• No results found

Through the Black Mirror: Encountering the Other in the Age of Digital Narcissism

N/A
N/A
Protected

Academic year: 2021

Share "Through the Black Mirror: Encountering the Other in the Age of Digital Narcissism"

Copied!
67
0
0

Bezig met laden.... (Bekijk nu de volledige tekst)

Hele tekst

(1)

THROUGH THE

BLACK MIRROR

Koen Vacano

Master’s Thesis Philosophy

Supervisor: Huub Dijstelbloem

Second Assessor: Michiel Leezenberg

(2)

Table of Contents

Summary ... 2

Introduction: Connections or Reflections? ... 3

Part I: Looking through the Mirror ... 7

1. The weeds in the water ... 7

2. Meno’s paradox of Other Minds ... 11

3. The other through transference ... 15

4. The split self in the arms of Narcissus ... 20

5. Embodied reflections ... 24

Part II: Looking at the Mirror ... 29

1. Men against fire ... 30

2. Technē: extending man ... 34

3. Reflections reified: the mirror perfected and exposed ... 43

Conclusion: Life in the Hall of Mirrors ... 57

Literature ... 61

(3)

Summary

As advanced modern technologies increasingly mediate our experience of the world, concerns have risen about their transformative effects on the encounter between self and other. In particular, technologies such as virtual assistants, ambient intelligence systems, chatbots, (potentially fake) social media profiles, personalisation through tracking cookies, and robots appear to engender a risk of ‘epistemological narcissism’, of believing to encounter some ‘other’ while actually perceiving representations technically constructed to suit the desires and preconceptions of the self. Yet although the particular effects of contemporary technological mediations have been amply studied by Philosophy of Technology (notably by Ihde, 1978, McLuhan, 1994, Latour, 1999, Sloterdijk, 2007, Verbeek, 2009a, and Van den Eede, 2011), the problem of epistemological narcissism is much older, and has been a returning, transhistorical concern in the disciplines of epistemology, phenomenology, and psychology. Plato, Descartes, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Freud, and Lacan each from their own perspective already challenged the way the ‘other’ can become known through mediations (like language and the body, which may be subject to misrepresentation and self-projection as well) long before the emergence of advanced modern technologies. So far, however, the relation between this universal problem and the particular effects of modern technologies has not received much critical attention, so that it is difficult to evaluate the actual, social impact of current technological advancements. This thesis, therefore, explores this question of how advanced technologies affect the problem of epistemological narcissism in encountering the ‘other’ through mediations. First, by analysing and connecting the fundamental views developed on this subject in the fields of epistemology, phenomenology, and psychology, a conceptual framework is developed for understanding the other-encounter as a universal phenomenon: it is conceptualised as a process of ‘reflection’, in which the identities of ‘self’ and ‘other’ are coevally constructed as mirror-images, and in which otherness is experienced foremost when one’s self-projections fail to be reflected. Subsequently, the place of technologies in this framework is evaluated by drawing on theories of mediation developed in Philosophy of Technology, notably by Ihde and McLuhan, and re-assessing the notion of technē. This results in an ontology of man as ‘coming into being through mediations’, which blurs the distinction between mediating technologies and mediated humans, so that the phenomenological-epistemological process of ‘reflection’ underlying the general other-encounter becomes applicable to the experience of technologies as well. However, it is argued that two specific aspects of modern technological advancements are fundamentally altering the way this process works: first, the link between mediator and mediation is being destabilised by technologies like bots and digital image manipulation, which transform, intercept, or falsify the technē-extensions of others; second, technological developments combined with social and commercial pressures have given rise to ‘others’, like personalised content, pet robots, and virtual assistants, which intentionally reflect self-projections. Together these two developments have simultaneously perfected and exposed the process of reflection inherent in the self-other-encounter: the modern self is increasingly surrounded by perfectly understandable ‘others’ which it knows to be technically designed self-reflections, resulting in serious, social

(4)

Introduction: Connections or Reflections?

The experience of encountering someone or something ‘other’ has changed significantly since the beginning of the twenty-first century. In our technologically1 advanced society, we may select future employees based on their LinkedIn profiles, find ourselves attracted to Tinder pictures, make new friends while playing Fortnite, keep track of them through their Instagram updates, and speak to them via Skype. Shopping, entertainment, and tracking the news increasingly take place on online platforms which, by making use of data aggregation, advanced algorithms, and tracking cookies, show us precisely the things we are likely to buy, watch, and read (Rushkoff, 2013: 158). When contacting a company’s customer service, we may get an instant and perfectly civil response through a chatbox, and find out later that we were talking to a bot (Romm, 2018). Fuelled by developments in AI, robotics, and cybernetics, there is a progressive blending of humans and technologies in the material world as well. More and more homes are equipped with virtual assistants or ambient intelligence systems, which responsively adapt the temperature, lighting, music, or even the contents of the fridge, to the inhabitants’ preferences (Verbeek, 2009a: 231). In several Japanese elderly homes, humanoid robots have taken over some of the nursing tasks, and the realistic robot-seal PARO is given to demented patients as a pet (Dumouchel & Damiano, 2017: 5, 156-66). The human body too can be enhanced with implants in the breasts, bones, or brains in order to improve its appearance, or behaviour (Wolf, 2002: 267-8). While many of these developments have greatly extended the quantity and efficiency of our encounters with others, their mediated nature inevitably raises phenomenological and epistemological questions about their quality. If our experiences of new people and things are algorithmically personalised and preprogramed, can we justifiably claim to encounter ‘others’, or are we just running into our own predispositions reflected back at us? When screens may mediate as well as simulate the presence of others, how do we know if there is someone on the other side? How can we experience something ‘other’ in a world coated with simulating screens, artificial intelligences, and media specifically designed to suit our ‘selves’? The advancements of modern technologies, in short, appear to have imbued the mediated other-encounter with the risk of ‘epistemological narcissism’ – of believing, like the mythological Narcissus, that one sees another, while actually looking at oneself. Academically, this problem has been taken up by the rapidly developing fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS), and Philosophy of Technology (cf. Van den Eede, 2011). The issues at stake in this domain of philosophical literature may be illustrated by juxtaposing the views of two prominent contemporary thinkers, Peter Sloterdijk and Bruno Latour.2

These philosophers, who have proclaimed themselves to be good friends, and agree on many issues, amongst which a central focus on the changing forms of social organisation in the globalising world, actually assess the part played by technologies in the current social constitution quite differently (Latour, 2009). Latour, on the one hand, sees our technologically advanced society as a ‘network’ of actors, in which “an increasingly large number of humans are mixed with an increasingly large number of nonhumans” (1999:

1 The adjectives ‘technological’ and ‘technical’ will be used interchangeably throughout this thesis, both to

describe things pertaining to devices, machines, and processes created by the application of knowledge.

