As differentiated from Unmapped, the works in Unrecorded compel all viewers to reflect on the precariousness and flexibility of their ethnicity; moreover, by exposing the complex historical connections that, through the agency of technology, interlink all particular destinies, they invite us all to reforge our ethnicity beyond the “obligation of an identity tethered to the signifying chain of history" (Mercer 62). If this potential forging of “new figures of ethnicity" represents an example of the process Poster calls “virtual ethnicity," it is one that reveals the relation between technology and ethnicization to be far more immanent than it is on Poster's account. As the mechanism for articulating figures of ethnicity that reflect their “electronic constitution in virtual spaces" (Poster 164), digital technology does not simply furnish a new, nonphysical place for memory, as Poster suggests.xxvii On the contrary, it brokers a new phase in the ongoing coevolution of the human and technology—in the technico-social-cultural differentiation, characteristic of the human species, that French anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan names (in specific opposition to genetic differentiation) ethnic differentiation.
On this view, ethnicity has always been technical, in the sense that it coincides with the possibility for passing on nongenetically programmed memory that is external to the individual: ethnicity is, in Bernard Stiegler's terminology, "epiphylogenetic," evolution through means other than life.xviii The works in Unrecorded foreground this coevolution of technology and ethnicization. By soliciting a confrontation and potential reforging of ethnicity in each user—one concretely premised on the complicity of colonization and slavery with technology—these works materialize the promise of“collective intelligence" in a manner that does justice not only to the freedom afforded by the virtual but also to the historically specific (though in no sense fixed or determinate) constraints that continue to differentiate subjects unequally and to bur den them with differential tasks.xxix
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