Bodies in code interfaces with digital media

This is why it is important that online interpellation submits everyone—not just a particular subgroup—to the condition of having to pass; the generalization of this condition means in effect that the resulting abjection of the lived body from the space of intelligibility (visibility) can no longer be limited to certain subjects, but rather becomes a problem for all. If we all must imitate cultural images of how particular bodies should appear in order to acquire agency—if we must give up our singular bodily experiences to occupy a constituted textual body—then we all must live the erasure of our lived bodies.

We might say then that what is most significant about the transcendence of visibility in online interpellation is less the possibility it affords for new modes of represented agency than its exposure of the violence exerted on bodily life by generic categories of social intelligibility and by the politics of recognition—identity politics—that it subtends. By severing imitation from visual appearance, online passing allows cultural signifiers to appear as what they are: social codings that have no natural correlation to any particular body and that, for this reason, are and cannot avoid being profoundly reductive of bodily singularity.

1. “CORPOREAL MALEDICTION”AND THE“RACIAL-EPIDERMAL SCHEMA"

In a manner not dissimilar from the deployment of virtual reality by Char Davies, cyberspace-the site of today's online identity play—comprises a kind of laboratory for testing the contribution of embodiment, in this case, to our experience of living our “self" as racially marked. By bracketing out the visual markers that have given content to the process of racialization in our culture, cyberspace would seem to provide a zero-degree" of racial identification, a certain universality rooted in the precariousness—what we have been analyzing under the concept of passing—of identity as a stabilization or fixation of embodied life (or, following Simondon, of individuation). So long as racialization proceeds automatically, as it were, from the availability of visual markers of race, it will perforce apply unequally to differently embodied individuals. However, as soon as this automaticity is interrupted—as I suggest it is by the generalization of passing requisite for agency in cyberspace—racialization is opened up for a certain exploration.

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The important question thereby raised is whether this margin of indetermination and the exploration it facilitates can yield something positive. Does the generalization of passing—and the bracketing of the visual as the privileged register for racialization—simply subject all embodied individuals to the same conditions, to the same struggle for identity? Or, might it rather be an opportunity to challenge the assumptions underlying the application of racial signifiers to bodies, assumptions that include a static picture of the individual as well as a subordination of embodiment to the force of the image?

So long as we remain focused on the most literal spaces for identity play in cyberspace (the chat room, multiplayer video games, etc.), we will be unable to address this crucial alternative. That is, we will retain interpellation—the hailing of the embodied individual that confers identity and agency, always at the expense of some dimension of embodiment—as the category for thinking racialization. We will thus fail to capitalize on the excess of embodiment over interpellation that I propose (following Simondon and Michael Hardt) to call “affectivity' and that, as we shall see, forms the medium for an inclusive experience of impropriety, a collective "whatever body" (Agamben).

Because we need to think beyond interpellation, the generalization of passing that has been our focus thus far (and indeed, online identity play in general) can do no more than suggest a kind of technical readiness or even ripeness, an availability or disposition, to use Simondon's term (disposition), for a rethinking of the relation between embodiment and racialization. To pursue the avenue it opens, I shall thus turn to the work of Malta-born British artist Keith Piper, whose multimedia, multiplatform, archival synthesis of his work from 1980 onward, Relocating the Remains (1997), brilliantly deploys digital technics as a means of thinking—of compelling viewers to think—racialization beyond interpellation.

Piper's work constructs yet another body-in-code—this one concerned specifically with the dematerialization of cyberspatial interaction and community—that, to the extent it invests in the materiality of the digital, forms a complement to the online epochē of the visual. Because of its use of digital technics, Piper's work (as we shall see shortly) allows and perhaps even compels us to negotiate our relation to stereotyped media images—images that function by capturing embodied force—in ways that mobilize viewer affectivity as a mechanism for experiencing the excess of embodiment and for deploying it toward the forging of a collective "whatever body."

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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.

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The source of this malediction is, of course, the perverted or false dialectic between the black body and the world. To the extent that this dialectic is mediated not internally, as a direct structural coupling, but rather by white society and the values it imposes on black bodies, it can only be an interrupted and impotent dialectic, one that cannot secure the coupling of body and world theorized by Lhermitte (and Merleau-Ponty) and hence can only burden its “subjects" with extrinsic and disabling contents. These contents comprise another schema—the historico-racial schema"—that operates not on top of, but below the corporeal schema; this schema interferes, terminally in Fanon's estimation, with the successful constitution of a physiological bodily schema.