2 Cf. Dijstelbloem, 2010 for a comparison of both philosophers with regards to their analyses of the social

(5)

214). It is a fundamentally ‘democratic’ ontology that urges us to do away with the distinction between human subject and material-technological object, and to see instead a collective of sociotechnical hybrids, humans combined with technologies to form new actors, like ‘gunmen’, and technologies onto which human moral-political agency has been ‘translated’, such as speed bumps. These hybrid actors continuously combine and rearrange to create new relations and possibilities (idem: 180, 186; cf. Dijstelbloem, 2010). Thus it is pointless to consider technological mediations like Facebook profiles epistemological barriers to the ‘others’ they mediate; rather we should consider them new types of agents – Facebook-men – who can make their own, unique contributions to the socio-political collective. Sloterdijk, on the other hand, emphasises the ways in which our interactions with technologies help shape the ‘spheres’ in which we operate socially. Looking at our social organisation from this perspective, he sees a world of ‘foam’, in which people live in personalised ‘bubbles’, or ‘egospheres’, gadget-filled apartments that serve as ‘operating rooms for our self-care’ and ‘immune systems’ in a highly contaminated field of ‘connected isolations' (2007: 92). The globally connected world is revealed to be sustained by “media that can be identified as ego-technologies [... which] sustain self-fulfilment and allow for the users to constantly return to themselves and eo ipso to pair formation with themselves and their ‘surprise’ inner partners” (97). This raises the possibility that while we may think to be endlessly connecting to others all over the world, we are actually interacting with nothing but our self-reflections seen in technologies that respond to our fantasies. This brief juxtaposition of Sloterdijk and Latour reveals that the problem of encountering the other through technological mediations runs across several fundamental branches of philosophy: it involves an ontological debate about the status of entities such as ‘human’ and ‘technology’, where they begin and end, and whether they can be distinguished at all; it invites normative consideration of the constitution of society, and whether technologies have served to connect or isolate people; it touches upon many psychological and phenomenological issues, ranging from how individuals understand themselves in relation to (mediated) others, to how the experiences of ‘self’ and ‘other’ come into being in general, and how they are influenced by processes of technological mediation; lastly, it animates fundamental epistemological and hermeneutic questions about the limits of perception, the possibilities of gaining knowledge through representations, and the ways in which one may come to an understanding of something or someone ‘other’ at all. Furthermore, although Sloterdijk and Latour themselves would (rightly) be keen to point out that their perspectives are in many respects not mutually exclusive, their juxtaposition here reveals one fundamental conceptual opposition running across all layers of the problem: the conception of technological mediations as ‘connectors’ which may extend the human self and enable its understanding of the other, versus their conception as ‘reflectors’ which falsify the experience of otherness by simulating connections that are perfectly responsive to the self.3 In short, are we looking through the technology, at the other, or are we looking at it, unwittingly mistaking our own reflections for others? Though contemporary technological developments and the academic waxing of STS have made this problem more prominent, the issue itself is certainly not a modern one. Ever since 3 Cf. Latour, 2011 for his own analysis of the similarities and differences between his view and Sloterijk’s.

(6)

Plato, the difficulty of ‘knowing the other’ through signs, mediations, and potential obstructions has been central to philosophy. It may indeed be deemed the fundamental object of epistemology itself, and, as such, it has returned time and again in different shapes and sizes, from the more analytical concerns underlying the problem of Other Minds, to the more experiential perspectives of hermeneutics and phenomenology. Time and again these diverging philosophical disciplines have hit upon (variants of) the same question of how the ‘other’ can be known or experienced through mediations which are liable to misrepresent the other, and to be misinterpreted by the (preconceptions of the) self. For indeed the presence of malleable representations mediating the encounter between self and other is all but particular to communication via modern technologies. Language itself, after all, as Plato famously warned, is also a medium which may be misunderstood and used to ‘mask’ oneself – let alone writing and painting. So from a transhistorical, philosophical perspective, the problem of grasping some ‘other’ through mediations is actually universal, going beyond the particular technological possibilities and difficulties of our time.

Thus it becomes clear that a comprehensive evaluation of the problem of encountering others through current, advanced technological4 mediations, requires a thorough

exploration of the relation between the universal phenomenological-epistemological problem of getting to know some other, and the specific influence of contemporary technologies on these encounters. While, as mentioned above, the first has been a central concern throughout the history of philosophy, and STS and Philosophy of Technology have extensively studied the latter issue (cf. Van den Eede, 2011 for an overview), to date there has been little interaction between these two traditions. As such, contemporary philosophical literature has yet to satisfactorily answer the following question: how do advanced technologies affect the problem of epistemological narcissism in encountering the ‘other’ through mediations? That is, do they merely present us with a new version of a universal problem, or have they changed the nature of our encounter with the other fundamentally? It is by answering this question that this thesis aims to make a contribution to Philosophy of Technology, and to our understanding of the particular social and technological complications of our time.

In order to accomplish this, it is necessary both to separately investigate the universal problem and the specific influence of contemporary technologies, and to relate the latter to the first. To that effect, my argument is divided into two interconnected parts: the first part serves to identify universal principles and problems underlying the self-other-encounter, irrespective of the specific nature of the medium. Establishing such a universal conceptual framework requires connecting concepts from three different philosophical disciplines: epistemology, phenomenology, and psychology.5 For the question of how one ‘encounters’

the other is essentially situated on the interdisciplinary crossroads of asking how one can (epistemologically) know another, how one (psychologically) understands the other in relation to the self, and how one (phenomenologically) comes to experience otherness, or not. Thus, the first part of this thesis analyses how the ideas of fundamental thinkers in these

4 The term ‘advanced technologies’ is used in this thesis to refer to technologies particular to the digital,

globalising world of the twenty-first century, including the Web 2.0 (with social media), smartphones, Artificial Intelligence, robotics, and biomedical implants.

5 For the understanding of psychology, particularly psychoanalysis, as a philosophical discipline, see Jonathan

(7)

three traditions – the epistemology of Plato and Descartes, the psychology of Freud and Lacan, the phenomenology of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty – can be fruitfully integrated in a conceptual framework for understanding the self-other-encounter in general. This results in a conception of the self-other-encounter as fundamentally spectral in nature, determined by processes of ‘projection’ and ‘reflection’, which coevally construct the identities of ‘self’ and ‘other’ as mirror-images.

The second part of this thesis, subsequently, explores several theories of technological mediation, notably McLuhan’s notion of ‘extension’ and Ihde’s analysis of technē, in order to determine the place of technologies in this broader scheme of phenomenological-epistemological ‘reflection’; this will lead us to question the distinction between mediating technologies and the human beings (‘self’ and ‘other’) who are mediated, and challenge the separability of the general problem of knowing the other and the specific issues pertaining to communication through modern technologies. In the final section of the second part, then, by analysing a variety of contemporary technologies, I will argue that two developments unique to our advanced technological society, namely the destabilisation of the link between the ‘mediator’ and the ‘mediation’, and the emergence of (technological) extensions specifically designed to reflect the self, are currently changing the fundamental principles that have defined the other-encounter throughout modern history, as we are increasingly surrounded by perfectly understandable ‘others’ whom we uncannily know to be illusory reflections.

