The Threshold of the Visible World

Kaja Silverman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317795971
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

In The Threshold of the Visible World Kaja Silverman advances a revolutionary new political aesthetic, exploring the possibilities for looking beyond the restrictive mandates of the self, and the normative aspects of the cultural image-repertoire. She provides a detailed account of the social and psychic forces which constrain us to look and identify in normative ways, and the violence which that normativity implies.

The Threshold

1

The Bodily Ego

In The Ego and the Id, Freud maintains that the ego is “first and foremost, a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface.”¹ Although he does not define any of the terms through which he characterizes the psychic entity which is the primary concern of this often-quoted sentence, one thing emerges from it with absolute clarity: our experience of “self” is always circumscribed by and derived from the body.

On the face of it, this is a puzzling assertion, since the body ostensibly lies outside the domain of psychoanalysis. In “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” Freud stresses that drives communicate with the unconscious only via an ideational representative.² And in The Interpretation of Dreams, he refuses to specify a physical location for psychical reality.³ Moreover, in his account of hysteria, the one neurosis within which the body would seem to occupy pride of place, Freud makes clear that it does so only as a network of denatured signifiers.⁴ Lacan insists even more emphatically upon a disjunctive relationship between body and psyche; identity and desire are inaugurated only through a series of ruptures or splittings, which place the subject at an ever-greater remove from need and other indices of the strictly biological.⁵

How then are we to understand Freud’s claim that, from the very beginning and in its most profound sense, the ego is corporeal in nature? In this chapter I will attempt to provide a rather different answer to this question than that which is usually proffered. Since my ultimate goal is to clarify how gender, race, sexual preference, and other culturally constructed and enforced distinctions come into play at the level of the bodily ego, I will be concerned not only with the mirror image, but also with the gaze and the cultural “screen” or image repertoire; not only with idealizing identifications, but also with their deidealizing equivalents; and not only with the alterity of the ego, but also with its conventional insistence upon “self-sameness.”

The Visual Imago

Lacan’s account of the mirror stage has generally been read as a fuller elaboration of Freud’s tantalizingly brief description of the ego—as an explanation, in particular, of Freud’s insistence upon the ego as the “projection” of a “surface.” Lacan proposes that the ego comes into existence at the moment when the infant subject first apprehends the image of its body within a reflective surface, and is itself a mental refraction of that image. Thus, the ego is the representation of a corporeal representation.⁶ Significantly, both of these representations have an emphatically visual status. Not only is the “surface” of which the ego is a “projection” specular, but the cerebral cortex itself also “functions like a mirror,” a “site” where “images are integrated.”⁷

Lacan insists on the fictiveness and exteriority of the image which founds the ego. He also characterizes the psychic process which the ego sets in motion as the first of many structuring identifications (often involving not only exterior representations but other subjects). This has encouraged some commentators to insist that the mirror stage should be understood metaphorically rather than literally. Laplanche, for instance, suggests that the mirror stage be grasped simply as the child’s “recognition of the form of another human and the concomitant precipitation within [it] of a first outline of that form.”⁸ Lacan’s discussion of pigeons and locusts in his mirror stage essay might even seem to support such a reading. In the passage in question, normal development once again depends upon the introduction of an image (3). That image need not be a mirror reflection; the simple appearance of another member of the same species, of either sex, is all that is necessary, since what is at stake here is merely species identification.

However, in Seminar I, Lacan stresses that things rarely proceed as smoothly with human subjects as they do in the rest of the animal world. With humans, there is an extra term, one that would seem to coincide precisely with what might be called the “moi” or “belong-to-me” aspect of the ego, as opposed to those that would be exhausted by the subject’s mere recognition of him or herself as a member of a species.⁹ And in his account of the mirror stage, Lacan paradoxically insists on both the “otherness” and the “sameness” of the image within which the child first finds its “self.” On the one hand, the mirror stage represents a méconnaissance, because the subject identifies with what he or she is not. On the other hand, what he or she sees when looking into the mirror is literally his or her own image.

Lacan attributes to this literal reflection both a decisive role in the initial formation of the ego, and a determinative influence over the ego’s subsequent development. In Seminar I, he characterizes the literal reflection as the “Urbild,” or specular prototype of the ego (74), and in the mirror stage essay, he describes it as “the threshold of the visible world” (3). With this threshold metaphor, whose many meanings this book will explore, Lacan suggests that the subject’s corporeal reflection constitutes the limit or boundary within which identification may occur.

Seminar I provides an extended discussion of an optical experiment, the experiment of the inverted bouquet, which helps to clarify the notion of the mirror image as a threshold or limit. In this experiment, a stand with an upright vase faces a spherical mirror. An inverted bouquet of flowers is suspended from the bottom of the stand. When a spectator occupies a particular position in relation to the stand and the spherical mirror, a real image of the flowers (i.e., one capable of being reflected in a plane mirror) is projected into the vase, so that it seems to contain them. In Lacan’s revision of the experiment, the relative positions of the vase and the flowers are reversed, so that it is an image of the vase rather than the flowers (or, to state the case in terms more directly germane to the present discussion, the container rather than what is contained) that is produced as a mirage on the top of the stand. In Lacan’s theoretical appropriation of the experiment, the imaginary vase represents the body’s image, which—although fictive—effectively works to structure and contain.

