Page 240 - Cyberculture and New Media

Desistant Media

Seppo Kuivakari

Abstract
Through analyses of works from contemporary media artists I argue for a
certain mode of information I call desistant. Desistance can be understood in
terms of mise-en-abyme, considered here as an abyss following the logic of
the paradox, or the logic of the hyperbologic, as French philosopher Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe calls it. For him, mise-en-abyme must always reflect in
order to ensure (re)presentation, namely, reflection itself as (re)presentation.
Thus, hyperbology is the logic of mimesis: the hyperbological is unceasing,
endless and thus without resolution. As opposite to a mirror, which holds the
truth as adequation, mise-en-abyme is a tool for folding the truth by
producing hyperbological folders of uncertainty into the operations of the
truth itself. Hyperbologic is indifferentiable as such, imperceptible and
always superlative: the greater the attempt at any identification with the
other, the more this intention fails. This, finally, is “desistance”. To “desist”,
in Jacques Derrida’s vocabulary, is to correspond to a kind of madness,
obsession, siege and caesura, a double bind and the impossibility of
reappropriation: not just formal oscillation but hyperbology.

Key Words: mimesis, media art, desistance

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1. Introduction
Within Western traditions of aesthetic thought, the concepts of
imitation and mimesis have been central to attempts to theorize the essence of
artistic expression, the characteristics that distinguish works of art from other
phenomena, and the myriad of ways in which we experience and respond to
works of art. In most cases, mimesis is defined as having two primary
meanings – that of imitation (more specifically, the imitation of nature as
object, phenomena, or process) and that of artistic representation. Mimesis is
an extremely broad and theoretically elusive term that encompasses a range
of possibilities for how the self-sufficient and symbolically generated world
created by people can relate to any given “real”, fundamental, exemplary, or