Page 278 - Cyberculture and New Media

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possessive media program, even if we now can, after Derrida, claim that the
idea of “Cartesian oppression” is in fact correct.
Even though the cultural content of voyeurism and the mode of the
gaze are inseparable from each other, the images will still break down and we
will remain in the middle of things, of pictures, of words, in the blindness
where Tiresias lives and tells infinitely the stories of him never actually
interpreting them. Lacoue-Labarthe argues that blindness is the empty space
between words, it is the gaze beyond the gaze. Also this is why poetry occurs
as the brutal revelation of the abyss that contains art and nevertheless
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constitutes it, as such, in its strangeness.
Instead of the interpretations made by psychoanalytical media
theory, the reflections in media art are often the deconstruction of the very
concept of “the self”. This renders all categories violently impure and results
in a destabilisation of all distinctions by what Derrida calls “differantielle
contamination”. Purity without violence is an impossibility due to the fact
that “iterability requires the origin to repeat itself originarily, to alter itself so
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as to have the value of origin, that is, to conserve itself”. Lacoue-Labarthe
and Nancy claim that it would be fruitless to identify the philosophical and
the political: the political marks the place where the distinction between
philosophy and non-philosophy, between philosophy and its unthought,
becomes blurred. This place, the place of the political, would always have the
character of a limit. But this limit is not simply restrictive: it marks both an
inside and an outside. In marking out the limit of philosophy it therefore
traces an identity. The political is both at the limit of philosophy and forms its
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limit. We can see now how this political form of thinking is tending
towards an aporia of totalising, repressing violence, whereas within
desistance there’s still a trifle of contamination.
Totalizing madness can also be elaborated through concept of
“scopic regime” with which Martin Jay referred to as Cartesian
perspectivalism and Chris Jenks to modern power. Jenks says this modern
power has the deft touch of a “look” in interaction. It no longer requires the
hard-edge and the explicit realization of the ancien régime, through a “look”
it can absorb all and do so without being noticed, or say all without ever
revealing its true intentions. Modern power to Jenks means pervasive power,
though not omnipotent, because it cautiously acts on and in relation to the
scopic regime. Also for Jenks the “gaze” and the conscious manipulation of
images are the dual instruments in the exercise and function of modern
systems of power and social control. This cultural network, grid, is, finally,
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our scopic regime. But there are also uneconomical procedures, disorder,
of course, but, as Derrida says, differance that produces what it forbids makes
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possible the very thing that it makes impossible. What, then, happens with
this oscillation to madness, or, rather, to the myth of madness?