Abstract

Once upon a time when black intellectuals used to elaborate their arguments against racism and colonialism, they would be compelled to explain that they did come from places that existed, that they did have a culture, or that they were in fact human. I think of them as I reflect on the suggestion that in the age of digital technology “we” don’t need to be concerned with the violent exercise of power on bodies and territories anymore because “we” don’t have to carry all that meat and dirt along to the virtual promised land. I think of them because I have been visiting places where the hardware of the digital revolution is assembled, and the people are not a part of this culture, and the conditions in which they work and live form the underside of the post-human. If we are to comprehend how identity and subjectivity are being reshaped in the digital age, we must look at the relationship between the desire to enable minds to fantasmatically disengage from bodies and the actuality of technologies that objectify bodies and bodily activity, thus disengaging them from minds. Digital disembodiment’s fiction of transcendence relies on the expulsion of the abject inter-relations between bodies and technologies from the virtual imaginary. Clearly, I am not the first person to question the universal applicability of the digital revolution’s emancipatory rhetoric, or to ask who gains and who loses by ignoring the political realities in which these technologies develop. There are many ways in which the question of access to the electronic wonderland has been posed to demonstrate how imbalances of power in the material world carry over into the virtual domain.

• Coco Fusco is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist. She has lectured, performed, exhibited, and curated programs throughout the US, Europe, Canada, Australia, South Africa and Latin America. Her collection of essays on art, media and cultural politics, entitled “ENGLISH IS BROKEN HERE”, was published by The New Press in 1995. Her latest performance, a collaboration with Nao Bustamante entitled “STUFF”, was commissioned by London’s Institute for Contemporary Art and Highways in Los Angeles. Her current solo work, a performance installation entitled “BETTER YET WHEN DEAD”, was recently featured at the Bienal de Arte of Medellin. From 1989 to 1995, she collaborated with Guillermo Gomez-Pena on a variety of exhibitions, performances and works for radio. Fusco’s work has been included in The Whitney Biennial, The Sydney Biennale, The Johannesburg Biennial, The London International Theatre Festival, the National Review of Live Art, The Los Angeles Festival, The Festival 2000 of San Francisco and several other international events. Her videos include The Couple in the Cage, Pochonovela and Havana Postmodern: The New Cuban Art, all of which have been broadcast on public television. She has also curated several art exhibitions, media programs and performance festivals in the US and Europe. Fusco writings have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, Art in America, The Nation, Ms., Frieze, Third Text, Latina, and Nka: Journal of African Art, as well as a number of anthologies. She has also contributed to National Public Radio’s Latino USA. She has received grants from The National Endowment for the Arts, The New York Council on the Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts, The Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and Arts International, and was a 1994 Mellon Fellow in Critical Studies at the California Institute for the Arts. Fusco currently teaches at the Tyler School of Art of Temple University. cocofusco.com