In both parts I will make use of science-fiction films – notably Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1974) and ‘Men Against Fire’, an episode of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror (2016) – as cases of the philosophical principles and phenomena under investigation. This is for several reasons. First, these films, because they cast phenomenological and epistemological problems related to technologies in a compact, visual narrative structure, may provide tangible examples that help to clarify the otherwise abstract analyses. Second, because films, like any art form (and perhaps more so because of their commercial nature), capture ideas from the culture in which they are made, they may serve as indications of what aspects of the philosophical issues addressed in this thesis are currently perceived as pertinent. Third, because of their artistic nature, films may present these issues in a stylised and symbolic fashion, which, precisely because it escapes the logical dichotomies of philosophical prose, may itself provide insights and inspiration contributing to our philosophical analysis. All of the above, moreover, is particularly true for the genre of dystopian science-fiction, which, by its visualisation of potential problems arising from current technological developments, pre-eminently succeeds in providing tangible touchstones for critical inquiry with regards to technology. In fact, because (as we shall see) such films often couple speculation about technology and the cosmos with introspective investigation of the human psyche, they provide excellent cases for reflecting upon the relation of the first to the latter, i.e. for uncovering how universal principles of human experience relate to the particular

(8)

Part I: Looking through the Mirror

Psychoanalysis’ and Phenomenology’s Philosophies of Reflection

1. The weeds in the water

There are few films which could claim to delve more deeply into the phenomenon of encountering the other than Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1973), adapted from Stanislav Lem’s novel (1961) of the same name, and, as such, I hope that it may serve as a concrete and revealing example throughout this chapter. Psychologist Kris Kelvin leaves the dacha (Russian wooden country house) of his father in order to travel to a space station orbiting the planet Solaris. His mission is to assess whether the team of researchers there present should continue their scientific attempts to understand the planet. Kelvin soon finds out, however, that the planet, visualised throughout the film as an undefinable mass of yellow liquid, continually defies comprehension: it remains utterly ‘other’. The scientists’ endless attempts at scanning, probing, and classifying have rendered no results whatsoever; that is, except for what seems to be an attempt on the part of the planet itself to answer their quest for knowledge. As Snaut, one of the station’s scientists explains, Solaris is continually causing neutrino-based replicas of people from the scientists’ memories to materialise on the station – the planet, it seems, is trying to speak back in their own terms (i.e. literally in images from their minds). Thus Kelvin is confronted with an image of his late wife, Hari, whose real-life alter-ego had committed suicide after feeling abandoned by Kelvin. Tragically, however, Kelvin’s failure to understand the planet repeats itself in the relation he subsequently develops with his simulacrum-wife: in his contentment with her ‘return’, Kelvin fails to see how this neutrino-Hari increasingly develops a consciousness of her own, with her own fears that are different from the original Hari’s – instead of being abandoned she is (perhaps rightly) frightened of not being real – and so he cannot foresee and prevent that, like her real-life counterpart, she commits suicide by entering the station’s neutrino disintegrator. Kelvin’s inability to understand Solaris-Hari’s fundamental otherness, i.e. to understand her as ‘other’ than his own memory image of her, tragically renders him blind to her inner struggles and resulting death. Thus Solaris fundamentally questions the possibility of ever truly knowing another. Kelvin and his fellow scientists fail to grasp both the nature of the planet itself and the simulacra-people it creates. The suggestion of the film, however, is that the heart of the problem is not simply a misperception of the other, but rather an unavoidable projection of the self. In a speech which Tarkovsky nearly copied from Lem’s original, scientist Snaut vehemently derides the human epistemological enterprise:

Science? Nonsense. […] We have no interest in conquering any cosmos. We want to extend the Earth to the borders of the cosmos. We don't know what to do with other worlds. We don't need other worlds. We need a mirror. We struggle for contact, but we'll never find it. We're in the foolish human predicament of striving for a goal that he fears, that he has no need for. Man needs man.

Tarkovsky’s cinematography, indeed, strongly endorses Snaut’s remarks: hard-core positivist Sartorius has a broken pair of glasses, Kelvin is frequently depicted in the mirror with Hari (cf. fig. 5), and the planet Solaris continually appears through a distorted (and

(9)

semi-reflecting) round window6 (Spackman, 2001: 5). The film’s enigmatic opening shot of a small stream near the house of Kelvin’s father (fig. 1) may be understood as a captivating metaphor for this phenomenon: as the current slowly moves some weeds, the underwater world appears alien, ungraspable, like another planet – the movements are not unlike those of Solaris’ yellow ocean itself. Yet if we look closer, we perceive in the image’s lower left a vague reflection, which, in the subsequent shot, is revealed to be that of Kelvin, who, like us, is gazing into the water. The view of the other, in short, is overlaid with a projection of the self, so that there arises a fundamental epistemological uncertainty as to whether one actually perceives the other or (without knowing it) oneself. Thus the scene establishes a strong thematic and symbolic connection between Kelvin’s character arc, the epistemological danger of ‘projecting’ the self on others, and, arguably, the ancient myth of Narcissus, the boy who thought he perceived another in the water while actually seeing nothing but his own reflection. (Both because of the intrinsic symbolic power of this mythological analogue and because it has served as a transhistorical exemplar of ‘self-projection’ across various disciplines, notably psychoanalysis and phenomenology, it will serve as a continuous touchstone here as well.) For the fundamental question it raises is closely related to the one taken up by Solaris and this thesis: is it possible to escape this ‘epistemological narcissism’? That is, how can we ever perceive others as something other than reflections, copies or versions of ourselves; understand them in their instead of our own terms? As for Solaris, the film’s ending seems to answer this question in the bleakest way possible. After Hari’s death, the scientists decide to ‘beam’ Kelvin’s brainwave patterns into the 6 The link between Kelvin’s projections upon Hari and Ocean is strengthened by the fact that Hari first “appears framed against the dazzling white circular window of the space ship. The circle represents the Ocean […and] also stands in neatly for the planet the space ship orbits above… Hari encircles Kelvin – and soon he's orbiting around her, psychologically” (Robinson, 2006: 308). Figure 1: opening shot of Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1973). The fascinating otherness of the underwater world is overlaid with the subtle reflection of Kelvin standing over the water (lower-left).

(10)

planet, hoping that this will make it understand them and stop the terrifying neutrino-simulacra. Subsequently, Snaut tells Kelvin that indeed the appearances have stopped, that islands have started forming on the planet’s surface, and that this may be a good time to go home. The final scene then depicts Kelvin back at the dacha, where he meets and embraces his father; yet as the camera zooms out it is shockingly revealed that the house is actually on Solaris, in the middle of the yellow, alien ocean (fig. 2): Kelvin’s attempts to communicate with the other planet have resulted in nothing but the figurative and literal projection of himself on its surface, and it is only in this way that he may ‘understand’ (and enter) the planet. (The significance of this ending is underscored by its radical departure from Lem’s original: while Lem’s ending, in which “we see Kris Kelvin alone on the spaceship, staring into the mysterious surface of the Solaris Ocean, the meaning of which is forever foreclosed, real contact with which, forever denied,” suggests that ‘understanding the Other’ is impossible tout court, Tarkovsky goes one step further and emphatically locates the cause of this impossibility in the inescapable phenomenon “of projecting oneself onto the other” (Kaganovsky, 2014: 43-4)). The most striking difference between the ‘real’ and ‘fake’ dachas in Tarkovsky’s version seems particularly significant in this respect: on Solaris, winter has fallen and as Kelvin makes his way to the house, he once again walks past the water; only this time, the pool has frozen over and its strange and mysterious weeds are no longer visible under a cover of solid, intransparant, perfectly reflecting ice. Narcissus’s projection has been ‘realised’ and in the perception of the underlying other there is literally no way past the reflection of the perceiver himself.

