More on Mirrors

Several posts ago, I mentioned the importance of the mirror in a lot of contemporary (and not so contemporary, in fact) theories of subjectivity: how a person comes to see herself as, well, herself.  Last week, before I left for Bolivia, Helena Iara spent more time in front of the bathroom mirror, which gives me some more insight into the way that she is beginning to recognizer herself as an "I".

Helena Iara doesn'tjust watch herself in the mirror.  Her eyes often begin on her own face, then go to my eyes (looking at her, rather as I would with no mirror), then back to her own face, or often her body (especially her hands).  It isn't just that she sees herself in the mirror: she sees me seeing her in the mirror. She sees me, sees that I am "the same" in the mirror as I am "in real life".  She sees me looking at her.  Then she sees herself.  The process of subjectification is, in fact, social.  It doesn't just happen through the strange reflecting object that is a mirror, but through the interactions of multiple people in front of the mirror.

The second thing about the mirror is that Helena doesn't necessarily look at herself as a whole, at least not yet, and that is the basic premise of the Lacanian theory of the mirror stage.  She looks at her own eyes (particularly beautiful eyes, if I do say so myself, blue with a hint of violet), and at her own hands.  Given that she spends so much time playing with her own hands, looking at them and moving them for hours, the fact that she sees her own hands in the mirror strikes me at particularly important.

The mirror metaphor is a particularly visual one for the construction of identity and subjectivity, but hands are something different.  One feels with one's hands, and one feels where one's hands are, even without looking at them.  One also sees one's own hands, and can feel the effect of them on another part of the body when they swing around.  Since Helena has been able to recognize her own hands, she has also gained control over them: she now moves them deliberately (when she wants to, at least) instead of thrashing around as a subconscious expression of happiness, anger, or hunger.  Her control is especially good when she is looking at her hand.

Perhaps the construction of subjectivity is better seen as synesthesia, as the ability to conjugate different senses and see them as pertaining to the same event, than it it about seeing oneself.  Helena sees her hand, feels my hand on hers, and feels where her hand is.  Then, she looks in the mirror and sees herself seeing her hand, felling herself seeing the hand, feeling my hand, which she knows as my hand, touching hers...  What she is learning is to put all of these sensations and experiences together.

Lacan insisted that because one becomes a subject in the image, subjectivity is imaginary.  From what I have seen of Helena, however, it is better seen as gregarious, as the process of gathering together sensations, people, and the perspectives of those other people.  More complicated than a simple mirror, but much more interesting, too.  Maybe that's why Helena smiles so much when she sees herself in the mirror.  You can almost hear the joy of the synapses popping.