Page 241 - Cyberculture and New Media

232 Desistant Media
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significant world, Mimesis is thus understood as integral to the relationship
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between art and nature.
Different media have treated this relationship differently. For
example, Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin make an argument in their theory of
remediation that the desire for immediacy would appear to be fulfilled by the
transparent technologies of straight photography, live television, and three-
dimensional, immersive computer graphics. Such transparent technologies,
however, cannot satisfy that desire because they do not succeed in fully
denying mediation. Each resolves to define itself with reference to other
technologies, so that the viewer never sustains that elusive state in which the
objects of representation are felt to be present; therefore the oscillation
between media modes that, according to Bolter and Grusin, finally construct
the viewer’s identity. Whenever we engage ourselves with media, we become
aware not only of the objects of representation but also of the media
themselves. Instead of trying to be in the presence of the objects of
representation, we, due to oscillation, define immediacy as being in the
presence of media. This can be questioned through the hyperbologic of
media: this fascination, as Bolter and Grusin say, with media works as the
sublimation of the initial desire for immediacy is something as central to the
Western tradition, the desire to be immediately present to oneself –
something that has an onto-typological philosophy as a guarantee. Still,
oscillation means that this idea of investing to oneself is too narrow
explanation. We can admit that the double logic of remediation recapitulates
the Lacanian psychic economy – but it does not yet open the field of
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“frustration” to be recognized: the very problematics of identification.
Western thought, believes Jacques Derrida, has always been
structured in terms of dichotomies or polarities like truth versus error and
identity versus difference. These polar opposites do not, however, stand as
independent and equal entities. The second term in each pair is considered the
negative, corrupt, undesirable version of the first, a fall away from it. Hence,
the absence is the lack of presence error is the distortion of the truth, etc. In
other words, the two terms are not simply opposed in their meanings, but are
arranged in a hierarchical order, which gives the first term priority, in both
the temporal and the qualitative sense of the word. In general, what these
hierarchical oppositions do is to privilege unity, identity, immediacy, and
temporal and spatial presentness over distance, difference, dissimulation, and
deferment. In its search for the answer to the question of Being, Western
philosophy has indeed always determined Being as presence. Derrida’s
critique of Western metaphysics focuses on its privileging of the spoken word
over the written word. The spoken word is given a higher value because the
speaker and listener are both present to the utterance simultaneously. There is
no temporal or spatial distance between speaker, speech, and listener, since
the speaker hears himself speak at the same moment the listener does. This