Page 209 - Cyberculture and New Media

200 The Différance Engine
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the possibility of the other two (which are contentual and thus downstream or
secondary in form).
By the mere act of looking the cinematic spectator forgets their own
distinction and is thus enveloped by and made subject of the apparatus.
Doane points out that ‘[T]he pleasure of misrecognition ultimately lies in the
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confirmation of the subject’s mastery over the signifier’ . This “mastery” is
however the very misrecognition that is their actual non-mastery (for this
gaze or look does not master, bring-forth or change the signifier). This act of
looking within an apparatus which envelopes causes the spectator to
misrecognise their look for a look which has the power to bring-forth. On
this model, this misrecognised power to bring-forth, to master or ‘write’ the
space in-front in fact writes or inscribes the passive spectator themselves: the
mistaken feeling of performing (of being the hero) within the film constitutes
the spectator’s very passivity or actual non-mastery. For the primary-
projection of the screen itself and the secondary-look of the protagonist
within that screen hollows-out both the spectator’s subjection as well as the
film’s own fixed narratological futurity. This voyeuristic misrecognition of
having potency over the cinematic signifier would seem then to write,
inscribe or suture them securely into the screen-space; writing them ‘in’ as
though they were the themselves third-person constative character already
hardwired and pre-written within the film’s screenplay or cinematic ecriture.
Such a self-less cinematic subjection leaves no room for any play or
indeterminacy over the signifier. How can this be for the videogame?
By expanding this model into the game any screen/play is thus
turned into a more powerfully functioning and diegetically immersed
linearising screenedplay. To return again to Rehack. Another strategic re-
encounter with cinematic suture makes the point of a cinematic sort of
subjection all the more strongly:

The film spectator’s role as an implied observer of
narrative events -an “absent one” flickering ghostlike
through the diegesis, positioned anew from shot to shot- is
concretised in the video game imaginary through the figure
of the avatar, a “present one” standing in for the player,
who chooses the path of the camera-body with apparent
freedom. The disavowal necessary to gameplay is like the
“Yes, that’s what I see” of successful cinematic suture, but
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goes further: it is “Yes, that’s what I do”

This “Yes” is of course an inauthentic and very small ‘yes’ which
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would remediate the succumbing-slumber of a massed cinematic ‘they-self ‘
which then ‘[b]ecomes an extreme form of subject positioning, a scenario of
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continuous suture’ . Without the ‘breaks’ that film’s shot-reverse-shot lends