Page 277 - Cyberculture and New Media

268 Desistant Media
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We are witnessing a “strange perspective”, but not without a price to
pay. Paz refers to Duchamp’s Given as a work that will be fulfilled only
through voyeurism additionally defines an act in which somebody sees
him/herself seeing something. As well, the target sees us, and my gaze will
complete the work only on condition that I voluntarily become part of the
work. This means that mimesis is construction made only a priori by the
subject, not as pro priori relation set by the world beyond us. This is a self
deconstruction of the truth in the artwork, the impossibility of exposure –
even the lesson from early anamorphoses was that it, according to Sabine
Melchior-Bonnet, forces us to admit that reality must be interpreted, and,
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everything that seems enduring is in fact transitory .
Derrida has been criticized for lacking positive and concrete socio-
political aims and purposes. Despite his selective focus — linguistic and
philosophical thought over political and social thought — the spirit of
deconstruction remains the same for him. Deconstructive interrogation for
Derrida destabilizes and complicates the opposition between droit (as law,
convention, institution, positive law) on the one hand and Nature and natural
law on the other. It mimics the oscillation of difference or the displacement
of oppositionalism and puts into question the authority of the questioning-
form itself in order “to show the constitutive undecidability, radical
incompletion or untotalizability of textual, institutional, cultural, social and
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economic structures”.
For Lai deconstruction is a double-movement between an empirical
interrogation of law-as-droit and an interrogation of the subjection of this
interrogation; an apolitical movement that formulates logico-formal
paradoxes together with the events that are evidently political. In relation to
justice and law-as-droit, Derrida writes that “deconstruction takes place in
the interval that separates the undeconstructibility of justice from the
deconstructibility of droit (authority, legitimacy and so on)”. Accordingly,
justice is an experience of aporia: experience is a passage, a traversal towards
a destination. Aporia, as the impasse of meaning, does not permit (direct)
passage. The experience of this impossibility is the aporia of justice. Or, in
this sense, media is traumatized with two or more madnesses: in the heart of
the media modes, whether psychological or desistant, lies trauma towards the
represented. Mimesis will never cease to be the same as it is, as an aporia of
imitation. There’s a long history of communicative trauma following each
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other besides the latent desistant media mode, as Kittler has already shown.
But should consider the mises-en-abyme produced by media technology:
within desistance, as a passage, there is no absolute destination, no end for
the search of the figure of man. Our picture of ourselves stays unclear within
this undecidable process – and this is our part, instead of any ethical or
aesthetical aporia, within humanity. Different modes of violence do not
necessarily mean technological determination (Kittler, Williams) as a