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PART I
THE INSISTENCE OF THE IMAGINARY
Introduction: The Mirror Stage
No piece of leftist cultural criticism of the 1970s and 1980s seemed complete without an account of Jacques Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage – that moment in the development of a small child when, contemplating its own reflection in a mirror, it delights in the magical correspondence between its own movements and those of the image before its eyes.1 Magical correspondences and miraculous affinities are the stuff of myth; and if Lacan’s essay ‘The Mirror Stage’ investigated such a myth, it rapidly became one in its own right. The boundaries between reality and make-believe, so Lacan argues, are blurred in this early phase: the ego, our window on the so-called real world, is really a kind of fiction, while the child before the mirror is said to treat its image as real even though it knows it to be illusory. A similar ambiguity applies to the word ‘imaginary’, which for Lacan means ‘pertaining to an image’ rather than fantastic or unreal, yet which (like the theory of ideology which Louis Althusser was famously to derive from it) involves delusion and deception even so.
In a mirroring kind of way, the fictional or real-life status of Lacan’s argument itself came into question. Was the mirror stage meant to be literal or metaphorical? Was this most mandarin of French intellectuals really talking about something as embarrassingly empirical as toddlers? How on earth could one actually know what a child might experience in this situation? What – to raise the kind of commonsensical objection of which only the English are capable – about societies which did not enjoy the privilege of possessing mirrors? Would ponds or rivers do just as well? Or is the true mirror of the child its parent or carer, who by investing different parts of its body (face, orifices, etc.) with variable degrees of intensity, builds up for the infant a somatic self-portrait? Are our bodies, like our desire, constituted by the Other? How odd, in any case, that such a momentous piece of theorising should be based on that most fictive and primitive of all human activities, play and play-acting! Playacting, to be sure, as well as play – for the child jubilantly imitating its own motions in the mirror is a mimic, a miniscule magician who can alter reality simply by raising his hand, an actor performing before an appreciative audience of one, a pocket-sized artist who revels in his ability to shape and transform his product at the flick of a finger or the turn of a head. To perform in front of a mirror involves a kind of infinite regress or mise en abyme, as the Gestalt in the glass beams approvingly at the child’s endeavours, thus provoking his smile, which in turn cues another supportive sign of delight from the reflection, and so on. We shall see something of the same dialectic later, in – of all things – eighteenth-century moral philosophy.
It was not, to be sure, as though the cultural theorists of the time were particularly enthralled by the topic of child development. The importance of Lacan’s lecture lay in its illustration of the imaginary – that strange realm of the human psyche in which subjects and objects (if we can even speak of such a division at this early point) appear constantly to exchange places and live each other’s lives. In this play of projecting and reflecting, things seem to pass in and out of each other without mediation, feel one another from the inside with all the sensuous immediacy with which they experience their own interiors. It is as though you can put yourself in the very place from which you are being observed, or see yourself at the same time from the inside and outside. Psychology is only just beginning to understand the neural mechanisms by which a very small infant can playfully imitate an adult’s facial expression, in a complex set of reflections from outside to inside to outside again.2 As Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes:
A baby of fifteen months opens its mouth if I playfully take one of its fingers between my teeth and pretend to bite it. And yet it has scarcely looked at its face in a glass, and its teeth are not in any case like mine. The fact is that its own mouth and teeth, as it feels them from the inside, are immediately, for it, an apparatus to bite with, and my jaw, as the baby sees it from the outside, is immediately, for it, capable of the same intentions.3
The imaginary is a realm in which things give us back ourselves, if only we had a determinate enough self to appreciate it. It is a prelapsarian domain, in which knowledge is as swift and sure as a sensation.
In this peculiar configuration of psychic space, where there is as yet no clearly organised ego or centre of consciousness, there can be no genuine otherness. My interiority is somehow ‘out there’, as one phenomenon among others, while whatever is out there is on intimate terms with me, part of my inner stuff. Yet I also feel my inner life as alien and estranged, as though a piece of my selfhood has been captivated by an image and reified by it. This image seems able to exert a power over me which both does and does not spring from myself. In the domain of the imaginary, then, it is not apparent whether I am myself or another, inside or outside myself, behind or before the mirror. One can imagine this as capturing something of the experience of the small infant nursed by its mother, who uses her breast as though it were its own organ; but it is also, as far as objects which are ambiguously inside and outside us goes, a matter of those ‘part-objects’, bits of the body extruded into the external world (faeces, breast milk and the like), which Melanie Klein portrays as transitional between self and other, subject and object, and which Lacan himself describes as the very stuff, lining or imaginary filling of the human subject.
