We, the moderns, who are heading towards the metamodernity represented by the metaverse, cannot very well imagine what a world without mirrors would be like. Yet they seem to us to have existed forever.
We have, of course, the myth of Narcissus, compiled by Ovid around 10 BC, where our very modern character appears in love with his own image, reflected in the shining surface of a stream.
But checking the narrative more precisely, we realize that Narcissus’ tragedy is not that he sees himself in the mirror of the waters and takes himself for an object so beautiful that passion for himself is unleashed. On the contrary, the myth says that he is enchanted by an “incorporeal” image, that he tries to catch it in his hands, that he struggles with this strange capture by an unrecognizable image.
In fact, mirrors were relatively rare objects during antiquity, and in the Roman Empire they were reduced to small polished spheres of bronze or iron, which returned a generally very small image of the person himself. It was at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance, mainly in Flemish painting, that the first faithful representations of a mirror, as we know it today, can be observed.
A notable example is the canvas “The Arnolfini Couple”, now in the National Gallery in London, representing marriage as a symbolic act, surmounted by a mirror and above this a new kind of signature: “Jan van Eyck Was Here in 1434”.
The Arnolfini Couple, by Jan van Eyck
Image: Reproduction/ Wikimedia Commons
It will seem strange to us that a wedding takes place inside a couple’s bedroom, but the whole scene is covered with allegorical elements: the little dog represents fidelity. Clogs left aside indicate that they are down to earth suggesting purity. There is a walnut on the window frame, suggesting fertility, just as the white dove beckons to the protection of the Holy Spirit. The bed could only be in red, a color that since then begins to represent lust.
She wears a small blue vest, a very difficult color to produce in the Middle Ages and which has since come to represent the mother of Jesus Christ. (Attention! You read that right. The color blue is primarily linked to the Virgin Mary. So if you’re an enlightened Christian, you don’t have this man wear blue, woman pink, ok?)
She offers her outstretched hand to her husband who takes the oath that marks the marriage, with her hand raised in a vertical motion.
It is known that until then marriages, with the exception of nobles and aristocrats, for whom he indicated a political and military alliance, were a private situation, celebrated by the bride and groom, by their own decision and ingenuity and announced to the community by free and spontaneous willing. The priests and ecclesiastical representatives were only witnesses of this act, which was above all a commitment and agreement between the bride and groom and their families.
That is why the signature of the Dutch master acquires special importance. It performs the witness function, but it does so by writing above another recognition function, namely the mirror.
Observing the image more closely, we see the couple, a little from the side, given that the mirror is somewhat convex, as well as at least two people, among them the presence of the painter is intuited.
The scene introduces the mirror to the same extent that the role of authorship is becoming more and more important. In the old workshops, many works were composed, usually collectively, without signature, sometimes with the inclusion of the author, painted as a character of the scene, as we see in Fra Angelico, Boltrafio and Signorelli.
The mirror becomes an icon and a fundamental instrument of our “relationship with oneself” in symmetry with the rise of the novel form in literature, with mass society and with the increasingly ambitious promise that we can exercise freedom, both in the public and private, making us virtually who we want to be.
This means that we have to dedicate ourselves more and more to the work of self-adjustment, self-regulation, self-control, self-cultivation. For this we increasingly need “feedback”, “feedback”, “applause or boos”, “criticism or evaluation”.
It is in this context that Freud proposes the notion of narcissism, unfolded by Sartre and Lacan in the concept of the imaginary. This will lead us to the consideration that the self is a double. Me and my double. Me and the echo of my voice or my conscience. Me and my band. Me and my bubble.
The impact of digital language on our grammar of recognition, the effects of neoliberalism on our way of working and the decrease in experiences of belonging, narratives of community and the experience of intimacy, in the formation of our desire, contributed to the mirror becoming the main accessory of the self and the first condition of our individualization process.
I, my shadow now becomes a three-term equation: shadow, mine and I. It is the shadow and the feeling of ownership over it. Feeling denounced by the reiterative use of the pronoun “my”. In such a way that in the current situation the immanent problem of the imaginary has unfolded into a triple entity, not just a double one.
Now, it is as if it “came from the factory” as an instance of ephemeral self-recognition, a blinker that allows us to say: here “I”, or “there sometimes happens to be me”, or “when I saw , I realized that… I”.
That is, the impermanence of the self is subtly compensated for by the excess of double auxiliaries. They are important in sustaining a certain sense of continuity of experience and existence.
After that we have the third incidence of the self, as a function of ownership and possession. Here the unpleasant inversion effect takes place: everything we possess in excess will soon appear to possess us. If I need to dominate the other, soon I will feel that this other dominates me.
In pre-election times, we hope that these three dimensions of the imaginary can be replaced by the force of the word. Word by which we can begin, end or restart human affairs. A word that Narcissus cannot hear, and that makes us be seized by the passion for identity, judgment and property. As Frejat says in “Love to Start Again”:
I wish you had someone to love
And when you’re really tired
There is still love to start over
to start over
i want you to earn money
‘Cause you have to live too
And that you tell him, at least once,
Who really owns whom.”
