This much, simply to say that mirrors make us lose our head. But if instead we would keep our head, we must conclude from this that mirrors do not provide reversal but perfect congruency, as when I press blotting paper on a sheet of paper. The fact that I cannot read what remains impressed on the blotting paper has to do with my reading habits, not with specularity (Leonardo da Vinci, who had other reading and writing habits, would not have had this problem). However, I could read what remains impressed on the blotting paper by using a mirror, that is to say, by having recourse to a mirror image of a mirror image.
The same thing happens to me if I stand in front of the mirror holding the dust jacket of a book. I can’t manage to read the title in the mirror; but if I have two angulated mirrors, as people often have in their bathrooms, I can see reflected in one of the two mirrors (more easily in one than the other, depending on the angulation) a third image in which the letters on the dust jacket appear as they do when I look at the book directly (moreover, I really would see myself with my watch on the left wrist). Now, this third image really is a reverse of the mirror image (which in itself reverses nothing).
We use mirrors well, because we have introjected the rules of catoptric refraction. We use them well, when we know that we are dealing with a mirror. When we do not know this, misunderstandings or deceptions may arise. But, when we do know, we always start from the principle that the mirror is telling the truth. It neither «translates» nor interprets but registers what strikes it exactly as it strikes it. And so we trust mirrors, just as we trust, under normal conditions, our own organs of perception. We trust mirrors just as we trust spectacles and telescopes, because, like spectacles and telescopes, mirrors are prostheses.
There is no doubt that mirrors are extensive and intrusive prosthetics par excellence, for example, in that they allow us to look where the eye cannot reach: they allow us to look at our face and eyes, they allow us to see what is happening behind our back. Starting from this principle, we can use mirrors to obtain some very sophisticated intrusive effects: think of angulated dressing table mirrors that allow us to see ourselves in profile, or of barbers’ mirrors arranged en abîme. Some mirrors are also magnifying prostheses, because they reproduce an enlarged image of our face; others are deforming prostheses.
With complex theaters of mirrors we can create illusions, right up to the disquieting catoptric theater in Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai. With series of mirrors arranged at suitable angles we can extend our intrusive powers (I can construct systems of mirrors that allow me to see what is happening in the next room, even if I am not looking toward the door); we can use mirrors as channels for transporting or projecting luminous stimuli (think of the various possible signaling systems that use light reflected by mirrors)…But for the moment what interests us here are simple everyday mirrors, which I am going to consider as presemiosic phenomena.
Of course if I «interpret» my image in the mirror and draw conclusions about my aging (or my unfading beauty), I am already in a more complicated phase of semiosis. And this can also be said of that «mirror stage» in which Lacan saw the moment in which the symbolic was established. But the fact that children must learn to use mirrors does not mean (as some people think) that the mirror is not a primary experience. Children have to learn everything, even to use their hands and eyes; let’s give them time. But the magic of mirrors is such that it is hard for many people to accept the extremely banal experience that I stubbornly insist on proposing: I intend to speak of the mirror image in terms of the way I use the dressing-table mirror every day, perhaps to adjust my tie, and in this phase there is no longer any interpretation, apart from that perceptual interpretation that also comes into play when I look at someone in front of me.
The normal mirror is a prosthesis that does not deceive. All the other prostheses, insofar as they interpose something between the organ whose powers they extend or magnify and what they «touch,» can deceive our perceptions: walking with shoes on leads us into making a poor judgment of the terrain; clothes give us poor information about the external temperature; pliers can give us the impression we have gripped something that then eludes us. But with mirrors we can be sure that we see things the way they are, even when we look in the mirror and wish we were not as we see ourselves.
Naturally we must exclude mirrors that have misted over, cases in which we are deceived by our own mistake (such as when we think we see someone coming toward us, and it is our reflected image instead), misunderstandings in which we take for a mirror an empty frame on the other side of which there is someone who imitates our every movement (as in the Marx Brothers film). In normal circumstances we use mirrors armed with the certainty that they do not lie.
We do it because we have learned that the specular prosthesis provides the eye with the same stimuli that the eye would receive were the prosthesis in front of us (perhaps on the tip of an index finger that we point toward our face). We are sure that the mirror provides us with the absolute double of the stimulating field. If an iconic sign (in the sense of hypoicon) really were an image that has all the properties (visual, at least) of the object represented, the mirror image would be the iconic sign par excellence, or it would be the only icon external to our mind of which we really have experience. But this pure icon stands only for itself.
However, it is not even a Firstness in the Peircean sense, because what we see is already interwoven with an awareness of a relation to a fact: if anything, the mirror image is a Firstness already anchored to a Secondness, insofar as it establishes a necessary and direct relation between the mirroring and the thing mirrored. But it is not yet a sign. This statement holds as long as we assume that in order to define a sign as such, the following criteria must be respected:
(i) The sign is something that stands for something else in its absence. The mirror image, on the other hand, stands in the presence of the object it reflects.
(ii) The sign is materially distinct from the thing of which it is the sign, otherwise one might say that I am a sign of myself. The mirror image, on the other hand, is, as we have seen, an absolute double of the same stimuli that our eye would receive were it in front of the reflecting object.
(iii) In the sign the expression plane is distinguished by substance and form, and the form itself could be transposed into another substance. But with a mirror, at most I transfer (by reversing it) the same luminous substance onto an opposed specular surface.
(iv) For there to be a sign, it must be possible to relate a sign token to a type. In the mirror image, on the other hand, type and token coexist.
(v) The sign can be used to lie or to state (erroneously, even though in good faith) that which is not the case. The mirror image, on the other hand, never lies. The sign can be used to lie, because I can produce the sign even though the object does not exist (I can name chimeras and portray unicorns), while the mirror image is produced only in the presence of the object.
The mirror image has no indexical value. It is not an index of the fact that we are in front of the mirror, because we would not need it (if anything, the absence of the image of the mirrored object could be a symptom, but only for the Invisible Man or for vampires). It is not an index of the fact that we have, for example, a mark on our nose: insofar as the mirror is a prosthesis, we see the mark as we would see it if the mark were on our hand.
The mirror image is not even an imprint (unless in the sense in which the sensation is a metaphorical «imprint» of what has been sensed): imprints are such, and tell us something, when they subsist as material traces in the absence of an imprinter, and only then do they become a semiosic phenomenon. For someone following me, the tracks left on the ground by my feet are imprints, but not for me, because I am not concerned about the
