Page 245 - Cyberculture and New Media

236 Desistant Media
______________________________________________________________
several hundred years, is an effect but cannot be recognized as such without
great moral and epistemological angst. The conjoined Western modern sense
of the “real” and the “natural” was achieved by a set of fundamental
15
innovations in visual technology beginning in the Renaissance.
Now comes the question presented by Derrida: why is the space of
the one not the space of the other? Deconstruction questions the
fundamentality of onto-typology: if space were “objective” – or universal, as
we have spoken here –, geometric, ideal, no difference in economy would be
possible between the two systems of incision. According to Derrida, the
space of geometric objectivity is an object or an ideal signified produced at a
moment of writing. Before it, there is no homogenous space, submitted to one
and the same type of technique and economy. Before it, space orders itself
wholly for the habitation and inscription in itself of the body “proper”. There
still are factors of heterogeneity inside a space to which one and the same
“proper” body relates, and therefore there are different, indeed incompatible,
economic imperatives, among which one must choose and among which
sacrifices and an organization of hierarchies become necessary. An original
16
economy is prescribed each time. This opinion challenges the universality
of different programming of media and is the key factor in differencing the
media modes from each other practically.
We can continue this elaboration with Lacan. In contrast to the
tactile, “visuality” is the space of light that Lacan calls “dazzling, pulsatile”:
there’s an atmospheric aura that illuminates the viewer from both back and
front, so that from the start there is no question of mastery. And in the context
of this space of the luminous, the viewer is not the surveyor, but, caught
within the onrush of light, he is what interrupts its flow. Into this interruption
the viewer enters a picture created by this light as a “stain” or blind spot, as
the shadow cast by the light, its trace, and its deictic mark. The viewer’s
position is one of dependence on an illumination that both marks him (the
deictic) and escapes his grasp (the distich). This illumination Lacan calls the
17
“gaze”. Gaze in fact exists in relation with illusion, pointing still to a certain
attempt to master the seen, not leaving it without comprehension but with
failure, whereas the cognitive look upon this defines it rather as a universal
18
way of media homogenizing the human experience.
With Lacan’s psychoanalytic understanding of thought,
deconstructive philosophy problematizes this latter tradition of thinking at a
technological momentum that differs with each effort to determine it. Kaja
Silverman, for instance, interprets Lacan to affirm that through the gaze a
19
subject relies for his or her visual identity on an external representation, but
at the core of Lacan’s work is the idea that the unconscious is structured like
language. The passion of the signifier is Lacan’s name for something
Silverman calls the language of desire. Signification comes into play with
displacement – which the mirror experience produces – both in the sense that