Chun - Race As Technology

From Colour Separation (Mongrel, 1997).
Courtesy of the artist.
Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscura/article-pdf/24/1 (70)/7/401027/CO70_02_Chun.pdf

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Introduction:
Race and/as Technology; or,
How to Do Things to Race
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
This special issue poses the questions: to what degree are race and
technology intertwined? Can race be considered a technology or
a form of media — that is, not only a mechanism, but also a practi-
cal or industrial art? Could race be not simply an object of repre-
sentation and portrayal, of knowledge or truth, but also a tech-
nique that one uses, even as one is used by it — a carefully crafted,
historically inflected system of tools, mediation, or enframing that
builds history and identity?
“Race and/as technology” is a strange, and hopefully estrang-
ing, formulation, but its peculiarity does not stem from its conjoin-
ing of race and technology. There already exists an important body
of scholarship that simply addresses race and technology in science
and technology, media and visual culture, and African American
and ethnic studies, ranging, just to give some examples, from analy-
ses documenting the resurgence of race as a valid scientific cat-
egory to those tracing the historically intersecting truth claims of
phrenology and photography, from investigations uncovering the
Camera Obscura 70, Volume 24, Number 1

doi 10.1215/02705346-2008-013 © 2009 by Camera Obscura
Published by Duke University Press

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8 • Camera Obscura
centrality of data processing to the execution of the Holocaust to

those analyzing the importance of raced images to mass-mediated
consumer culture.1 These works have mapped the ways in which
race and technology impact each other’s logic and development,
especially in relation to enterprises that seek to establish the truth
of race as a scientific fact or as a cultural phenomenon.
Yet the consideration of race as technology brings even
more questions forward. Crucially, race as technology shifts the
focus from the what of race to the how of race, from knowing race
to doing race by emphasizing the similarities between race and tech-
nology. Indeed, race as technology is a simile that posits a compara-
tive equality or substitutability — but not identity — between the
two terms. Race as technology, however, is not simply an example of
a simile; it also exemplifies similes by encapsulating the larger logic
of comparison that makes both race and similes possible. Race as
technology reveals how race functions as the “as,” how it facilitates
comparisons between entities classed as similar or dissimilar. This
comparison of race and technology also displaces claims of race
as either purely biological or purely cultural because technologi-
cal mediation, which has been used to define humankind as such
(“man” as a “tool-using” animal), is always already a mix of science,
art, and culture. Humans and technology, as Bernard Stiegler has
argued, evolve together.2 Race, it therefore follows, has never been
simply biological or cultural; rather, it has been crucial to negoti-
ating and establishing historically variable definitions of biology
and culture. Thus, as the articles included in this special issue
make clear, by framing questions of race and technology, as well
as by reframing race as technology, in relation to modes of media
naturalization, not only can we theoretically and historically better
understand the force of race and technology and their relation to
racism; we can also better respond to contemporary changes in
the relationships between human and machine, human and ani-
mal, mediation and embodiment, nature and culture, visibility and
invisibility, privacy and publicity.
Race, in the biological and medical sciences, has returned
as a new form of natural history, that is, as a means to track “the
great human diaspora” through mainly invisible (nonexpressed)

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Introduction • 9
genetic differences or as a way to weigh risk factors for certain dis-

eases.3 As Jennifer Reardon has noted, these biological “confirma-
tions” have disturbed the post – World War II, cross-disciplinary
“consensus” on the physical nonexistence of race, catching off
guard many humanities scholars, whose critiques rested in part
on “scientific evidence.”4 In response, some, such as the philoso-
pher of science Lisa Gannett, have analyzed the ways in which race
never left population science; similarly, some historians of science
and medicine, such as Evelyn Hammonds, have highlighted the
biases underpinning the use of current and historical race.5 Oth-
ers, such as Henry Louis Gates Jr., have embraced DNA tracing
to write a more comprehensive African American history, and
still others, such as Paul Gilroy, have argued that these new bio-
logical categorizations, because they view the body from a nano-
logical perspective from which race may exist but is not visible,
defy the epidermal logic that has traditionally defined race and
thus offer us an opportunity to shelve race altogether.6 That is, if
race — like media — has involved linking what is visible to what is
invisible — then Gilroy argues that race, as an invisible entity, can
no longer buttress its logic of revelation. This debate over the ontol-
ogy of race is important, and this special issue seeks to supplement
it with an analysis of race’s utility, regardless of its alleged essence,
suggesting how race itself has proven key to the modern concept
of essence that is apparent in discourses of science and art, of edu-
cation and entertainment, alike. Most important, understanding
race and/as technology enables us to frame the discussion around
ethics rather than around ontology, on modes of recognition and
relation, rather than on being.
Clustered around questions of the face, the articles in this
special issue focus on how, through various media, we relate to,
visualize, and recognize each other. They also reveal how race is
used to construct connections between — and indeed construct the
very concepts of — public and private, outside and inside. In addi-
tion to questioning the logic of revelation that drives both main-
stream mass media and the epistemological value of race, they also
explore the extent to which race and media can be used to make
possible different configurations of visibility, of self and other. In

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what follows, I offer a historical and theoretical context for these

interventions by outlining the ways in which race has been framed
as both biology and culture, and how this dichotomy also relies on
and is disturbed by race as technology. I further outline the stakes
of this reconfiguration of race by considering the ways in which
race can be considered a “saving” grace.
Making the Visible Innate

At a certain level, the notion of race as technology seems obvious,
for race historically has been a tool of subjugation. From Carl Lin-
naeus’s eighteenth-century taxonomy of human races in Systema
naturae to Charles Davenport’s early twentieth-century “documen-
tation” of the disastrous effects of miscegenation, from the hor-
rors of the Holocaust to continuing debates over the innateness
of intelligence, supposedly objective scientific categorizations of
race have been employed to establish hierarchical differences
between people, rendering some mere objects to be exploited,
enslaved, measured, demeaned, and sometimes destroyed.7 In the
US, racist theories maintained the contradiction at the heart of
the nation’s founding: that of all men being created equal and
black slaves counting as three-fifths human (thus allowing them
to be accounted for, but not themselves count). Even after eman-
cipation, racist legislation and bureaucratic practices such as seg-
regation, with its validation of discrimination in social and pri-
vate spaces as “natural antipathies,” maintained inequalities in a
facially equal democratic system. Race in these circumstances was
wielded — and is still wielded — as an invaluable mapping tool, a
means by which origins and boundaries are simultaneously traced
and constructed and through which the visible traces of the body
are tied to allegedly innate invisible characteristics.
Race as a mapping tool stems from its emergence as a scien-
tific category in the eighteenth century, although it has consistently
designated relations based on perceived commonalities. According
to Bruce Dain, race first denoted a group of people connected
by common descent (e.g., a noble house, family, kindred); then,

