Bodies in code interfaces with digital media

Generalizing from its impact on me, I would say that Caught like a Nigger in Cyberspace owes its efficacy to its success at confronting the viewer—black and white alike—with images that simply cannot be completed through action, at least not within the constraints the work imposes on our consumption. In this sense, the work functions in a manner akin to the cinema of the affection-image, following Deleuze's typology: like the affection-image, this mechanized interface with the image of the black body creates a crisis of the sensorimotor logic of the (movement-) image. If the affection-image ensues when the completion of the sensorimotor circuit is interrupted and received movement (sensation) and executed movement (action) are rendered incommensurable,xxxiii something like an affective-overflow occurs in our bodies when we are unable to correlate the sensations generated by the video game with some appropriate action on our parts.

Yet, in contrast to Deleuze's typology, affection here is not a modality of the cinematic image, but rather a “faculty" of our embodied singularity, and the source of our affective crisis is not an opening of the cinematic image to the force of time, but the concrete excess of our singular bodies.xxiv Piper's Caught like a Nigger in Cyberspace extends the logic of affectivity beyond the image and it does so by deploying a postcinematic interface in which the power of time has been subordinated to constraints of the body's agency within a game-space. The work compels its viewer to live through the exclusion of certain bodies from cyberspace via the frantic temporal mode of a survival exercise, thereby mobilizing the disappointment of viewer expectations concerning the payoff of video game-playing (where some kind of clear victory is an always achievable goal) in order to deliver a message about racial inequality.

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Put another way, the work utilizes the universal addressability of the video gamexxv—by which I mean above all its form as a simple, goal-directed temporal exercise—to produce an affective experience of the incommensurability of racial stereotypes: it is through the experience of seeing her expectations of victory disappointed that the viewer is brought to feel the inappropriateness of her efforts to “help” the black male figure overcome the burden of cultural stereotypes. Rather than an opportunity to experience “what it feels like” to be this figure, as Shohat and Stam propose, the viewer is made to feel the utter pointlessness of any effort that stops short of grasping the bankruptcy of the racialized image.

1. FORGING THE AFFECTION-BODY

We can now see clearly how Piper's project exploits the generalization of passing that forms the sociotechnical condition of possibility for online identity play. If we can say that passing within digital networks opens new opportunities for thinking identification, this is because and insofar as it gives concrete form to the essential impropriety of human life that is, as Agamben has shown, the basis for any collective individuation. To the extent that it deploys this concrete deployment of impropriety in the service of an affective universalization, Piper's work thus transforms a limited technical condition for identity production (passing within digital networks) into an opportunity to rethink identification. Whereas the generalized phenomenon of online passing simply exposes the bankruptcy of identity categories as a prosthesis for our bodily singularity, Piper's deployment of new media to catalyze an experience of impropriety turns this bankruptcy into an opportunity to think—and perhaps to live—singularity beyond identity.

More specifically, by catalyzing experiences of failed interpellation and affective confusion, Piper's work exposes a rich dimension of embodiment—affectivity—which is common to all. If affectivity is precisely the experience of one's incongruity with oneself (one's excess in relation to any fixing of identity), then Piper's work functions to link this fundamental singularity of the self with the fundamental singularity of the other (of all others), and thus to render singularity as such improper. In a simpler phrasing that is also more faithful to the phenomenology of the experience it affords, Piper's work confronts us with this incongruity in the other—the other's incongruity with itself—in a way that compels us to recognize it in ourselves.

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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.

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Relocating the Remains responds to this largely unprecedented opportunity by staging a confrontation with the image through which this line of flight can be rediscovered—by compelling its viewers to grasp within themselves this crucial gap between image and body. The affective confusion it brokers serves to catalyze a radical reconfiguration of the self beyond identity, its reconfiguration as a self rooted in the potentiality of the body, as a self essentially “out of phase” with itself.