Before we examine how several philosophical perspectives may help us get past these reflections, let us take one more cue from Solaris with regards to the relevance of the problem. For Tarkovsky’s complex symbolism and cinematography links the issue to several central oppositions of the modern world – not just to the endeavour of exploring outer space. First, by restaging the dynamic between Scientist and Planet in terms of the interpersonal relationship between Kelvin and Hari, Solaris comes close to critiquing, in a feminist vein, the male construction of the female ‘other’: Sartorius’ “analysis of […Hari’s]

(11)

tissue demonstrates that she is not composed of atoms like normal human beings – beneath a certain micro-level, there is nothing, just void” (Znižek, 1999: 222). She is literally nothing but a “materialization of […Kelvin’s] own [male] innermost traumatic fantasies” (ibid.). Thus, although Kelvin spends much time trying to ‘understand’ this pseudo-Hari-other, her very ‘otherness’ is suspect from the get-go. The development of male desire for woman, in short, is presented as inherently subject to the same danger of epistemological narcissism (mistaking self for other) as the quest for knowledge in general.

Second, while this layer of interpretation is certainly not explicitly foregrounded by Tarkovsky, any statement about the epistemology of ‘otherness’ produced in the midst of the Cold War naturally evokes the relations between the Soviet East and the Capitalist West and the concomitant danger of nuclear apocalypse. Viewing the film in this light, Lilya Kaganovsky notes that “the image of the Solaris Ocean […is like] a Hiroshima/Nagasaki vision of post-apocalyptic life” (2014: 41-2); thus, imagined as a danger and an incomprehensible other at the same time, the planet (taken in the film’s historical context) may figure as a stand-in for the threatening enemy ideology. Moreover, Kaganovsky continues, comprehension of the enemy is always an act of self-fashioning: “when you know who or what the other is, you know yourself” (ibid.). In the same vein, “in Solaris, contact with the ‘visitors’ produces not knowledge of the other but self-knowledge,” since Solaris-Hari is literally the stuff of Kelvin’s dreams – the antagonist effectively serves as a mirror for the self (ibid.). As we shall see below, this idea is extensively supported and elaborated (on the personal level) in Lacanian psychology. Third, Tarkovsky adds an element of faith to its theme of encountering the other through an abundance of religious imagery: the beginning of the film shows Berton, another cosmonaut, standing before a committee of experts in ‘Solaristics’ (the doctrine of science on the planet); framed as he is between giant portraits of leading ‘Solarists’ while he fruitlessly defends the credibility of his extraordinary experiences on the station (he saw a giant baby), the cosmonaut evokes the image of a heretic standing trial before orthodox patriarchs (Spackman, 2001: 4). The design of the library on the space station, moreover, resembles a church, “including candles, what appear to be stained glass windows, and busts” (ibid.). Taken together with some smaller references to Christianity7 – the theme of resurrection, the returning washing of hands, the name Kris – this suggests a link between Solaristic science and religion: like any believer, the implication seems to be, the Solaristic scientist takes a ‘leap of faith’ in positing the existence of some immense, conscious other, who is supposedly trying to communicate with him yet whose message remains forever obscure. It should be noted, in this respect, that none of the cosmonauts (not even positivist Sartorius) doubts that the neutrino-simulacra appearing on the station are evidence of the planet’s conscious attempt to communicate, even though this is suggested by nothing but the existence of these materialisations of their minds itself. Could it be that, in Freud’s words, Solaris, “like gods, […is] only the product of the psychic powers of man” (1918: 41)? Could it be that this great, intelligent other is in reality nothing but a shapeless blob of yellow goo upon which the scientists have projected their own desires and preconceptions? That their ultimate object of knowledge is a product of their fantasy? The protagonists of the film 7 The end of Solaris, moreover, “when the father lays his hands on the shoulders of his kneeling son, exactly mirrors Rembrandt’s” 1669 rendition of the return of the prodigal son (Robinson, 2006: 134).

(12)

may be unwilling to question that behind the neutrino-mirrors there is actually a conscious other, but Tarkovsky’s imagery suggests that the religious other inevitably involves projection of the self, or, conversely, that any postulation of Other Minds as such entails a religious ‘leap of faith’ (on which more below).

2. Meno’s paradox of Other Minds

Thus Solaris shows that the problem of understanding the other is essential to the modern era on several levels – indeed, as we shall discuss extensively in Part 2, the significant increase in technological mediation between self and other in the years after Tarkovsky’s film may have made it even more so. Yet the issue is certainly not exclusively a (post)modern one: it has been brought up in many different ways in a variety of historical periods, and at least in some form its roots go back to Plato, who in his Meno has the eponymous dialogist ask Socrates how knowledge of some unknown phenomenon could be acquired at all; “for what sort of thing, from among those you don’t know, will you put forward as the thing you’re inquiring into, and even if you really encounter it, how will you know that this is the thing you didn’t know” (80d6-8; translated by G. Fine)? By asking this question Meno highlights an epistemological paradox which fundamentally challenges the possibility of learning – in this case, specifically, the learning of aretē, ‘virtue’. Essentially, as Socrates aptly summarizes the point, Meno’s argument is ὡς οὐκ ἄρα ἔστιν ζητεῖν ἀνθρώπῳ οὔτε ὃ οἶδε οὔτε ὃ μὴ οἶδε; οὔτε γὰρ ἂν ὅ γε οἶδεν ζητοῖ—οἶδεν γάρ, καὶ οὐδὲν δεῖ τῷ γε τοιούτῳ ζητήσεως—οὔτε ὃ μὴ οἶδεν—οὐδὲ γὰρ οἶδεν ὅτι ζητήσει. that it’s not possible for someone to inquire either into that which he knows or into that which he doesn’t know. For he wouldn’t inquire into that which he knows (for he knows it, and there’s no need for such a person to inquire), nor into that which he doesn’t know (for he doesn’t even know what he’ll inquire into). (80e2-5; translated by G. Fine) Structurally the argument is this (Fine, 2014: 8): 1) We either know (A) or do not know (B) a certain phenomenon (x) 2) If A, we cannot inquire into x, for then there is no purpose in inquiry. 3) If B, we cannot inquire into x, for we wouldn’t even know where to start nor when to stop (since we cannot recognize x when we encounter it). 4) So inquiry is impossible: we can never get to know x.

