Hands, Feet, Self

Helena Iara has been on a voyage of discovery recently.  First, during Brasil's world cup victory over Chile, she discovered her hands, and since then, has been finding out new things about them every day, and seeing new things she could do with them.  Rita and I have had a wonderful time as we see her move them slowly, using one finger and then the next.  And today, she discovered her feet, and found out that she could control them, as well.

Putting these discoveries together with her love of mirrors, I have been thinking a lot about Jacques Lacan and his idea of the mirror stage.  According to Lacan, the self is actually constructed over time and through technology: particularly, the mirror.  All of the sensations a baby feels are not necessarily coherent: the baby does not feel that they all apply to him or her, because the border between I and the other has not yet been clearly formed.  But, the moment that baby recognizes herself in the mirror, something new happens: the multiplicity and confusion of sensations gets brought under a single sign, the image of herself in the mirror.  The image in the mirror is stable "in contrast with the turbulent movements that the subject feels are animating him."  To a great degree, the subject is constructed through the mirror, not a something natural or innate, but as the result of a contingent process.

Now, there are some very interesting results to this idea: I remember, for instance, a program for street kids in Brasília which said that the most effective intervention it had made with the kids was to put mirrors every place in the drop-in center, because it assured the kids that they existed as coherent, whole beings, while at the same time making them think that they could improve their appearance (which had as a result improving lots of other things).  And in fact, great part of the contemporary edifice of psychoanalysis, and the thought of great philosophers who I love, like Slavoj Zizek, depends on Lacan's idea of the mirror stage.

But as I told these ideas to Helena Iara this morning, after watching her research her own hands, I think there is a basic epistemological error in the idea of the mirror stage.  Watching Helena, it is clear that the first step to recognizing herself as a subject, as someone with different body parts that come together to act in the world, is the baby's effort to research her own hands and feet.  The first wonder is that she is able to control these things -- and in fact, since Helena recognized her hands (and now her feet), their movements are more coherent and projected.  But then, she begins to see that these things have results, and that she is, to some degree, responsible for these results.  Last night, for instance, as Rita and I watched, she reached out her hand to touch her favorite toy, Pinkme the pink hippo, first in an uncontrolled way, then just feeling the fabric in a kind of caress.  This morning, she hit the hippo lightly, just to see what might happen, and seemed to show regret when the toy fell down (I wrote a long essay on regret on doing harm to the other as the font of subjectivity, but it might be premature to project that onto her...)

It's too early to discard the mirror stage all together -- after all, it's a great theory, and I use it all over the place -- but Helena is already making me rethink Lacan's idea.