Page 267 - Cyberculture and New Media

258 Desistant Media
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Writing and madness must be sublated together, claims Lacoue-
Labarthe. This is why the hermeneutics of the unthought finds in obliteration
– in a certain erasure of the letter – its surest defence against madness. It is
obliteration that all of Heidegger’s operations ultimately take place.
Obliteration is the other of the “stratagem of é-loignement” and the primitive
operation or manoeuvre on which the whole strategy of thought is built: é-
loigment means both to bring nearer and carrying away. If danger lies in
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madness, the enemy for Heidegger is the letter. Lacoue-Labarthe thinks this
“stratagem” could be reversible; this madness is not to be fought back but to
make it the logic of identification, which finally is the erasure of the letter of
man.
Closed circuit video was among the first inventions of context
awareness in media art, if we understand context awareness now as
awareness of the other as allobiography: the spectator enters the stage that
could be imagined but never as familiar but strange. For Dan Graham, the
mirror takes on a much wider meaning. He uses it as a device for creating
awareness of identifications and identities that are essentially social. All
Graham’s works are directly or indirectly concerned with bringing about such
identifications. He refers to his performances and mirror spaces as being “a
feedback device governing behaviours – a superego” or “subconscious” to
the conalienation, specifically to the longing for a sense of identity and
home. The mirror as it is used by Graham – in my mind, as mise-en-abyme –
therefore has a direct connection with architecture, and not only with
architecture as such but also with power. The necessity of deconstructing the
image and the position of the subject has produced a paradigm shift in the art.
The inappropriateness of previous forms of art is neither the cause of that
paradigm shift nor a mere fed, but a necessity and logical consequence of the
shift but for me, the motif of mise-en-abyme is not a consequence of the shift
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but a theme underlying in arts’ essence. An illuminating example of mise-
en-abyme in closed-circuit video art of the era is Graham’s other installation
Opposing Mirrors and Video Monitors on Time Delay (1974) with multiple
echoes of dispossession. Visitors to this space find a variety of available
scenarios: a view of what had happened five seconds earlier, as reflected with
delay in the mirror on the other side of the room; a view, in the mirror nearest
them, of themselves and the nearby video monitor; or a faraway view in the
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opposite mirror. This uncanniness of reflection – Graham arguing that there
is no autonomous subject and that he uses mirrors to create alluring spaces
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that at the same time impose subtle forms of authority and self-censorship –
reminds us of the reflecting trap of Velasquez’ painting Las Meninas (1656),
which comes near the conjunction that Lacoue-Labarthe set between the
binary oppositions such as presence and absence of the observer and the
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observed, the artist and the model, a play that is never ceased.