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Introduction • 11
in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the era of exploration, it

roughly corresponded to “geographical groups of people marked
by supposedly common physical characteristics” (e.g., the English
race); lastly, in the eighteenth century, it designated all human-
kind (in distinction to animals), as well as the subspecies of Homo
sapiens, such as Homo sapiens asiaticus; according to Linnaeus, a
male of this subset is “yellowish, melancholy, endowed with black
hair and brown eyes . . . severe, conceited, and stingy. He puts
on loose clothing. He is governed by opinion.”8 As science moved
from eighteenth-century natural history, which based its species
classifications on visible structures, to nineteenth-century science,
which pursued the invisible processes of life itself, race became an
even more important means by which the visible and the invisible
were linked.9
The modern value of race stemmed from its ability to link
somatic differences to innate physical and mental characteristics.
According to Samira Kawash,
In this shift to a modern, biologized understanding of race, skin color

becomes visible as a basis for determining the order of identities and
differences and subsequently penetrates the body to become the truth
of the self. . . . Race is on the skin, but skin is the sign of something
deeper, something hidden in the invisible interior of the organism
(as organic or ontological). To see racial difference is therefore to see
the bodily sign of race but also to see more than this seeing, to see the
interior difference it stands for.10
This “seeing” of internal difference makes accidental character-

istics essential, prescriptors rather than descriptors. In terms of
US slavery, dark skin became the mark of the natural condition
of slavery through which all kinds of external factors — and the
violence perpetrated on African slaves — became naturalized and
“innate.” As Saidiya Hartmann has argued, “the wanton use of
and the violence directed toward the black body come to be iden-
tified as its pleasures and dangers — that is, the expectations of
slave property are ontologized as the innate capabilities and inner

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feelings of the enslaved, and moreover, the ascription of excess

and enjoyment to the African effaces the violence perpetrated
against the enslaved.”11 For many antiracists, then, the key to loos-
ening the power of racism was (and still is) to denaturalize race,
to loosen the connection between the bodily sign of race and what
it signifies.
The US has a long history of this attempt at denaturing,
from the work of radical abolitionists in the nineteenth century to
that of cultural anthropologists in the twentieth. Frederick Doug-
lass, in his commencement address at Western Reserve College in
1854, famously contended that similarities between the bodies of
Irish workers and black slaves undermined theories of racial traits
as inherent or natural.12 To Douglass, the congruence between the
“deformed” physical features of the American slave and the com-
mon Irish man revealed the importance of education and class to
bodily form, and the accomplishments of many Irish thinkers (and
implicitly of himself) testified to the potential of emancipated and
educated slaves. For Douglass, racist arguments about the inherent
inferiority of Africans were also a case of media bias, since they
would always feature images of the “best” Caucasians next to those
of the most oppressed African slaves. Franz Boas also deployed
arguments against “natural” reasons for visible racial traits in the
1930s. Boas’s work, which was key to transforming race from a bio-
logical to an anthropological category, argued against the innate-
ness of both racial traits and racism.13 Challenging those who
advocated racism as a form of natural selection, Boas contended
that antagonism between closed social groups may be innate, but
that what constituted a social group was not.
After World War II and the public renunciation by many
scientists of overtly racist science in various UNESCO statements,
race as a cultural, rather than a biological, fact seemed universally
accepted, and the “two cultures” of the sciences and the humanities
cemented together around this common understanding. Indeed,
many humanists in the late twentieth century rested their own cri-
tique of race as ideological on scientific definitions of race. Henry
Louis Gates Jr., for instance, argued:

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Introduction • 13
Race has become a trope of ultimate, irreducible difference between

cultures, linguistics groups, or adherents of specific belief systems
which — more often than not — also have fundamentally opposed
economic interests. Race is the ultimate trope of difference because
it is so very arbitrary in its difference. The biological criteria used to
determine “difference” in sex simply do not hold when applied to “race.”
Yet we carelessly use language in such a way as to will this sense of
natural difference into our formulations.14
By calling race a careless use of language, Gates implies that the

problem of racism (which stems from race) could be ﬁxed by a
more careful use of language. Racism, in other words, stemmed
from faulty media representations, and thus the best way to combat
it was to offer more realist portrayals of “raced others” and to pro-
duce media critiques that exposed the fallacies of racial thinking.
As mentioned previously, the resurgence of the category
of race in science and medicine has troubled this position, which
rests, as Reardon notes, on a separation between what are evalu-
ated as “ideological” and “true” scientific statements — a separa-
tion that work across media and cultural studies has repeatedly
emphasized is impossible.15 Even more damning, despite the good
intentions behind the reformulation, the conceptualization of race
as culture has created no fewer social divisions than the notion of
race as biology. Racist arguments have adeptly substituted culture
for nature, creating what Etienne Balibar has called “neo-racism.”16
For instance, as Anne Anlin Cheng has pointed out, the psycho-
logical evidence used in Brown v. Board of Education — the “doll
test,” which was pivotal to the juridical overturning of segregation
in schools — is now used to justify segregation as granting “black
children the opportunity to develop a stronger, ‘healthier,’ more
independent black identity.”17 Rather than the abatement of rac-
ism and raced images after World War II, we have witnessed their
proliferation. As Toni Morrison notes:
Race has become metaphorical — a way of referring to and disguising

forces, events, classes, and expressions of social decay and economic
division far more threatening to the body politic than biological “race”

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ever was. Expensively kept, economically unsound, a spurious and

useless political asset in election campaigns, racism is as healthy today as
it was during the Enlightenment. It seems that it has a utility far beyond
economy, beyond the sequestering of classes from one another, and has
assumed a metaphorical life so completely embedded in daily discourse
that it is perhaps more necessary and more on display than ever before.18
Although Morrison here argues that race has become metaphori-

cal, it is important to note the ways in which race, cultural or bio-
logical, acts as a trope. Even when understood as biological, race
was not simply indexical, but rather still served as a sign, as a form
of mediation, as a vehicle for revelation.
On the Limits of Culture

