Page 283 - Cyberculture and New Media

274 Desistant Media
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It is not the Lacanian unconscious of a machine but metatechnology: as
augmentation, the outside inhabits the inside – a hymen. There’s no limit
grounded by the mirror, as Lacan would suggest.
What we have seen here is that the desistant mode of media has been
with us for centuries – from the distorted mirror image of an ancient man to
the context aware media technology of today. Any history to deny this past is
an invalid history of media technology. Through desistance, the pedagogical
approach of media exposes itself as “archeration” of justice-injustice with a
certain betrayal of meaning. It is probably not the post-pedagogy Ulmer
predicts, but a pre-pedagogy in a sense of arche-violence. Desistance is the
pedagogy of the other as a productive tension of “o(the)riginal” obsession.
The same obsession can be found in Peter Greenaway’s 1996 film
The Pillow Book, in which the protagonist’s body is written over and over
again, at the peak of obsession with six languages at the same time. Behind
the film lies the ancient Japanese story of the creation of man – man made of
clay turns into human being with the writing (from god). Even logos here – as
in the writing of visitors in many desistant media art works – is allobiography
in the flesh: god gone mad, as Kittler mentions in a different historical
context.
An absolute desistant mode of media is not the only mode media
establishes – I am not positing a theory for only one mode of media – there
has always been a paradigm of desistance within media, or a tendency
towards a desistant mode as well as theoretical tendencies toward an
economical media mode, the media in us and us, with media. The argument
Derrida makes, that writing is not an independent order of signification, can
be used here as a key for analyses of this work: it is weakened speech,
something not completely dead; a living dead, a reprieved corpse, a deferred
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life, a semblance of breath. It is a waste of energy, uneconomy of energy:
aporia is not the denial but the betrayal – a deception of technology.
Within this mode of media, there is no sign of fusion (rather, vice
versa), no trace of unity, even no feeling of synthesis, there is only the trust
of distance that the concept of hymen does not tolerate. The injustice of
desistance is the rupture of the illusion of the world for which persistent
media economy is constantly striving. Instead of understanding the world as a
fulfilment of laws, we are actively ‘forgetting’ it into its constituent parts and
this, as a representation, means decay (of fiction).
Still, we can argue, desistance is a different mode than the one that
Margaret Morse describes in the 1996 article “Nature Morte”. Some, she
argues, speculate that a subject immersed in virtual reality, with its mobile
perspective and multiple narrative paths, would lose its identity, splinter, and
fall apart. Perhaps, says Morse, the opposite is true – by constructing binary
oppositions between persistent and resistant media modes she argues that the