This is why the imaginary involves what is technically known as transi-tivism, in which, as in some primitive bond of sympathy, a small child may cry when another child takes a tumble, or claim to have been struck himself when he strikes a companion. The eighteenth-century philosopher Adam Smith is much taken with this phenomenon, writing as he does in his Theory of Moral Sentiments of how, ‘when we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or our own arm’. Transitivism is just a peculiarly graphic instance of sympathetic mimicry as such, which remains to some extent a bodily affair even for those who have managed to travel beyond the seductions of the mirror stage. This is why smiling is contagious, or why, as Smith observes, ‘the mob, when they are gazing at a dancer on a slack rope, naturally writhe and twist and balance their own bodies, as they see him do, and as they feel that they themselves must do in his situation’.4 Smith seems to suppose that this spontaneous mimicry is a result of what Lacan calls imaginary transposition, as we project ourselves imaginatively into the body of the dancer. But these spectators are also would-be magicians, involuntarily seeking to control the dancer’s movements by their own sympathetic swaying, as the toddler in the mirror stage exuberantly masters his own reflection at the very moment he is in thrall to it. Smith’s spectators remain themselves at the very moment they assume the identity of another; and this conflation is typical of the imaginary register.
Transitivism, then, is a kind of chiming or resonating of bodies. Those with delicate fibres, Smith observes, feel itchy or uneasy sensations when they gaze on the ulcers of a beggar, while looking at the sore eyes of someone else is likely to make your own eyes feel tender. In the end, the only satisfactory image of this condition would be that of two bodies folded into one, as Clym Yeobright and his mother in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native speak to one another as though ‘their discourses were . . . carried on between the right and the left hands of the same body’. Jude Fawley and Sue Bridehead in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure achieve ‘that complete mutual understanding in which every glance and movement was as effectual as speech for conveying intelligence between them, (and) made them almost the two parts of a single whole’. The affection between Laurence Sterne’s Walter Shandy and Uncle Toby, a matter of gesture, intuition and wordless communion, is another case in point. We shall have occasion to return to this idea of the body as language later in the book.
There is a sense in which the adult version of the imaginary is friendship. In friendship, as Aristotle notes in the Ethics, the other is both you and not you – so that this merging and mingling of identities re-creates the mirror phase on a higher level. ‘The only joy I have in his being mine’, writes Montaigne in his great essay on friendship, ‘is that the not mine is mine.’5 His relationship with his dearest friend, he adds, left him nothing that was their own, nothing that was either his friend’s or his own. ‘If I were pressed to say why I love him’, he comments, ‘I feel that my only reply could be: “Because it was he, because it was I” . . . Such a friendship has no model but itself, and can only be compared to itself.’6 The imaginary resists being translated into rational or comparative terms. Unlike the symbolic, in which, as we shall see, exchange and commensurability are of the essence, all its elements are irreducibly specific.
On the whole, the cultural left of the 1970s evoked the imaginary only to demonise it. For one thing, for theorists for whom discourse had become a veritable obsession, pre-linguistic states were scarcely more popular than babies. For another thing, the imaginary was a matter of unity, stasis, resemblance, correspondence, autonomy, mimesis, representation, harmony, plenitude and totality; and no terms could have been less à la mode for an avant-garde whose buzz words were lack, absence, difference, conflict, fissure, dispersal, fragmentation and heterogeneity. The left of the day would tolerate the idea of representation only if the means and conditions of representation were given along with it; and all this, in the mirror stage, is ominously suppressed.7 Even worse, the representation in question is a false one. The image in the mirror is a deceptively unified version of the child’s actual, uncoordinated body, and his delight in it springs from contrasting this idealised whole with his dysfunctional state. The mirror allows him an autonomy which he lacks in real life. One might speculate, too, that he contrasts this agreeably coherent appearance with certain Kleinian fantasises of his own body as torn, mutilated, pounded to pieces.