Race, either conceived as biology or as culture, organizes social
relationships and turns the body into a signifier. Michael Omi and
Howard Winant have influentially argued that race is “a funda-
mental organizing principle of social relationships,”19 and they have
used the term “racial formation to refer to the process by which
social, economic and political forces determine the content and
importance of racial categories, and by which they are in turn
shaped by racial meanings” (61 – 62). Race, like media, is also a
heuristic, a way to understand, to reveal, the world around us. To
return to Kawash’s argument regarding skin color:
The modern conception of racial identity maintains an uneasy relation

to the visual; the visible marks of the racialized body are only signs of
a deeper, interior difference, and yet those visible marks are the only
differences that can be observed. The body is the sign of a difference
that exceeds the body. The modern concept of race is therefore
predicated on an epistemology of visibility, but the visible becomes an
insufficient guarantee of knowledge. As a result, the possibility of a gap
opens up between what the body says and what the body means.20
By linking outside to inside in an effort to make the body trans-

parent, the body becomes a signifier: by creating a gap between

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Introduction • 15
what one sees and what one knows, racial markers are placed in
an ever-shifting chain of signification.
Crucially, this gap between what the body says and what the
body is taken to mean underlies the force of racism. As Ann Laura
Stoler has argued, racism’s force lies in the productive tension
between the somatic and the essential. Reflecting on how racial
discourse slips between discussions of somatic and visual difference
and notions of inner, essential qualities, Stoler argues:
The ambiguity of those sets of relationships between the somatic and

the inner self, the phenotype and the genotype, pigment shade and
psychological sensibility are not slips in, or obstacles to, racial thinking
but rather conditions for its proliferation and possibility. . . . The force
of racisms is not found in the alleged fixity of visual knowledge, nor on
essentialism itself, but on the malleability of the criteria of psychological
dispositions and moral sensibilities that the visual could neither
definitively secure nor explain.21
Racial discourse has always been polyvalently mobile and capable

of thriving in the face of uncertainty. Race as biology and race
as culture are similarly mobile and flexible technologies. Focus-
ing on race as a technology, as mediation, thus allows us to see
the continuing function of race, regardless of its essence. It also
highlights the fact that race has never been simply biological or
cultural, but rather a means by which both are established and
negotiated.
Creating Differences: Eugenics and Segregation

Like technology, race has never been merely cultural or biologi-
cal, social or scientific. Indeed, the strict conceptual separation of
culture from biology — nurture from nature, development from
transmission — is a fairly recent phenomenon, stemming from the
acceptance of Mendelian genetics. Focusing on US eugenics and
segregation in the twentieth century as technologies of difference,
this section outlines how accepting race as biology also makes race
technological.

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Race did not simply move from a biological to a cultural

concept. The early “mixed” nature of notions of race is evident in
Linnaeus’s foundational description of the male variant of Homo
sapiens asiaticus cited earlier: “Yellowish, melancholy, endowed with
black hair and brown eyes . . . severe, conceited, and stingy. He
puts on loose clothing. He is governed by opinion.” This descrip-
tion treats interchangeably visible physical traits (“yellowish”), psy-
chological characteristics (“melancholy”), and cultural traditions
(“loose clothing”). Similarly, Thomas Jefferson, writing in the eigh-
teenth century, argued against incorporating African slaves into the
nation, using a mix of both historical and natural reasons.22 Even
in the nineteenth century, race was seen as encompassing both
cultural and biological transmission. As George W. Stocking Jr.
has argued, the terms race and nation differed not by nature but
by degree, since both intersected with questions of “blood.”23 Both
environmentalists and extreme hereditarians, that is, “started from
the same inclusive idea of race as an integrated physical, linguistic,
and cultural totality. Furthermore, because science — to paraphrase
a number of contemporary social scientists — no longer separated
the phenomena of the body from those of the mind, both heredi-
tarians and environmentalists tended to assume that racial mental
differences were related to racial physical differences” (15). The
clear separation of biology from culture and transmission from
development stemmed from Mendelian genetics’ strict separation
of germ from somatic cells.24 This emphasis on the chromosomes
as unchanging from generation to generation both made possible
and relied on a belief in unchanging “eternal” features, many of
which were racialized.25
The premise of eugenics — which seemingly defined race
as biological — was the breedability of the human species. Charles
Davenport, the father of US eugenics, argued in Heredity in Relation
to Eugenics, his textbook on eugenics:
Eugenics is the science of the improvement of the human race by better

breeding or, as the late Sir Francis Galton expressed it: — “The science
which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a
race.” The eugenical standpoint is that of the agriculturalist who, while

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Introduction • 17
recognizing the value of culture, believes that permanent advance is to

be made only by securing the best “blood.” Man is an organism — an
animal; and the laws of improvement of corn and of race horses hold
true for him also. Unless people accept this simple truth and let it
influence marriage selection human progress will cease.26
This notion of traits in the blood, which can be manipulated

through proper breeding, places eugenics within what Michel
Foucault has called an “analytics of sexuality.”27 The term breeding
exemplifies human races as technologically manipulable, while
also muddying the boundary between culture and biology, human
and animal. Agriculture, Davenport’s favorite metaphor — “the
human babies born each year,” he writes, “constitute the world’s
most valuable crop” — nicely encapsulates the intertwining of
the natural and the cultivated that is necessary to human civili-
zation.28 Eugenics is necessary because biology is not enough.29
Davenport’s work also exemplifies the difficulty of separating the
natural from the cultivated: in the end, he argued that any “char-
acteristic,” such as vagrancy, evident in more than one generation,
is transmitted through blood. Although Davenport’s work is now
considered ideologically corrupt, race and breeding are still inter-
twined in more modern understandings of race. According to
modern population genetics, a human race is a “breeding popula-
tion” marked by certain gene frequencies.30
However, as the history of segregation and antimiscegena-
tion legislation in the US makes clear, breeding populations, if they
exist, are never simply natural but rather result from a complex
negotiation between culture, society, and biology. Importantly,
segregation was a response to failures of biological theories of the
innate physical degeneracy of mulattos and Africans. It was also
a response to the “confusion” brought about by emancipation. As
Hartmann argues:
The conception of race engendered by slavery and abolished by the

