FROM NEGROPHOBIA TO NEGROPHILIA

(Re)thinking identification with Fanon requires us to interrogate its rac-ist foundation, which in turn requires us to recognize the universality of its scope without losing sight of the asymmetry of its actual impact.

Now, as I have already mentioned, new media technology—as exempli-fied in the Internet and, specifically, in the generalization of passing in online identity play—prepares the way for such a vigilant recognition.

By instancing the potential of new technically facilitated forms of com-munity to suspend, at least within certain parameters, the overdetermi-nation exercised by the (visual) image of the racial other, online identity play creates the possibility for a “zero-degree” of racial identification, a potential universality rooted in the precariousness of any identity as a fixation of embodied individuation.

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In Relocating the Remains, Keith Piper deploys new media technol-ogy as a means to effectuate—differentially, to be sure—the universal-ization 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 inde-termination 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 fixa-tion of individuafixa-tion—a reducfixa-tion 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 identifi-cation with the felt reality of the other that is important and poten-tially 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 result-ing from the failure of identification with the stereotyped racial image

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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.^xviii

Piper is perhaps the ideal figure for exploring the confrontation of new media technology and race theory. Not only has his artistic produc-tion coevolved with race theory and politics, taking inspiraproduc-tion from it and inspiring it in turn, but also his recent work acquires much of its res-onance from its success at holding together the contradictions of racial identity, as well as those of identity. This is why Piper’s critical engage-ment 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 bod-ies—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 on^xix—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 com-plexification 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 “double-voicing” 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 engage-ment 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

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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 identity^xxii). Accord-ingly, 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.

At first glance, the spatial layout of Relocating the Remains would seem no more than an opportune vehicle for Piper to archive the impres-sive array of his artistic production. The three “virtual” rooms each house works corresponding to his three main areas of interest: the cul-tural 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 Foucauld-ian 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 previ-ous 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 irre-sistibility of the commodified image of the black male. Indeed, as something like a synecdoche for the entirety of this line of explora-tion, 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

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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

Here, Piper’s strategy would seem to be that of resisting the evis-cerating 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 co-optation 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 emo-tionally resonant as well as inescapable. By melding the complex fig-ure 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 Chris-tianity, A Ship Called Jesus aims to expose the correlation between the desire for certainty and the experience of trauma and, subse-quently, 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—includ-ing a headstone and grave, made from shards of broken mirror, and a crucifix lightbox, both commemorating the victims of the Middle Pas-sage—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 catego-ries 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 pro-jected as moving animations onto images of shipping crates—in order to introduce a historical dimension into the interrogation of the con-temporary stereotype and thus, once again, to expand its scope. Con-versely, a new work made specifically for the CD-ROM, The Fictions of Science, deploys a viewfinder interface, reminiscent of a camera, as a

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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

As differentiated from Unmapped, the works in Unrecorded compel all viewers to reflect on the precariousness and flexibility of their eth-nicity; 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 poten-tial 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 eth-nicity 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 pro-grammed memory that is external to the individual: ethnicity is, in Ber-nard Stiegler’s terminology, “epiphylogenetic,” evolution through means other than life.^xxviii The works in Unrecorded foreground this coevolu-tion of technology and ethnicizacoevolu-tion. By soliciting a confrontacoevolu-tion 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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5. MOBILIZING AFFECTIVITY BEYOND THE IMAGE