Page 261 - Cyberculture and New Media

252 Desistant Media
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the Same nor through the Other but through an asociality, or through an
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altered sociality. It is imaginary in a sense that there is no oneness to
depend upon but understandably at the end not forming any such (id)entity. It
stays, as inside Rokeby’s cybernetic loop, in a state of arrival. We must
remember that in passing, as Lacoue-Labarthe says, subject is destabilizing
the Lacanian distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic. What
Lacoue-Labarthe undergoes here is the experience of the ineluctable: I
present myself, or rather write myself, sign my own desistance, the
impossible itself, as an experience of the double bind, the poetic experience
of the double bind, whereas, according to Silverman, the successful
imaginary alignment with an image can be seen as something that evokes
values like “wholeness” and “unity”. Silverman accentuates that all this
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radiates “ideality”.
Hyperbology as such critiques the idea of mimesis as adequation.
Any work like Paranoid Mirror or Zerseher is a story how the new born
sight has yet no identity to hold onto, to identify with in terms of passion and
catharsis: as in Paranoid Mirror or Zerseher, or as in Alba d´Urbano’s 1995
work Touch Me or in Max Dean and Kristian Horton’s Be Me (2002), our
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passion turns into obsession, to look, to see, finally, beyond man. This is a
modern thought, still, from James Joyce and T.S. Eliot to Franz Kafka and
Claude Simon: art is escape from personality. What is left behind is not
catharsis but, as Lacoue–Labarthe has named one of his key essays, the “echo
of the subject”. A deconstructive reading of Aristotelian heritage shows that
it is a distortion in the continuum of evercoming. As desistance, Lacan’s
camera is out of order – at least for the symbolic order as a structure for
imitating the world in the name of the “real”.
For Lacoue-Labarthe, the paradox of mimesis lies in the fact that in
order to do everything, to imitate everything, in order to (re)present or
(re)produce everything, one must oneself be nothing and have nothing proper
to oneself. Only the being without properties or specificity is able to present
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or produce in general. The logic of paradox is always articulated around the
division between appearance and reality, presence and absence, the same and
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the other, or identity and difference. Through becoming something else, as
both Touch Me and Be Me by nature propose, mimesis is always a matter of
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disappropriation, or even dispossession. Deconstructive power of a constant
identification of the other by semblance threatens the traditional schemata of
truth as adequation in the work of art. What is set forth in mise-en-abyme is
the law of impropriety. The hyperbological is unceasing, endless – thus,
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without resolution. For Lacoue-Labarthe, the logic of mimesis is
controversy. Mise-en-abyme, in the works of art, can be seen as a tool for
“folding” the truth, producing folders of uncertainty into the operations of the
truth itself. Here mirror image does not represent, it re-presents any
information available.