Thirteenth Amendment made “black” virtually synonymous with
“slave” and “white” with “free.” . . . Now that race no longer defined
status, classificatory schemes were required to maintain these lines of

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division. The effort to maintain the color line, or, properly speaking,
black subordination involved securing the division between the
races and controlling the freed population. Central to this effort was
the codification of race, which focused primarily on defining and
containing blackness.31
This codification — especially its “one-drop” formulation — widened

the gap between what the body says and what it means, since it
became increasingly difficult to read the signifier, let alone the
signification.
Segregation is an important US racial technology, a clari-
fying spatial mapping that creates stark racial differences where
none necessarily exist. As Grace Elizabeth Hale has argued, “whites
created the culture of segregation in large part to counter black
success, to make a myth of absolute racial difference, to stop the
rising.”32 Segregation made “race dependent on space, and the
color bar became less a line than the ground on which southern
people were allowed to drink and buy and stand” (228). Segrega-
tion, importantly, did not only map space but was also a reaction to
the transgression of space brought about by modern technologies,
such as trains. It fought mobility with immobility. Hale, analyzing
the importance of segregation on trains, argues:
For southern whites, however, more was at stake than comfortable plushy
cushions and clean-carpeted aisles. Whiteness itself was being defined in
late nineteenth-century first class train cars. When middle class-blacks
entered the semi-public space of railroads, they placed their better attire
and manners in direct juxtaposition with whites’ own class signifiers.
Because many whites found it difficult to imagine African Americans as
anything other than poor and uneducated, finely dressed blacks riding
in first-class cars attracted their particular ire. . . . Greater mobility
made the poorest whites more visible to the rising white middle class as
well. . . . Class and race, then, became more visibly unhinged as railroads
disrupted local isolation. Confusion reigned. (128 – 29)33
Racist technologies thus sought to make clear distinctions in soci-

ety where none necessarily existed. Segregation and eugenics are

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Introduction • 19
thus examples of what Foucault has called modern racism, a rac-

ism fostered to allow states, which are supposedly dedicated to the
social welfare of their populations, to exercise sovereign power —
that is, to punish and destroy. “Racism,” he writes, “is bound up
with the workings of a State that is obliged to use race, the elim-
ination of races and the purification of the race, to exercise its
sovereign power. The juxtaposition of — or the way biopower func-
tions through — the old sovereign power of life and death implies
the workings, the introduction and activation, of racism.”34
Importantly, though, for Foucault, modern racism did not
simply apply to those who were subjugated. Extrapolating from
Nazism, he argues that race wars became “a way of regenerating
one’s own race. As more and more of our number die, the race
to which we belong will become all the purer” (257). In terms of
an analytics of sexuality, eugenics too applies to everyone: Daven-
port’s eugenics textbook, for instance, is directed at those middle-
class readers who want to know “how to fall in love intelligently.”35
Eugenics redefined all humans as the carriers of eternal charac-
teristics, making the base unit not the human but the trait. Racism
renders everyone into a standing reserve of genes to be stored and
transmitted.
Mimicking Standing Reserves

According to Martin Heidegger in his 1955 “The Question Con-
cerning Technology,” the essence of technology is not technologi-
cal. Indeed, by examining tools, we miss what is essential about
technology, which is its mode of revealing or “enframing.” This
mode of revealing, he argues, “puts to nature the unreasonable
demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored
as such”; once transformed into energy, it is also transmitted
and circulated.36 Technology changes the nature of essence as
such, making what is essential that which endures rather than its
generic type, and it shrinks causality from the rich fourfold system
discussed by Aristotle (comprising a material cause, formal cause,
efficient cause, and final cause) to one mode: “A reporting —
a reporting challenged forth — of standing-reserves that must

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be guaranteed either simultaneously or in sequence” (23). Most

damningly, enframing endangers man by rendering man himself
a standing reserve:
As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object,

but does so, rather, exclusively as standing-reserve, and man in the midst
of objectlessness is nothing but the order of the standing reserve, then
he comes to the brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point
where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile
man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture
of lord of the earth. In this way the impression comes to prevail that
everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct.
This illusion gives rise to one final delusion: It seems as though man
everywhere and always encounters only himself. . . . In truth, however,
precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself. (27)
This endangerment, though, is not only a misrecognition and a

reduction of man to a standing and circulating source of energy;
it also makes it impossible for him to conceive of another kind
of revealing, since it “conceals that revealing which, in the sense
of poieses, lets what presences come forth into appearance” (27).
Poieses, art, enables a revelation that does not reduce nature into a
standing reserve, but rather lets it stand against man as an object.
The resonances between Heidegger’s post – World War II
reflections on the dangers of technology and analyses of race and
racism are profound and perhaps not surprising given Heidegger’s
involvement with national socialism. In a 1949 lecture on tech-
nology, Heidegger argued, “agriculture is now a motorized food
industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses
in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing
as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same
thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.”37 The national
socialist program reduced all humans to standing reserves: some
to be destroyed, others to be optimized and made more produc-
tive. Intentionally or unintentionally, Heidegger’s discussion of the
experience of the human as not even an object also resonates with
the historical experience of people of color. Hortense Spillers, writ-
ing on the situation of slaves in the Middle Passage, argues, “under

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Introduction • 21
these conditions, one is neither female, nor male, as both subjects

are taken into ‘account’ as quantities.”38 During this period, she
argues, the captives are unmade culturally. The pain of nonrecog-
nition, which makes one neither object nor subject, has also been
eloquently enunciated by Frantz Fanon:
I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things,
my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and
then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.
Sealed into that crushing objecthood, I turned beseechingly to
others. Their attention was a liberation, running over my body suddenly
abraded into nonbeing, endowing me once more with an agility that I
had thought lost, and by taking me out of the world, restoring me to it.
But just as I reached the other side, I stumbled, and the movements, the
attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which
a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was indignant; I demanded an
explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart.39
In addition, race understood as a set of visible or invisible genetic

characteristics is a mode of revealing that renders everyone into
a set of traits that are stored and transmitted; race is then seen
as what allows the human to endure through time as a set of
unchanging characteristics.
Yet crucially, for Heidegger, understanding the essence
of technology also makes salvation possible: although enframing
conceals poieses, it also makes poieses a saving power. “Because the
essence of technology is nothing technological,” he writes, “essen-
tial reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with
it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the
essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally differ-
ent from it. Such a realm is art.”40 According to Heidegger, poieses
“brings forth truth into the splendor of radiant appearing” (34).
Similarly, Fanon writes: “The crippled veteran of the Pacific war
says to my brother, ‘Resign yourself to your color the way I got
used to my stump; we’re both victims.’ Nevertheless with all my
strength I refuse to accept that amputation. I feel in myself a soul
as immense as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest of
rivers, my chest has the power to expand without limit.”41 Thus

