The Chimera of a Digital Utopia

Racialized bodies have been digitized. It is through internet sites and cybernetic worlds that this digitization is born and thrives. Post-identity, post-race, and perhaps post-gender; these will become the epochs that will host and dictate humans and our disembodied simulacra. The "face" and constructions of tropes, i.e., performances, are encoded, rendered into scientific modalities that compose the cyber world, a distant world that cannot yet be attained or fully understood. As we are in the pre-cybernetic present, will the cybernetic guarantee a radical transformation of the discourses that will shake the proto-ideological identities and reach total liberation? And if not, are we going to remain stagnant because we cannot comply with acts of self-mutilation (our inability to transcend our bodies)? Yet, in such a post-race, post-gender, post-structuralist, post-identity era, achieved through the act of self-mutilation and corporeal transcendence, the utopianism of cybernetic society will mean the destruction of the differences that we share as culturally and geographically diverse peoples. Such a world will be short-circuited by the gnawing mouth of postracial and postcultural banality and will leave unaddressed the inherently human propensity towards power hoarding. Because we are preoccupied with how the infinite range of phenotypes gets divided into rigorous categories, if such a world were to take shape, a post-identity (racial, gender, etc) world, then we are still left with the question of human nature that, in the first place, has given rise to the power structures from which we are attempting to liberate ourselves. Liberating ourselves would not mean eliminating the differences, it would mean eliminating the fixed categories that divide us. Perhaps if physical difference is not categorized, then post-identity (race, gender, etc) will cease to be.