An Anthropological Guide to the Art and Philosophy of Mirror Gazing

Maria Danae Koukouti, Lambros Malafouris

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781350202634
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350135178
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics

Looking at one's face in the mirror and finding one's self in the mirror are not the same. The former capacity is something we share with other animals; the latter is a skill: something we have to learn. What does it mean and what does it take to find oneself the mirror?

This book provides a comparative anthropological enquiry into the unity and diversity of mirror gazing. The reader is encouraged to reflect upon and experiment with different mirror gazes through a range of case studies. Koukouti and Malafouris weave together anthropology with philosophy and draw on examples from literature and experiments from psychopathology in a way that has never been attempted before.

The master metaphor is that of the mirror as trap. Mirror gazing is viewed on a par with hunting. Mirroring signifies the hunt for self-knowledge. In a time obsessed with the digital self-image, Koukouti and Malafouris reflect on the structures of consciousness that underpin the different ways of looking at and through the mirror. Combining metaphor, comparison and estrangement, they gesture towards a therapeutic alliance between body and mirroring. This allows us to look in the mirror, and think of our shared humanity differently.

1

About mirroring: An introduction

‘I’ see ‘me’

This book started with the imaginary and must turn now to the ordinary. We take that most readers know what it is like to look in the mirror and assume that, under normal conditions, one is able to recognize one’s own image in it. Presumably, we know much less about mirror images, their modes of being or the impact they may have on our lives. Nevertheless, we seem confident about the use we can make of this object of ‘perpetual fascination’ and everyday magic.¹ Indeed, once you get to know it and come to trust its surface, the mirror is a self-explanatory device. It attracts your gaze and performs its mimetic function (what we call ‘mirroring’),² asking nothing in return. You don’t need to know why or how it works, and you don’t need to do anything to make it work; it simply does. In fact, it works so well that even other species can use it (if they are offered the chance).

However, as it is often the case with most mimetic creatures, natural or artificial, simplicity is misleading. Mirrors do more than mirroring. More than just presenting our image (a body or a face), they actively influence our experience of selfhood (the consciousness of being that body or that face). This potent capacity of the mirror to act as a powerful device of self-identification will be the main focus of this book. We take the mirror as an opportunity to rethink the question of selfhood. Our stated objective also reveals something of our major assumptions: we all have a self somewhere even if that self is transitional, illusory and incomplete. Self is not a stable entity but a multifaceted process. We take that mirror gazing constitutes such a process or technique of self-becoming. Expressed by way of a single overarching objective, our aim is to provide a comparative anthropological enquiry of what it is to look and find a self in the mirror. We dub this the art of mirror self-identification: it can be conceived as a way of knowing things (episteme) as much as a way of doing things (techné).

The sceptic may object to these theoretical complications: ‘Thanks but last time I looked there was nothing especially difficult or interesting about finding myself in the mirror – especially early in the morning.’ It is very hard to think of the mirror as anything other than a piece of reflecting glass. You see, we are used to look at the world in a certain way. But it is exactly that degree of familiarity that costs us its magic and promise. Indeed, what we often fail to realize is that looking at oneself in the mirror and finding oneself in the mirror are two quite different things. One would think that, especially nowadays, living in an environment surrounded by mirroring surfaces of all sorts, and given the time we spend in front of the mirror, humans would be experts in mirror gazing. Nothing is further from the truth. The more used we are to something, the less likely we are to be enchanted or enlightened by it. The art of mirror self-identification, ancient as it may be, is almost becoming obsolete. Not only do we seem incapable of using the mirror as a tool for the self, we also often suffer from various delusional beliefs about what one’s reflection in the mirror might be and what it does. As developmental psychologist Philippe Rochat explains, the ‘[m]irror reflection of the self is paradoxical in the sense that what is seen in the mirror is the self as another person’.³ Our own face often becomes a stranger; a stranger’s face becomes the ‘I’.

What can we learn about the self by taking a different, more critical anthropological stance towards the mirror? If the mirror is an active participant in our daily routines of self-identification (not just mimicking but also constructing and dictating personal narratives), what is it that gives the mirror this power or agency? How does it do it?

Trying to answer those questions, one of the main arguments of this book will be that looking at one’s face in the mirror and finding one’s self in the mirror are two processes related but distinctive, both with profound psychological consequences. The former process, the ability to identify one’s own image in a mirror, requires no special effort or training. All it takes is having a mirror and looking at it. At first the untrained eye may be bedazzled with the dissonant spectacle – sometimes terrified by the sight of its mirror image.⁴ But soon habit will ease our anxiety, turning illusion into reality. The second process, finding one’s self in the mirror, is more complicated: it presupposes knowing how to look in it. The sufferings and the pleasures that come with this process outlast the period of initial exposure. The quest of self-knowledge through the looking-glass is very different from the visual process of identifying a face or a body in the mirror. Finding our self in the mirror is a skill that demands great effort and care. This skill is also of a different order from the so-called mirror self-recognition test discussed in the relevant experiments with small children and non-human animals.⁵ Self-recognition in those experiments speaks of the agency of the mirror and exposes the affordances (in Gibson’s⁶ sense of interactive possibilities) of this mimetic device. Still, to find one’s self in the mirror presents us altogether with a different challenge.