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the question becomes: To what extent can ruminating on race as

technology make possible race as poieses, or at least as a form of
agency? Can race become a different mode of creation or reveal-
ing? Race has historically enabled subversive action. Homi Bhabha,
for instance, has influentially argued that colonial mimicry — the
mimicking of the colonizers by the colonized, demanded by the
colonizers — “is at once resemblance and menace.”42 Understood as
something that is repeatedly performed, race, like gender, opens up
the space of parody and agency. Intriguingly, Fanon describes his
strength in terms that trouble the boundary between nature and
human: his soul as “deep as the deepest rivers.” This simile suggests
an embracing of factors not usually considered human. That is, if
race as technology does make it possible to expand without limit,
could this power stem not from asserting the difference between
humans and technology, technology and poieses, but rather from an
acceptance of their similarities through race as prosthesis?
Donna Haraway has influentially argued that we must
embrace the breakdown in boundaries between human and animal,
natural and artificial, mediation and embodiment. According to
Haraway, “late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly
ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and
body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other dis-
tinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines.”43 Rather
than condemning this situation, as does Heidegger, she argues for
the cyborg as a utopian figure precisely because it reworks nature
and culture so that “the one can no longer be the resource for
appropriation or incorporation by the other. The relationships
for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and
hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world. . . . The
cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of
mud and cannot dream of returning to dust” (151). As she notes,
however, “the main trouble with cyborgs . . . is that they are the
illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not
to mention state socialism” (151). Thus, in dealing with cyborgs,
one must always see things doubly and “see from both perspectives
at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities
unimaginable from the other vantage point” (154).

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on 14 February 2019
Introduction • 23
This question of seeing doubly — and indeed the act of

seeing more generally, especially as filtered through both race
and mass media — is taken up by the authors in this special issue.
They examine race as both the imposition of a grid of control and
as a lived social reality in which kinship with technology can be
embraced. And most important, as previously noted, they frame
this question of race and/as technology in terms of ethics. Race,
for these authors, is fundamentally a question of relation, of an
encounter, a recognition, that enables certain actions and bars
others.
Face-ing Public Exposure

This special issue pursues race and/as technology by analyzing a
wide range of phenomena: from the production of photographic
evidence to digital art practices, from the rise of the raced brand
image in advertising to the emergence of the generic Asian ter-
rorist in terror TV, from science fiction to legal cases and politi-
cal speeches. Focused on the intersections of facial and racial
recognition, it addresses the ways in which race constructs rela-
tions between self and other, private and public, visibility and
invisibility. These articles argue that race, like one’s face, is not
simply a private possession or technology — it is not a usually hid-
den “card” that one can choose to “play” publicly, but rather exists
at the cusp between the public and the private, the visible and
the invisible. As Jennifer González argues in “The Face and the
Public: Race, Secrecy, and Digital Art Practice,” “race is . . . a rela-
tion of public encounter,” or, as Eden Osucha contends in “The
Whiteness of Privacy: Race, Media, Law,” mass media are technol-
ogies of racialization, and the legal right to privacy is a response
to this racialized, mediatized publicity. The other articles in this
issue — Lisa Nakamura’s “Interfaces of Identity: Oriental Traitors
and Telematic Profiling in 24,” Thomas Foster’s “Faceblindness,
Visual Pleasure, and Racial Recognition: Ethnicity and Technic-
ity in Ted Chiang’s ‘Liking What You See: A Documentary,’ ” and
Beth Coleman’s “Race as Technology” — further investigate the
relationship between media and race, publicity and privacy, cul-

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on 14 February 2019
tural forms and embodied experience by examining the interrela-

tionship between technical and racial productions.
In her essay, González addresses the limitations of seeing
technoculture as an ideal public sphere through insightful critiques
of contemporary new media theory and digital art. Starting with
the contradiction between the “desire to see online digital spaces
as sites of universal subjectivity that can escape the limitations of
race” and the “proliferation of racially marked avatars and experi-
mental hybrids (human and nonhuman),” she argues that both
positions reduce cultural and racial difference to the domain of
visual signs in order to construct digital space as one free of aggres-
sion, exclusion, and invisibility. Taking on Mark Hansen’s analysis
of Keith Piper’s work as revealing the corrupt emptiness of images
and racial identifications in a capitalist system, and thus enabling
what Giorgio Agamben has called “community beyond identity,”
González argues that Piper’s work instead reveals how racial dis-
courses elicit complex affective and embodied identifications. It is
precisely because race is an embodied discourse that raced others
cannot participate in community without identity, for, according to
Agamben, community without identity is possible only if humans
become a “whatever face”: “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.”44
This position, however, is impossible for “raced” others precisely
because they are reduced by others to their face, although this does
not mean that the face cannot produce ethical encounters. Indeed,
González turns to Emmanuel Levinas’s theorization of the face to
argue that it can make legible the absolute infinity of the other.
In addition, rather than construct the digital as somehow outside
commodified images, she investigates, through the work of digital
artists Ken Obadake and Mongrel, how “visual culture (both online
and off) is the very place where contemporary race discourse might
be most powerfully critiqued and transformed.” Most provocatively,
González concludes by redressing the question of the paradoxical
erasure and proliferation of race online by positing race as the

by guest
on 14 February 2019
Introduction • 25
secret fundamental to the ongoing conflation of technoculture

