Page 246 - Cyberculture and New Media

Seppo Kuivakari 237
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it is there that meaning is produced, and that each new term functions as a
representative of what came before. Each new memory is ultimately a
signifier “of” passion. We can also become passionate about the signifier
itself – about what makes it distinct from what it represents, claims
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Silverman. This abyss will remain in focus as we proceed further, to the
extent that there is no proper image, no pure image, no whole picture for us to
comprehend or, as Derrida says, an entire theory of the structural necessity of
the abyss will be gradually constituted: the indefinite process of
supplementarity has always already infiltrated presence, always already
inscribed there the space of repetition and the splitting of the self.
Representation in the abyss of presence is not an accident of presence, the
desire of presence is, on the contrary, born from the abyss (the indefinite
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multiplication) of representation. Thus, no patterns of presence in media
can be surely erected. Already the notion of the unconscious by Lacan has
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challenged the metaphysics of presence and of the self-conscious subject.
The relationship between art and imitation has always been a
primary concern in examinations of the creative process, and already in
Aristotle’s Poeisis the “natural” human inclination to imitate is described as
“inherent in man from his earliest days; he differs from other animals in that
he is the most imitative of all creatures, and he learns his earliest lessons by
imitation.” The very pedagogy of this thought is shared by Plato, but in
contradiction to him, whose skeptical and hostile perception of mimesis and
representation operate as mediations that we must get beyond in order to
experience or attain the “real”, Aristotle views mimesis and mediation as
fundamental expressions of our human experience within the world – as
means of learning about nature that, through the perceptual experience, allow
us to get closer to the real. In this thinking, works of art are encoded in such a
way that humans are not duped into believing in them as “reality”, but rather
to recognize features from their own experience of the world within the work
of art that cause the representation to seem valid and acceptable. Mimesis for
Aristotle functions not only to re-create existing objects or elements of
nature, but also to beautify, improve upon, and universalize them. Mimesis
creates a fictional, supplementary world of representation in which there is no
capacity for a non-mediated relationship to reality. Here Aristotle locates two
types of mimesis: general, and the one that is restricted, productive. He looks
upon mimesis as something that both nature and humans have in common,
something not only embedded in the creative process but also in the
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constitution of the human species. This thought, which ultimately accounts
for no meaningful space to the “otherness” of our reality, is quite ecological
in its constitutional manner.
Onto-typology assumes the world to be pretended, or to be fictioned.
As far as we think that metaphysical thinking is onto-typological, its essence
is fictionnement – a word that Lacoue-Labarthe creates from the French word