Naturally, Plato’s cognitive and conceptual discussion of learning is not identical to the psychological-phenomenological encounter between ‘self’ and ‘other’ we have been discussing so far, but it is similar in one significant respect. The metaphor of the planet Solaris in particular shows how the utter ‘other’ in terms of identity and experience is intertwined with the notion of the complete unknown. At the same time, the pessimistic ending of the film suggests that ‘knowing’ is essentially grasping a phenomenon in terms of the self: Kelvin could only ‘get to know’ the planet by literally transforming it into an image from his own memory. Thus the paradox of Meno may be rewritten as a phenomenological encounter between self and other: i. Understanding some other (x) requires it to be perceived in terms familiar to the self. ii. We either can (A) or cannot (B) perceive x in terms familiar to the self.

(13)

iii. If A, in perceiving x we do not grasp its otherness (the very essence of x), so we cannot perceive x as such. iv. If B, understanding x is impossible. We cannot grasp its otherness (x). v. So understanding the other as such is impossible. Just as Socrates is severely hindered in getting to know the nature of aretē – the main topic of the Meno – because he could only identify virtue as such if he already knew, somehow, what it was like, the fundamental otherness of Solaris is lost in Kelvin’s perception of the planet in terms of his own desires and memories. So, if the paradox is correct, can we ever truly understand someone not ‘like’ ourselves? Just like knowing the unknown and grasping the ungraspable, understanding the other seems a contradictio in terminis. Both Plato himself and his ancient successors, of course, did not accept the validity of Meno’s point. Indeed, the very fact that Plato chooses the character of Meno to give voice to the paradox should make us suspicious of the argument from the get-go. At the time of writing (around 385 BCE) Athens had already seen Meno the young student, as he is portrayed in the dialogue, change into Meno the terrible military, who according to his fellow-soldier Xenophon (Anab. 2.6.29) was known for his disloyalty, immorality, and self-interestedness (Bluck, 1961: 124; Sharples, 1985: 18). Meno’s objections to the possibility of inquiring into virtue may thus seem less a reflection of a general epistemological problem than of Meno’s personal incapability of learning it. The dialogue suggests, moreover, that this incapability may be the result of Meno’s unfortunate choice of teachers. For the young Meno is taught and highly impressed by the teachings of Gorgias and the other sophists, whom Plato frequently criticizes for covering up a lack of understanding with clever arguments and intellectual labels (ibid.). Hence it is probable that Plato intended Meno’s argument to be understood as precisely such an exercise in sophistry, as an argument for argument’s sake, a disingenuous juggling with terms that conjures up the illusion of a problem where in reality none exists.

This, at least, is the impression which Plato’s Socrates seems to have of his opponent,8 as he

essentially circumvents Meno’s contradictio in terminis of ‘knowing the unknown’ by demonstrating that empirically learning is possible and offering a metaphysical narrative as justification. The ‘empirical’ evidence consists of an interrogation of one of Meno’s slaves: when Socrates presents the slave with a geometrical problem of determining a diagonal, the unsuspecting boy fails at first, but, aided by Socrates’ questions, is eventually able to grasp the correct solution. Apparently, Socrates argues, the knowledge of the diagonal was already latent in the boy’s mind and only required some prompting questions to be drawn out (Silverman, 2014). Therefore, he argues, learning is essentially a form of recollecting: it is the process of making conscious something which was already unconsciously inside of us. Plato later (already in the Meno but more prominently in the Phaedrus) develops this idea into his famous theory of Forms: the reason we latently possess knowledge is because between death and reincarnation our souls have seen the true Forms of phenomena “on the outside of heaven” (ἔξω τοῦ οὐρανοῦ, Phdr. 247c). As a result, Plato’s Socrates rejects both the dichotomising premise of Meno’s argumentation (1) that we either know or do not know something, and the argument (3) that we cannot inquire into what we do not (absolutely) 8 He calls Meno’s argument eristikos (looking for disagreement).

(14)

know: instead, he suggests, our prenatal experience of Forms allows us to intuitively have ‘true beliefs’ about phenomena (with a status somewhere in between knowledge and the absolute unknown), which, by questioning ourselves and each other, we may pursue in order to recollect the true knowledge of Forms from which they stem. If we apply this to our main topic, it implies that Plato blurs the dichotomy between self and other (ii), as whatever seems strange or unknown to us, is essentially already ‘part’ of ourselves, albeit latently, as forgotten knowledge we need only recall. There simply is no absolute ‘other’ in the world, since we have already prenatally internalized the Form of everything that exists. While naturally not all subsequent authors in Antiquity agreed with Plato’s metaphysics of Forms, they generally followed him in solving Meno’s paradox by postulating some kind of ‘foreknowledge’. For Aristotle, knowing a phenomenon (x) does not necessarily require innate knowledge of x itself, but knowledge (γνῶσις) of related phenomena or premises from which x can be induced or deduced (Fine, 2014: 12). Epicurean philosophers similarly postulate the existence of foreknowledge in the shape of prolepses, preconceptions of the nature of phenomena formed through sensory input over time (idem: 255). The Stoics, lastly, perhaps most akin to Plato, believe in the existence of certain innate ‘natural notions’ (sometimes also called ‘prolepses’) – e.g. a natural sense of the Good – which serve as guides to knowledge. Each of these approaches in its own way defies Meno’s absolute dichotomisation of the ‘known’ and ‘unknown’, of what is already within ourselves and what is utterly other, by postulating that the other is always already naturally familiar in some sense, whether it is because of pre-perceived Forms or the existence of reliable preconceptions. This ubiquitous rejection of Meno’s problem, indeed, may find its roots in the fact that Antiquity in general had no well-defined conception of what we now call the subject-object distinction: whether it is in Plato’s conception of the ideal State or in Sophocles’ tragedies, the individual subject was always conceived and defined in terms of his part in the social, historical or cosmological whole. A case in point is the concept of logos, which ever since the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus has simultaneously denoted the ‘structure of the universe’ (the objective world), ‘reason or rationality’ (the foremost quality of the individual subject), and (as an obvious mediation between self and other) ‘language’ (Dilcher, 1995: 37-42); when a person is believed to share such a logos with all of the world, there is no division between self and other that cannot be bridged.

Hence it was only during the Enlightenment, when Descartes established the classical epistemological distinction between the thinking subject (res cogitans) and material object (res extensa), that a fundamental rift between self and other could begin to be truly felt (cf. Çüçen, 1998). In one memorable passage from his Principles of Philosophy Descartes implicitly draws the parallel between the uncertainty of our perception of the objective world and of other ‘subjects’: for just like we are wont to identify and define a piece of wax as ‘wax’ both before and after it has melted, even though our perception shows us an entirely different object,

when looking from a window and saying I see men who pass in the street, I really do not see them, but infer that what I see is men, just as I say that I see wax. And yet what do I see from the window but hats and coats which may cover automatic machines? Yet I judge these to be men. (1969 [1644]: 155).

