Page 284 - Cyberculture and New Media

Seppo Kuivakari 275
______________________________________________________________
multiple aspects of personhood and agency may offer more possibilities for
143
subjective integration and control.
The art works briefly studied don’t claim that man is
autobiographical in the modern implications of a socio-cultural state of man,
but more or less subconsciously, the vision they’re proposing is
allobiographical as such – always re-figuring itself in a manner state of
hyperbology. Like psychophysics (for which it is a technological
precondition as well), the typewriter or contemporary media tools alter the
status of discourse and repositions literature, science, and theory. The end of
“man” postulated by Foucault is not an aporia but brought on by a
mechanism that writes writing – or, now, is it allobiography in a sense the
Umheimliche was covered on a man’s body with the torture machines in
Kafka’s short story?
This is the realm of the black sun of madness: we must understand
that black sun is not a condition of the “absence of light”, as the binary
oppositions in a European tradition lead us to think, but merely the
“desistance of light” in the sense of persistence of “black speculation”,
speculation in terms of “mirror gazing” via the literal meaning of the word
144
“speculation” .
An ending here means, of course, not an ending but merely an
opening: supplementing a void instead of complementing it. After this
discussion my proposal to media studies is not to consider media only in
terms of immersion (into the image) or distraction (of the image), but also in
terms of desistance (from the image), in all their implications of
dissemination. Theoretically, when desistance stays persistent in mises-en-
abyme of media art, remaining constant in its efforts to lock the
hyperbological relation, then in terms of mimesis it must stay open, unended.
Then desistance can be seen as violent towards figuration’s own limits: it is
the interruption in the myth of man, as Nancy has proposed. Madness of
desistance means not, as the polygraph for Kittler, the psychopathology of
modern culture, but a deferral from corporeal punishment of violence, from
an idol erected in various identification protocols by persistent media
ecologies.
Can we say that deconstruction of media theorization has provided
us a means for seeing the tradition of media art as apart from another, larger
perspective? For me the answer is yes. We have seen that the desistant mode,
as Derrida has defined it as correspondence to obsession and hyperbology,
something that is at play in the subject, is neither a post-modern mode
(Poster), nor a network of 1900 by Kittler as a network of cultural
psychopathology; rather, we can think of it as a mode of madness of
supplementary logic.
We can see that none of these historical steps, paradigms of
possession and control, deal with a withdrawal or desistance with certain