Bodies in code interfaces with digital media

In accord with this aim, as Mark Pesce suggests, Davies manages to design a space "that contained no distinct boundaries between self and world," one that functions by engaging vision and touch as irreducibly interlinked sensory modalities, both centered on the bodily sensation that confers reality on all perception. In what he describes as a “direct assault on two fronts," Pesce contends that Davies' work simultaneously changes “what the eye would see" and “how the participant would move through the world" (Pesce, "Cathedrals," 2). The result is a use of the virtual reality interface to catalyze a profoundly affirmative and empowering experience of psychasthenia. That is why, to cite the experience of one participant, at some point in the immersion, “the border between the interface as a symbolized surface and the surface of the physiological body begins to blur."23 As the visual (representational) boundaries between body and world dissolve in favor of an affective contact that foregrounds what Jonas called the“force-experience" characteristic of tactility—internal self-movement synchronized with the visual “perception" of the immaterial—what is brought to the fore is an energetic connection of the body with the world, their primordial indivision.

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digitizing the racialized body, or the politics of common impropriety

In his recent study of the Internet, Mark Poster has argued for a radical approach that would do more than simply deploy new media as a “tool for determining the fate of groups as they are currently constituted."1 As Poster sees it, the transformational potential of the new media stems from their impact on how human beings are interpellated as social actors. As it becomes increasingly mediated by the communication networks of the new media, interpellation comes to materialize a “self that is no longer a subject since it no longer subtends the world as if from outside but operates within a machine apparatus as a point in a circuit" (16). In this way, new media allow us to suspend existing cultural figurations of the self—“race, class, and gender, or citizen, manager, and worker"—in order to forge new cultural forms that have the potential to change “the position of existing groups ... in unforeseeable ways" (3).

In their call for a new “pedagogy" adequate to the technically facilitated phenomenon of globalization, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam appear to endorse just such a radical program. Specifically, they wonder whether the potential of digital technologies to "bypass the search for a profilmic model" might furnish the opportunity to “expand the reality effect exponentially by switching the viewer from a passive to a more interactive position, so that the raced gendered sensorial body could be implanted, theoretically, with a constructed virtual gaze, becoming a launching site for identity travel."² For Shohat and Stam, the important question is this:

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Might virtual reality or computer simulation be harnessed for the purposes of multicultural or transnational pedagogy, in order to communicate, for example, what it feels like to be an illegal alien' pursued by the border police or a civil rights demonstrator feeling the lash of police brutality in the early 1960s? (166)

Despite a shared enthusiasm regarding the potentiality of new media, it is the differences between these two positions that help to foreground exactly what is new about new media and to specify ways in which it calls on us to transform our techniques of cultural analysis. Thus, Poster's sensitivity toward the materiality of new media gives the lie to Shohat and Stam's easy subordination of interactivity to the demands of contentbased practices of resistance; and his insightful (if ultimately insufficient) criticism of the concept of identity in the wake of digital mediation poses an insuperable obstacle for a media practice rooted in emancipative transformation via the category of identity. On both counts, I would suggest, Poster's analysis issues the challenge for any transformative media practice in the postbroadcast age: to find a way of conceptualizing and deploying media that does not subordinate them to preconstituted categories of identity and subjectivity and that exploits their capacity to bring the “preindividual” dimension (following Gilbert Simondon's conception) to bear on the ongoing process of individuation.

It is precisely this challenge I propose to take on in this chapter. My focus will be the performance of race and ethnicity in cyberspace—specifically, the difference (and the opportunity) that might be said to distinguish the category of race as it comes to be cyberized. Following those critics who have argued that online interactions generalize the condition of passing hitherto associated with racial performance, I shall deploy race as a privileged topos for experimenting with the radical potentialities afforded by new media for transforming how we conceptualize identity in general. Because race has always been plagued by a certain disembodiment (the fact that race is manifestly a construction at the level of the image because visible racial traits are in no way reducible to organic, i.e., genetic, organization), it will prove especially useful for exposing the limitations of the Internet as a new machinic assemblage for producing subjectivity. For the same reason, it will help us to grasp and potentially to deploy the possibilities new media offer for experiencing community beyond identity.