From an optics perspective, there is nothing mysterious in the way a polished surface reflects rays of light showing us how we look. The same cannot be argued, however, from an anthropological perspective concerned with the phenomenology (what is it like) and cognitive ecology of mirroring. When unnoticed and unexamined the mirroring is transparent. It is the moment we start thinking about it that it becomes a problem. What does the mirroring do? What is it made of? What happens when ‘I’ see ‘me’ inside the mirror? Once we raise those questions, the mirroring is transformed from a mundane experience into a meshwork of socio-political and material considerations about what exactly happens when the human body, or selective parts of that body (in particular the face), becomes the centre of visual attention. Suddenly, the mirror image can no longer be taken for granted; it is now a source of epistemic enchantment and confusion/dissonance.

The mirroring is enchanting because, quite ‘un-naturally’, it allows the eye to perform a function deemed useless by natural selection, that is, to gaze at one’s own face. Our eyes stare at our staring eyes. To look at our face in the mirror is to gaze directly at that part of the human body that we are not supposed to see, even though it is probably the part we associate with human subjectivity more than any other. Perhaps this explains why the mirroring radiates a sense of awkwardness and law-breaking: we are no longer blind to the ‘eye’ of the ‘I’. Even if, as Ronald Barthes⁷ rightly observes for the photographic image, the old ‘madness’ inherited in autoscopy (the experience of seeing one’s body in extrapersonal space) has probably, in our times, been forgotten, the momentary illusion, the split between ‘I’ and ‘me’ that comes with mirroring, remains still. So, we may also say that the mirroring is confusing because it is an illusion that cannot lie: on the one hand, what we see in the mirror is nothing but a phantom image of our body standing against the background of an impenetrable shiny surface. But on the other hand, as the semiotician Umberto Eco observes, ‘[o]nce we have acknowledged that what we perceive is a mirror image, we always begin from the principle that the mirror “tells the truth”’.⁸

Contrary to what Eco’s semiotic treatment of the mirror appears to recommend, however, one of the central themes of this book will be that mirrors are not to be trusted. Mirroring, like any other form of re-presentation, is never innocent. Unfailingly, the mirror will try to play its usual tricks on us – to enthral us, to mesmerize us.

Fooled by the mirror

Let’s try a simple experiment which we borrow from art historian Ernst Gombrich. Next time you happen to look at the fogged-up mirror of your bathroom, circle the outline of your head with your finger.⁹ Then come closer and measure the length of the outline you have just produced. Strange, isn’t it? Repeat the experiment as many times as you wish from whatever distance. The result will be the same: the length of the outline of your reflected head is actually half the size of your real head. Surprised? If you are, it is because you, like anyone else, share an unexamined and largely automatic conviction: the mirror always speaks the truth; therefore, it presents real-size reflections. Those of you who tried our experiment now know that this conviction is clearly wrong: an illusion.

So what? Surely, one might think, the world of physical phenomena is full of perceptual illusions of one sort or another. True, but there is a darker side in all this, which often passes unattended. Let us explain. There is a paradox: only a few lines above, it was revealed to you for the first time – at least to those of you unfamiliar with Gombrich’s experiment – that all your life you have been fooled by the mirror. Still – and this is where the paradox lies – despite the extent of this treachery, none of you felt the slightest concern or worry. Should one worry?

Indeed, why should one care about a mere mirror illusion? It’s not that you’ve seen a ghost or someone else’s face in the mirror or that you tried to get inside the mirror to touch the reflected face behind its surface.¹⁰ No, nothing of this radical sort: what you see is simply smaller than you think. No harm is done. Besides, we are rational, so-called sapient creatures and presumably now that the illusion has been revealed our superintelligence can be fooled no more. Right? Let’s find out. Turn your glance towards the mirror and look at your face once more: do you see your mirror face as being half the size of your real face? Obviously, the answer is no. How would that be possible? The psychology of perception has an easy reply: one needs only to realize that the mirror is always located halfway between oneself and our own virtual image.¹¹ Still, the fact that our image is constantly half the physical size independently of how far we are from the mirror is counterintuitive.

