In some racialized codings, the “Asian” is high-tech and assimilates to (supposedly) western consumerist modes. In others, the encounter between postcolonial literary theory and new media forms produces quite other conjunctures. To collapse a rich and complex debate along just one of its fault lines: imperial languages such as English can be treated either as something detachable from its supposed national origin or as something to refuse altogether.
The former path values hybridity and the claiming of agency within the language of the colonizer. The latter wants to resist this and sticks up for the unity and coherence of a language and a people. And, just to complicate matters further, this second path is also a European idea—the unity and coherence of a people and its language being itself an idea that emerged out of European romanticism.
Much the same fault line can be found in debates about what to do in the postcolonial situation with the internet, which can also be perceived as western and colonizing—although it might make more sense now to think of it as colonizing not on behalf of the old nation-states as on behalf of an emerging postnational geopolitics of what Benjamin Bratton calls the stack. Nakamura draws attention to some of the interesting examples of work on non-western media, including Eric Michaels’s brilliant work on video production among western desert Aboriginal people in Australia and the work of the RAQS Media Collective and Sarai in India, which reached out to non-English speaking and even nonliterate populations through interface design and community access.141
Since her book was published, work really flourished in the study of non-western uptakes of media, not to mention work on encouraging local adaptions and hybrids of available forms.142 If one shifts one’s attention from the internet to cellular telephony, one even has to question the assumption that the west somehow leads and other places follow. It may well be the case that most of the world leap-frogged over the cyberspace of the internet to the cell space of telephony. Yuk Hui even asks if there are non-western cosmotechnics.143
The perfect counterpoint to the old cyberculture idea of online disembodiment is Nakamura’s study of online pregnancy forums—the whole point of which is to create a virtual community for women in some stage of the reproductive process. Here Nakamura pays close attention to ways of representing pregnant bodies. The site she examines allowed users to create their own signatures, which were often collages of idealized images of themselves, their partners, their babies, and (in a most affecting moment) their miscarriages. Sometimes sonograms were included in the collages of the signatures, but they separate the fetus from the mother, and so other elements were generally added to bring her back into the picture.
It’s hard to imagine a more kitsch kind of cuteness. But then we might wonder why masculine forms of geek or otaku culture can be presented as cool when something like this is generally not. By the early 2000s the internet was about 50/50 men and women, and users were more likely to be working class or suburban. After the here-comes-everybody moment, the internet started to look more like regular everyday culture. These pregnant avatars (“dollies”) were more cybertwee than cyberfeminist (not that these need be exclusive categories, of course).144 But by the early 2000s, “the commercialization of the internet has led many internet utopians to despair of its potential as a site to challenge institutional authority.”145
But perhaps it’s a question of reading outside one’s academic habitus. Nakamura: “‘Vernacular’ assemblages created by subaltern users, in this case pregnant women create impossible bodies that critique normative ones without an overt artistic or political intent.”146 The subaltern in this case can speak but chooses to do so through images that don’t quite perform as visual cultural studies would want them to.147 Nakamura wants to resist reading online pregnancy forums in strictly social-science terms and to look at the aesthetic dimensions. It’s not unlike what Dick Hebdige did in retrieving London youth subcultures from criminological studies of “deviance.”148
The blind spot of visual cultural studies, at least until recently, was vernacular self-presentation. But it’s hard to deny the pathos of images these women craft of their stillborn or miscarried children. The one thing that perhaps received the most belated attention in studies of emerging media is how they interact with the tragic side of life—with illness, death, and disease. Those of us who have been both on the internet and studying it for thirty years or so now will have had many encounters with loss and grief. We will have had friends we hardly ever saw in real life who have passed or who grieve for those who have passed. In real life there are conventions for what signs and gestures one should make. In online communication they are emerging also.
Nakamura was right to draw attention to this in Digitizing Race, and she did so with a tact and a grace one can only hope to emulate:
The achievement of authenticity in these cases of bodies in pain and mourning transcends the ordinary logic of the analog versus the digital photograph because these bodily images invoke the “semi-magical act” of remembering types of suffering that are inarticulate, private, hidden within domestic or militarized spaces that exclude the public gaze.149
Not only is the body with all its marks and scars present in Nakamura’s treatment, it is present as something in addition to its whole being.
We live more, not less, in relation to our body parts, the dispossession or employment of ourselves constrained by a complicated pattern of self-alienation … Rather than freeing ourselves from the body, as cyberpunk narratives of idealized disembodiment foresaw, informational technologies have turned the body into property.150
Here her work connects with that of Maurizio Lazzarato and Gerald Raunig on machinic enslavement and the dividual respectively, in its awareness of the subsumption of components of the human into the inhuman.151
But for all that, perhaps the enduring gift of this work is (to modify Adorno’s words) to not let the power of another or our own powerlessness stupefy us.152 There might still be forms of agency, tactics of presentation, gestures of solidarity—and in unexpected places. Given the tendency of the internet culture in the decade after Digitizing Race, perhaps it is an obligation now to return the gift of serious and considered attention to our friends and comrades—and not least in the scholarly world. The tragic side of life is never far away. The least we can do is listen to the pain of others and speak in measured tones of one another’s small achievements of wit, grace, and insight.
Hito Steyerl: Art Is Beauty That Does Not Try to Kill Us
Thinking of getting into the art world? According to Hito Steyerl, here’s what you may find:
Public support swapped for Instagram metrics. Art fully floated on some kind of Arsedaq. More fairs, longer yachts for more violent assholes, oil paintings of booty blondes, abstract stock-chart calligraphy. Yummy organic superfoods. Accelerationist designer breeding … Conceptual plastic surgery … Bespoke ivory gun handles. Murals on border walls.153
“Good luck with this,” she concludes, “You will be my mortal enemy.”154
The art world does not seem like a promising place from which to write and think critically about the world as it is, let alone its possibilities for being otherwise. It seems to have floated free from any other world. And yet in Duty Free Art, Steyerl finds a way to make its autonomy interesting. Its separation affords her the possibility of observing, if not the totality of the world, then at least a few more sides of it than many others see. What she sees is planetary civil war, sharpening class conflict, and the enclosure of the informational commons into proprietary theme parks.
From her art world vantage point, history appears to have a tempo no longer accessible to humans, running backward, from a vacant future to a festering past. “What was public is privatized by violence, while formerly private hatreds become the new public spirit.” A spirit drunk on twitterbots, fake news, internet hacks, and “artificial stupidity”155—mostly in the service of actual or aspirational authoritarian rule.
It