Such being-out-of-phase with itself is, of course, the phenomenological correlate of Gilbert Simondon's conceptualization of individuation as an ongoing process continuously stretched between the domain of preindividual metastability and the never fully achieved constitution of the individual.xxxvii By offering an account of embodied life as an ongoing materialization of the human on the cusp between the individual and the preindividual, the actual and the potential,xxxviii Simondon's work thus fills in Agamben's purely formal conceptualization of the coming community, a "community without presuppositions and without subjects," with a concrete account of how collective individuation takes place. If it thereby furnishes the ontological basis for singularity beyond identity, it also puts to concrete use the potential that Agamben associates with life. Because it necessarily involves the disindividuation of the individual, collective individuation (transindividuation) taps what remains preindividual, improper, potential, "within" the human.xxix

Given our interest in Piper's technically facilitated catalysis of affectivity as the "medium" for realizing postidentitarian communion, we cannot but find Simondon's theory of individuation fundamental. By conceptualizing affectivity as the experience, within the individual, of the preindividual, of its proper excess over itself (its impropriety), Simondon positions affectivity as the phenomenological correlate of singularity beyond identity. As Simondon develops it in L'Individuation Psychique et Collective, affectivity is that mode of bodily experience which mediates between the individual and the preindividual, the personal and the impersonal. Whereas perception appeals to structures already constituted in the interior of the individuated being,

affectivity indicates and comprises this relation between the individualized being and preindividual reality: it is thus to a certain extent heterogeneous in relation to individualized reality, and appears to bring it something from the exterior, indicating to the individualized being that it is not a complete and closed set [ensemble] of reality. (Simondon, L'Individuation, 108)

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Affectivity thus furnishes the basis for a reconfiguration of singularity beyond identity (which Simondon names the “subject"): "the problem of the subject is that of the heterogeneity between perceptual worlds and the affective world, between the individual and the preindividual; this problem is that of the subject as subject [en tant que sujet]: the subject is individual and other than individual; it is incompatible with itself" (108).

Because it is incompatible, indeed, out of phase, with itself—because it is a subject of, and also subject to, affectivity—the subject (the human being) must participate in collective life. Collectivity—the experience of the common beyond identity—comprises the opportunity for the subject to coincide with itself: "the subject can coincide with itself only in the individuation of the collective, because the individuated being and the preindividual being that are in it cannot coincide directly" (108). It is, in short, affectivity that calls into being commonality beyond identity. Affectivity is the catalyst for collective individuation (or transindividuation), understood, as we have seen, as a distinct individuation, an individuation at a higher level that is not reducible to any set of individual individuations. Affectivity, in sum, furnishes the possibility for a “resonance" beyond or beneath the category of the individual (identity).

When Agamben invokes individuation as a concept of the subject adequate to the “absolute indetermination, [the] absolute indiscernibility between internal politics and exterior politics" that has, in the wake of the Gulf war and Yugoslavia, formed a “new figure of domination,"11 he would seem to be acknowledging the need for just such a materialization of the impropriety constitutive of singularity beyond identity. As Agamben understands it, individuation serves to mediate the personal and the impersonal as two phases that are always in relation even though they are clearly separated:

One could call the impersonal the order of the impersonal power [puissance] with which all life is in relation. And one could call desubjectivation this experience that one has every day of bordering on [cotoyer] an impersonal power, something which both exceeds [dépasse] us and makes us live. Hence ... the question of the art of living would be: how to be in relation [en rapport] with this impersonal power. How will the subject learn to be in relation with a power that does not belong to it, that exceeds it? (9)

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Not surprisingly, the answer is: through affectivityxxxx-and not simply through the “use" of affectivity to keep ourselves open as subjects bevond the lure of identity-positions and figures of individuality, but, more fundamentally, through an exposure of affectivity insofar as it is the essential impropriety, the utter singularity, common to us all.

We can now discern how Piper's politicization of affect responds to and transforms racial politics. As a catalyst for precisely such an exposure, Piper's complex strategy addresses the contemporary reality of technologized racialization which, in a sense, can be said to derive its power from its appropriation of the force of the (visible) raced image. At the moment when the raced image has been emptied of its promise as the signifier of a positive difference (recall the hypervisibility of a black sports figure like Michael Jordan), it has become brutally effective as the signifier of racism. I would suggest that this coincidence is not in fact a coincidence and that the current proliferation of racializing (and racist) techniques—including surveillance, profiling, and facial identification—can be linked directly to the emptiness of the (visible) raced image.

Stripped of any positive meaning for the subjects that it would mark, the raced image can function all the more effectively as an instrument of control. Without power to interpellate subjects as raced subjects, the raced image can no longer broker processes of identify formation and struggles for social recognition and, in effect, remains in force solely as an instrument of social techniques for identification, classification, and exclusion. The result is a profound paradox of our contemporary moment: the subjects targeted by these racist techniques can only misrecognize themselves in the images that, for this reason, manage all the more effectively to exert their violence upon them. Is this not just an updating of the “corporeal malediction" that Fanon describes?

