Page 257 - Cyberculture and New Media

248 Desistant Media
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abyssal of the strange. In Weibren’s work, viewers are implicated in a sharing
of the hysteria and tension that female inmates felt in an 1850’s experience of
imprisonment. In this strict sense Unheimliche, as strange or uncanny, is to be
understood as that which throws us back outside of the Heimliche, that is to
say, outside the innermost, outside the habitual, the familiar, the unthreatened
security. It is in relation to the Unheimliche thus defined or redefined, in
relation to this overpowering or this original violence that is nothing other
than the incommensurability of being or the nothing, that man himself is
determined as das Unheimlicheres, that which is more uncanny. In his book
Poetry as Experience Lacoue-Labarthe claims that the Umheimliche,
estrangement, affects existence, undoes its reality. The Unheimliche does not
open up another domain as something to take us “outside the human”, but
ratrher opens up a domain “turned toward that which is human” – existence
itself made strange. The Unheimliche is thus essentially a matter of language.
Language is the locus of the Umheimliche. Language is that what “estranges”
the human and is, at the same time, essential part of his humanity. Language
is not the Umheimliche, though only language contains the possibility of the
Umheimliche. But the Unheimliche appears, or rather, sets in (and is it
always, already there) something turns in man and displaces the human,
something in man even overturns, expulsing him from the human – along
with a certain posture in language: the artistic posture, or the mimetic. That
is, the most natural posture in language, as long as one thinks or pre-
understands language as a mimeme. In the infinite cross-purposes of the
“artistic” and the “natural”, in linguistic misprision, the Unheimliche is,
finally, forgetfulness. The motif of forgetfulness and turnaround (reversal)
indicates here that the Unheimliche, because of language, is the catastrophe
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of the human.
An allobiography of man can now be defined, in Lacoue-Labarthe´s
vocabulary, as the one who does violence, which is to say, the one who
transgresses the limits of the Heimliche and is heading towards the
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Unheimliche. This is to place oneself in danger, not just to cross the tragic,
but to stay in the abyssal of strange. Entrance into Frames traces a
transformation from a visible, symbolic order to a more imaginary realm that
desists (endlessly) meaningful interpretations and suppressive behaviour of
media technology, the very stele of media ecology.
Lacoue-Labarthe stresses that the figure is never one and that the
imaginary destroys at least as much as it helps construct. This explains,
perhaps, why the subject in the mirror (of media) is first of all a subject in
“desistance”. There is no essence of the imaginary, and the subject desists
because it must always confront at least two figures (or one figure that is at
least double). Lacoue-Labarthe postulates that destabilizing division of the
figural muddles the distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic, and
broaches at the same time the negativity or absolute alterity of the “real”,