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).