Page 275 - Cyberculture and New Media

266 Desistant Media
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for the looking, the viewer is, in effect, both captivated and made acutely
aware of the equivocal nature of this voyeuristic scenario. The work becomes
a self-reflective space of ethical reflection, the critical intervention into the
mechanics of spectacle that is one of the consistent features of Hershman’s
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work.
Lacoue-Labarthe says that myth is considered as the originary poem
(Urgedicht) of a people. Which means that a people originates, exists as such
or identifies itself, appropriates itself – and that is to say, properly is itself –
only on the basis of myth. According to the mimetic logic or mimetologic
just evoked, myth is the means of identification, and the appeal to myth is the
demand for the appropriation of the means of identification, judged, in short,
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more decisive than those of the means of production. But already for
Derrida the principle of mimesis is differance, a productive freedom, but not
any elimination of ambiguity; mimesis contributes to the profusion of images,
words, thoughts, theories and action, without itself becoming tangible.
Mimesis thus resists theory and constructs a world of illusion, appearance,
aesthetics, and images in which existing worlds are appropriated, but changed
and re-interpreted in the processes of invagination: images are non-disposable
doubles that always stand in relation to what has preceded them and thus are
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never the origin, the inner, never outer but always by gestaltung doubled.
Derrida argues that Lévi-Strauss, like Rousseau, associates writing
with simple binary-opposition violence and falls preys to structuralism. He
points out that writing is violent insofar as it classifies and pigeonholes, going
against the différance-structured economy of writing. Accordingly, Derrida
believes that Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology fails to recognize the original
violence in writing. He then distinguishes three levels (tertiary structure) of
violence of writing: first, 1) the “ arche-violence”: “the originary violence of
language which consists in inscribing within a difference, in classifying, in
suspending the vocative absolute”; second, 2) the totalizing violence: the
force which organizes and assimilates the first violence into effects of
propriety; and, third, 3) the resistant violence: the returning force of what is
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excluded and repressed in the disciplinary system of language.
For Derrida the structure of violence is complex and its possibility –
writing – no less so. Arche-violence, loss of the proper, of absolute
proximity, of self-presence, in truth the loss of what has never taken place, of
a self-presence which has never been given but only dreamed of and always
already split, repeated, incapable of appearing to itself except in its own
disappearance (oscillation of the hyperbologic). Out of this arche-violence,
forbidden and therefore confirmed by a second violence that is reparatory,
protective, instituting the “moral”, prescribing the concealment of writing and
the effacement and obliteration of the so-called proper name which was
already dividing the proper, a third violence can possibly emerge or not (an
empirical possibility) within what is commonly called evil, war, indiscretion,