Dramatizing his discovery that he has “sketched a historico-racial schema" of this sort, Fanon clarifies the additional burden faced by black men and women:

The elements that I used had been provided for me not by “residual sensations and perceptions primarily of a tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic, and visual character" [citing Lhermitte, L'Image de Notre Corps], but by the other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories. I thought that what I had in hand was to construct a physiological self, to balance space, to localize sensations, and here I was called on for more. (111)

Specifically, he was called on to assume the burden of history, of the sedimented stereotypes (tertiary retentions) of his race. Continuing his dramatization, Fanon describes his discovery of this inexorable burden: "I could no longer laugh, because I already know that there were legends, stories, history, and above all historicity ..." (112). Inexorable or not, this burden proves overwhelming, as Fanon goes on to describe how his fractured "corporeal schema," already "assailed at various points," finally crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema" (112).

With this passage from the "historico-racial schema" to the "racial epidermal schema," Fanon and the black men and women for whose experience he testifies truly and properly become objects:

I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination; I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: "Sho' good eatin'." On that day, completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white man, who unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object. (112)

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No longer even aware of his body through third-person consciousness, Fanon now experiences himself, his body, solely from the perspective of the white man's gaze. Literally the object of the gaze of the other, Fanon can only live his embodiment as a flattened, one-dimensional racial epidermal schema:

In the train, it was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third person but in a triple person. In the train, I was given not one but two, three places. I had already stopped being amused. It was not that I was finding febrile coordinates in the world. I existed triply: I occupied space. I moved toward the other ... and the evanescent other, hostile but not opaque, transparent, not there, disappeared. Nausea ... (112)

One can hardly imagine a stronger expression of the fact, the historicoracial reality, that black bodies do not live in the same space as other, white bodies; they are, quite simply, barred from the intercorporeity that is, as we have seen, the very payoff of having a body schema on Merleau-Ponty's account.

In her commentary on Fanon, Gail Weiss astutely grasps the depth at which racial alienation occurs, stressing that:

Social objectification should not be viewed as a subsequent influence upon the construction of an individual body image (i.e., coming into play only in the development of the ego-ideal or body image ideal), but is always already operative, and for those societally designated as "racial minorities," the internalization of this racial epidermal schema (whose inscriptive force penetrates the psyche through the skin) results in a (psychophysical) inferiority complex that no body image ideal, however positive, can ever completely overcome. (27–28)

Not only is objectification “always already operative"within the process of body image construction, but it also similarly contaminates the constitution of a body schema, which forms, as we have seen, the background for the construction of any body image, coherent or otherwise. Accordingly, the disturbance Fanon calls "corporeal malediction" is much more than a mere contamination of the black self's body image by racial stereotypes and the objectification they render unavoidable; it is a disturbance in the bodily schema, in the process that would make possible the construction of a body image in the first place, that would accord black selves the agency to perform such a construction.

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Thus, the corporeal malediction created by the imposition on black selves of a “racial epidermal schema” involves a reduction of the bodily schema to the image; this reduction, moreover, is distinct from, and far more fundamental than, for instance, Paul Schilder's (or, for that matter, Elizabeth Grosz's) conflation of body schema and body image. Here, what is at issue is a wholesale displacement of the physiological corporeal schema—the embodied basis for agency as such—by a racial epidermal schema whose content is stereotyped images of the black body imposed by white society. (This difference is marked by Fanon's differentiation between the "third person" and the “triple person." The former names a situation in which the self's bodily schema is impeded by the body image, i.e., the image of his or her own body; the latter describes a situation in which the self has lost its schema entirely—that is, any contact whatsoever with his or her embodiment—and consequently exists only as the bare living of a set of images imposed on his or her body from the outside.) What this means, ultimately, is that racism, on Fanon's account, occurs through the “expropriation" of the corporeal schema of black men and women, which is simply replaced by a set of contents, tertiary memories, and racial images permitting only the most hollow, automatic forms of agency.

