Bodies in code interfaces with digital media

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

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Piper is perhaps the ideal figure for exploring the confrontation of new media technology and race theory. Not only has his artistic production coevolved with race theory and politics, taking inspiration from it and inspiring it in turn, but also his recent work acquires much of its resonance from its success at holding together the contradictions of racial identity, as well as those of identity. This is why Piper's critical engagement with race and media exemplifies the radical promise of new media. Indeed, his practice is perhaps most distinctive in its success at exposing and capitalizing on the intrinsic duality of technologies of containment and control like surveillance and cyberspace. Without disregarding the primary deployment of these technologies to target minority bodies—and indeed, by thinking their logic through to the limit—Piper attempts to make them available for postidentitarian identification on the basis of the singularity or impropriety common to us all.

Piper's complex project—which combines a gallery installation, a CD-ROM, and a Website and integrates much of his work from the mid 80s onxix—bears vivid witness to the role that technology plays as the facilitator for the politicization of affect, at least or especially when it is a question of race and ethnicity. Put bluntly, new media technology allows for a certain despecification of Piper's critical engagement with racial stereotypes and the paradoxical invisibility of the black (male) body. This despecification, in turn, allows for an opening up and complexification of the mode of address of his work. In an insightful essay on the project, Kobena Mercer pinpoints the operative mechanism for this technically facilitated despecification, arguing that Piper's turn to the digital allows him to treat the body as the focal site for a "doublevoicing" of the "confrontational" and the "invitational," a site where resistance is always contaminated by identification, where activism is complicated by emotion.xx,10

Extending this analysis, I would suggest that Piper's concrete engagement with technology as a site of dedifferentiation and universality must be understood in the dual mode of confrontation and invitation. The result is a significant complexification: not only is the address to black subjects nuanced in a way that routes self-perception through perception by the other (that is, through the surveillant and/or consumerist gaze),xxi but also the address is opened in an unprecedented way to nonblack, nonminority white subjects. In short, not until Piper deploys the allegedly universal technologies of surveillance and cyberspace can his work truly address a white audience (and thus accomplish his goal, formulated in the early 90s, of liberating address from concerns of identityxii). Accordingly, if Relocating the Remains can be said to culminate Piper's shift to a more nuanced and dialogic deployment of the “cut and mix” aesthetic, this is because it brings to fruition the universalizing of address that was always implicitly at issue in his turn to multimedia technologies.

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At first glance, the spatial layout of Relocating the Remains would seem no more than an opportune vehicle for Piper to archive the impressive array of his artistic production. The three “virtual" rooms each house works corresponding to his three main areas of interest: the cultural imaging of the black body, the legacy of colonialism, and the racial politics of contemporary technology. Yet, doubling this homogenizing spatial division is a heterogenizing temporal logic that restructures the interrelations between works in order to foreground Piper's trajectory toward a multivalent mode of address. Following this logic, the three virtual rooms—Unmapped, Unrecorded, and Unclassified (organized from left to right)—might be thought of as designating distinct phases or levels of generality in Piper's effort to complexify his broadly Foucauldian racial politics.xxiii

Devoted to manifesting the multiple contradictions attaching to the cultural image of the black body (specifically, the black male body), Unmapped cites and mediates the most prominent area of the artist's interest from the mid '80s until the early '90s. Incorporating previous works, including The Body Politic (1983), with new material and a new interface entitled "Negrophilia"(encompassing spaces devoted to the "sight," "sound," and "feel" of the Negro), Unmapped charts the course leading from Piper's initial confrontations with black stereotypes (themselves much nuanced by the addition of animation and especially sound) to his later complex engagement with the paradoxical figure of the black athlete.

As a whole, this archive overwhelms the spectator with the irresistibility of the commodified image of the black male. Indeed, as something like a synecdoche for the entirety of this line of exploration, the image of the black athlete brings to a head the oversaturation that, as Mercer insightfully points out, is crucial to the efficacy of the stereotyped image. It is not simply that too much meaning is packed into the image, but rather that visibility has been thoroughly co-opted as a viable category of resistance: "The paradox is that the hypervisibility of black sportsmen like U.S. basketball star Michael Jordan perpetuates the spectacular otherness on which colonial fantasy turns, only this time in the service of multicultural commodity fetishism" (58).xxiv

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Here, Piper's strategy would seem to be that of resisting the eviscerating of the image by capital, not by restoring content to the image of the black male athlete, but rather by reclaiming its empty promise as the source for the experience of affective confusion. However, the high degree of specificity attached to this act of reclaiming is most crucial. Although the exposure of the paradox of hypervisibility can certainly speak to all viewers, white and black alike, the concrete effect Mercer cites—namely, Piper's nuanced channeling of the commodified image through the channels that mediate each subject's self-image—here applies specifically to black (male, and to a lesser extent, female) subjects. Put another way, the emotional charge of these images—their capacity to induce affective confusion—will be limited to a narrow group among Piper's potential audience who are directly affected by the particular cooptation exercised in the capitalist exploitation of these stereotypes. This specificity, moreover, is interconnected in complex ways with the unique problematic of (in)visibility in the performance of race, what Fanon describes as the utter slavery of the black man to his appearance.

