had other ideas.
The third tendency Nakamura layers onto the so-called neoliberal turn and the commercialized and more-popular internet is the academic tendency known as visual studies or visual culture studies.116 This in part grew out of, and in reaction against, an art historical tradition that could absorb installation art but did not know how to think digital media objects or practices. Visual culture studies drew on anthropology and other disciplines to create the “hybrid form to end all hybrid forms.”117 It also had something in common with cultural studies, in its attention to low, ephemeral, and vulgar forms, treated not just as social phenomena but as aesthetic ones as well.
Not all the tendencies within visual culture studies sat well together. There could be tension between paying attention to digital media objects and paying attention to vulgar popular forms. Trying to do both at once was an exercise in self-created academic marginality. The study of new media thus tended to privilege things that look like art; the study of the low, the minor, or the vulgar tended to favor social over aesthetic methods and preoccupations. Not the least virtue of Nakamura’s work is that she went out on a limb and studied questions of race and gender and in new and ephemeral digital forms and as aesthetic practices.
One way to subsume these three questions into some sort of totality might be to think about what Lisa Parks called visual capital.118 How is visual capital, an ensemble of images that appear to have value, created and circulated? How does social differentiation cleave along lines of access to powerful modes of representation? Having framed those questions, one might then look at how the internet came to function as a site for the creation and distribution of hegemonic and counterhegemonic images of racialized bodies.
Here one might draw on Paul Gilroy’s work on the historical formation and contestation of racial categories, or the way Donna Haraway and Chela Sandoval look to cyborg bodies as produced by biotechnical networks, but within which they might exercise an ironic power of slippery self-definition.119 Either way, one might pay special attention to forms of image-making by nonelite or even banal cultures as well as to more high-profile mass media forms, cool subcultures, or avant-garde art forms.
There are several strands to this story, however, one of which might be the evolution of technical media form. From Nick Mirzoeff, Nakamura takes the idea of visual technology as an enhancement of vision, from easel painting to digital avatars.120 In the context of that historical background, one might ask what is old and what is new about what one discovers in current media forms. This might be a blend of historical, ethnographic, and formal-aesthetic methods.
A good place to start such a study is with interfaces, and a good way to tie together the study of cinema, television, and the internet is to study how the interfaces of the internet appear in cinema and television. Take, for instance, the video for Jennifer Lopez’s pop song, “If You Had My Love” (1999). The conceit of the video is that Lopez is an avatar controlled by users who can view her in different rooms, doing different dances in different outfits. The first viewer is a young man who appears to be looking for something to jerk-off to; other imaginary viewers include teenage girls and a rather lugubrious interracial threesome, nodding off together on a sofa.121 We become voyeurs on their voyeurism. But the interface itself is perhaps the star, and J-Lo herself becomes an effect. With the interface, the imaginary user can make J-Lo perform as different kinds of dancer, slotting her into different racial and cultural niches. The interface offers “multiple points of entry to the star.”122 She—it—can be chopped and streamed. It’s remarkable that this video made for MTV sits so nicely now on Youtube.com, whose interactive modes it premediates.
Another example: There was (and still is) a lot of commentary on The Matrix (1999), but not much of it lingers over the slightly embarrassing second and third movies in the franchise.123 They are “bad films with their hearts in the right place.”124 Like the J-Lo video, they deal among other things with what Eugene Thacker in Biomedia called immediacy, or the expectation of real-time feedback and control through an interface.125 As Nakamura drolly notes, “This is an eloquent formulation of entitlement.” Where the Matrix films get interestingly weird is in their treatment of racial difference among interface users under “information capitalism.”126
The Matrix pits Blackness as embodiment against whiteness as the digital. What goes on in the background to the main story is a species of Afrofuturism, celebrating the erotics of the Black bodies as that which is most remote from the whiteness of technics. It’s the opposite of Black Accelerationism, in which a close proximity of the Black body to the machine is in advance of whiteness and to be desired. In The Matrix version, the Black body holds back from the technical and retains attributes of soul, individuality, corporeality, and this is its value. Nakamura: “Afrofuturist mojo and black identity are generally depicted as singular, ‘natural’ … ‘unassimilable’ and ‘authentic.’” But with the bad guy Agent Smith, “Whiteness thus spreads in a manner that exemplifies a much-favored paradigm of e-business in the nineties: viral marketing.”127 The white Agents propagate through digitally penetrating other white male bodies.
At least race appears in the films, which offer some sort of counterimaginary to cyber-utopianism. But as Coco Fusco notes, photography and cinema don’t just record race—they produce it.128 An algorithmic technics may in the main exacerbate the production of racialized difference.129 Lev Manovich notes that it’s in the interface that the photographic image is produced now, and so for Nakamura, it is the interface that bears scrutiny as the place where race is made. In The Matrix, race is made to appear for a notionally white viewer.
The presence of blackness in the visual field guards whites from the irresistible seduction of the perfectly transparent interface … Transparent interfaces are represented as intuitive, universal, pre-or postverbal, white, translucent, and neutral—part of a visual design aesthetic embodied by the Apple iPod.130
Apple’s iconic early ads for the iPod featured blacked-out silhouettes of dancing bodies, their white earbud cords flapping as they move, against bold single-color backgrounds. For Nakamura, they conjure universal consumers who can make product choices, individuated neoliberal subjects in a color-blind world. Like the “users” of J-Lo in her video, they can shuffle between places, styles, cultures, ethnicities—even if some of the bodies dancing in the ads are meant to be read as not just black-out but also Black. Blackness, at the time at least, was still the marker for the authentic in what white audiences desired from Black music. In this world, “Whiteness is replication, blackness is singularity, but never for the black subject, always for the white subject.”131
Nakamura:
This visual culture, which contrasts black and white interface styles so strongly, insists that it is race that is real. In this way the process of new media as a cultural formation that produces race is obscured; instead race functions here as a way to visualize new media image production … In this representational economy, images of blacks serve as talismans to ward off the consuming power of the interface, whose transparent depths, like Narcissus’ pool, threaten to fatally immerse its users.132
If Blackness usually stands for authentic embodiment in this visual culture, then being Asian stands for proximity to the tech.133 The Asian shows up only marginally in The Matrix. Its star, the biracial Keanu Reeves, was like J-Lo racially malleable for audiences. In his case he could be read as white by whites and Asian by Asians if they so desired. A more ironic and telling example is the 2002 film Minority Report. Tom Cruise—was there a whiter star in his era?—has to get his eyes replaced, as retinal scanning is everywhere in this film’s paranoid future. Only the eyes he gets belonged to a Japanese person, and the Cruise character finds himself addressed as a particularly avid consumer everywhere he goes. Hiroki Azuma and Asada Akira had once advanced
