Is the mirror a semiotic phenomenon? Or else, is the image reflected from the mirror surface a sign? These questions may well be nonsense —in that common sense would suggest that mirrors are just mirrors. In any case, putting such questions is not without purpose: it might be somewhat meaningless to discover that the mirror image is a sign, but it would be more interesting to discover that the mirror image is not a sign and why. Even though we assume we know everything about the mirror, excluding mirrors from the class of signs might help us better to define a sign (or at least to define what a sign is not).
Of course, we should first establish what we mean by both sign and mirror. But we are immediately faced with the question of whether the two definitions may somehow be linked to one another in a circle; so that we would not be able to decide whether we should begin from the mirror to define a sign, or vice versa. How can we know that, if we begin from a definition of sign, it is not so constructed as to exclude the mir-ror? It would seem easier to begin from the mirror (which is assumed to be thoroughly, objectively, and unquestionably described by optics). But defining what a mirror is and what it is not may depend on certain previ-ous assumptions— although unspoken —on the nature of semiotic phenomena as different from mirror phenomena.
No phylogenetic argument can be of any use in establishing a priority. Man is a semiotic animal; this is a matter of fact. But saying so does not exclude that man is so thanks to an ancestral experience with mirrors. No doubt, the myth of Narcissus seems to refer to an already speaking animal, but how far can we trust myths? From a phylogenetic viewpoint, the question sounds like that of the chicken and the egg or of the origin of language. Since we lack any good document on the ‘dawn’ of our species, we had better keep silent.
From an ontogenetic viewpoint, too, we definitely have very poor cer-tainties. We are not sure whether semiosis is at the basis of perception or vice versa (and, therefore, whether semiosis is at the basis of thought or vice versa). Psychoanalytical inquiries on the ‘mirror stage’ (Lacan 1966) would suggest that perception (or at least the perception of one’s own body as an unfragmented unit) and the experience with mirrors go hand in hand. And, therefore, perception —thought—self-consciousness — experience with mirrors —semiosis seem to be the points of a rather in-extricable knot, the points of a circle where it would be difficult to spot a starting point.
7.2. The imaginary and the symbolic
Lacan’s pages on the ‘mirror stage’ would seem to solve our problem from the very beginning. The mirror is a threshold-phenomenon mark-ing the boundaries between the imaginary and the symbolic. When a child is between six and eight months old, at first he mistakes the image for reality, then he realizes that it is just an image, and later still he under-stands that it is his image. In this ‘jubilant’ acceptation of the image, the child reconstructs the still scattered fragments of his body as something outside himself— in terms of inverse symmetry, so to speak (a notion we shall take up again later). The experience with mirrors still belongs to the imaginary, just as the experience of the deceptive image of a bunch of flowers created in a spherical mirror described in «Topics of the Imag-inary» (Lacan 1953:101).
The imaginary mastering of one’s own body which the experience with mirrors induces is earlier than actual master-ing: the final development «is achieved insofar as the subject integrates into the symbolic system and asserts itself there, through the exercise of a true word» (Lacan 1953). By the way, what Lacan defines as the sym-bolic is actually the semiotic, although he identifies it with verbal lan-guage. In the acceptation of the mirror image there is a symbolic matrix into which the ego plunges under a primeval form; only language should give it back its function of a subject «in the universal’ (Lacan 1966:94). As we shall see, this restitution back «to the universal» should pertain to any semiotic process, although not verbal.
The mirror as the moment when the reflected ego changes to social ego is a «structural crossroads» or, as we were saying before, a threshold Phenomenon.
7.3. Getting in through the mirror
However, in the event these conclusions are valid, they only tell us what the mirror is (or, better, what use it is for) at a single moment in the subject’s ontogenesis. On the whole, the considerations of the mirror stage do not exclude that, at any further stage in the development of symbolic life, the mirror may be used as a semiotic phenomenon. This is why it is worthwhile considering a different approach, that is, question-ing ourselves about the use of mirrors by human adults who produce signs, perceive themselves as subjects, and, above all, are already famil-iar with mirror images, rather than considering an auroral or primary moment (be it phylo- or ontogenetic). If we consider the problem at this stage, we can avail ourselves of our everyday experience, with a pegging down to phenomena, instead of searching into our ancestors’ experience (which cannot be verified) or our infant children’s (which we define con-jecturally, based on guesswork and external data).
But, once again, the problem is whether to begin from mirrors or from signs.
If there is a circle, we might as well get in from any point whatsoever. Let us then get in through the mirror (without getting stuck inside it, as we shall see), since optics seems to know a lot about mirrors, whereas it is doubtful whether semiotics knows anything about signs. On the whole, optics is an ‘exact’ science, and so-called exact sciences are sup-posedly more accurate than so-called nonexact sciences. When question-ing ourselves on our experience with mirrors (but from now on we are entitled to speak ‘scientifically’ of catoptric experience), we might at the most wonder to what extent catoptrics is actually exact.
7.4. A phenomenology of the mirror: the mirror does not invert
We initially define a mirror as any polished surface reflecting incident rays of light (therefore excluding so-called mirrors reflecting other kind of waves, such as repeater systems). These surfaces are either plane or curved.
By plane mirror we mean, a surface reflecting a virtual image, which is straight, inverted (or symmetrical), specular (the same size of the re-flected object), free of so-called chromatic aberrations. By convex mir-rors we mean a surface reflecting virtual, straight, inverted, and reduced images.
By concave mirror we mean a surface (a) reflecting virtual, straight, and magnified images, when the object stands between the focus and the observer, and (b) reflecting real, upside-down, magnified, or re-duced images depending on the position of the object anywhere in space between infinity and the focal point, which can both be observed by human eyes and be projected on a screen.
We shall not consider parabolic, ellipsoid, spherical, or cylindrical mir-rors, because they are not in common use; they do not belong to our everyday experience. Their results will possibly be considered under the general heading of distorting mirrors and catoptric theaters.
Already, when working out these definitions, we should question our-selves on the meaning of terms such as virtual and real. The real image in concave mirrors is actually unreal in terms of common sense, and is called real not only because the subject perceiving it may mistake it for a physical object but also because it may be projected on a screen, which is impossible with virtual images. As for the virtual image, it is so called because the observer perceives it as if it were inside the mirror, while, of course, the mirror has no ‘inside’.
On the other hand, the definition by which a mirror image —as it is commonly said — would have an inverted symmetry is even more whim-sical.
This belief (that after all the mirror shows the right place of the left) is so deeply rooted that some went so far as to suggest that the mirror has this odd quality of exchanging the right with the left, but not the top with the bottom. Catoptrics, of course, does not allow for this conclusion; if, instead of being used to vertical mirrors, we would more generally be used to mirrors horizontally fixed to the ceiling, as libertines are used to them, we would come to believe that mirrors also tip top with bottom and show us the world upside-down.
But the point is that vertical mirrors themselves do not reverse or in-vert. A mirror reflects the right side exactly where the right side is, and the same with the left side. It is the observer (so ingenuous even when he is a scientist) who by self-identification imagines he is the man inside the mirror and, looking at himself, realizes he is wearing his watch on his right wrist. But it would be so only if he, the observer I mean, were the one who is inside the mirror (Je est un autre!). On the contrary, those who avoid behaving as Alice, and getting into the mirror, do not so deceive themselves.
And, in fact, every morning, in the bathroom, each of us does use a mirror without behaving as a spastic. But we are clumsy right when we use lateral opposite mirrors to cut our sideburns and see an image (the reflection of a reflection) having its right side where we feel we have it and vice versa.
