Page 260 - Cyberculture and New Media

Seppo Kuivakari 251
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the viewer’s desire to look and the (imaged) woman’s protest at that look.
Mimesis strikes back at the viewer: Paranoid Mirror implicates the spectator
in the visual spectacle, inasmuch as the viewer is herself photographed from
behind by a wall-mounted video camera and projected into the image field of
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the mirror. We see ourselves looking at the mirror. It is not a mirror any
more; it is mise-en-abyme, of face(s) so familiar turning into strange and
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unfamiliar. Here is an oscillation between absence and presence never
achieving its goal in a sense of a meaningful ending. Within frames such as
Paranoid Mirror, the subject desists. Desistance resists. With Lacoue-
Labarthe’s words, it remains paradoxically constructive, fictionable at its
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very origin.
Because in the Unheimliche there’s no solid ground for any type of
reasoning, hyperbologic (as in Paranoid Mirror) stays indifferentiable as
such, always imperceptible. The greater the reach for identification with the
other, the more the attempts fails: the closer it is, the further it is, the more
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proper, the more improper, and vice versa. Desistant experience machinery
creates paranoid fiction through circumstances of surveillance. Fictionable
media speculate, as is the case with Paranoid Mirror, the Unheimliche of our
identity, the possibility of transformation. This is the potential for
transgression that Rokeby considers in the opening of his highly influential
article Transforming Mirrors, such that

the medium not only reflects back, but also refracts what is
given; what is returned is ourselves, transformed and
processed. To the degree that the technology reflects
ourselves back recognizably, it provides a self-image, a
sense of self. To the degree that the technology transforms
our image in the act of reflection, it provides us with a
sense of relation between this self and the experienced
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world.

The first possibility given by Rokeby is again a narcissistic loop; it
is autopoeisis, mimetology of the autobiographical self, which has the power
to predict the world, the symbolic order of things. Second possibility,
processed image of our selves, is on the contrary a subject on arrival.
Through the double path of narcissistic and, in paranoid mirror, at the same
time hysterical identifications, one does not thus end up with a concept, but
with the formation which endlessly redoubles and undoes itself, as Lacoue-
Labarthe says, of a constitution of identity through a being-with-the-Other
which only takes place in the negation of the Other. This negation is also an
appropriation: but the one who appropriates has no “proper”, he is not a
subject. Consequently, if there must be a question of origin, the latter takes
place (or arrives) neither through a subject nor through an other, nor through