Page 280 - Cyberculture and New Media

Seppo Kuivakari 271
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no means obvious that self-identity presupposes that there will be an other,
because the other also presupposes the identical. The speculative dialectic is
an eschatology of the identical; and so long as this logic, more or less
explicitly, underpins the interpretation of mimesis, one can only ever move
endlessly from the same to the other – still under the authority of the same.
Conceived more rigorously, however, mimetologic complicates and de-
stabilizes this schema: in the dialecticization of mimetism, a subject is
presupposed, albeit a virtual one. But, by Lacoue-Labarthe’s definition,
mimetism forbids such a presupposition (something already convincingly
established by Diderot): no subject, potentially identical to himself or related
to himself, can exist prior to the mimetic process, except to render it
impossible. If something pre-exists, it is not even, as Plato believed, a
substance, in the form of a pure malleability or plasticity which the model
would come to stamp as its own “type” or on which it would imprint its
image. Such a substance is, in reality, already a subject, and it is not on the
basis of an eidetics that one can hope to think the mimetic process, if the
eidos – or, more generally, the figural – is the very presupposition of the
identical. We remember that such an eidetics – from Plato to Nietzsche and
Wagner and even to Heidegger – underpins mimetology in the form that
Lacoue-Labarthe calls onto-typology, where an entire tradition has thought
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that the political is the sphere of the fictioning of beings and communities.
We have seen that, instead of the dialectics this tradition of thought,
the deconstructive displacement of the subject does not merely reverse an
oppositional dissymmetry while leaving the opposition and its terms intact.
Rather, it seeks to articulate a relation other than that of opposition itself, a
relation of differential intrication in which the involvement of terms with
each other constitutes their only identity or quidity. This excess over closure,
this failure of closure, meaning or sense is always à venir, yet to come,
indefinitely deferred – which is to say that this is essentially a question, an
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indecision, an ambiguity instead of possession produced both by
economical and uneconomical (resistant) modes of media.
Gregory Ulmer believes that Benjamin’s comparison of
psychoanalysis and film shows the optimistic side of the education, holding
out the hope for film as a cognitive medium. For Benjamin, one of the
revolutionary functions of film would be “to demonstrate the identity of the
artistic and scientist uses of photography which heretofore usually were
separated – and from the pedagogical point of view: the illiterate of the future
would be one who did not know how to take a photograph. Dream-work, as
Lacan and structuralist psychoanalysis have tried to show, amounts to a
generic codification of the organizing principles of a wide range of non-
analytical texts, including dreams, jokes, myths, all the forms of everyday
life, as well as of the arts. Freud was among the first ones to point out the
essence of dream work as condensation and displacement. With this he may