Digitizing the Racialized Body or The Politics of Universal Address

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" (3). 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" (165). For Shohat and Stam, the important question is this: "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).

Notwithstanding their shared enthusiasm regarding the potential of new media, the differences between these two positions help to foreground exactly what is new about the 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 content-based 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 precisely in emancipative transformation via the category of identity.¹ On both counts, I would suggest, Poster's analysis issues the challenge for any transformative media practice in the post-broadcast age: to find a way of conceptualizing and deploying media that does not subordinate it to preconstituted categories of identity and subjectivity.

It is precisely this challenge that I propose to take on in this paper. My focus will be the performance of race and ethnicity in cyberspace, and specifically, the difference that might be said to mark the category of race as it comes to be cyberized. Following those critics who have argued that online interactions generalize the condition of "passing" (pretending to be what one is not) hitherto associated, in concrete historical configurations, with racial performance, I shall invest race as a privileged site for exfoliating the radical potential of new media. Because race has always been plagued by a certain disembodiment (the fact that race, unlike gender, is so clearly a construction, since racial traits are not 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 selves. For this reason, deploying the lens of race to develop our thinking about online identification will help us to exploit the potential offered by the new media for experiencing community beyond identity.

In my transformational engagement with racial theory, I shall attempt to redeem the generalization of "passing" on the internet from the criticism that it functions negatively to erase the category of race.² As I see it, the suspension of...