Page 248 - Cyberculture and New Media

Seppo Kuivakari 239
______________________________________________________________
one traces its examination, on this side of imitation and contagion, right back
to an appropriation of the other, who can only result from a community, from
an already given being-with-the-Other. Through the double path of
narcissistic and hysterical identifications, a path never absolutely reduced,
one does not end up with a concept, but with the formation, which endlessly
redoubles and undoes itself, of a constitution of identity through a being-
with-the-Other which only takes place in the negation of the Other. This
negation is also an appropriation, but the one who appropriates has no
“proper”, he is not a subject. Consequently, if there must be a question of
origin, the latter takes place (or arrives) neither through a subject nor through
an other, nor through the Same nor through the Other (l’Autre) but through
29
asociality, or through an altered sociality. This is not only a modernist
rupture in the transparency of the visual regime – Bolter and Grusin say
hypermediacy, the “hold” of technology, becomes the sum of all the
unconventional unusual, and in some sense deviant ways of looking: it is
multiple and deviant in its suggestion of multiplicity, a multiplicity of
30
viewing positions and a multiplicity of relationships to the object in view –
but a centuries old technique of the artist. Philosophically, we can understand
this not as inter-, but alteration.
Within this, the identification process as such will not be finalized.
Or fragmented, as the myth of “modern” in the evaluation of modernism
suggests. Instead, it will continue, infinitely.
Now, with extensive use of desistant motifs in art, there might be a
certain deconstructive process happening that dis-erects the human from the
image – simulation from the emotion machine, as ecological media theory
supposes – of ourselves: an unstructuring of being and its relation to the
world. Hypothetically, we can understand that desistant media are
misappropriated tools and thereby produce, as we will see, the uncanniness
within (and of) mimesis.
31
To “desist” is, in Derrida’s words, to correspond to a kind of
madness, obsession and schiz, siege and caesura, double bind and
impossibility of reappropriation, hyperbology, ineluctable dis-identification.
What interests us here is neither the subject nor the author. Nor is it the
“other”, whatever one places under the term, of the subject of the author. It
would be rather what is also at play in the subject; what, in the subject,
“deserts” the subject itself, and which, prior to any “self-possession” (and
following another mode than that of dispossession), is the dissolution, the
defeat of the subject in the subject or as the subject. The (de)constitution of
the subject, or the loss of the subject is to conceive of the loss of what one
has never had, a kind of “originary” in a sense of “constitute” loss (of self).
Lacoue-Labarthe’s way of parenthesizing the “de” in “(de)constitution”
signifies for Derrida that one must not hear it (any more than in the case of
desistance) as a negativity affecting an originary and positive constitution.