"What is ideology if not simply the familiar, well known, transparent myths in which a society or an age can recognize itself (but not know itself), the mirror it looks into for self-recognition, precisely the mirror it must break if it is to know itself?" –Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.”
The following piece was initially composed for a 2007 course within the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley, titled: “The Rhetoric of Psychoanalysis.”
THE MOVEMENT-IMAGE
For Jaques Lacan, the mirror stage is an identificatory event in which an infant subject, viewing his reflection in a mirror, arrives at an apprehension of both its self and other - indeed of itself as other.
Held “tightly by some prop, human or artificial” the infant “overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the constraints of his prop in order to adopt a slightly leaning forward position and take in an instantaneous view of the image in order to fix it in his mind.”
This assumption of a mirror image is for Lacan the very model of the ego function itself, the category which enables the subject to operate as “I.” This mirror image allows the subject to appear as the seemingly coherent author of its own movements while he or she appears situated within the confines and boundaries of a legible “mirror.”
In the case of films, computers, phones — the modern screen functions as the mirror upon which this Ideal I or ego ideal is projected. This mirrored mode of viewing, prevalent in classic film texts, offers the pleasure of recognition and a posture or identification with the images on screen by obscuring the workings of the prop that Lacan speaks of.
For Lacan, the prop, which the infant believes itself able to surpass, serves a key function as the agency that structures and aligns the infant’s look with that of the mirror. For Lacan, the prop is ultimately the mechanism through which a particular image is held up to the viewing subject as ideal or culturally valorized. “The absorbing quality of film derives from the imperative that the camera/prop deny its own existence as much as possible, fostering the illusion that what is shown has an autonomous existence, independent of any technological interference, or any coercive gaze.”
The technique of shot/reverse shot is particularly crucial and consists of successive images: first of a character looking at something, and then of what that character presumably sees. This is the cinematic equivalent of what narratology calls “transitions of focalization,” a technique used to link image to diegetic character in order to stimulate identification.
As a result, the level of enunciation remains veiled from the viewing subject’s scrutiny, which is entirely absorbed within the level of the fiction; the subject of the speech seems to be the speaking subject, or to state it differently, the gaze which directs our look seems to belong to a fictional character rather than to the camera. This is successful at the moment when the viewing subject says, “yes, that’s me” or “that’s what I see.”
The mirror stage thus offers a primary model for conceptualizing this particular visual misrecognition, which denies the alterity and exteriority of the constituting image. This reflective interaction leads to a certain ontological structure of the human world, with the child believing in the coherent and legible self temporarily experienced in the mirror and aggressively seeking to confirm this illusion.
Thus for Lacan, as long as the subject is caught in this lure of spatial identification, the longing to have its own coherent, legible ego ideal mirrored back to it takes precedence in every interaction. By remaining fixed in mirror stage interactions, the subject remains trapped between the vacillating interactions with this ego ideal.
“The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation,” a vicious cycle experienced as insufficiency for not being one with the coherent, ideal image, and manic anticipation of achieving this goal. In attempting to overcome, incorporate and assume this ideal, the subject ultimately evacuates whatever image or body previously occupied the space of any distinct properties, resulting only in “Hegelian Death” for the other through this mode of interaction.
Thus, in a mirror stage mode of interaction, the other has only a fleeting existence, since it is no sooner apprehended than it is either repudiated or assimilated as "self."
Political art produces images which, in addition to challenging the complacencies of the self and the limitations of cultural scripts, offer a creative and alternative mode of resistance to them. Through engagement and recognition of the apparatus that structures and reflects the viewing experience, the film subverts the mirror stage interaction with the screen that traditional film encourages. Through these techniques of dis-identification, spaces are created in which multiple voiced subjectivities are engaged, transforming and displacing the way in which screen discourse produces, defines, and confines potential subject positions.
THE CAMERA APPARATUS
Indeed, by locating our awareness at the site of the camera, artists can allow viewers the belief that they can overcome the constraints of their “prop” in order to aggressively fix the image in an indentificatory way. Most classic films go to great lengths to cover the cuts indicating their own construction, thereby constructing a viewer who imagines that he speaks without simultaneously being spoken and believes himself to exist outside of filmic discourse.
By unabashedly foregrounding the voyeuristic dimensions of the screen experience, artists draws attention to the camera as speaking subject, resisting mirror-stage identification and forcing the viewer into oblique and uncomfortable positions.
