Ghost in the Wire

The difficulty in distinguishing between these two registers and the rhetorical slippage between them seen in paragraph four will quietly haunt the remainder of the mirror stage address, begging the question of distinction, for if one cannot distinguish theoretically between the imaginary and the symbolic, what then does the mirror stage accomplish? Perhaps as an attempt to preempt this overarching concern, the fourth paragraph concludes with an abrupt shift in verb choices. Whereas Lacan previously describes the male child as initiating a fluid and dynamic series of gestures in relation to his image, Lacan now describes the hypothetical child as "fixing (suspendre) his attitude" toward the image "in order to hold (pour le fixer) it in his gaze." Fixing and holding thus define the child’s appropriation of the image. This rhetorical move becomes a means of holding the earlier slippage at bay as Lacan links the mirror stage to identification of self with self in the subsequent paragraph. He writes: "We have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification…the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image – whose predestination to this phase-effect is sufficiently indicated by the use…of the ancient term imago." This phase-effect, the temporal and spatial fixing of "an image" (now always singular), reinforces the static quality of the mirror. As the renowned Slavoj Žižek notes, Lacan repeatedly stresses the fixed singularity of the image: "the feature to be emphasized is…a kind of ‘freeze of time’: the flow of life is suspended, the Real of the dynamic living process is replaced by a ‘dead’, immobilized image – Lacan himself…compares the ego to the fixed image which the spectator perceives when the [film] reel gets jammed." Indeed, so important is the rhetorical focus on fixing and holding that Lacan must introduce a term qualified apparently only by its age—"the ancient term imago"—to dispel alternate interpretations of the image in the mirror. Imago, defined contextually, thus comes to be understood as the exotic fixity of the child’s reflected image, a definition that might seem curious in light of the apparent fluidity of the symbolic and imaginary registers. It is as if Lacan wants to emphasize explicitly the certitude of the mirror image even as he implicitly acknowledges the impossible certitude of the symbolic to which the mirror sublimates the imaginary.

To make this argument effectively, Lacan must transform the imaginary before the mirror into an imaginary beyond the mirror; the imago must be understood, as he characterizes it in the ninth paragraph, as an "exteriority…which…is certainly more constituent than constituted…a contrasting size that fixes it…in contrast with the turbulent movements that the subject feels are animating him." A clever trick of the tongue, so to speak: the mirror stage becomes both a moment of transition (between the univocal dominance of the imaginary and the subsequent trumping of the imaginary by the introduction of the symbolic) and a means of quietly refiguring the imaginary as something extrinsic to the subject. The imaginary becomes not so much displaced as re-placed; the symbolic that gives birth to the subject in a moment of spatial fixation forces the imaginary to be fixed as something outside the subject: the child feels the turbulent movement without feeling like he himself is that turbulence. Strangely, in a move perhaps thinkable only because of the exoticism of the term, Lacan’s depiction of the imago as an exteriority to the symbolic does not mean that it resides instead with the imaginary, but rather somewhere between the two, for as he states in the tenth paragraph, "the mirror-image would seem to be the threshold (seuil) of the visible world." Thus the paradox of the imago (its production of a symbolic subject without itself being a part of the symbolic) is perhaps resolved; the imago is the gatekeeper between the imaginary and the symbolic—the fixed limit of otherwise fluid registers.

Having assigned the imago/mirror stage to its proper non-place, Lacan’s semantic slippage returns at the close of paragraph thirteen: "These reflections lead me to recognize in the spatial captation manifested in the mirror-stage, even before the social dialectic, the effect in man of an organic insufficiency in his natural reality – in so far as any meaning can be given to the word nature." Lacan has "turned back" to the double-entendre of reflection, but it clearly has lost whatever sense of crisis that may have flowed from it earlier, for now Lacan is able to declare assuredly in the very next paragraph: "I am led, therefore, to regard the function of the mirror-stage as a particular case of the function of the imago, which is to establish a relation between the organism and its reality – or, as they say, between the Innenwelt and Umwelt." These two brief passages merit particular scrutiny.

First, whereas the first instance of reflection (as thought) is followed by an attempt to clarify the rigid nature of reflection (as image), no such anxiety about semantic slippage can be detected in this second moment of reflection. It is as if the slipperiness of the symbolic and its potential implosion into the imaginary has been resolved, at least temporarily, by the fixing power of the mirror.

Second, Lacan explicitly links the theory of the mirror to the revelation that man is naturally insufficient. This insufficiency occurs even before the social dialectic, which is to say that it both anticipates and follows the onset of the symbolic, which is also to say that the symbolic plays only a limited role regarding whatever this insufficiency might be. As to the actual nature of this insufficiency — "at least in so far as any meaning can be given to the word nature" — Lacan offers next to nothing. True, the first half of paragraph thirteen concerns epistemological limitations in human perception, but these limitations are explicitly linked to those social dialectics that have little overall effect on the supposed insufficiency. One can deduce two possibilities inherent within the idea of an "organic insufficiency" itself: either a failure to measure up to the potential of the organic, either through disability or something akin to lethargy, or the insufficient potential of the organic itself, a problem with the organic body proper. The latter formulation seems more consistent with the overall tone and theme of the address, but begs all the usual questions: who measures sufficiency? What counts as sufficient? What lies beyond sufficiency? These questions will remain, but at least Lacan pinpoints their origin; the fixity of the mirror makes possible the discovery of organic insufficiency.

