Page 273 - Cyberculture and New Media

264 Desistant Media
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they activate alternative or poetic possibilities for correspondences or links
between language and the object world that are different than the tacit
associative network of links and the automatisms in everyday language. In
fact, it is this difference that for Morse makes the well-worn traces of the
mystic writing pad first visible and that also reveals the Giver of Names as a
machine for poeisis or fresh or creative meaning-making from the substance
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of the material world. Enigmatism, the poetic strange consumes the
rational: mind means not automatics, and in the case of The Giver of Names,
no “new” structures of truth are necessarily revealed. I see that a trace is an
abyss in the sense defined by Lacoue-Labarthe: our task is not to surpass it
but to understand it from its own conditions.
By our critical excavation we can assume a slow withdrawal from
the metaphors such as the light of the sun (of truth) to the metaphor of the
black sun (of mimesis) provided by the mekhane of media art. The good of
sun, as Plato thought, turns into a metaphor of, not bad but disappropriation:
concrete references are gone with the light. What is left is the black sun of
madness as Georges Bataille has predicted. Thus the historical shift in the
reasoning of art takes place between pedagogy and madness. This is not to
suggest that madness has been historically produced for us as an alternative,
but as the way it has always been a part of us, our essence as human beings,
the familiar of us.
History of desistance in media art has been a history, rather than
denying madness, to predict it, to form it in various ways. To comprehend the
world also implies the acknowledgment of the Unheimlich within this world,
within us: we negotiate, with all our capability, how to organize the known
and the unknown, Heimlich and Unheimlich, in our lives. This, For Lacoue-
Labarthe, means mimesis.
We have to be fully aware of that there is no goal for this
negotiation in a strict, teleological sense. From the pedagogical perspective,
we must understand this project as an endless, infinite process of producing
the other in the self. In this tradition, augmentation is a guarantee for
allobiography. Desistant media mode is dispossessive in its allobiography;
there, it doesn’t divide the teleological aporias of any given dialectics,
including interpretations of the binary oppositions presented by Derrida. In its
withdrawal desistance, however, shares something in common with Derrida’s
concept of dissemination, processes of truth and non-truth set upon each
other endlessly and without destination.
This means that we cannot see the presence itself in the mirrors of
media art, since presence does not present itself; instead, in the erasure of the
letter there is the multiplication of screens as emblems.
The argument Derrida makes about the polysemy is that this kind of
project belongs to the attending discourse. Its style is that of the
representative surface. It forgets that its horizon is framed. The difference