Piper's work can thus be said to seize the opportunity glimpsed by Agamben: the opportunity to “appropriate the historic transformations of human nature that capitalism wants to limit to the spectacle, to link together image and body in a space where they can no longer be separated, and thus to forge the whatever body, whose physis is resemblance" (1993, 50). By re-embodying the image as bodily affect—as an affectivity always in excess of the image's desire to fix the body (and the body's captation by the image)—Piper's work seizes on the gap between image and body that, following Agamben, holds the potential for redemption understood as the opening to potentiality.
For Agamben, the hope for humanity can be found in this gap, the hope that comes from the emptying-out of the image by capitalism. Just as exchange capitalism of the early twentieth century performed the momentous work of redeeming the body “from the stigma of ineffability that had marked it for millennia," making it for the first time something truly whatever," so too the apotheosis of exchange capitalism in the bankruptcy of the advertising image yields the rediscovery of the “fragile, slight human body" that it had for so long masked behind its “glorious body" (48). The ultimately fatal—and ultimately redemptive—paradox of the society of the spectacle thus takes shape in the gap between image and body:
Never has the human body-above all the female body—been so massively manipulated as today and, so to speak, imagined from top to bottom by the techniques of advertising and commodity production: The opacity of sexual differences has been belied by the transsexual body; the incommunicable foreignness of the singular physis has been abolished by its mediatization as spectacle; the mortality of the organic body has been put in question by its traffic with the body without organs of commodities; the intimacy of erotic life has been refuted by pornography. And yet the process of technologization, instead of materially investing the body, was aimed at the construction of a separate sphere that had practically no point of contact with it: What was technologized was not the body but its image. (50, emphasis added)
The force of this “and yet" could not be clearerxxxvi: because it has so insistently invested the image as a wholesale prosthesis for the body, capitalism has left open a line of flight beyond it. This line of flight is the potentiality for reinvesting the body, reinvesting it beyond the categories of the spectacle (identity)—the potentiality, in short, for investing in the body's potentiality.
DIGITIZING THE RACIALIZED BODY
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