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My transformational engagement with race theory aims to redeem the generalization of passing on the Internet from the criticism that it functions negatively to erase the category of race. As I see it, the suspension of the social category of visibility in online environments transforms the experience of race in what is, potentially, a fundamental way: by suspending the automatic ascription of racial signifiers according to visible traits, online environments can, in a certain sense, be said to subject everyone to what I shall call a “zero degree" of racial difference. The certain universalization thereby effectuated, a universalization that certainly remains differential, divorces the image from the living body it would capture. It thereby exposes—in ways that are singular but somehow also common—the affective basis of racial signification and, more specifically, the radical disjunction between racial identity categories and the singularity of each body whose life is always in excess of any particular, fixed identity.

In two initial sections devoted to the phenomenon of online interpellation as a form of passing, I attempt to foreground the differences between raced and gendered interpellation in order to expose the bodily mediation that necessarily gives all interpellations their force. In a third section devoted to Frantz Fanon's analysis of racism as “corporeal malediction," I explore the crucial role that embodiment (specifically, the corporeal schema) plays as the root level where racism gains a foothold and also, necessarily, where racism must be universalized and attacked. Then, in two sections focused on the deployment of new media in the work of artist Keith Piper, I explore how race is experienced within a postbroadcast media environment and along a (potentially) universal continuum, first through the incommensurability of the static image of the black body and subsequently through the phenomenon of interpellative failure and the production of an affective bodily excess.

Finally, in a concluding section centered on the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, I link this postinterpellative, affective experience of the constraints of race with an ethics of singularity predicated on the bankruptcy of the stereotyped media image and the categories of identity through which it previously performed its reifying cultural work. By showing how new media potentially facilitate an experience of community rooted in the commonality of the improper, I hope to give a glimpse of the radical promise they may hold for radically reconfiguring the obsolescent categories that clearly still function to introduce inequalities of all kinds and, beyond that, to obscure our shared singularity, our common status as beings radically in excess of our selves.

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1. BEYOND SYMBOLIC INTERPELLATION: UNDERSTANDING DIGITAL PERFORMATIVITY

Cultural criticism has already recognized the potential of the Internet to usher in a postidentitarian politics rooted in the obsolescence of racial and ethnic categorizations. In her discussion of cyberspace in Continental Drift, for example, Emily Apter suggestively positions the Internet as the natural extension of postcolonial theory's complexification of identity, embodiment, and community and as its (potential) salvation from its internal contradictions. Welcoming the cyborg as the "quintessential hybrid' postcolonial subject," Apter sees the fluidity of cyberidentity as a chance for postcolonial theory to sublate what she understands to be its historically specific (thus provisional) embrace of emancipatory identity politics.ii,3

Abstracted from its narrow concern with redeeming postcolonial criticism, Apter's analysis of cyberculture as the vehicle for an “ironic screening of the subject" helps to expose the bankruptcy of the image as a basis for any representational or performative politics of identity that would function by linking agency to transgression via the category of visibility and the visibly marked body. More than any other figure, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has explored this bankruptcy and its crucial position within the endgame of the society of the spectacle. For Agamben:

[T]he absurdity of individual existence ... has become ... so senseless that it has lost all pathos and been transformed, brought out into the open, into an everyday exhibition: Nothing resembles the life of this new humanity more than advertising footage from which every trace of the advertised product has been wiped out.4

This total cooptation of the category of the individual explains why images of the ethnic other can today be nothing but fantasy projections of the same. They might look like the other, but they work only to the extent that they speak and think just like us.iv

As a new phase in the apotheosis of the becoming-image of capital, the technologies of cyberspace and the new media simply take the logic of the spectacle one step beyond globalized advertising and cinema, in effect emptying the spectacle of all promise from the start. Because online identity and the cyborging of the body are constructions through and through, whatever allure they may hold simply cannot be that of a fetish masking difference, but must rather be something more like an unapologetic celebration of the simulacral.

