Flesh in the Machine: Digitality, Embodiment and Life in the Carceral Surround

• In Event: Race and/as Technology - II

Abstract

Flesh in the Machine: Digitality, Embodiment and Life in the Carceral Surround traces the impact of mass digitality on the governance of racialization, embodiment, and life itself in the context of ubiquitous distributed carcerality. I locate the rise of contemporary digital analytics and biometrics technologies in the historical techniques and technologies of carceral racial capitalism. These concatenated with processing power and neoliberal restructuring during the policing reforms of the 1980s and 1990s and laid the groundwork for database-driven surveillance and command-and-control. In doing so, I show show that mass digitality’s ontological transformations of the relation between life and liveliness, the body and embodiment, fundamentally
rearrange “the human” into logistics systems built for seamless accumulation.

This paper poses a generative corrective to the field of digital studies by insisting that concerns about the contemporary "reduction" of the human to the datafied elide the historical processes by which racializing technologies have, following Hortense Spillers, worked to coerce a distinction between the "body" and the "flesh." The mass distribution of digital surveillance in all its forms follows a logic by which the "racial state" and its allies in the private sector produce carceral disembodiment as a condition of governance. By drawing of black feminist scholarship, queer theory, and digital media studies, "Flesh" shows that any accounting of mass digitality's logics and logistics must center the specific ways in which differential embodiment is produced and circulated to fulfill specific aims of reproducing deliberately constituted matrices of domination.

Author

• Raymond Joshua Scannell, New School University