The pre-egoic innocence of the mirror stage, then, seemed ripe for deconstruction, turning as it did on what was really an iconic notion of identity. This mirror is a glass in which, in St Paul’s phrase, we see only darkly. The dysfunctional toddler enraptured by his own image was as much a case of false identification as the idea that every signifier, as with an icon, is leashed by an internal bond to a single signified, which can be said to represent its meaning. In the mirror, remark Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, ‘there is a sort of coalescence of the signifier with the signified’.8 The other place where this is supposed to happen is known as poetry, in which, by a kind of verbal trompe l’oeil, these two aspects of the sign appear indissociable.9 But it will not do either to think of words and meanings as separate, as long as one still imagines that they are roughly the same kind of entity. ‘Here the word, there the meaning’, remarks Ludwig Wittgenstein sardonically. ‘The money, and the cow that you can buy with it. But contrast: money and its use.’10 A word for Wittgenstein acquires meaning through its use; and this involves it entering into rule-governed relations with other signs in a specific form of life. This, one might suggest, is his version of what Jacques Lacan will term the symbolic order. It is just that Lacan shows that what goes for signs goes for human subjects too. The toddler who imagines that his mirror image is the tangible incarnation of his selfhood is an old-style prestructuralist who has not yet grasped that human identity, like signs, is a differential affair – that it is a question of assuming a place in a symbolic order, a system of roles and relations in which you are an exchangeable function rather than a unique, irreplaceable, living and breathing animal. Elated by the fantasy of being wholly at one with himself, the infant has yet to recognise that, as Wittgenstein comments in his Philosophical Investigations, there is no more useless proposition than that of the identity of a thing with itself. The small child has fallen prey, so to speak, to the philosophical error that there is a special kind of certainty and accessibility about human selfhood.
So it is that the child’s self-recognition in the imaginary sphere is in fact a misrecognition – one which acts as a prelude to the rather more momentous form of misrecognition which it shall encounter in the symbolic order. Its identity is also an alienation, as the je, or subject, mistakes its elusive being for that of a mere moi, a determinate thing in the glass of its self-reflection. The truth of the subject accordingly eludes it – the fact that, in Lacan’s flamboyant rewriting of Descartes, ‘I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think.’ The infant has yet to learn that a subject which coincides with itself is no sort of subject at all. The selfhood which (so one assumes) the young Narcissus of the mirror stage regards as fixed and determinate is in fact fissured and imperfect. Like the process of signification itself, it is driven on by its own incompleteness.
The opposition of the imaginary, in which each term (infant and image) depends symbiotically on the other, must eventually be prised apart or triangulated. And this, for Lacan, is the Oedipal moment. The imaginary enclosure must be thrown open to the play of difference and otherness. The small child must break through the mirror of its own misrecognition to emerge on the terrain of the intersubjective, where it may alone negotiate some poor scraps of truth. For Hegel, from whom much of Lacan’s thought derives, the transition from the one state to another has an ethical dimension. The subject must be weaned from mistaking itself for an autonomous entity and come instead to confess its dependence upon others in the domain of the intersubjective – a domain which Hegel names Geist and Lacan calls the Other or the symbolic order. In Lacan’s words, this involves at its most complete the ‘total acceptance of the subject by the other subject’.11 It was not an ideal of human reciprocity he was to maintain for very long. We must cease to derive our self-image from the other, as we do in the imaginary, and come instead to take it from the Other (the realm of sociality as a whole), as we do in the symbolic. For Hegel, the most elementary forms of human life involve a non-reflective absorption in a closed social order, one which is not far removed from Lacan’s imaginary. Only when one ventures upon the intersubjective exchanges of the symbolic can one become conscious of oneself as an individual. We shall see later, however, that this achievement is, in Lacan’s eyes, never far from catastrophe.
For the cultural avant-garde of the 1970s, this shift of ontological registers was more political than ethical. The point was not to bolster the bourgeois subject by holding a looking-glass to its self-satisfied gaze, but to pitch it into permanent crisis. The former was a matter of ideology, while the latter was a question of revolutionary cultural practice. What made us what we were – lack, the Real, repression, castration, the Law of the Father, the invisible laws of the social formation – lay quite beyond representation. They were the fractures and blind spots in the mirror of consciousness – a phenomenon which itself was traditionally conceived of in specular terms (‘reflection’, ‘speculation’, ‘contemplation’). As the Earl of Shaftesbury puts it: ‘Every reasoning or reflecting creature is, by his Nature, forc’d to endure the review of his own mind, and actions; and to have representations of himself, and his inward affairs, constantly passing before him, obvious to him, and revolving in his mind.’12 Self-reflection is in this sense a kind of inward imaginary – a matter of contemplating ourselves in the mirror of our own minds, a mental theatre in which we pass like actors before our own spectatorial gaze as though we were someone else. It was this rather smug self-enclosure which in the left’s view needed to be shattered, and t...