Building upon and moving beyond the eclipse of visibility at stake in the online generalization of passing, Piper's work takes up the challenge posed by this paradox. Piper seizes the empty husk of the raced image, not to rehabilitate it against capitalist fetishism, but to extract its redemptive kernel. In the various ways we have explored, he deploys this empty image as the catalyst for a reinvestment of embodiment beyond the image, for an exposure of the rootedness of life in a source—affectivity—that lies beyond identity and individuality and thus beyond the reach of commodification.

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If Piper's work manages, even for an instant, to expose the bare singularity, the common impropriety, that binds us beyond identification, and if it does so for potentially any viewer, then it can be understood as a form of resistance to the principle informing today's technologized racism: the notion that human beings can (and should) be classified through categories of social visibility. Such resistance takes shape not as an external struggle by an oppressed group, but rather as a collective individuation rooted in the exposure of the affective basis of life, the excess of bodily life in relation to itself.

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wearable space

Today's wearables ... might listen to you talk, watch your gestures, and sense changes in your heart rate, blood pressure, and electrodermal response ... emotion modulates not just autonomic nervous system activity, but the whole body—how it moves, speaks, gestures; almost any bodily signal might be analyzed for clues to the wearer's affective state. Signals that currently require physical contact to sense, such as electromyogram and skin conductivity, are especially well-suited to wearable technology. (Rosalind Picard¹)

Just as we can use an array of pixels to create any image we please within the confines of a screen, or a three-dimensional array of voxels to create any form within the confines of an overall volume, so we can create a precise sense-shape with an array or volume of appropriate sensels. Such a shape would be exact, but invisible, a region of activated, hypersensitive space. (Marcos Novak²)

Let these citations stand for the two “poles" circumscribing current conceptions of wearable and ubiquitous computing. On one extreme, we encounter a sober, technical, yet nonetheless exciting prospect for a hitherto unimaginable fluidity between human body and computer: an extension of the body that takes advantage of the rich panoply of bodily signals and internal regulatory processes. On the other extreme, we brush against a visionary, perhaps truly alien, projection of a complete fluidity between body and space: a mutual embedding of both in the primary “medium” of sensation. What I am calling “wearable space" results from the superposition of these two poles: space becomes wearable when embodied affectivity becomes the operator of spacing.

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Neither in itself sufficient to theorize wearable space, affective computing and the aesthetics of eversion foreground crucial components of this concept. The former emphasizes the superiority of an affective basis of interface between computer and body; the latter demonstrates how space is intimately correlated with sensory capacities of the body and yet also infinitely flexible and convertible through these same capacities. Each, that is, foregrounds in its own way the creativity of the affective body—-the role of the body as at once a source for and activator of a rich affective constitution of space.

My aim in this chapter is to fill out this picture of wearable space by delving further into what happens when the body "spaces the formless, to borrow a phrase from architect Peter Eisenman.³ If the defining material cultural shift of our time—the shift to the digital—has suspended the framing function performed by the (preconstituted) technical image (as I have argued in New Philosophy for New Media), then the task of clarifying the nature and extent of the coupling of body and space is particularly crucial at this moment in our coevolution with technology. The body—or rather, embodiment, the process through which bodies are produced—comprises the selective background on which information can be framed. Embodiment, accordingly, takes on a truly unprecedented responsibility: the responsibility of constraining and thereby specifying the process through which informational "objects"—images, space, events—are actually generated.

To understand how architecture is implicated in this new regime of embodied framing of information, let us consider a recent suggestion that architecture has dethroned cinema as the quintessential art of framing for our time. In Earth Moves: the Furnishing of Territories, architect and philosopher Bernard Cache boldly asserts the singular privilege of architectural images as the "urban texture that enfolds all other images." Cache defines architecture as

the manipulation of one of these elementary images, namely, the frame. Architecture, the art of the frame, would then not only concern those specific objects that are buildings, but would refer to any image involving any element of framing, which is to say painting as well as cinema, and certainly many other things.4

Following Cache, could we not say that architecture, as the art of the frame, forms a correlate to embodiment, as the operator of framing, such that all embodied framing is, necessarily, architectural, and all architecture is, likewise, necessarily embodied? To what extent, indeed, does architecture's privilege as the generic art of framing stem from the fact that architectural framing unavoidably entails a negotiation among formal manipulation, built space, and embodied life? Unlike cinema and any other technical art in which framing is built into an apparatus, and unlike painting, in which the frame forms a material precondition, architectural framing occurs as a process that is contemporaneous with its reception or consumption. That is precisely why we can say that it is intrinsically (rather than contingently) embodied.

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