with the ideal public sphere. As she argues, “race and other forms
of cultural difference have been historically presented as secret
unknowns that require definition, mapping, measuring, and leg-
islating by those in power to render them public.”
Osucha also links races and faces as sites of exposure
through an insightful analysis of the mass-mediated and com-
modified faces of two women: Nancy Green, the first model for
the mass-produced Aunt Jemima pancake mix, and Abigail Rober-
son, the “anti-Jemima,” an upper-class white woman whose image
was used, against her wishes, to advertise flour. Looking at the his-
torical emergence of privacy as a right, most famously articulated
by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis in “The Right to Privacy,”
Osucha argues that media publicity constitutes a technology of
racialization. That is, the right to privacy, conceptualized as a prop-
erty right in the self, emerged in response to the invasion of the
domestic sphere by new visual technologies and media, an inva-
sion that threatened to expose and “sell” all individuals as African
Americans had historically been exposed and sold. She writes,
“The specter of injury to privacy that haunts ‘The Right to Privacy’
and Roberson and the laws that followed in its wake thus finds more
concrete expression in the media depictions of people of color in
that era, images generically shaped by abjecting and frequently
grotesque racial stereotype.” Focusing like González on race and
commodification, Osucha emphasizes the historical dimensions
behind this commodification. The right to privacy is inextricably
linked to the construction of whiteness as inviolable and, in con-
trast, of other bodies as “natural” objects of visual consumption.
Osucha’s analysis therefore reveals that the threat — or, conversely,
what we might call the democratic potential — of mass media lies in
the ways in which they threaten to racialize, to expose, everyone.
Similarly addressing questions of race and publicity,
Nakamura reveals how, after 9/11, the threat of raced others has
been used to deny everyone’s right to privacy. In the landscape of
terror TV, every face can and must be scanned so that the truth
can emerge and the foreign terrorist in the nation be exposed.
Examining the television series 24 in relation to face recognition

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on 14 February 2019
technologies more broadly, Nakamura argues, “the horror of wit-

nessing torture perpetrated both by and on American bodies, as
well as the destruction of urban infrastructures in the US, is paired
with the spectacle of the digital sublime in the form of advanced
telecommunication technologies that perform the work of remote
sensing and the identification of bodies and especially of faces.”
That is, “the problem of correctly identifying the true and loyal
‘American,’ as opposed to the concealed Islamic fanatic, can only
be solved by the deployment of highly advanced, spectacular sur-
veillance and identification technologies, such as aerial and sat-
ellite photography, FRS [facial recognition systems], biometrics,
frame enhancement technology, infrared visioning systems, and
extensive databases and ‘traces’ of informational network traffic.”
In terms of the “watchful eye” of facial recognition technology and
the larger security society it supports, the ideal is to deny the mys-
tery of every face — the basis for Levinas’s concept of ethics — and
to render all of them into completely knowable entities. Impor-
tantly, this making of the face completely knowable also racializes
the terrorist as Asian and Asian American. Terror TV justifies racist
stereotyping by representing “both West Asians and East Asians as
spies, permanent aliens whose loyalties are always in doubt”; the
technologies used on these shows thus seem to reveal the rightness
of racial profiling. Once again, race becomes the open secret that
must be exposed.
Foster also addresses questions of what it means publicly to
recognize a face through a science fiction story by Ted Chiang and
through new media and its theory. A highlight of Foster’s article
is an investigation of how nature and culture are being reformu-
lated within technoculture, a process encapsulated by what he calls
“technicity.” Foster specifically focuses on how “processes of visual
recognition and response are being reconceptualized in some tech-
noculture contexts,” so that “today, this technical manipulability
seems to be increasingly relocated to the level of the viewers’ cog-
nitive architectures and mental processes, understood as scientifi-
cally material, physically identifiable, and therefore open to change
rather than reified or eternalized.” Rather than nature and culture

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Introduction • 27
simply changing places, though, Foster argues that Chiang’s “Lik-

ing What You See: A Documentary” reveals that the “breakdown
in traditional conceptual distinctions between nature and culture,
biological givens and social constructs, might also represent an
opportunity to move beyond the impasse of these dichotomies to
an understanding of the natural environment, including our own
bodies, as something other than a constraint and to a recognition
of our technology as something other than a neutral instrument
or extension of our conscious will.” In particular, it is through this
story’s representation of the perception and recognition of racial
features — which are first classed as “ just cultural,” but then shown
to intersect biology and culture in interesting ways — that a new
form of technoscientific hybridity emerges.
Finally, these questions of hybridity and of the possibilities
of technology are taken up in Coleman’s piece. The proposition
of race as technology, she argues, “moves race away from the bio-
logical and genetic systems that have historically dominated its
definition, toward questions of technological agency”; that is, it
moves race from an object to a technique. Drawing from a wide
range of theories of technology and race, she addresses examples
of both theorizations and enactments of race as technology that
span philosophical texts and political speeches, cinema practice
and film criticism, art and science. They include Barack Obama’s
2008 speech on race in Pennsylvania, the film The Battle of Algiers,
recent debates on genomics, and James Snead’s theory of blackness
as repetition. Acknowledging that the construction of race as tech-
nology can be used for good or evil, Coleman nonetheless argues
that “race as technology . . . moves toward an aesthetic category
of human being, where mutability of identity, reach of individual
agency, and the conditions of the culture all influence each other.”
That is, “if race as we know it is an ‘algorithm’ inherited from the
age of Enlightenment, reprogramming its function from inheri-
tance (a form of destiny) to insurrection provides the possibility
of new formulations.” This is because the pronounced quality of
race, Coleman finds, is its immateriality, “its speed of change, its
sliding value, its apparent and invisible differences.” Coleman, like

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on 14 February 2019
Foster, thus also investigates the extent to which modes of racial

recognition allow us to address changes to visuality brought about
by new technologies and by varied media forms.
Race as technology thus problematizes the usual modes of
visualization and revelation, while at the same time making pos-
sible new modes of agency and causality. Importantly, it displaces
ontological questions of race — debates over what race really is and
is not, focused on discerning the difference between ideology and
truth — with ethical ones: what relations does race set up? The for-
mulation of race as technology also opens up the possibility that,
although the idea and the experience of race has been used for
racist ends, the best way to fight racism might not be to deny the
existence of race but to make race do different things. Crucially,
however, this is not simply a private decision, since race has proven
key to the definition of the private and the public as such. To refor-
mulate race, we need also to reframe nature and culture, privacy
and publicity, self and collective, media and society.
Notes
1. For examples, see Jennifer Reardon, Race to the Finish: Identity

and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2005); Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis, eds., Only
Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (New York: Harry
N. Abrams, 2003); Aly Gotz and Karl Heinz Roth, The Nazi
Census: Identification and Control in the Third Reich (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2003).
2. See Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus,

trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1998).
3. See Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Francesco Cavalli-Sforza, The

