Page 256 - Cyberculture and New Media

Seppo Kuivakari 247
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at the precise spot where the spectator fixes his/her gaze. This is a strange
world, producing strange perceptions.
In this sense I speak about the desistant figure of man in the mirrors
of Paranoid Mirror or Zerseher: although we see ourselves represented in the
mirror it is not “us” in a sense of autobiography but of allobiography. Florian
Rötzer holds that in Hershman Leeson’s works we see how the avant-garde’s
“escape from the image” leads consistently toward the appropriation and use
of new media. He continues that it is possible to remove boundaries in one
place without erecting them somewhere else. Rötzer seeks an oscillation
between image and its viewer: there are interfaces everywhere connecting us
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to the world, even as they simultaneously separate us from it.
What the poststructuralists call mimetology involves subordinating
mimesis to a deadening logic based on visual reproduction, which they see as
typical of the western ontotheological project in general. Mimesis understood
as rhythmic repetition without closure, an infinite oscillation between original
and copy, is posited as a never fully successful hyperbological antidote to
mimetology, as the uncanny caesura in a speculative system that seeks to
stifle its playful uncertainties. The hyperbologic, as I take it, targets Lacan´s
privileging of vision in the mirror stage and in the imaginary, which depend
on a conceptualisation of the subject in narcissistic terms. As Silverman has
condensed the problem under discussion here, the category through which
Lacan concretises the gaze is not God or the master, but the camera. The
camera, like God and master, represents one of the persistent screens through
which we have traditionally apprehended the gaze. Lacan metaphorizes the
gaze as a camera so as to characterize it as an apparatus whose only function
is to put us in the picture – it does not determinate what that picture will be,
nor what it will mean for us to be “there”. Finally, Lacan´s metaphorization
of the gaze as a camera represents that gesture through which he most
energetically dissociates it not only from such psychoanalytically specific
signifiers of the subjectivity as “lack” and “desire”, but also from such
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conventional designators of the human as “psyche”, “spirit”, or “soul”.
Lacoue-Labarthe (partly with Lacan, partly against him) constructs a
nonidentical, uncanny version of the self. He calls it “allobiographical” – the
“novel” of an other (be it a double) – rather than autobiographical. Such a
self, he claims, is not based on specular reflection, on the imitation of the
same, but rather on the Unheimliche, rhythmic repetition of an original that
never existed in itself, a perpetual spacing without end and instead of being
reality, echoing Aristotelian empowerment over nature, is replaced by self-
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defined and reinvented reality.
The transgression goes further yet: before Grahame Weinbren’s
1999 work Frames, viewers are able to transform a present day person into a
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moulded “there”, recalling something of Lacan. To participate is not to
engage. It is, as is the case with Zerseher, to enter the obscure, the very