However, what is at stake in Fanon's conceptualization of "corporeal malediction" is more than just an account of racism; indeed, with his firm insistence that racial difference concerns how racial difference is actually lived, his analysis has significant consequences for how we think identification as such. By demonstrating that racism operates fundamentally at the level of the bodily schema—as an impairment of the embodiment, of the corporeal agency, of certain bodies—Fanon's analysis advances an important claim about identification in general: namely, identification not only crucially involves subrepresentational processes of bodily life, but these latter—insofar as they comprise the processes through which the effects of differences are actually lived or felt—are what makes differences matter!

This stress on how difference is lived may in fact be the crucial difference between processes of racial and gender identification-if, for example, we think the latter with Judith Butler and view it fundamentally as a performative problematic involving the attempt to secure "a certain possibility for social existence," as she puts it in Excitable Speech.8 Butler's nuanced analyses of the illocutionary force of linguistic utterances notwithstanding, it remains the case that the subject materialized through performative interpellation, even if it is produced in the act of its materialization, is from the moment of its materialization always already possessed of an intact, coherent bodily schema.

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We might legitimately ask, then, if the becoming-object that Fanon describes is an interpellation at all. It is undeniable, as Diana Fuss argues, that “colonialism works in part by policing the boundaries of cultural intelligibility"9; however, the exclusion of the black man (and the black woman), as Fanon depicts it, is so categorical—he or she is “denied entry into the alterity that underwrites subjectivity" (which is the sense of Fanon's conception of the “triple person")—that any capacity to respond to the call of the other would seem to be vitiated from the get-go. The singularity of the black man (or woman) on Fanon's account stems from this last reality. Deprived of any capacity to respond, of any “self" that could be produced in responding to the call of the other, the black man (or woman) simply cannot be the subject of any interpellation, even one brought into being through the “violence of racial interpellation." Thus, in Fanon's reckoning, when the black man (or woman) hears the call of the other—"Dirty nigger!" or "Look, a Negro!"—he or she cannot even purchase some compromised social standing through identification with the racial slur. Instead, he or she spirals away along the perverted, empty dialectic of crushing objecthood, becoming the mute, impotent object of the system of racism.

As a contribution to the thinking of identification, Fanon's work thus provides a negative archaeology of the infrastructural embodiment necessary for a "politics of the performative" not only to succeed, but simply to be possible in the first place. If his work thereby underscores an important difference between racial and gender identification, it is because of his personal and historical demonstration that racial difference, indeed racism, is lived at a deeper level than gender difference (at least as contemporary feminists tend to conceptualize it); it does not concern cultural intelligibility, but rather the embodied preconditions for acquiring such intelligibility in the first place, the capacity to sustain, to live, to give body to, the subjectifications imposed upon it.xvi In sum, the “corporeal malediction" generated by racism yields the dispossession not only of the meaning of the body but also of the body itself, as Fanon's experience makes unbearably clear: "My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly ..." (113, emphasis added).

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Although the imposition of the "racial epidermal schema" has the effect of turning the black self into an object, it nonetheless remains part of a larger dialectic; indeed, this devastating effect can only be the rigorous result-in a sense, the distorted remainder—of the dialectic of white identification. The question thus arises: what does the racial epidermal schema—the reduction of black embodiment to a racial image—do for and to the white self?

Fanon turns to this question in his effort to identify, extrapolating from and expanding Sartre's analysis of anti-Semitism, the constituents of “negrophobia." This leads him to a startling conclusion:

Phobia is to be found on an instinctual, biological level. At the extreme, I should say that the Negro, because of his body, impedes the closing of the postural schema of the white man—at the point, naturally, at which the black man makes his entry into the phenomenal world of the white man. (160)

Fanon's point is that the black man—and with him, racial alterity, of which he is the exemplar—interrupts the mirror stage which functions to lend an imaginary integration, an illusory closure, to the postural schema. As Fanon sees it, this failure of the mirror stage to achieve its imaginary sublation of bodily fragmentation describes the actual workings of identification processes in the white world of his time, i.e., in a white world constituted on the basis of the system of racism.