Lacan implies at one point in Seminar I that the bodily image plays this including and excluding role with respect to other images, specifying those which are acceptable loci of identification, and those which are not (145). In Seminar VII, he makes this axiom explicit, suggesting that the mirror image fulfills “a role as limit”—“it is that which cannot be crossed.”¹⁰ Thus, at the heart of Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage there would seem to be something which has gone largely unremarked, something which calls into question the currently fashionable notion of a perpetually mobile subject, capable of a wide range of contradictory bodily identifications: the principle of the self-same body. It will be the primary task of this chapter both to elaborate and problematize this principle, which, unfortunately, never comes into sharp focus within the pages of Lacan’s Seminars or Écrits.

Laplanche also says that the identification which first conjures the ego into existence implies the articulation of bodily boundaries. “We are…led to admit the existence of an identification that is both early and probably also extremely sketchy in its initial phase,” he writes in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, “an identification with a form conceived of as a limit, or a sack: a sack of skin” (81). Although here “limit” would seem to signify the dividing line between “self” and “world,” through its conceptual proximity to “sack,” it also signifies a container whose shape determines in advance the imaginary “contents” which can be put into it. In other words, like Lacan, Laplanche suggests that, far from being wide open to any corporeal imago, the normative ego allows only those identifications which are congruent with its form. As I have already indicated, however, a moment later Laplanche goes on to disassociate the articulation of this bodily container from the subject’s own reflection by attributing a metaphoric status to the mirror stage. The moi or “belong-to-me” component of the ego makes its appearance from another direction—from the direction of the “sensational” body.

A note added by James Strachey in his translation of The Ego and the Id, and approved by Freud, proposes a very different explanation of the bodily ego than that advanced by Lacan in the Écrits and early Seminars. “The ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensations,” this note reads, “chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body. It may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body….” (26n). Laplanche draws upon this note from The Ego and the Id as well as on Lacan’s essay on the mirror stage for his own account of the subject’s primordial identification. On the one hand, he explains, the specular image allows “an apprehension of the body as ‘a separate object?’” On the other hand, the body is apprehended by the subject as its “own” via the tactile exploration of its “cutaneous surface” (81–82). In a subsequent discussion of physical pain and its role in defining the limits of the corporeal ego, Laplanche once again stresses the crucial part played by the sensational body within the constitution of the ego (82).¹¹ He thereby accounts more satisfactorily than Lacan for how the ego can be predicated upon both “sameness” and “otherness.” However, Laplanche does not elaborate any further on either the nature of the sensational body, or its relation to the visual image. For such an elaboration, we must turn to the work of Paul Schilder and Henri Wallon.

Sensation and the Bodily Ego

It might seem difficult to account for the ego as a projection of bodily sensation without somehow naturalizing that psychic entity. However, in an extraordinary book first published in 1935, The Image and Appearance of the Human Body, Viennese neurologist and psychoanalyst Paul Schilder elaborates a radically deessentializing theory of the part played by sensation in the production of the corporeal ego, and one whose emphases are often surprisingly congruent with Lacan’s essay on the mirror stage. While Schilder readily grants the importance of images of the body in the formation of the “self,” he argues that they represent only one of that entity’s components. The “postural model of the body” or “image of the body,” the two terms which Schilder uses to refer to the corporeal ego, also include all tactile, cutaneous, and kinaesthetic sensations.¹² Through synesthesia, these sensations are experienced as referring to one body, occupying a single point in space:

The image of the human body means the picture of our own body which we form in our mind, that is to say, the way in which the body appears to ourselves. There are sensations which are given to us. We see parts of the body-surface. We have tactile, thermal, pain impressions. There are [also] mental pictures and representations.¹³

Far from being a biological given, the postural model of the body must be painstakingly built up. Moreover, this process of construction must be endlessly repeated, since—lacking any stable referent—it undergoes repeated disintegration and transformation. This can be demonstrated most dramatically through that element in the postural model of the body which would seem to evade psychic mediation, and to refer back to Freud: cutaneous sensation. Like the specular image, which forms the basis of the Lacanian ego, cutaneous sensation is conferred upon the subject from outside. Without social exchange, Schilder insists, it would never come into existence, since it can be defined only through the relationship between the body and the world of objects. Without such contact, the cutaneous surface of the body has neither form nor decisive boundaries: “The outline of the skin is not felt as a smooth and straight surface,” he writes. “This outline is blurred. There are no sharp borderlines between the outside world and the body. The surface of the body can be compared in its indistinctness of feeling with the indistinctness of Katz’s so-called space color” (85).

Schilder later suggests that it is only when the surface of our body comes into contact with other surfaces that we are even able to perceive it (86). This formulation stresses the crucial role played by one’s surroundings, but not necessarily by social exchange, in the construction of the body. However, still later in the book, Schilder formulates his view of the relation between the subject’s bodily ego and the larger environment in more insistently cultural terms. He remarks that “the touches of others, the interest others take in the different parts of our body, will be of an enormous importance in the development of the postural image of the body” (126). In this way, he indicates that the body is not the simple product of physical contact, but that it is also profoundly shaped by the desires which are addressed to it, and by the values which are imprinted on it through touch.

Elsewhere in The Image and Appearance of the Human Body, Schilder maintains that the shape of the body also shifts with the desires of the subject, desires which position him or her once again in a structuring relation to the Other. “Every emotion…changes the body-image,” he observes. “The body contracts when we hate, it becomes firmer, and its outlines towards the world are more strongly marked. This is connected with the beginning of action in the voluntary muscles…. We expand the body when we feel friendly and loving…and the borderlines of the body-image lose their distinct character” (210).

For Schilder, bodily openings are particularly important to the postural model, because it is “by these openings that we come in closest contact with the world” (124–25). Consequently, physical desire is most classically localized there. Although Schilder does not actually suggest that erotogenic zones are mapped onto the child’s body through the parenta...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgment
• Introduction
• The Threshold
• The Visible World
• Notes
• Index