Great Human Diasporas (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995);
Alan Templeton, “Human Races: A Genetic and Evolutionary
Perspective,” American Anthropologist 100 (1999): 632 – 50.
4. See Reardon, Race to the Finish.
5. See Lisa Gannett, “Making Populations: Bounding Genes in

Space and Time,” Philosophy of Science 70 (2003): 989 –1001;

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on 14 February 2019
Introduction • 29
and Evelyn Hammonds, “Straw Men and Their Followers: The

Return of Biological Race,” SSRC, http://raceandgenomics.ssrc
.org/Hammonds, 7 June 2006.
6. See Henry Louis Gates Jr., African American Lives, PBS Series,
2006; and Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture
beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2000).
7. See Charles Davenport and Morris Steggerda, Race Crossing in

Jamaica (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington,
1929); Edward Black, IBM and the Holocaust (New York: Crown,
2001); Richard J. Hermstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve:
Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free
Press, 1994).
8. Bruce Dain, A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory

in the Early Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2002), 7; Carl Linnaeus, as quoted by Gregor Benton and
Edmund Terrence Gomez, The Chinese in Britain, 1800 – Present:
Economy, Transnationalism and Identity (Basingstroke, Hampshire:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 287.
9. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of

the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan Smith (New York:
Pantheon, 1971); and François Jacob, The Logic of Life: A History of
Heredity, trans. Betty E. Spillman (New York: Pantheon, 1973).
10. Samira Kawash, Dislocating the Color Line (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1997), 130.
11. Saidiya Hartmann, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-

Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997), 26.
12. Relaying his experience of speaking on temperance before “the

common people of Ireland,” Douglass stated: “Never did human
faces tell a sadder tale. More than five thousand were assembled;
and I say, with no wish to wound the feelings of any Irishman,
that these people lacked only a black skin and woolly hair, to
complete their likeness to the plantation negro. The open,
uneducated mouth — the long, gaunt arm — the badly formed
foot and ankle — the shuffling gait — the retreating forehead
and vacant expression — and, their petty quarrels and fights — all
reminded me of the plantation, and my own cruelly abused

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on 14 February 2019
people. Yet, that is the land of GRATTAN, of CURRAN, of

O’CONNELL, and of SHERIDAN. . . . The Irishman educated,
is a model gentleman; the Irishman ignorant and degraded,
compares in form and feature, with the negro!” (Douglass, The
Claims of the Negro: An Address, before the Literary Societies of Western
Reserve College, at Commencement, July 12, 1854 [Rochester, NY:
Lee, Mann, 1854], 30).
13. Responding to arguments that racism was key to the evolution

of the species, Boas contended: “I challenge him [Sir Arthur
Keith] to prove that race antipathy is ‘implanted by nature’ and
not the effect of social causes which are active in every closed
social group, no matter whether it is racially heterogeneous
or homogeneous. The complete lack of sexual antipathy,
the weakening of race consciousness in communities in
which children grow up as an almost homogeneous group;
the occurrence of equally strong antipathies between
denominational groups, or between social strata — as
witnessed by the Roman patricians and plebeians, the Spartan
Lacedaemonians and Helots, the Egyptian castes and some of
the Indian castes — all these show that antipathies are social
phenomena. If you will, you may call them ‘implanted by nature,’
but only in so far as man is a being living in closed social groups,
leaving it entirely indetermined [sic] what these social groups
may be” (Franz Boas, “Race and Progress,” Science 74 [1931]: 8).
Importantly, this argument highlighted race’s functioning: race
was a tool for creating social groupings to enclose “man” into
them, which could then coincide with a natural antipathy to
other closed social groupings.
14. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It
Makes,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Gates (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1986), 5.
15. Reardon, Race to the Finish, 18 –19.
16. Etienne Balibar, “Is There a Neo-racism?” in Race, Nation, Class:

Ambiguous Identites (London: Verso, 1991), 17 – 28.
17. Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis,

Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001), 5. The same group of white parents argued that
“major differences exist in the learning ability patterns of white

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on 14 February 2019
Introduction • 31
and Negro children.” As Cheng notes, “this line of argument

advanced by white segregationists aimed to transform psychical
damage as the result of social injury into a notion of inherent
disability” (5).
18. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary
Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993), 63.
19. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United
States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (New York: Routledge, 1986), 66.
20. Kawash, Dislocating the Color Line, 130.
21. Ann Laura Stoler, “Racial Histories and Their Regimes of

Truth,” Political Power and Social Theory 11 (1987): 187, 200.
22. Thomas Jefferson, arguing against the incorporation of

freed black slaves into the nation-state, argued, “deep
rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; the thousand
recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained;
new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made;
and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and
produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the
extermination of one race or the other.” Quoted in Dain, Hideous
Monster of the Mind, 31.
23. He writes: “In 1896, the processes and the problems of heredity
were little understood, and ‘blood’ was for many a solvent in
which all problems were dissolved and all processes commingled.
‘Blood’ — and by extension ‘race’ — included numerous elements
that we would today call cultural; there was not a clear line
between cultural and physical elements or between social and
biological heredity. The characteristic qualities of civilizations
were carried from one generation to another both in and with
the blood of their citizens” (George W. Stocking Jr., “The Turn-of-
the-Century Concept of Race,” Modernism/Modernity 1 [1994]: 6).
24. To be clear, this is not to say that understandings of race prior

to the widespread acceptance of Mendelian genetics did not
assert racial differences as biological: the polygenesist argument
provides a perfect example of this. Yet importantly, this
argument did not strictly separate biologically transmitted racial
traits from cultural ones — that is, racial characteristics were
considered mutable.

