, the specific form it takes in a digital environment where it has been divested of the automaticity that, as Fanon highlights, renders him (and the black men and women for whom he stands) a “slave not of the idea' that others have of me but of my own appearance" (116).
The promise of the digital, then, is the promise of a certain indetermination in the correlation between racialization and the image, an indetermination that suspends the "overdetermination" of the black body "from without" and thereby positions the image as a static fixation of individuation—a reduction of embodiment, of the biological life common to all humans (116). Recalling our earlier discussion of Agamben, we might well say that Piper's work invests racialization as a concrete—and perhaps privileged—actualization of the contemporary bankruptcy of the image; in exposing the utter incongruence of the image of the black body with any form of embodied life, it announces the obsolescence of the image as a support for identification as such.
To the extent that it attacks the image as an adequate vehicle for the apprehension of the other, Piper's project would seem to take up Shohat and Stam's call to exploit the capability of digital technologies to "bypass the search for a profilmic model." Indeed, Piper relies extensively on digital compositing to create fragmented and conflicted images of black men—images which, through their lack of viability as objects of (either) identification or projective expulsion, lay bare the insidious workings of the racial epidermal schema. That is why, in the end, Piper's politics of affectivity gives the lie to Shohat and Stam's well-intentioned effort to deploy new media in the service of an empathic politics.xvii
Indeed, Piper is keenly aware that it is not the felicitous identification with the felt reality of the other that is important and potentially transformative, but rather the political force linked to the affect of incommensurability. In this sense, his use of new media in Relocating the Remains brings to the politics of bodily life what Gilles Deleuze's analysis of "third cinema" brings to the politics of memory. Just as the“intercessor" operates a movement beyond habitual memory into absolute memory, so too the experience of incommensurability resulting from the failure of identification with the stereotyped racial image sparks a movement beyond habitual feeling networks into an affective confusion. Where the former opens the possibility to invent a new future (or a new people), the latter opens the possibility to live new affects, ones commensurate to the singularity or impropriety of life.xvii
DIGITIZING THE RACIALIZED BODY
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