Page 276 - Cyberculture and New Media

Seppo Kuivakari 267
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rape; which consists of revealing by effraction the so-called proper name, the
originary violence which has severed the proper from its property and its self-
sameness (proprété). Derrida names the third violence as violence of
reflection, which denutes the native non-identity, classification as
denaturation of the proper, and identity as the abstract moment of the
concept. We can all accept Derrida’s idea that it is on this tertiary level, that
of the empirical consciousness, that of the common concept of violence (and
the system of the moral law and of transgression) whose possibility remain
yet unthought, should no doubt be situated. The last violence is all the more
complex in its structure because it refers at the same time to the two inferior
levels of arche-violence and of law (modern art has many times been
confronted by law). In effect, it reveals the first nomination which was
already an expropriation, but it denudes also that which since then functioned
as the proper, the so-called proper, substitute of the deferred proper,
perceived by the social and moral consciousness as the proper, the reassuring
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seal of self-identity, the secret.
We can see from this differentiation how desistant modes of art
differ from resistant art in the deferral of the proper instead of resisting this
substituted proper presented through totalising violence of media machinery
through ages.
As effects of arche-writing, these three levels of violence together
constitute the endless cycle of the violence against violence phenomenon or
what Derrida calls an “economy of violence”. For Derrida, discourse can only
do itself violence and negate itself in order to affirm itself. Philosophy, as the
discourse of the Self, can only open itself to the question of violence within
and by it. It is an economy: “violence against violence, light against light”.
“One never escapes the economy of war”. In other words, if metaphysics is a
violence of assimilation, one must fight against this violence with a certain
other violence. It is this endless cycling, or the tertiary structure, of violence,
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which makes the economy of violence irreducible. But what are the ethical
impacts of allobiography? The writing of media art from our standpoint stays
not in a state of aporia of discontinuity, but in a latent state of a infinite mise-
en-abyme. Writing chews writing. Thus, the ethics are: arche-violence waves
from within us. In mirrors of art analysed here we are more than just an
autobiography, which always censors the image of ourselves – mastery over
submission in search for identity over difference. This logos which today
defines differently the circumstances of the culture of mirrors than those
pedagogical perspectives of, let’s say, Kircher’s mises-en-abyme. Still the
desistant mode is the same than the Baroque mirror culture already produced:
allobiography instead of autobiography that Phelan thinks is a resistant
representational mode of information towards the stability of media – or
transparency.