This excerpt on the use of race to sell computer technology intersects nicely with a couple of themes in this week’s readings on consumer culture (e.g., the “theraupeutic discourse” in which modern ads “speak to problems of anxiety and identity crisis,” PRACTICES OF LOOKING, p. 197; the connection that Mirzoeff develops in Ch. 6 between the primitive and the post-human, the racial other and the alien). In truth, though, I’ve passed it along for the rather broad, imprecise reason that I wanted to share with you a nifty (i.e., worthwhile and deftly argued) book.
Kevorkian’s argument—that the overrepresentation of black men as technologists signals a fear in “white America” [to borrow from Eminem] of both the black male body and disembodied information technologies—initially sounds, well, bizarre. However, Kevorkian persuades through amplification, looking at an astounding number of examples of these representations manifested in various cultural productions (ads, film, television, music, novels). The “docile bodies” in these advertisements refer not to the viewers’ bodies, stimulated by media images to acts of self-control and self-policing, but to the containment or neutralizing of both (a) the strong, oversexed, “primitive” bodies of the black male and (b) the disembodied information of the computer age.
I’ll have to think about directions for discussion, but here are two initial suggestions:
1. Who authors (and authorizes) these images? Why is their authorship so hard to pin down? How might different audiences read them? (K. seems reluctant to assign intentionality to the production of these ads, positing instead that they are symptomatic of an unexamined ritual on the part of corporate advertisers.) Do these representations just emerge out of the murk of “culture”? Can we make claims for responsibility here?
2. Cyberphobia—in these ads, a familiar medium (the advertising photograph) contains the threat of an unfamiliar one (the computer technology). How might anxieties about certain visual media (and the unexamined “black boxes” of their production, mechanisms) affect our reading of them?
Finally: I apologize for overlooking the endnotes. If anyone would like a copy of the accompanying notes, just let me know.
Response and Question
This was an interesting read.
In response to your question no. 1, I wonder if part of the issue is that white men hold a disproportionate number of executive jobs, so, for example, when the MS ad shows white executives contrasted with black workers, it is merely describing (in some way) the makeup of corporate America.
My question is this: is there a way that these images can be read as a kind of appropriation of and critique of white culture's "domination"? I'm thinking specifically of the example of the airplane internet "Tenzing Communications" (its on the third or fourth page from the back in the handout you gave). I wonder if this could be read as a kind of dig at Hillary (and other cappuccino-sipping mountaineers), as if he was merely a figurehead, while Tenzing had all the knowledge and did the real work. Not having read the entire book, Does Kevorkian address these kinds of readings?