Page 271 - Cyberculture and New Media

262 Desistant Media
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provide the world to us and how media see us within this world. In this query
of information modes, we have to keep in mind the words of Lacoue-
Labarthe: nothing differs from mimesis more than possession.
We have also seen how mimesis for Lacoue-Labarthe means a
paradox, a logic that is intertwined in the relation between presence and
absence, same and different or identity and the other. This logic is not
dialectical but endless, infinite and unclear: it is also a faculty of producing
real and delusion. It is a faculty without a principle, which in the end could
answer whether a production is truthful or not. Mimesis is thus an endless,
infinite paradox; it is not a concept, or an object, at most it can be seen as
logic. At the same time it is impurity; a relation to something else, a try to
make adequate with something else without assurance to this desire for
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identity to be certain.
The subject of philosophy appears to Lacoue-Labarthe as a
(de)constitution of the subject and therefore it is unclean, wrenched from
itself. It is a subject identifying itself endlessly. The self is a subject of its
own infinite, unfinished and fragmented utterance, which mimetics make
unclean and contaminated. Its identity is always uncertain, vanishing, present
but still beyond any reach. Lacoue-Labarthe:

Mirror is there for the mimetician. It is only a certain
means, a trope, for (re)presenting (darstellen) the
mimetician […] one must understand that the “trick of
the mirror” is a turn or trick of conjuring or illusionism
(thaumatopoiia, from thauma, thaw, cf. theaomai) […]
From the mirror we pass to painting, from there to poetry,
and the matter is settled […] Specularization (“the 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
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precisely the absence of appropriative means”

In place of the identical, mimesis names the similar. Rokeby,
through The Giver of Names (1997), refers to this difference in a fascinating
way: the giver of names creates thought from the objects put in front of the
work. The installation includes an empty pedestal, a video camera and a
computer system. The camera observes the top of the pedestal. A visitor may