The Cyborg Manifesto provides rich possibilities for intervention in a technological realm built upon the logical and mythological foundations of Western Enlightenment epistemology. Our readings from the past week, notably Digitizing the Racialized Body, complicate the position of existing technologies of internet visuality in terms of their complicity in digital race. It is easy to fall into the belief that technologies of anonymous communication and digital self-identification will make race disappear; but as Hansen points out, though perhaps we are all “passing” in cyberspace, technological access and agency are not uniformly distributed.
Because cyberspace changes the conditions under which seeing and writing---the preeminent cyborg technology---take place, and indeed makes possible new models of communication previously impractical or unthinkable, race in cyberspace is not entirely congruent to race in biospace. However, it is precisely the ways in which cyberspace estranges race while allowing it to remain a force that make it so interesting. What avenues are open for constructive action in digital worlds? The endurance (or, ironically, the enduring effacement) of race in digital culture makes clear that we are developing new worlds with potentially new race-functions.
Understanding and critiquing these often-ambivalent developments of digital race will only become more important as we become, as a species, more and more cyborgian. How can we direct digital race to be productive, rather than destructive or complicit or compromised? And how can our individual cyberspace existences take part in this project? I envision considering Hansen’s arguments about online passing, the nature of online identity, mimicry, and performance from the position of ironic, cultural-mythological creation that Haraway takes as a productive model for feminist theory and action in the digital age.
Other thoughts informing my line of thinking that need not appear directly in my proposal:
ReplyDeleteThe promise of cyborg mythologies seems to be connected, at some level, with concepts I have been developing for changing the substance of information technologies to expose and destabilize the foundations of racial enframing. How do we call a growing culture of cyborgs to take part in cyborg culture? How do we engage the public in discourses and critical experiences of digital race, and open up possibilities to deal seriously with issues of technology and race in a wider field? What part do games and spaces of virtual reality presently play in exploring race, and what part should they play? And, perhaps most critically, how much do we have to insist on making race visible, precisely because it is its frequent invisibility that so eerily exposes the necessity of probing digital race?