Page 259 - Cyberculture and New Media

250 Desistant Media
______________________________________________________________
invagination. With Lacoue-Labarthe’s words, mirror is there for the
mimetician. It is only a certain means, a trope, for (re)presenting the
mimetician. One must understand that the ´trick of the mirror´ is a turn or
trick of conjuring or illusionism (thaumatopoiia, from thauma, thaw,
teaomai). From the mirror we pass to painting, from there to poetry, and – in
the sense of techne – back to technology, but even before that the matter for
Lacoue-Labarthe is settled. For him specularization, the actual trick of the
mirror, has precisely this function: it assigns to mimesis its means. It makes
of mimesis a “theoretical” practice that organizes itself within the visible. It
delimits mimesis as (re)presentation/reproduction, as “imitation”, as
installation with a character of veri-similitude (the true here being determined
in terms of idea and aletheia), speculation (the mise-en-abyme, the theoretical
reduction) does not happen all by itself. It remains fragile: mimesis is
precisely the absence of appropriative means whereas platonic philosophy
behind onto-typology presupposes the possession of a proper image (of
62
man).
Within this framework, a work of art schematised here should not be
seen as a mirror for a subject, as it is framed by psychoanalysis and cinema,
but as a mise-en-abyme, an endlessly reflective abyss, an enunciation of our
identity. I suggest that we read Paranoid Mirror as we read Lacoue-Labarthe
by rejecting the privileging of vision in speculative mimetology and contrast
it with a presensual and rhythmic repetition of a nonexistent original.
Hershman Leeson says that Paranoid Mirror

uses reflection as a means of portraiture and reflected self-
portraiture. Though obscured and distanced, the artist’s
reflection watches from behind the central figures.
Paranoid Mirror engages ideas of reflection, tracking,
surveillance and voyeurism and uses the viewer as a direct
interface […] underscoring the often mistaken paranoid
fear of being watched as well as the relationship of
63
paranoia to voyeurism and surveillance.

As viewers walk in the room where Leeson’s mirror is installed,
they see images on the mirror, but the closer they walk to the mirror the
stranger it gets. For instance, they see themselves reflected but behind them
they also see themselves from behind – now, when we see ourselves merge
into the abysses of a paranoid mirror, we can say that mimesis is finally a
polysemic, even catachrestic concept, an infinite oscillation between original
64
and copy.
This is a commentary on control and surveillance: how are we in the
picture? Abigail Solomon-Godeau, in a feminist interpretation of Paranoid
Mirror, says that the work contains sequences that stage the conflict between