Third, the mirror’s gatekeeper function expands in the above passages to one of regulation, with the imago now being made responsible for reconciling the inner and the outer worlds of the subject, even though it is the distinction between those inner and outer worlds that made the imago necessary originally. If one never stabilizes the conceptual border dividing the symbolic and the imaginary there would be no inner and outer world for the mirror stage to regulate. Given that the only binary that parallels and precedes the sudden separation of the organism from its reality is the separation of the symbolic from the imaginary, we must conclude that these binaries share some implicit structural connection—in other words, that the capacity of the mirror to distinguish these two registers grounds the differentiation between interior and exterior.

Fourth, what are we to make of this strange diction, the decision to suddenly introduce a series of terms never used in an expository fashion elsewhere in the address? Given the syntactic structure of the sentence, one expects "organism" to correspond to Innenwelt and "reality" to correspond to Umwelt, but why vanquish reality to the environment/outside? I am tempted to believe that the order of these sentences is not entirely coincidental, and that reality’s exile has everything to do with the mysterious organic insufficiency identified previously. The separation of the organism from its reality/environment might thus explain the nature of the insufficiency: the organism is insufficient in its nature precisely because of its natural separation from its environment. Those traces of the organic—the whole range of the corporeal—can only interact with the environment, never integrate with it. The organic retains this failure from birth through the mirror stage and beyond, unable to cope despite the entire range of social dialectics that comprise the symbolic. Interestingly, this insufficiency is revealed only by the fixity of the imago in the mirror, and yet the mirror stage will be able to regulate its relationships.

Fifth, and finally, the mirror stage is only one possible function of the imago. The other functions are not mentioned, at least not in this essay.

Unfortunately this complex and subtle play of differentiation (between the symbolic and the imaginary, between the organism and reality, between the interior and the exterior) reinjects the entire problematic of metaphysics into Lacan’s theorizing. The situation is not a simple continuation of the conventional cogito ergo sum, but rather a Hegelian sublation: Lacan’s theory of the mirror dismisses the Cartesian subject by effectively doubling it (the child object conjoins the mirror object, the dialectic of desire, etc.). Descartes’ evil demon is displaced in the symbolic register by the mystical bar that separates signifier from signified and against which every articulation of the subject must be tested. While the Cartesian subject had to submit to the optical question of perspective, its Lacanian successor is able to masquerade as the Janus-like imago—which properly understood is nothing less than the founding possibility of subjectivity itself. The symbolic may make the subject possible by preceding its formation from without, but the imaginary precedes the subject from within. Not from a "within" of the corporeal—there’s no sidestepping the organic insufficiency of humanity—but from a “within” of some unavailable and thus unassailable essence. Prior to the symbolic, the imaginary simply is, even if it exists as the imaginary only in the wake of the mirror stage. The imaginary thus conceived stands as a link to something greater and more primordial than itself: a lost essence only visible in that specular moment of clarity that the "ancients" called the imago. Why else stress the age of such an exotic term rather than the nuances of its meaning? Why else declare the imago to be greater and more potent than the mirror stage that makes it visible? As the gateway between the symbolic and the imaginary, as the threshold of the visible world, as the mediator of the internal and the external, Lacan’s articulation of the imago offers itself as a last chance to understand a lost essence. The cogito replaced by aspicio—I see, therefore I am—with the subtle prospect that with Lacan, one sees more.

It comes as no surprise then that in paragraph seventeen the mirror becomes the foundation for this new conception of subjectivity, manufacturing "for the subject … the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body - image to a form of its totality…to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development." The fixity of the imago produces the "rigid armour" of alienation ("rigid armour" translates the French "structure", which also carries connotations of a place of refuge), which in effect produces identity as a consequence of its double; the subject knows itself by the difference between what it sees and what it is. The subject exists only in that it remains alienated from itself. The symbolic will never match the appearance of "totality" afforded by the image in the mirror and so the subject can never be complete, even if, as Lacan argues, it is this incompleteness that allows the subject to be at all. One must not ignore the recurrent theme of the imago: the continued emphasis on stability and fixity provided by the mirror stage. Precisely because of its definition as gatekeeper of the symbolic and imaginary registers, the mirror becomes somehow exempt from both the failure of signification within the symbolic and the fragmentary and partial constraints of the imaginary. Absent this exemption, the theoretical development of the mirror stage is impossible, not only because one could never satisfy the chain of signifiers, but also because the mirror itself would dissolve within the intermingling of the imaginary and symbolic. The rhetoric of fixity makes thinkable the split between interior and exterior by mapping the subject as the distance between the self and its imago, a mapping that can only occur as a function of the symbolic. And so, while the Cartesian subject celebrated itself, the very different Lacanian subject celebrates its lack—a far more subtle and more dangerous formulation, since rejoinders can be simply swept up in the Aufhebung of the symbolic: always reacting, always progressing, but never there. As Lacan announces in the twenty-second paragraph: "This moment in which the mirror-stage comes to an end inaugurates, by the identification with the imago…the dialectic that will henceforth link the I to socially elaborated situations."