7.10. Why mirrors do not produce signs
In the light of what has been said above, the mirror image does not meet the requirements for a sign. One cannot say that, when discovering through a mirror that someone is standing behind one, one infers a con-sequent by an antecedent. Since, as we have seen, mirrors are prosth-eses, this inference is not so different from the many pseudo-inferences one can draw from the use of periscopes or binoculars: if I see something through them, then there must be something. But this inference is not dissimilar from the fundative inference that rules our relationship with our own senses: if I see something, then it means that there there is something.
(1a) The mirror image (even when it is taken as an antecedent) is pres-ent in the presence of a referent which cannot be absent. It never refers to remote consequents. The relationship between object and image is the relationship between two presences, without any possible mediations. The consequent (by virtue of the prosthesis action of the mirror) comes into the radius of the interpreter’s perceptibility.
(2a) The image is causally produced by the object and cannot be pro-duced in the absence of the object itself.
(3a) Thus, as we have already seen, the mirror image cannot be used to lie. We can lie about mirror images (making phenomena which are not mirror images pass as such), but we cannot lie with and through a mirror image.
(4a) The mirror image cannot be correlated to a content, or, rather, it might well be (I look at my image in the mirror to reflect on the generic char-acteristics of the human body), only by virtue of its necessary relation-ship to the referent. The signs can refer to a referent because they automatically refer us to a content, whereas the mirror image refers only to one content as it has a primary relationship with the referent.
(5a) Thus the mirror image never establishes a relationship between types but only between tokens, which is another way of distinguishing the imaginary from the symbolic — where the symbolic implies a ‘uni-versal’ mediation which is in fact the relationship between types.
(6a) It goes without saying that the mirror image is not independent of the medium or channel in which it is formed and by which it is conveyed. It is embodied by one, and only one, channel, the mirror.
(7a) In the end, the mirror image cannot be interpreted. At most, the object to which it refers can be interpreted (in terms of different types of infer-ences, definitions, and descriptions which are increasingly analytical), or, rather, the stimulating field from which the double is produced. The image as such can only be reflected as such by a second (third, fourth . . .) mirror. On the other hand, if the interpretability is an inherent feature of the content, an image without content cannot by definition be interpreted (at least in the sense which we have given to the concept of interpretabil-ity).
7.11. Freaks: distorting mirrors
Mirror images are not signs and signs are not mirror images. And yet there are cases when mirrors are used to produce processes which can be defined as semiotic.
The first peculiar case is that of distorting mirrors, whose amazing effects were already observed by Arab physicists and in Le Roman de la Rose, A strange prosthesis, the distorting mirror amplifies but distorts the organ’s function, as a hearing aid which transforms all conversation into a pop song. Therefore, a prosthesis with hallucinatory functions. If we take hallucinatory substances, we continue to perceive shapes, colors, sounds, and smells, but in an altered form.
The sensory organs function abnormally. And yet we know that these are our sensory organs, which we usually trust. If we are not aware that we are drugged, we trust them, with the most unforeseeable effects; if, on the other hand, we are aware, in that we are still able to control our reactions, we force ourselves to interpret and translate the sensorial data to reconstruct ‘correct’ percep-tions (or, rather, analogous to the perceptions of most human beings). The same thing occurs with the distorting mirror. If we know neither that it is a mirror nor that it is distorting, we will therefore find ourselves in a situation of normal perceptive deceit. It is just a question of noise on the channel. At times this noise is not perceived as such, and if while speaking to someone on the telephone the line is disturbed, we are bound to assume that the noises are the mutterings, the coughing, or the hoarseness of the person we are talking to. But in this case we are wrongly interpreting sensations, and once again we are taking dross for gold.
The case where we know that we are in front of a distorting mirror, as, for instance, at a fun fair, tends to be more interesting.
Our attitude is therefore double: on the one hand, we find it amusing; that is, we enjoy the hallucinatory characteristics of the medium. We therefore decide (for the sake of playing) to accept that we have three eyes or an enormous stomach or very short legs, just as we accept a fairy tale. In reality, we give ourselves a sort of pragmatic holiday: we accept that the mirror, which usually tells the truth, is lying. But the fact that our disbelief is suspended does not concern the image as much as the distorting prosthesis. The game is a complex one: on the one hand, I behave as if I were standing in front of a plane mirror telling the truth and I find that it gives back an ‘unreal’ image (that which I am not). If I accept this image, I am helping, one could say, the mirror to lie. The pleasure that this game gives me is not of a totally semiotic nature but of an aesthetic nature. I do the same with other prostheses if, for example, I observe the world through colored lenses. But this game is not so dif-ferent from the one I play when in the midst of an incredible hum of voices: I place the palms of my hands over my ears, lifting my hands off and replacing them rhythmically in order to hear an ‘unreal’ noise.
However, at the same time (or immediately afterward), another atti-tude comes into play: since I know that I am standing in front of the mirror, I imagine that in one way or another it always tells the truth because it reflects (even if poorly) incident rays emanating from my body. (Naturally, the same applies if I look at someone else’s body in the distorting mirror; however, there is no doubt that the whole business becomes psychologically more interesting, from a narcissistic point of view, if that body is mine.)
Under these circumstances I interpret the data given back to me by the mirror, in the same way in which, with regard to refractory phenom-ena, even if I continue to see the stick which is broken in half by the water, I nonetheless interpret these data by continuing to accept this stick as unbroken. Interpretive rules to decode the optical illusions exist (if not at a perceptive level, at least at a level of intellectual judgment). In front of the distorting mirror, I put a few projective rules to the test, so that a given length or width of the virtual image must proportionally correspond to different lengths or widths of the reflected object. I pro-ceed as if I had to interpret a type of cartographic projection in terms of another.
These projective rules are no different from the ones I apply in order to recognize, in a stylized or grotesque drawing, the characteristics of the object or the class of type-objects to which it refers. In this sense the experience of the distorted image constitutes a further threshold phenomenon which shifts the boundaries between catoptrics and semiosis.
If the distorted image were not also parasitic with respect to its referent, we would have to admit that it has many semiotic char-acteristics, even if rather vague, imprecise, and erratic. For example, in this relationship (which is always a token-to-token one), I am forced to see myself as another (as a dwarf, a giant, a monster): it is like the beginning of a generalization process, the negligence of the referent to fantasize on the content —even if in terms of a continually repressed temptation controlled by a consciousness of the singularity of the phe-nomenon, a cold reasoning on a hallucinatory situation. There is that extra knowledge concerning what I am or could be, the dawn of a coun-terfactual exercise — the beginning of semiosis.
Perhaps, in accordance with this possibility, we relegate the distorting mirrors to enchanted castles, so as not to question the frontier between catoptrics and semiosis which we have instinctively demarcated so well.
Finally, undoubtedly the image reflected by the distorting mirror is an indication of the fact that the mirror as a channel is in fact a distorting one. Just as the image of the broken stick tells me that (as if I didn’t already know) the stick is immersed in water. We have already described these symptomatic uses of the image, where the image does not give us information about the object, but about the nature of the channel. In these cases it is my perceptive surprise which becomes the symptom of the channel anomalies (how can I see a broken stick and my face with three eyes when I know that ‘it is not the case’?), so that the semiosis effort actually is