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on 14 February 2019
25. Charles Davenport’s studies of the transmission of traits, for

instance, revealed how eye color, skin color, feeblemindedness,
and so on moved unchanged from generation to generation.
These characteristics allegedly formed a stable link between
individuals across time. These unit characteristics, however,
also reveal that, although eugenics is now popularly conceived
as pitting race against race, it also made unstable the concept
of race. Davenport, for instance, consistently wrote about the
need to better the race, but he also argued that “two very light
‘colored’ parents will have (probably) only light children, some
of whom ‘pass for whites’ away from home. So far as skin color
goes they are as truly white as their greatgrandparent and it
is quite conceivable that they might have mental and moral
qualities as good and typically Caucasian as he had. Just as
perfect white skin can be extracted and a typical Caucasian
arise out of the mixture. However, this result will occur only in
the third, or later, hybrid generation and the event will not be
very common” (Davenport, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics [New
York: Arno, 1972], 37 – 38). In this passage, the race of a typical
Caucasian is viewed as something that is “recoverable” from
a mixture of other races — a notion diametrically opposed to
the “one-drop rule” used in many southern states and to the
percentage logic that drove Nazi anti-Semitism (although later,
arguing against hybrid vigor in offspring between black and
white Jamaicans, Davenport would write about the disharmonies
in mulattos, thus implying that racial types comprised a certain
balance of racial features). See Davenport and Steggerda, Race
Crossing in Jamaica, 471. This passage also reveals the connection
between visible differences — white skin — and mental
characteristics. Yet importantly, what this passage suggests is
that the move to separate biology from culture did not designate
the biological as unchangeable, but rather as technological — as
something that could be bred and improved upon.
26. Davenport, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, 1.
27. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, volume 1, trans. Alan

Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1978), 148. Foucault argues
that, within a sovereign society, blood relation was paramount
because “differentiation into orders and castes, and the value
of descent lines were predominant. . . . It [blood] owed its high
value at the same time to its instrumental role (the ability to shed

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on 14 February 2019
Introduction • 33
blood), to the way it functioned in the order of signs (to have a

certain blood, to be of the same blood, to be prepared to risk
one’s blood) . . . blood was a reality with a symbolic function. We,
on the other hand, are in a society of ‘sex,’ or rather a society
‘with a sexuality’: the mechanisms of power are addressed to the
body, to life, to what causes it to proliferate, to what reinforces
the species, its stamina, its ability to dominate, or its capacity for
being used” (147). Given Davenport’s argument, it would seem,
however, that the society of sex does not forego blood, but rather
resignifies it.
29. Breeding is an “unnatural” product of human ingenuity, needed

because natural and sexual selection are not sufficiently rational:
“The general program of the eugenist is clear — it is to improve
the race by inducing young people to make a more reasonable
selection of marriage mates; to fall in love intelligently” (4).
This falling in love intelligently implies that any “natural”
phenomenon can be cultured, cultivated, to produce something
better — that biology, in other words, can never be completely
separated from culture.
30. See Gannett, “Making Populations.”
31. Hartmann, Scenes of Subjection, 187.
32. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation

in the South, 1890 –1940 (New York: Vintage, 1999), 21.
33. This technology of segregation was also accompanied, Hale

contends, by modern technological spectacles such as the lynch
festival, which represented the consequences of crossing racial
lines through a perverse “crossing” of the black lynched body
(see “Deadly Amusements” in Making Whiteness, 199 – 239).
34. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de

France, 1975 –1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Macmillan,
2003), 258.
36. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in

The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William
Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 14.

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on 14 February 2019
37. Qtd. in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics:

The Fiction of the Political, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Blackwell,
1990), 34.
38. Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American

Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17 (1987): 72.
39. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam
Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967), 109.
40. Heidegger, “Question Concerning Technology,” 35.
41. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 140.
42. Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” in The Location of

Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 86.
43. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology,

and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in
Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York;
Routledge, 1991), 152.
44. Qtd. in Mark Hansen, “Digitizing the Racialized Body; or, The
Politics of Universal Address,” Substance 33 (2004): 110.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is associate professor of modern culture

and media at Brown University. She has studied both systems design
engineering and English literature, which she combines and mutates
in her current work on digital media. She is author of Control and
Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT Press, 2006),
and co-editor (with Thomas Keenan) of New Media, Old Media: A
History and Theory Reader (Routledge, 2005). She is currently working
on a monograph entitled Programmed Visions: Software, DNA, Race
(forthcoming MIT, 2010).

by guest
on 14 February 2019
Introduction • 35
From Colour Separation (Mongrel, 1997).

Courtesy of the artist.

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on 14 February 2019

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From Colour Separation (Mongrel, 1997).

Courtesy of the artist.

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Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

Camera Obscura 70, Volume 24, Number 1

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centrality of data processing to the execution of the Holocaust to

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genetic differences or as a way to weigh risk factors for certain dis-

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what follows, I offer a historical and theoretical context for these

Making the Visible Innate

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in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the era of exploration, it

In this shift to a modern, biologized understanding of race, skin color

This “seeing” of internal difference makes accidental character-

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feelings of the enslaved, and moreover, the ascription of excess

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Race has become a trope of ultimate, irreducible difference between

By calling race a careless use of language, Gates implies that the

Race has become metaphorical — a way of referring to and disguising

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ever was. Expensively kept, economically unsound, a spurious and

Although Morrison here argues that race has become metaphori-

On the Limits of Culture

The modern conception of racial identity maintains an uneasy relation

By linking outside to inside in an effort to make the body trans-

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The ambiguity of those sets of relationships between the somatic and

Racial discourse has always been polyvalently mobile and capable

Creating Differences: Eugenics and Segregation

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Race did not simply move from a biological to a cultural

Eugenics is the science of the improvement of the human race by better

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recognizing the value of culture, believes that permanent advance is to

This notion of traits in the blood, which can be manipulated

The conception of race engendered by slavery and abolished by the

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This codification — especially its “one-drop” formulation — widened

Racist technologies thus sought to make clear distinctions in soci-

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thus examples of what Foucault has called modern racism, a rac-

Mimicking Standing Reserves

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be guaranteed either simultaneously or in sequence” (23). Most

As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object,

This endangerment, though, is not only a misrecognition and a

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these conditions, one is neither female, nor male, as both subjects

In addition, race understood as a set of visible or invisible genetic

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the question becomes: To what extent can ruminating on race as

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This question of seeing doubly — and indeed the act of

Face-ing Public Exposure

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tural forms and embodied experience by examining the interrela-