Digitizing the Racialized Body or The Politics of Universal Address

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. [...]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. 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. [...]a possibility, however, is precisely the unprecedented redemptive opportunity which, according to Agamben, must at all costs not be squandered: Because if instead of continuing to search for a proper identity in the already improper and senseless form of individuality, humans were to succeed in belonging to this impropriety as such, in making of the proper being-thus not an identity and an individual property but a singularity without identity, a common and absolutely exposed singularity - if humans could, that is, not be-thus in this or that particular biography, but be only the thus, their singular exteriority and their face, then they would for the first time enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects, into a communication without the incommunicable. (75, emphasis added) What Poster discerns in on-line identity