Page 253 - Cyberculture and New Media

244 Desistant Media
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study of early Romanticism in literature. Still, Lacoue-Labarthe is not
drawing substantial differences between fragmentative and desistant modes
of art; modernist art seems for him a monolith of resistant information modes,
modes of counter-reading and counter-picturing.
Figure, for Lacoue-Labarthe, cannot present the true story of man,
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instead, the word “figure” always contains fiction. If we follow the thought
of desistance carefully enough, we might point out that camera, as a
modelling tool, lies us, in an act of dispossession, into the picture – even
when it is monitoring us. This means participation as dispossessive
desistaction: a poetic paradox instead of proprioceptivity, which derives
etymologically from proprius, personal and characteristic, and capere, to
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grasp, to catch. This, in short, alludes to personal grasping and, ultimately,
possession akin to safeguard.
Mimesis is a concept of fascination. Historically, the word mimesis
has denoted representation and imitation, but, when chained to imitation, it
has also meant repetition. Greek word “mimesis” belongs to the word family,
whose root is mimos, an imitator or mime. Other members of the family are
mimesthai (imitate, represent), mimetes (person who represents or imitates),
mimesis (practise of imitation), mimetikos (something capable of imitating;
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also the object of) and mimema (representation). Mimesis could also mime
something that is missing – and, interestingly, also the truth. For Derrida
repetition means giving meaning to multiplicity of reality and experience.
Repetition, a structuring of reality and experience within a certain historical
context, works as a supplement for nature: by giving certain structure to
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natural phenomena, not unproblematically.
Lacoue-Labarthe postulates that repetition creates the manners of
construction, of Ge-stell, so to speak. Repetition helps us to draw the line
between mimetic and non-mimetic, but also between the real and the
fantastic, familiar and non-familiar, life and fiction. In his celebrated essay on
typography, Lacoue-Labarthe holds that the absence of rhythm is equivalent
to the infinite paradoxical appearances of the mimetic itself. The lack of the
imitated reveals what is in fact unpresentable – the imitated, repeated. This
signifying faculty is a mimetic faculty: music (harmony and instrumentation
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on the other, rhythm on the other hand) imitates. The weird and the
fantastic, madness, these all assemble to create a world of stories, and vice
versa: stories are weird, or they are mad: they are fantastic. This means also
the stories produced by media art exhibit a certain faculty of possession,
which makes the mental guarantees of aprioric world tremble, the supposed a
priori order of things.
Mise-en-abyme is a term used for multiple purposes from heraldry to
art history and literature. The principle of mise-en-abyme is that of a
miniaturised form within the work, which either reflects the work as a whole
or at least a major theme. The term was coined by Andre Gide, who