Page 247 - Cyberculture and New Media

238 Desistant Media
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fiction (figure, creation) as translation for German word (Ein)bildung
(einbildung = imagining; Bildung = shaping, formation, pedagogy etc.) This
“fictionnement”, which is translated here as figuration, is evident in Plato’s
ideas, categorizations of Aristotle, Kant’s schematization or in Ge-stell from
Heidegger. They are based exactly on what Kant called the forming force
(bildende kraft) of transcendental imaginative power (Einbildungskraft), in
other words, in transcendence or metaphysics itself. It is a kind of
“schematism” that defines the essence of reason as the “positing of the
same”. Schematization, the constitution of the same, fashioning and
fictioning, is categorization in the Aristotelian sense or idea in the Platonic
sense. Idea, category, and schema consequently connect to the same
fictioning force of reason that Kant called the “forming force” of reason or
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transcendental imagination. And despite its always being a question of a
formation of a world of man, of how the world always produces or pretends
itself, this transcendental bildungskraft has nothing to do with the
presentation of the subject. The world, being, and the truth remain as a stela,
they are characterized by slowness or even permanence – and this is the very
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articulation of the being itself. Stelae of man, of representation and thereby
a finalizing system of belief: a myth that calls us to be a part of the world
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giving within this closure a gift of defining “us”.
Since Freud (and Nietzsche), the installation of the system –
modification of the Aristotelian schema of “recognition” by accounting for
processes of identification such as they do – implies an exclusion which in
turn is no longer merely that of physical suffering and illness, but that of
mental illness as well, of neurosis that is realized, constituted and “foreign”
and thus resistant to recognition. Lacoue-Labarthe tells us that this exclusion,
which pertains to insanity or madness, is not treated adequately in theories
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implicating identification through recognition. This “theory” is hidden even
in the realms of interactivity – at the precise point where any thought about
“protagonism” arises. Still, Malcolm Le Grice avers that if the early traditions
of (pictorial) representation can be characterized by the representation of the
object to us – confirming our power over objects – and if the more recent
state of our representational (cinematic) technologies have placed us as
spectators within the representation of unfolding events, then interactivity for
Le Grice seems to offer a representation of our intervention in those events.
He argues that where the cinematic implicates us as viewers through the
processes of identification supported on a layer of photographic, sensory
simulation, and an illusion of instantaneous presence, interactivity promises
us implication as protagonists, which means a continuity of psycho-cultural
enterprise from pictorial representation using perspective to the dynamic
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“narrative” of represented events.
But Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy hold that, in the history of the
notion of identification, the experience of hysteria joins identification when