(15)

Descartes’ point here is to emphasise the importance of the mind in perception: we only perceive the melted liquid as wax and the clothed figures as men because an ‘intuition of the mind’ is added to our sensory input. The visual observation itself, i.e. hats and coats moving through the street, does not directly warrant their identification as men: they could also be machines! Thus, although Descartes himself does not pursue this line of thought any further – he feels no need to question the mind’s ‘intuition’ that the figures are people instead of machines –, the road lay open towards a radical scepticism of the ‘other’.

In the first half of the twentieth century these concerns about the ‘epistemology of the other’ reached their most fundamental form in the so-called ‘Other Minds’ debate. While Plato’s Meno had merely questioned our ability to learn something from or about another, Descartes’ philosophical scepticism had now culminated in the problem of “how to justify the… belief that others have minds very like our own” at all (Hyslop, 2016). In short, what if Descartes’ off-hand remark happened to be true? What if the people we encounter every day really are brainless machines perfectly simulating human behaviour? Or, less extreme, how can we be sure that another person experiences a sunrise, a kiss, or a feeling of sadness in a way similar to ourselves? Ever since John Stuart Mill, the canonical solution to the problem consisted of an argument based upon analogical inference: because other people generally behave the same as I do in similar situations – e.g. they scream when they get burnt – I may assume that they have corresponding inner states (an experience of pain) similar to those of my own as well. Yet the argument has increasingly lost ground because, though seemingly likely, it is inherently uncheckable and essentially an “inductive generalization based on only one case” (ibid.): it is unjustified to assume that all people experience pain like myself based upon the case of just myself (like the observation of a single black swan does not make all swans black). While other solutions have been put forward – the most common suggestion today is that the existence of Other Minds is simply the best way to explain human behaviour – no theory has been able to ‘solve’ the problem without relying in some way or another on inference, analogy and probability (ibid.). So however ‘likely’ the existence of Other Minds has been made, accepting it as true inherently requires the assumption that the others we encounter in our daily lives are like ourselves on the inside as much as on the outside. That is, paradoxically, the very notion that others exist at all is grounded in the projection of the (subjective experience of the) self upon them. To conclude this section, then, we may view Tarkovsky’s Solaris not just as a metaphor for the interactions between man and woman, East and West, humans and the divine, but also for encountering others in general. While the otherness of the planet may seem far removed from the familiarity with which we converse with another person, the epistemological foundation of getting to know this ‘other’ is essentially the same: just as Kelvin may only understand Solaris to the extent that he ‘projects’ his own thoughts and concepts on the simulacra it creates, our understanding of other people depends on the belief that we may interpret their words, actions and expressions as representations of an inner world of meaning that is similar to our own. The two main points implied by this comparison and our discussion so far are the following. First (as briefly noted above), in so far as Solaris is a

religious metaphor, the parallel highlights an inherent element of faith in our encounters

with others as well.

(16)

with other people we naturally employ a similar faith in their existence and our ability to know them (2009). Like the Solaristic scientists did not establish firm grounds for their postulation of a conscious, communicating entity behind the planet’s mysterious appearances, our assumption that other people have minds like our own rests upon a belief of similarity which we generally do not question. In the same way, Plato required faith in a mystical realm of Forms to explain how some complete ‘other’ could become known to us; and Descartes too, had he explicitly questioned the existence of Other Minds, would most likely have offered faith as a solution – for, he claims, in case our reason is insufficient to arrive at the truth, our good (non-deceiving) God “has given us a very great inclination to believe, [so] that we can take it that what we believe is true” (Descartes paraphrased in Avramides, 1996: 42). Second, this means that every encounter with an ‘other’ is in some way inherently ‘narcissistic’. Just like Kelvin’s ‘knowledge’ of Solaris was severely challenged by the literal and figurative projection of his own preconceptions on its simulacra (i.e. Hari and its surface), we too can never securely establish whether we understand mediations (words, expressions, actions, or indeed social media profiles) of others in the way they do themselves. Indeed, it means that for their mediations to be understandable at all, we simply must assume to some extent that they mean what we think they mean – that we can safely ‘read’ our own understandings in them. Narcissus, then, (like Kelvin’s relationship with Hari) is more than a metaphor of psychological pathology; his catch-22 of choosing between believing in an illusory other whose existence (he eventually recognises) is constituted by his own reflection or, by abandoning the illusion, losing the connection with the other and condemning himself to subjective solipsism, essentially constitutes the epistemological condition of our lives.

3. The other through transference

As Ingmar Bergman already observed, visualising life as such a reflection was a defining characteristic of Tarkovsky’s cinematography, and it often takes a pessimistic turn. The films, especially the one tellingly called Mirror (1975), present themselves less as stories an sich than as visualisations of the protagonist’s or director’s own stream of consciousness, in which memories from different times are intertwined, mixed with the present, and supplemented by images of fantasy. ‘Real’ events and the narrator/director’s projections become impossible to separate. The ending of Nostalghia (1983), for example, consists of an enigmatic shot, comparable to the one in Solaris, in which protagonist Andrei Gorchakov sits in front of a Russian dacha, which, as the camera zooms out, is revealed to lie within the ruins of an Italian church. Like the dacha in Solaris, the image represents Andrei’s longing for home (from his exile in Italy), yet this time there is no alien planet to explain the phantasmatic apparition, so that what we see can only be understood as a direct projection of the protagonist’s subjectivity on our screen – and probably of the director’s as well, since he, a namesake of the protagonist, defected from the USSR around the same time. This suggestion is (once again) emphasised by the Narcissus-like reflection of Andrei in the small pool where he sits (fig. 3). Tarkovsky’s protagonists, indeed, are all of the Narcissus-type: incapable of looking at the world as anything other than a reflection of their own fantasies, they become solipsistic, estranged, and occasionally insane. But Tarkovsky’s epistemological pessimism should not be the endpoint of our discussion. For if the world unavoidably presents itself to us as a mirror, perhaps it is more useful to take this as a

(17)

starting point and ask how this reflective encountering of the other works, i.e. in what way, in or despite the reflection, we encounter the other.

Since at the fin du siècle Other Minds came to be experienced as a fundamental philosophical crisis and Freud identified ‘narcissism’ as a neurosis potentially interfering in human interaction, many (particularly continental) thinkers began to develop conceptions of the self-other-encounter that were built upon rather than frustrated by the notion of epistemological reflection. The approaches which have addressed the concept of mirroring most directly, psychoanalysis and phenomenology, have each in their own way challenged the absolute distinction between ‘self’ and ‘other’, emphasising instead the ways in which they intermingle, meet in the middle, and mutually constitute each other. In the remainder of this chapter I will elaborate how they have done so, focussing in particular on the works of Freud, Lacan and Merleau-Ponty. Arguably it was psychoanalysis, when Freud wrote his essay On Narcissism9 (1914), which first sparked a fundamental psychological-philosophical interest in the idea of reflections. In Freud’s eyes, the psychological condition named after Narcissus emerged in two variants. The first, ‘primary narcissism’, takes precedence both in time and importance, as it is essentially a form of self-love (the investment of Libido into the Ego) which develops during infancy and never really leaves us afterwards. It consists of the desire to protect and take care of oneself, which is gratified by meeting basic needs such as nourishment and comfort. The psyche of the infant child, Freud claims, is particularly characterized by this ‘primary narcissism’, as this is practically the only ‘desire’ it has; having not yet transferred its desire to objects in the world, it experiences ‘sexual’ satisfaction exclusively in an ‘auto-erotic’ way, 9 The term was originally coined in 1899 by Paul Näcke, but owes its popularity mostly to the influence of Freud’s essay. Figure 3: the dacha in the Italian church ruins. Final shot of Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983).