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Such a possibility, however, is the unprecedented redemptive opportunity that, according to Agamben, must at all costs not be squandered:

Because if instead of continuing to search for a proper identity in the already improper and senseless form of individuality, humans were to succeed in belonging to this impropriety as such, in making of the proper being-thus not an identity and an individual property but a singularity without identity, a common and absolutely exposed singularity—if humans could, that is, not be-thus in this or that particular biography, but be only the thus, their singular exteriority and their face, then they would for the first time enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects, into a communication without the incommunicable. (65)

If the new media hold the potential to generate radically new forms of cultural existence, I would suggest that this is because and insofar as they facilitate this belonging to the improper, this process of forging the “whatever body." Where the society of the spectacle passively generates its own obsolescence—and thus functions as a precondition for the coming community"—the new media actively invest the dimension of the thus, the dimension of bodily life that exceeds concrete embodiment and thus (potentially) evades the grasp of capitalism's wholesale investment of the image.

In this sense, we might say that the Internet completes the positive movement beyond the spectacle and the trap of identity bound up with its (empty) promise. More specifically still, we might say that it suspends the force of the image, of capital's “becoming-image," which forms the precondition for a reinvestment of the body outside the image. What permits the Internet to perform this crucial function is, to return to Poster's terminology, its deployment of machinic means for facilitating the performance of identity beyond the constraints imposed by physical appearance:

The important question [in online communities] is the way identity is performed.... Participants are authors of themselves as characters, not simply by acts of consciousness, but by the interactions that take place on the screen. In these situations, ... mediated by the interface of computers and communications network, the body enters a new relation with the subject, a dissociated yet actual relation that opens identity to new degrees of flexible determination. The body no longer constrains the performativity of speech acts to the extent it does in face-to-face relations. These digital authors enact an unprecedented type of performative self-constitution in which the process ofinterpellation becomes an explicit question in the communication. Instead of the policeman-teacher-parent-boss hailing the individual in a manner that occludes the performative nature of the communication, in online communities one invents oneself and one knows that others also invent themselves, while each interpellates the others through those inventions. Unlike earlier forms of mediated communication, digital authorship is about the performance of self-constitution. (75, emphasis added)

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On Poster's account, online identity performance exemplifies a postideological and postsymbolic form of interpellation in which the artifactuality of identity is exposed by the technology that mediates it. Because it is effectuated by the machinic performativity of computer language, rather than the symbolic performativity of social institutions, online interpellation affords an unprecedented freedom to the digital author to invent herself, subject only to the constraints of the online medium.'

Despite its utter blindness to the social constraints that thoroughly permeate virtual spaces,vi Poster's analysis crucially foregrounds the experimental function of online identity play. If there is indeed a general awareness concerning the disjunction between online and actual identity, as he suggests,vii then what is at stake in online identity performance must be something quite different from the struggle for social recognition central to recent theories of performativity. Such a conclusion is implicit in Poster's definition of online interpellation as entirely borne by the words on the screenviii: so long as the body is entirely constituted from text, it can have no necessary analogical correlation with the flesh-and-blood body of the user outside the virtual space; put somewhat differently, it lacks all force to compel the subjection of this latter body.

Contextualized in relation to our concerns here, Poster's conception attains a crucial specificity: in materializing interpellation via a text-body, online identity performance does not bracket out the body per se so much as it suspends the constraint the body exercises as a visible signifier—as a receptive surface for the markings of racial (and gendered) particularity.

