Page 258 - Cyberculture and New Media

Seppo Kuivakari 249
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whereas Lacan – in seminar VII – says that the mirror image fulfils a role as
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limit: it is that which cannot be crossed. This thought can be seen as
limiting as the other philosophical postulations of the repressing regime of
visuality.
A few words on the differences between onto-typology and the
concept of mimesis by Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe are probably necessary
to distinguish existing theorization of “mimetology” from the very approach
of deconstruction.
First, we can ask if media histories are often told as crossing points
of experience or if they’ve been based on dualistic systems of perception in
which a rapt, timeless presence of perception constructed by onto-typological
philosophy is contrasted with lower, mundane or quotidian forms of seeing or
listening that challenge this Western tradition of thought. We can even ask, as
Rosalind Krauss has done, whether modernist vision with its “all-at-oneness”
is founded on the cancellation of the empirical conditions of perception,
including the very experience of successiveness. Despite the endless flow of
questions we can say that attention and distraction have been not two
essentially different states but been existing on a single continuum and thus,
as Jonathan Crary emphasizes, attention has been a dynamic process,
intensifying and diminishing, rising and falling, ebbing and flowing
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according to an indeterminate set of variables. Inasmuch as Walter
Benjamin suggests that distraction and concentration form polar opposites,
Crary argues that attention and distraction cannot be thought outside of a
continuum in which the two ceaselessly flow into one another, but as part of a
social field in which the same imperatives and forces incite one and the
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other.
Instead of a cancellation of successiveness, a certain field of the type
might be the one of the hyperbologic. Cancellation, a serious myth of the
modern, turns into an infinite grasp for identification as is the case with many
deserting characters within media arts: there’s simply no pedagogical
ahistorical oscillation in one of the crossings at stake here.

2. Unheimliche Art
During our efforts thus far to demonstrate what is valid processing of the very
thing hyperbologic we have been forced to defer certain aspects of the
problem. But now we historically distinguish two different definitions for an
(id)entity represented in arts: (1) traditional, autobiographical, and (2)
transgressive, allobiographical.
In the continuum of transgression – without any sustainable
destination for our identification process – Paranoid Mirror produces a lack
which, in turn, leaves us within the field of the threatened security: infelicity
is embedded, as Derrida points out, in the act’s very structure, the structure
that can taken over by anyone at any time, the same structure which assumes