We are all willing to accept that things are not always what they seem. But the reason we can accept this undeniable fact light-heartedly is because of our certainty that knowing our illusions we overcome them. We are certain, in other words, that the logical power of our rational thinking is stronger and, in the end, will prevail and protect us. Unfortunately, this is not what’s happening. In fact, it is often the other way around. Maybe then, more important than asking why people stubbornly refuse to see the real size of their faces on the mirror’s surface is to ask what else do we fail to notice? We propose that this question is quintessentially anthropological (in both the ethnographic and the philosophical sense of the word). And, as it happens with questions of that kind, they usually demand not just to learn but also to unlearn several things we usually take for granted.

Towards a comparative anthropology of mirror gazing

Analytically speaking, this book can be described as a comparative philosophical anthropology of mirror gazing. We call our approach in this book anthropological not because we want to embark on a detailed ethnographic study or provide a comprehensive coverage of the relevant literature on mirrors. Rather, our intent is critical and comparative. We adopt an anthropological approach primarily because we want to disturb and estrange the familiar so that new connections and patterns of juxtaposition may emerge. Technically, we approach mirroring as a visual mode of material engagement.¹² We are interested to explore how the mirror affects human perception, modes of attention and self-transformation. Indeed, the moment we are exposed to our mirror image we become something else. We insist on integrating ‘knowing’ and ‘doing’ because this integration is the best recipe for effecting and understanding this self-transformation. This integration of thought and action also provides the primary stuff or ingredients for a good relational ontology.

Recognizably, putting the right ontological ingredients together at the right time is a difficult task. For this to happen, you need a manual. This book can also be seen as a manual, albeit, of an unusual comparative sort. We understand that speaking of a comparative manual may sound as a contradiction in terms. Manuals, like maps, are meant to be unambiguous and universally applicable. The language of instructions might differ, but the process described must be identical. Yet, a distinctive feature of anthropological enquiry can be seen in the way it reveals the constant tension between similarity and difference as it can be observed in various forms of human biosocial becoming.¹³ The practice of mirror gazing is not an exception. Mirror self-identification is an acquired skill, something you learn as a child growing up in a particular historical situation. This is why we propose that the art of mirror gazing involves a great deal of unlearning. Take for instance our shared conviction that the mirror is a solid reflective surface – rather than a forward extension of space. This conviction demands and predisposes us to look ‘at’ the mirror rather than ‘through’ it. In our world there is nothing to grab and reach for other than the mirror’s cool surface. But what would happen if we were instead to look ‘through’ the mirror as if it was transparent? Taking such a step requires a perspectival understanding of the world, which allows for ontological multiplicity. That is, the possibility that there is more than a single reality to see inside the mirror, more than one world to navigate, more than a single story to tell. Talk about ontologies is increasingly fashionable among philosophers and anthropologists these days. We will not take issue with the theoretical discussions and debates surrounding ‘new materialisms’¹⁴ and ‘ontological turn’.¹⁵ Rather, we use the term ‘ontology’ in a very basic sense, denoting a quintessential form of comparative anthropological enquiry that aims to expose, adding resistance and friction, the reality (what it is that matters) of certain transparent phenomena that may otherwise pass unnoticed or be mischaracterized as elusive or merely imaginary. We are interested to understand how the mirror matters¹⁶ and to illustrate some of the multiple ways by which the mirror comes to matter. The task is more difficult than what it might seem: as we will see in the following chapters, the mirror will prove to be a profoundly unsettling and unstable piece of vital materiality.¹⁷

Patterns that connect

Tackling this ontological pluralism of looking in the mirror, this book will set out a creative juxtaposition of stories about the life of the mirror, that is, stories of mirroring and mirror gazing. We take inspiration about how to build our stories from Gregory Bateson’s thesis of connectedness. In this context, a ‘story’ is defined as a ‘little knot or complex of that species of connectedness which we call relevance’, and following Bateson we will assume ‘that any A is relevant to any B if both A and B are parts or components of the same “story”’.¹⁸ Tim Ingold is another anthropologist who used the metaphor of the knot to describe the creative forces of life.¹⁹ The stories we compile in the following chapters aim at providing exactly such a ‘pattern that connects’,²⁰ not in the linear sense of causality, but in the sense described by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as rhizomatic.²¹ Rhizomatic connections, like grabgrass, are growing in all directions, with no beginnings and endings. Our stories of mirror gazing are a species of process ontology, they live in the ‘middle’. In that sense, they do not serve a taxonomic or classificatory function; rather, the aim is to highlight possible patterns or pathways of connectivity. As Tim Ingold points out, ‘stories a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• Image and imagination: A prolegomenon
• 1 About mirroring: An introduction
• Part 1: Dis-enchantment
• Part 2: Re-enchantment
• Part 3: Hunters and Prey
• 9 Epilogue
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Imprint