Page 282 - Cyberculture and New Media

Seppo Kuivakari 273
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This is finally a state of metatechnology. If we recall the GPS, the iris code,
infrared or biochips under our skin there is no question of mimesis, likeness
but pure essence.
Bolter and Grusin imagine that ubiquitous computing – a pervasive
mode of computer technology – is an extreme form of hypermediacy that
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carries in itself the possibility of total surveillance, but we must also
remember that the Unheimliche – the other in us – is delivered into us in the
form of a chip. Lacoue-Labarthe says that possession presupposes a matrix in
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which the imprint – or, in this case, the chip – is stamped or installed. The
oscillation here is opened up also by Haraway. Through her “Cyborg
Manifesto” she argues that in similar circumstances the certainty of what
counts as nature is undermined, probably fatal. The transcendent
authorization of interpretation is lost, and with it the ontology grounding
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“Western” epistemology. Technological determination is only one
ideological space, opened up by the reconceptions of machine and organism
as coded text, through which we engage in the play of writing and reading the
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world. From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition
of a grid of control, but from another perspective, a cyborg world might be
about lived social and bodily realities, being unafraid of permanently partial
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identities and contradictory standpoints.
As already mentioned, for Lacoue-Labarthe nothing differs more
from mimesis than possession. Mimesis is active, possession, on the contrary,
presupposes the supposition itself or the supportive medium. Possession, in
other words, presupposes a subject. It is the monstrous, dangerous form of
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passive mimesis. Any transparent, functional media use, which clings to
Aristotelian emotive-cognitive theory of imitation, can be seen as much
possessive as ecological in its own totalising violence, but in terms with
mimesis, fertility of an eye cannot be considered as such. Instead, it must stay
violent towards any human closure in order to give birth to the type, to the
imprint, in order to tupein – Greek for typing, here, the original man. In my
interpretation, here is arche-violence instead of the totalising violence the
ecological media mode erects through, for example, Gibson’s “universality”
of ecology. Be Me particularly shows that there is recognition, but only the
recognition of one’s own actions; therefore there can be no identification with
the seen – or this identification would be narcissistic. Furthermore, it is a
question of violence, of madness, of Unheimliche: it is allobiographical if we
think this kind of contemporary media art is producing any source of muthos
for the visitor to live with – to live with the strange of our own lives.
This implies strongly that allobiography is the betrayal, which, in
turn, is arche-violence. Writing – or mimesis – writes always the other
instead of the same, friendship of the same. Violence inside the friendship;
arche-violence, where totalising violence is not betrayal, is also justice and
injustice, but in a mode of surveillance, keeping the visual regime untouched.