Atdtda26: Lovely to see you, 728-730

[Mark Kohut]

If I understand all you wrote, you've convinced me......
  If I don't, I'm acting convinced......

Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
  On 3/15/08, Mark Kohut wrote:
> Saw a quote from Lacan basically saying it is thru mirrors that we moderns
> confirm our identity.........give me 25 words on THAT when you feel like
> it.............

false start: trying to take off from the lyrics to
Hendrix's "Room Full of Mirrors" -- can't get
anywhere with that, good song tho...

how about,
http://maven.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/lacan/
-----------------------------------------------
Drawing on work in physiology and animal psychology, Lacan proposes
that human infants pass through a stage in which an external image of
the body (reflected in a mirror, or represented to the infant through
the mother or primary caregiver) produces a psychic response that
gives rise to the mental representation of an "I". The infant
identifies with the image, which serves as a gestalt of the infant's
emerging perceptions of selfhood, but because the image of a unified
body does not correspond with the underdeveloped infant's physical
vulnerability and weakness, this imago is established as an Ideal-I
toward which the subject will perpetually strive throughout his or her
life.
------------------------------------------------------

--- OTOH, Nabokov presented a more balanced
development: walking down a wooded lane between his
parents, he first became aware that he was he and his parents
were his parents.

His good fortune perhaps not the rule...but inspiring anyway...

Dally, then, suffering from a broken home, having a less
fortuitous development of self-awareness, here is shown
actually seeing "American-ness" in the mirror...

even though she's had the breakthroughs in language
recognition and even a very pleasing moment when she
knows when the fresh what-is-it,scallops? have arrived
at the corner grocery, she's still saddled with the
American identity

- the language implies it's something
she's trying to grow out of (nationality, being, perhaps,
for sensible people, something like one of Vonnegut's
granfalloons, meaningless groupings celebrated inanely,
like the Seinfeld scene where George or somebody questions
a tablemate's saying "look, we're twins" when in fact they
are merely wearing the same color shirt or something --- without
invalidating the "twinning" theme in AtD...just not basing
it on nationalism)

maybe the development into a non-provincial person with
a global viewpoint proceeds from the inside out, and rather
than being an early stage, mirror-recognition only occurs after
enough change to physically alter one's appearance.
If so, her puzzlement at not seeing a difference may precede
a "becoming-different" (to hop from Lacan to Deleuze)


       
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