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1. BEYOND VISIBILITY: THE GENERALIZATION OF PASSING

It is precisely on account of its specific epochē of the visual that online identity performance can be said to generalize the phenomenon of passing. By decoupling identity from any analogical relation to the visible body, online self-invention effectively places everyone in the position previously reserved for certain raced subjects: everyone must mime his or her identity.ix However, in generalizing the phenomenon of passing, the Internet does far more than simply materialize an already existent racial or ethnic problematic. In effect, it introduces a radically unprecedented condition of selfhood: what is fundamentally new about Internet passing is not its generalization of an epistemosocial problematic (the fact that there is no way to “tell if a character's description matches a player's physical characteristics," as Nakamura puts it), but rather its generalization of a situation in which the only way to acquire an identity is to "pass," to perform or imitate a role, norm, or stereotype that is itself a cultural performance.x

In his analysis of the “ambivalent relationship of race and cyberspace," Thomas Foster contends that this kinship between online interpellation and passing allows us to understand “African-American culture ... as prefiguring the concerns of virtual systems theory.' Online identification is like racial performance, Foster suggests, because it lacks any naturalizing norm that it might transgress and is thus always already“antifoundational":

Histories of racial performance complicate the project of de-essentializing or denaturalizing embodiment.... Race has never been constructed only through “the corporealizing logic that [seeks] to anchor the indeterminacies of race to organic organization [...]" [citing Robyn Wiegman].... [Rather, as blackface shows,] racial norms have historically been constructed through the kind of antifoundational performative practices that have come to be associated with postmodern modes of cross-identification and gender-bending. By antifoundational," I mean that in blackface performances it was not necessary to ground racial identity in a black body. Nor was it necessary to occupy a black body in order to be perceived by others as producing a culturally intelligible performance of "blackness."5

Like that of racial passing, the problematic of blackface demonstrates that raced identity has always been constructed as a disembodied mimicry, that it has always been a performance of pure convention, in the absence of any bodily foundation. It is thus closely akin to online performance because, in both cases, identity is exclusively bound to the imitation of culturally sanctioned signifiers. The paradox in which such performance results is aptly captured in the figure of the black minstrel imitating himself: to do so, he must, as Eric Lott puts it, "offer credible imitations of white men imitating him." In online self-invention, as in blackface and racial passing, identity is always an imitation of an imitation: a purely disembodied simulacrum.

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In this, both forms of passing differ fundamentally from gender performativity, where the strong motivation to resist all appeal to the body stems from the traditional identification of femininity with the body—that is, from the assurance that the body has always been (and will always be) there. To cite only the most famous example, in her account of interpellation, Judith Butler shows how the body emerges as an excess or residue in the very act in which it is materialized through a particular socially or institutionally sanctioned coding.x The kinds of transgressive performative practice Butler valorizes function by making this bodily residue culturally intelligible, i.e., visible. Such a model of the body is precisely what is missing in the case of blackface performance, racial passing, and, we might add, online self-invention, whose similarity in this regard helps to show the limitations of a theory that builds bodily excess into the scene of interpellation and thus denies it any standing outside the interpellative act.

In these instances, the problem is that interpellation works all too well: the mimicry at work in all three requires a wholesale replacement of the lived body with a new prosthetic body—whether it is the text-body of Internet communities or the cultural image of the black body operative in blackface and passing.xii The absolute discontinuity between the materialized body and the lived body means that there simply is no possibility for embodiment to form a site of resistance within the process of interpellation; insofar as it constitutes a prosthetic body that replaces the lived body, passing can leave no bodily residue that could be made visible or otherwise rendered culturally intelligible.

For Thomas Foster, this transcendence of visibility makes cyberspace a promising frontier for reconceptualizing race. By altering the accustomed grounding of social interaction in the physical facticity of human bodies," as Sandy Stone puts it, cyberspace opens possibilities for identity-performance that are not “simply expressive or mimetic."xiii Insofar as it dispenses with the category of visibility, cyberspace holds the potential to broker raced identity through means other than the imitation or expression (the visible or epidermal traits) of a body.xiv Yet, to stop there—and to see in the generalization of passing nothing more than the suspension of the constraint of visibility and the possibility for variant couplings of self and body thus afforded—is to underestimate its impact massively. The license passing affords us to try on other and multiple representational selves (the experimental function foregrounded by Poster) is at the same time a call into being of that heretofore invisible domain of our existence: the life of the body.xv

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