Page 279 - Cyberculture and New Media

270 Desistant Media
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Mimesis, as opposed to possession as an optical discipline, and as
opposed to ideology of mythical censorship technologies, which in all their
mimetology deny the possible mad(n)essence of man, shows that desistant
media, producing obscure sights of madness, are not a modern,
psychoanalytical master-machine. Instead, these thaumatic machines are – in
all of their violent deferrals – differance engines. For Lacoue-Labarthe the
incoherence, the excess, the lack of control, this whole movement of a racing
motor, a mad machine indeed escapes mastery. The appearance of separation
in particular mise-en-abyme is the mechanism of desistance. We have seen
how the question of the “artist” for artists like Della Porta, Kircher, Duchamp
and Hershman Leeson forms an ambiguous project: whereas the engineer is
the controller of the knowledge to technology, the artist uses this knowledge
to question the nature of the technology at hand. Hence, arche-violence. It is
not resistant towards technology, but looks upon the nature of technology’s
power to enunciate: arche-writing, or original mimesis. We can say that the
oeuvre of the artists here is set against possession, against totalising violence
of economical media mode.
Mirror is one mode of media that encompassed the production of no
one, but two madnesses. Madness of media does not start with the typewriter
as Kittler claims; we have seen desistant features from the mirror cabinets of
Della Porta and Kircher, features where gestures are not autobiographical but
allobiographical and thus the other of us deferring from ourselves as ethical
trait clinging between freedom and responsibility laid by history of an endless
mimesis of man.
This challenges onto-typology in a violent manner: since Plato,
education or training, political Bildung has been understood as taking the
mimetic process as starting point. Plato challenges this, dreaming precisely of
a (philosophical) self-grounding of the political (i.e. cutting through the
mimetological double bind), admittedly with an idea of the Idea that is itself
paradigmatic (and belonging, in consequence, to the mimetological). The
crucial point is that Bildung is always thought on the basis of archaic mythic
paideia. It is not by chance that in the “myth” of the Cave – a myth that has
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no mythic source, a myth that is self-formed and self-grounded – lays the
foundations of Plato’s political project.
Identification or appropriation – the self-becoming of the self – will
always have been thought of as the appropriation of a model, as the
appropriation of a means of appropriation, if the model (the example) is the
ever paradoxical imperative of propriation: imitate me in order to be what
you are. Difference does not resist appropriation, it does not impose an
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exterior limit upon it.
Yet the question remains of how, and above all why, identity
(properness/propriety, or being-in-oneself/being proper) – in what art works
like Touch Me and Be Me ask – derives from mimetic appropriation. It is by