Whether or not this renders Lacan's account of identification racist, it does serve to specify the privilege of the white man and to mark the limitations of that privilege:

It would indeed be interesting, on the basis of Lacan's theory of the mirror stage, to investigate the extent to which the imago of his fellow built up in the young white at the usual age would undergo an imaginary aggression with the appearance of the Negro. When one has grasped the mechanism described by Lacan, one can have no further doubt that the real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man. And conversely. Only for the white man the Other is perceived on the level of the body image, absolutely as the not-self-that is, the unidentifiable, the unassimilable. For the black man, as we have shown, historical and economic realities come into the picture. (161, note, translation modified)

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Once again, Fanon pinpoints the fundamental asymmetry of the identification process: the black self is simply deprived of any opportunity to participate in the dialectic of identification as described by Lacan. At the same time, however, insofar as the image of the black man constitutes absolute alterity within the white man's dialectic, it manages to exercise a degree of constraint on the latter. As that which refuses to be sublated in the dialectic of identification, resists integration into the corporeal schema and thus hinders its closure, the black body as absolute Other fundamentally interrupts the dialectic as Lacan describes it. On this account (i.e., from the white man's standpoint), racism stems from the need on the part of the white man to preserve the illusion of imaginary integration by denying the force of this interruption. Negrophobia is simply the result of such a projection: the image of the black man creates anxiety because it is "the corporeal reminder" of just how precarious the illusion of integration actually is to borrow a term from Gail Weiss.

To comprehend the reverberations of this interrupted dialectic— specifically, the qualified agency it would seem to assign the black man's image—we need to ask why, exactly, the black body has this role of absolute Other, exemplar for pure alterity. Fanon's reasoning here is admittedly complex, detouring as it does through psychoanalytical theorizing; however, what seems unequivocal throughout his analysis is the identification of the Negro with the “biological." "What is important, he specifies at the beginning of his analysis of negrophobia, “is to show that with the Negro the cycle of the biological begins” (161). Unlike the Jew who is persecuted as a member of a race, the Negro is persecuted as a concrete personality": “it is in his corporeality that the Negro is attacked" (163). Again, unlike the Jew who stands for the “intellectual danger" of cultural displacement, the Negro "symbolizes the biological danger." By “projecting his own desires onto the Negro," the “civilized white man behaves as if' the Negro really had them.

Thus, concludes Fanon, "to suffer from a phobia of Negroes is to be afraid of the biological. For the Negro is only biological. The Negroes are animals. They go about naked. And God alone knows" (165). By identifying the Negro with the biological, Fanon in effect comprehends the absolute alterity of the black body as the corporeal remainder of the biological itself, as that dimension of the living (what Agamben has analyzed as zoē or “bare life") that simply cannot be denied, no matter how forceful and complex the mechanism of projection may be. In this respect, the unassimilable black body is a living emblem of the excess of embodiment over its captation by the image (the dialectic of identification).

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As such, racial difference (and here it again contrasts with gender difference) holds a certain potential for universalization: notwithstanding the fundamental asymmetry that permeates the concrete experience it conditions, racial difference as it structures life in our world today interrupts the dialectic of identification in all cases, albeit differentially. Despite the fact that some bodies (black bodies) are wholly deprived of the chance to acquire a coherent body schema and others (white bodies) are interrupted in their effort to achieve imaginary integration, the violence of both forms of deprivation stems from a common root cause: the imposition of the “racial epidermal schema" on black men and women.

As the process that transforms the black body into an inert image, this imposition is responsible for making the black self into an object just as it is responsible for rendering the black body an anxiety-inducing, phobic image. What this means, then, is that all parties—black and white alike—have an interest in overturning the reduction of the black body to a mere image, even if this interest is asymmetrical. What is at stake here, as Fanon's identification of the black body with the biological makes clear, is the excess of bodily life over any form of identification that would seek to contain it through identification with or explusion as an image.

1. FROM NEGROPHOBIA TO NEGROPHILIA

(Re)thinking identification with Fanon requires us to interrogate its racist foundation, which in turn requires us to recognize the universality of its scope without losing sight of the asymmetry of its actual impact. Now, as I have already mentioned, new media technology—as exemplified in the Internet and, specifically, in the generalization of passing in online identity play—prepares the way for such a vigilant recognition. By instancing the potential of new technically facilitated forms of community to suspend, at least within certain parameters, the overdetermination exercised by the (visual) image of the racial other, online identity play creates the possibility for a “zero-degree” of racial identification, a potential universality rooted in the precariousness of any identity as a fixation of embodied individuation.

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