Page 274 - Cyberculture and New Media

Seppo Kuivakari 265
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between polysemy and textual dissemination is precisely difference itself, “an
implacable difference”. This difference is of course indispensable to the
production of meaning (and that is why between polysemy and dissemination
the difference is very slight). But to the extent that meaning presents itself,
gathers itself together, says itself, and is able to stand there, it erases
difference and casts it aside. Structure (the differential) is a necessary
condition for the semantic, but the semantic is not itself, in itself, structural.
The seminal, on the contrary, disseminates itself without ever having been
itself and without coming back to itself. Its very engagement, its division, its
involvement in its own multiplication, which is always carried out at a loss
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and unto death, is what constitutes it as such in its living proliferation.
Likewise, desistance veils the processes of truth, as Lacoue-Labarthe has
pronounced; it is there, and it is not, it has it freedom in its own
multiplication.
Works from Lynn Hershman Leeson, of which A Room of One’s
Own (1991-1993) and Deep Contact (1990) produce ironic interpretations of
possession, evoking the Lacanian problem proposed by Lacoue-Labarthe. In
A Room of One’s Own, Hershman Leeson lets the spectator be immersed,
gazing into the peep show of the work – into the bedroom of the woman
under surveillance. The viewer observes a total of four video scenes or
tableaux featuring a seductive, blonde woman. These tableaux can be
experienced in a total of seventeen ways, depending on how the sequence is
sparked by the viewer’s mobilization of the interactive mechanism. In one of
the four video sequences, the woman carries out what resembles a
commercial phone sex conversation with the caller; the agreed-upon fantasy
is that of a prison cell in which the two have sex. In another, and for our
inquiry more important sequence, the woman addresses the viewer directly as
she strips to her underwear, protesting her visual objectification and
surveillance (“Don’t look at me”, “Go away”). The monologue here is an
extremely cold coquetry, mirroring with no shame back the viewer to
him/herself.
Each of these sequences is visually activated according to where the
viewer focuses the movable viewer within a miniature roomlike environment
in the “real” space in front of the virtual space of the video screen.
Containing a bed, a video monitor in which the viewer’s eyes are both
projected and mirrored, a telephone, a chair, and a heap of clothing, each of
these objects, when focused on by the viewer, activates one of the
audio/video sequences. Focusing on the bed, for example, produces an audio
track of jouncing bedsprings, the sounds of lovemaking, a tinny radio song,
and a ghostly composite image of a woman imprisoned behind the bedposts.
With its erotised atmosphere, seductive protagonist, and privatised viewing
conditions, the work deliberately mimics the scopic economy of the peep
show. Invited to peep and provided the desired spectacle of femininity staged