Devoted to the legacies of colonialism, the second virtual room, Unrecorded, marks a significant expansion of the affective dimension of Piper's project. Here, Piper takes the plurality inherent in colonialism's legacy as the basis for an interrogation of the concept of identity. Indeed, by articulating colonialism with contemporary technoscience, Piper opens up a vast continuum that potentially encompasses the interests of any potential viewer-participant, regardless of his or her given marks of particularity. No matter where one is positioned in relation to the Diaspora experience, no one can claim to be outside the sphere of its contemporary effects--that is, if these effects are taken as manifesting biases and violence built into the reigning epistemological discourses of the West. Put in a perhaps more positive light, we might say that Piper stages a deterritorializing of colonialism from an overly narrow historicism, thus revealing "the convulsions of a multicultural society in which the descendents of colonizers and colonized alike are mutually enmeshed in histories that are not yet fully known" (Mercer 18).

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Like Unmapped, Unrecorded brings together prior work and new material, again supplemented with animation and sound. Two of the three prior artworks—A Ship Called Jesus (1991) and (now garbed in a colonial tapestry interface) Go West Young Man—exemplify Piper's strategies for interiorizing contradictions in order to make them emotionally resonant as well as inescapable. By melding the complex figure of the black father with the handing-down of tradition among the enslaved and colonized, the father-son dialogue of Go West lends an indeterminate historical dimension to the failure of the black father, implicitly inviting its audience (whoever that may be) to nuance any easy conviction regarding its cause.

Likewise, by exploring the historical coupling of slavery and Christianity, A Ship Called Jesus aims to expose the correlation between the desire for certainty and the experience of trauma and, subsequently, to challenge the certainties of its spectators. Named after a slave ship, "The Jesus of Lubeck," endowed by Queen Elizabeth I to Sir John Hawkins, the work juxtaposes its historical context—including a headstone and grave, made from shards of broken mirror, and a crucifix lightbox, both commemorating the victims of the Middle Passage—with three archives of contemporary material, including quotes from Margaret Thatcher on Britain's race fears (“An English Queen"), gospel music (“A Ship"), and the ventriloquized rhetoric of commerce (“A Pirate"). In this way, A Ship Called Jesus manages to generalize the trauma of slavery (without compromising its differential referentiality) such that any position of “fundamentalist certainty"(whether black nationalism, racism, or, interestingly enough, the denial of racism) can only appear as the symptom of trauma. In consequence, loss of certainty becomes a redemptive vehicle for a new, more open-ended ethnicization that has dispensed with the constraining binary categories of race as a historical substance.xxv

Extending this dispensation, the two remaining works featured in this space serve to link the intrinsic imbrications of colonialism and ethnicization with the other two domains of Piper's aesthetic interest. Tradewinds (1992) deploys the rhetoric of the black body—now projected as moving animations onto images of shipping crates—in order to introduce a historical dimension into the interrogation of the contemporary stereotype and thus, once again, to expand its scope. Conversely, a new work made specifically for the CD-ROM, The Fictions of Science, deploys a viewfinder interface, reminiscent of a camera, as a vehicle to access various spaces where the value-neutrality of different sciences-including the now suspect “science"of craniology-finds itself under question. Here, the colonial legacy is generalized insofar as it is shown to inhabit the classifying systems responsible for the knowledge institutions of our culture.xxvi

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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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1. MOBILIZING AFFECTIVITY BEYOND THE IMAGE

That the vehicle of Piper's universalization of address is technology appears most clearly in the final space, Unclassified, where two new works divergently take up and radicalize the immanent correlation of ethnicity and technicity.xxx By focusing on the racist deployment of surveillance technologies and the inequalities of access to cyberspace, Tagging the Other and Caught like a Nigger in Cyberspace bring a true universality of address to Piper's nuanced blend of the confrontational and the invitational, while at the same time tempering the indifference implicit in all visions of a technically instantiated collective intelligence. They do so by deploying the mechanism of technology as a universal form of address in order better to foreground the fact of its differential application (the burden of Tagging the Other) and, more importantly still, to resituate the potential for community beyond ethnicity (the burden of Caught like a Nigger in Cyberspace).

Tagging the Other adapts a 1992 video installation, resituating the four monitors of the original within the rectangular space of the computer screen. On these four “virtual" monitors, the work presents four black male heads, variously cloaked with a red band over the mouth, over the eyes, or with a target, and corresponding to a set of curious binaries (culture-ethnicity, subject-reject, other-boundaries, visibledifference) superimposed on the image and seemingly meant to expose the differential conditions of life in the "New European State." Clicking on each of the virtual monitors sets off a barrage of news clips reporting on topics like racist killing, the “Fortress Europe impregnable for black people," and the becoming extrageographic of life, as well as a music loop repeatedly intoning the incendiary imperative to “bring it on."

