Page 243 - Cyberculture and New Media

234 Desistant Media
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subject in spoken discourse, but as moments in the very constitution of the
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subject and signified of discourse.
For Lacoue-Labarthe onto-typology is ontology, which lies hidden
in every – traditional or contemporary – definition of mimesis: truth means
placing the world itself in its own truth, the revelation of truth, regardless of
the subject positing this phenomenon. Onto-typology is a transcendental
production of the world in itself in a away the world opens up and will be
stabilized by the being – whether it is the question of ideas which mark the
things by Plato, or Heidegger’s technic, which essence, Ge-stell (meaning
“framework”) is nothing technical but the marking of the being, installation –
typing its seal on it. Onto-typology is a philosophical effort to set together the
demand for truth and the idea of the world as pre-constructed. World is a
“work”, but it is not depended on any subjective discretion (in other words,
from the threat of mimesis), but it constructs itself from within. Lacoue-
Labarthe’s thought on onto-typology is primarily as follows: onto-typological
philosophies are, because of their emphasis on infinity, too near the
Christian-platonic thinking to be free to think about the transcendentality
itself. In onto-typological philosophies the world appears as types, characters
or forms (idea, schema, Ge-stell): even if transcendental type cannot be seen
or be represented as such, directly, a thought about type is attached with an
idea of its own permanence, a certain a priori shape of the world. This is why
onto-typological philosophies are culminated – even though this cannot be
seen in Hegelianism – in a thought about a system, perfect categorization of a
whole, which could, at least in principle, be seen as a complete illumination.
Lacoue-Labarthe’s thought about the essence of the world demands to its pair
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a notion of an image that a finite subject will from this pretension construct.
By onto-typology Lacoue-Labarthe means finally a term he – in his
own words – forged on the model of the Heideggerian philosopheme of
“onto-theology” to designate the ontology that underlies at once the most
ancient thought of mimesis and the modern thought about figures (Gestalt)
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that proceeds from it. Onto-typology is by nature a belonging of the
“Western metaphysics”; it overthrows the thematic values proposed by an
“original mimesis”.
A convincing form of onto-typology, forming a type or schema, is
hidden in the ecological media theorization that relies also on the Aristotelian
apparatus of identification by emotional involvement, namely, empathy, pity,
sorrow, and finally, catharsis as a powerful “emotion machine” described by
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Ed Tan, psychologist Joseph Anderson and other media ecologists, but
elaborated also by Bolter, who holds that television in particular seeks to
foster the illusion that it is pure perception, a perfect recreation of the world –
persuading the viewer that he or she is looking through the screen at the “real
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world beyond” . Bolter and Grusin say that one in all its various forms the
logic of hypermediacy expresses the tension between regarding a visual space