(18)

by being happy in the fulfilment of vital self-preservation functions, e.g. when it is breast-fed. In Freud’s words, it is like “a bird’s egg with its food supply enclosed in its shell” (Freud in Bromberg, 1983: 261). This desire for self-care (fortunately) never completely disappears, but – at least in the healthy mind not disturbed by ‘secondary narcissism’ – is supplemented by the development of Objekt-Libido, the investment of erotic energy in the world, like love for other people. Hence primary narcissism is not a “perversion, but the libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation, a measure of which may justifiably be attributed to every living creature” (1914: 73-4).

‘Secondary narcissism’, on the contrary, is neither universal nor natural, but a specific neurosis which may emerge when one’s natural Objekt-Libido is disturbed, e.g. through impotence, repression, or amorous rejection. In order to compensate for this loss, Freud theorised, Libido could flow back into the Ego (Ich-Libido) and cause an inflation of the sense of self. Hence, the psyche would become characterised by an attitude of arrogance, alienation, and megalomania: happy with its autoeroticism, it imagines itself to be omnipotent and loses interest in other things and people, which are reduced to the status of accessories or puppets dancing to the Ego’s greatness (cf. Bromberg, 1983: 359). Thus this pathology is ‘narcissism’ both in Freud’s psychological sense of primary narcissism – an imaginary return to the self-sufficient ‘egg’ – and in the epistemological sense which we have been discussing so far through the example of the Tarkovskian protagonist: the tendency to see oneself reflected in others, or even to experience others as mere desire-fulfilling means, extensions, or versions of the self. Yet while the projection of self on other thus already played a part in Freud’s (early) essay on narcissism, there it remained foremost an anomaly, a specific failure to see others for what they really were resulting from a pathologically all-encapsulating self. It was only in his later works on ‘transference’ (Übertragung) that he actually got to the heart of what we have been discussing as epistemological narcissism. Freud first noticed this phenomenon when some of his patients appeared to treat him like a figure from their past: for example, a patient nicknamed the ‘Rat Man’ (after the young man’s returning dream of rats gnawing their way into his father’s anus) would at random moments start violently abusing Freud and his family, even though in his deliberate actions he exhibited nothing but respect for the good doctor (1909: 209). Freud concluded that this behaviour could only mean that the Rat Man had unconsciously ‘transferred’ the complicated relationship with his father into the analytical context: the image of his repressing father was projected onto Freud. Indeed, as he later found out, patients often projected several such images onto him at once: a woman called Dora, for example, appeared to simultaneously transfer her relationship with her father and her relationship with her lover to her interaction with Freud (1905 [1901]: 118; cf. below). Tarkovsky’s Hari (and every other figure appearing on the space station) may be the ultimate metaphor for transference, as she is literally shaped by the projections of Kelvin’s psyche – several projections, indeed, as in one quintessentially Tarkovskian dream sequence Hari morphs into Kelvin’s mother bathing him.

While these transferences could be termed ‘narcissistic’ in the way we have used the term so far, namely as a desire-induced projection of something or someone from one’s own fantasy onto the other, Freud did not consider the two phenomena to be directly compatible

(19)

(1916-17: 447); after all, Freud’s conception of ‘narcissism’ strongly emphasised the all-encompassing aggrandisement of the self, rendering others tools or subordinates of the Ego, whereas he considered the transference to replicate in reality an Ego-undermining figure from the patient’s subconscious. Yet without neglecting the significant difference between the two – perceiving someone as like the self and as a figure threatening to and often repressed by one’s sense of self naturally have a completely different effect on someone’s experience of the other – we may observe that from an epistemological viewpoint both phenomena entail an understanding of the other through a framework of images familiar to the self (just as Meno envisioned in his paradox).10 Moreover, Heinz Kohut has later

influentially adapted Freud’s concept of transference to include the possibility of perceiving an idealised image of the self in the other, i.e. a ‘narcissistic transference’ (2011 [1978]: 431, 478): he argued that analysands would often project upon the analyst an ‘idealised parent imago’, representing and reaffirming everything they considered good about themselves (224, 435). In any case, whether or not one accepts Kohut’s addition to Freud’s conception of the phenomenon, transference essentially entailed that other people could serve as “screen[s] for the projection of internal structure” (219). At first, Freud considered this phenomenon primarily an obstacle to treatment – if patients transferred onto him a figure from their past, they might not take him seriously as their analyst – yet he later came to appreciate it as a crucial therapeutic tool. First, he believed, some psychic repressions would simply not come to light without them being ‘re-enacted’ in the transference. Sometimes, “the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed”, so that even hypnosis or dream analysis cannot reveal it (Freud, 1914: 147, 150); yet in his behaviour towards the analyst, in his inexplicably hostile remarks or sudden confessions of affection, the patient may be ‘acting out’ the traumatic events from his past, revealing the underlying problem. In this way, it is arguably only because of Hari’s appearance that Kelvin comes to recognise his own feelings of guilt for her suicide. Second, Freud came to believe that the transference could not only be utilised in this way as a heuristic-diagnostic tool, but also as a method towards a cure: if the traumatic relationship with a person from the patient’s past is ‘re-enacted’ in his relationship with the analyst, the analyst may consciously take up this role and rewrite it towards a different ending. That is, precisely because the analyst plays the part of the problematic figure, he has the power to change it. Freud’s treatment of the Rat Man, for example, was successful because, while through the transference he represented the patient’s father, he did not replicate the father’s repressive behaviour: when the Rat Man started abusing Freud, Freud reassured him that he would not strike or scold at him (as his father would have), so that the part of the tyrannical father in the patient’s mind could be transformed into a caring father figure (1909: 209). By being the object of the patient’s projection yet simultaneously resisting to completely conform to it, the analyst may effectively change the projected part of the patient’s psyche.