In yet another bid to destroy the certainty of conviction, this work confronts all viewers with the patent racism made invisible (to all but its immediate victims) by the neutrality of technological rhetoric. Yet, beyond simply drawing attention to this new reality, the work manages to place the viewer in the position of the surveilling gaze in a way that compels her to question her potential complicity with this situation. Interestingly enough, the target of this questioning is less one's participation in the technology of surveillance per se than the implicit ratification oflimiting identity categories that such participation would seem to betoken: “Central to the piece," explains Piper, “is the framing and fixing of the Black European under a high tech gaze which seeks to classify and codify the individual within an arena in which the logical constraints of race, ethnicity, nation and culture are fixed and delineated in a discourse of exclusion."xxxi

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Because the effect of this strategy remains for the most part cognitive, at least for the nonblack viewer, the work cannot realize the universality of address I have been invoking here. Indeed, it is only with the realization of Caught like a Nigger in Cyberspacexximodeled as a computer game whose ostensible goal is entry into cyberspace—that the affective logic so crucial to Piper's work from the early 1990s onward finally becomes the true driving force of his aesthetic. Initially challenging the viewer with the oscillating image of a black male and the injunction, "Click on to interrogate," Caught like a Nigger in Cyberspace subsequently invites the viewer to the "New Frontier" of cyberspace, extending “A Welcome Beneath the Silicon Sun for You and Your Family" (pasted against an image of a white couple and baby), and urging him or her to “apply within" (see Figure 3.1).

When the viewer clicks on this option, he or she is thanked for the application and invited to select one of three handles for entering cyberspace. Selecting “Al Gore Lookalike” yields immediate entry into cyberspace and an invitation to play a game, "Infopoly," in which money endlessly and automatically circulates around a monopoly-like board. Selecting “Techhead" inserts the viewer in a circular loop of derogatory questions and accusations, such as, "Which part ofmouse down' don't you understand?" "Looks like your KeyUpScript just keyed down," and "Read the fucking manual." Finally, selecting “Other" yields a screen informing the viewer that the application has been put on hold and advising of three possible courses: abandoning the application, waiting in a cyberspace waiting room, or a third option obscured by a red sign reading “Do not touch.'

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If the viewer is so bold as to disregard this injunction, a screen appears featuring a black man running and a sign reading "You are trespassing in cyberspace; we advise you to step the fuck back." This unequivocal message notwithstanding, the viewer is then invited to enter and, if she does so, is told that “our first defensive level” is being entered. This, it turns out, is a video game in which the goal is to avoid low-flying jargon and insider speak." Informed that the mission is to dodge the bombardment of techno jargon" and that she will be given five lives with which to survive 30 seconds of bombardment, the viewer is again asked whether she wants to play the game. Assenting to this invitation causes mathematical symbols to bombard the icon of a black male from all sides (see Figure 3.2).

Let me invoke my experience of the game to illustrate its affective impact. Having made my way to this point in the game, I dutifully used my mouse to control the icon in what turned out, again and again, to be a vain attempt to survive the assault. After each such attempt, I was greeted with the message, “You have just suffered death by techno jargon” and advised to leave by the nearest exit, yet offered the chance to "try again." Finally, after countless failed efforts, I fortuitously dragged the mouse outside the game space entirely and waited while the timer clicked down to zero. Informed that I had “survived bombardment by techno jargon," I was asked whether I had seen enough or was hungry for more. Selecting the latter yielded a screen with a black male figure running from a viewfinder controlled by my mouse that informed me I was entering “Defensive Level II.'

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Using the viewfinder to fix my sights on the red target adorning the back of the black male figure, I clicked and was again asked whether I wanted to continue my mission; answering yes, I was then confronted with a building displaying the sign “Price of a Ticket" and flashing a red light at the location of the doorbell. Once again using the target to select this light, I clicked and entered a theater as the field zoomed into a screen displaying the message, “Seduction by Cyberspace: A Million Applications for a Brave New World," and showing six pictures featuring examples of high technology, including a stock trader, a comic book muscle man, a robotic auto factory, a combat soldier, a monitor displaying the logo, “Guerilla computing," and a photographer snapping a photo (apparently) of me.

Continuing to use the viewfinder interface, I clicked on each of these images in turn, only to be disappointed that the action thereby triggered consisted of nothing more than zooming into the image. Still energized from my earlier success at avoiding techno jargon, I felt trapped in this space of inaction, where my need for some outlet in an action was disappointed by my severely limited ability to frame the image from a purely classifying and analytic point of view. Once I became sufficiently exasperated with this protracted inaction, I selected the exit button and was brought to a screen featuring a smiling white woman thanking me for visiting cyberspace and urging me to “have a nice day.

Ostensibly aimed at securing the viewer entry into cyberspace, this game-like space is in fact designed to make affectively salient the vast disparities between those who control this new medium and those who are not wanted there and are urged, as one screen puts it with a self-effacing, almost parodic irony, to “find contentment in premodernity" (see Figure 3.3). In this sense, it functions much like Piper's earlier work, in which contradictions facing the black male subject are exposed for the viewer's consumption, except the anger informing that work has been replaced by a far more nuanced solicitation of an impossible emotional identification. Paradoxically, the vehicle for this solicitation is the work's deployment of the specific, constrained temporality of the video game interface.

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