Page 281 - Cyberculture and New Media

272 Desistant Media
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have alluded to dream’s affinity to all artistic activity, for his entire
psychoanalytical method may, in some respect, be considered the working
out of the science of tropes: metaphors and their variations. Freud proved that
consciousness can operate without logic – and now we have come to the main
point of hyperbologic – but not without any guiding dream-image, which also
controls the realm that gives birth to logic. Similarities and oppositions
appear as images in the dream unifying, not dividing, the various elements.
Freud’s project reflects the invention of an alternative mode of thought,
whose form, style, and function are still in the process development. Taking
dream-work as the logic of primal thinking Ulmer argues that the film or
video media provide the technology for primal writing. Such writing
functions as the representation of invention. The point here is that dream-
work is “logic”, and within that, every logic is the logic of relationships. The
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relations specific to dream-work are those of figuration.
Dream-work paths the way to the deconstruction mises-en-abyme
erected with various media mekhane. Works we have analysed are
constructed generally by (visual) jokes and puns, of myths and dreams. This
is also a way of approaching how double images, for instance, have remained
invisible in our culture since the days of Della Porta and Kircher: not as a
main mode of media production, but as the pedagogy of a betrayal (just as a
joke or pun is a betrayal of the meaning of the content), of speech, of logos,
of the memory of technology. If Ulmer’s post-pedagogy finds the answer to
the pedagogical problem of Avant-Garde – the discontinuity – in
grammatology growing from the recognition of this break in the tradition, in
the separation, we must keep in mind the oscillation between things (instead
of the dialectical): the memory of an open artwork is open also to
allobiographical notes. The memory of the specific artworks is something
Plato feared: the memory in the works of Della Porta, Kircher, Duchamp,
Cage, Rokeby, and others is open to changes in an infinite manner.
Moreover, the trick of the mirror is to stay in some in-between, which is, and
has been, a “magical” stage. This magic of augmentation has been interpreted
differently in several historical stages, from religious to political and finally
historio-structural phases, but up to this point art has always flirted with the
history of the popular, of the mirror cabinets, of anamorphoses, of
tintamarres: popular history has been a history of the fun of the pun, pun-fun,
so to speak.
What is, then, at stake with desistant media? It is a matter of
discharging the tragedy – or to be more precise, to replace the appropriative
mode of tragedy with a disappropriative mode, which will then loosen itself
from the matrix of truth: desistant mirror withdraws itself from the truth, any
socially determined truth to consider its own representations. Desistance is a
play of semblance, not essence: where semblance can be a cheating mode
altogether, control of the essence means total control with no safe haven left.