Now while Freud, being a psychoanalyst, naturally concentrated his discussion of transference on the relationship between analyst and analysand, later critics, notably Jonathan Lear (1998), have suggested that it may have implications for the way we encounter others in general: whomever we meet or interact with, following the principles

10 In this sense, Freud’s theory of transference is akin to Gadamer’s hermeneutics, who considered “pre-existing

(20)

of transference it is inevitable that we overlay these new relationships with psychic ‘types’. Just as Dora perceived Freud through the filter of her former lover and father, any conscious impression we form of another person “will typically be embedded in a wealth of associations which will endow that thought with meanings which are at once unconscious and idiosyncratic” (Lear, 1998: 64). In this sense, the very way in which we ‘understand’ or appreciate someone or something depends on the projections we make, so that, in Lear’s words, “transference... is just the psyche’s characteristic activity of creating a meaningful world in which to live” (60). Our conception of the other emerges through the projection. Freud’s (more well-known) understanding of the choice of our love objects exemplifies how this works:

[E]ach individual, through the combined operation of his innate disposition and the influences brought to bear on him during his early years, has acquired a specific method of his own in his conduct of his erotic life... This produces what might be described as a stereotype plate (or several such), which is constantly repeated – constantly reprinted afresh – in the course of the person's life, so far as external circumstances and the nature of the love-objects accessible to him permit, and which is certainly not entirely insusceptible to change in the face of recent experiences. (1912: 99-100)

Thus the very reason we feel desire for people is grounded in our ability to transfer ‘stereotype plates’ of erotic interaction onto them. Indeed, as Freud’s metaphor of (active) ‘reprinting’ suggests, our appreciation of them may result less from their objective similarity to our relations from the past than from our subjective imposition of these templates onto them. As we have seen, Freud did not actually behave like the Rat Man’s father, but still the Rat Man came to appreciate him as such a type (Lear, op. cit.: 100). Yet this epistemology of transference does not imply that the other is completely ‘lost in projection’, since, as Freud says, the stereotype plates are “not entirely insusceptible to change” (loc. cit.). The very fact that these transferable types have been formed in the first place as facsimiles of real-life interactions (albeit primarily in early childhood) implies that we are capable at least to some extent of internalising people and phenomena which are initially ‘other’. The successful treatment of the Rat Man is a case in point: while he first came to appreciate Freud as a ‘type’ of his father, Freud’s behaviour essentially changed the Rat Dad template to a non-repressive type: the ‘reprint’ is not exact, but becomes a new and revised edition (Lear, op. cit.: 73). Thus the epistemology of transference theory essentially tackles the central problem we observed in Meno’s paradox by negating the opposition between ‘seeing the self reflected’ and ‘getting to know the other’: through the transference-projection we naturally see ourselves ‘reflected’ in the other, but since this other is not a static mirror, the reflection takes on a life of its own, like Hari, and through its own agency changes the projection we perceive. In terms of Meno’s paradox, what we get to know is indeed understood as a projected constellation of concepts familiar to the self, but, while we perceive it, this constellation itself may shift, and thus reflectively change the projected constellation in our minds. What is ‘other’ becomes known to us not as something outside our own reflected preconceptions, but as the pushing and pulling of the reflection itself in a different direction than we had initially cast it – in this sense, Freud states, transference treatment is a “battlefield” (1916-17: 454). Otherness is felt (though not directly seen) in the resistance offered by one’s own mirror-image.

(21)

4. The split self in the arms of Narcissus This notion of the resisting reflection does not fit with Freud’s diagnosis of the pathological (secondary) ‘narcissist’, the projections of whose boundless self are so imposing that they eclipse any suggestion of difference. Yet ironically the myth of Narcissus itself, as Freud’s scion Jacques Lacan was keen to notice, asserted a much more significant antinomy between the reflection and its caster. In fact, the Narcissus episode in Ovid’s Metamorphoses develops into a tragedy precisely because of the boy’s experience of an unbridgeable divide between himself and the ‘other’ in the pool: Iste ego sum: sensi, nec me mea fallit imago. Uror amore mei, flammas moveoque feroque. Quid faciam? roger, anne rogem? quid deinde rogabo? Quod cupio mecum est: inopem me copia fecit. O utinam a nostro secedere corpore possem! Votum in amante novum: vellem quod amamus abesset! O, I am he! I have felt it, know now my own image. I burn with love of my own self; I both kindle the flames and suffer them. What shall I do? Shall I be wooed or woo? Why woo at all? What I desire, I have; the very abundance of my riches beggars me. Oh, that I might be parted from my own body! And, strange prayer for a lover, I would that what I love were absent from me! (Ov. Met. 3.461-6, translated by F. Justus Miller) At this climax of the story, when Narcissus recognises his beloved as himself, there emerges a complex and tragic paradox of simultaneous self-love and self-alienation. By being ‘split’ between himself and his beloved reflection, he deeply feels the need to become unified with his double; yet for the very reason he is really already ‘whole’, he can never truly unite with this ideal other.11 Thus his fate is to eternally desire a merging with this illusory, ideal

version of himself, while remaining permanently incapable of doing so. It is significant, in this respect, that unlike some later versions (e.g. Plotinus), Ovid’s Narcissus cannot even ‘merge’ with his mirror-image by drowning in it; instead, eventually fully aware that his ‘beloved’ exists only by grace of himself hanging over the surface, he dies a slow death at the water’s edge, only to continue his never-ending gaze in the Underworld’s river Styx. So Lacan, who placed this reflector-reflected split at the centre of his own conception of the psyche, was essentially a better reader of Ovid than Freud. Indeed, inspired by this myth, Lacan developed his foremost contribution to psychoanalysis (and concomitantly to the central question of this thesis), the concept of the ‘Mirror Stage’, which fundamentally links the problem of ‘knowing the other’ to the problem of ‘knowing the self’ (1997 [1949]); for when we, like Narcissus, look in the mirror, the ‘self’ whom we are supposed to be completely identified with also presents itself to us as an objectively visible ‘other’ in the world.12 Hence, following up on Freud’s notion of the infant’s natural ‘primary narcissism’, Lacan makes the moment the child begins to recognise itself in the mirror (around the age of six months) central to constitution of the (adult) human psyche. 11 The passage in Ovid in fact contains a large amount of words evoking ‘singleness’ and ‘doubleness’, which strongly emphasise this paradox (cf. Hardie, 2002: 165-172). 12 This notion of making the self ‘other’ to itself is of course a general feature of psychoanalysis, which from Freud’s first proclamation of the unconscious onwards essentially opened up a whole world of otherness within our psyches for us and our analysts to explore.

(22)

For this recognition produces the profound realization of difference between the fragmented experiences of its inner subject and the image of a unified self as it is objectively visible; as such, it ends the boundless state of ‘primary narcissism’, in which (desire-fulfilling) objects like the breast are not yet perceived as external phenomena, by making the Ego visible as a separate and consequently identifiable entity in the world.13 On the one

hand, this reflection or (in Lacan’s terms) ‘Ideal-I’ is empowering, as its stable unity provides coherence and meaning to the fragmented sensations of the psyche. The recognition of oneself as an ‘other’, i.e. as an external phenomenon with a name, an appearance, a manner of behaving, displaying, and presenting itself amongst others, allows for the unification of one’s diverse, subjective sensations in a single symbolic image (idem: 2). Hence, we feel self-love for our reflection as it delivers a sense of selfhood and identity. On the other hand, however, it creates the need for the subject to always ‘live up to’ it. That is, if our objective Gestalt is to provide our sense of self, we must continually cultivate it – say the right things, wear the right clothes, keep up the appearances which make us into who we are. To some extent this goal will always remain unattainable, as our subjective self-experience – fragmented, vulnerable, and filled with the occasional taboo desire – simply never coincides with its ideal, reflected counterpart, so that we are inherently self-alienated (Pearl, 2013: 534). Suddenly ‘split’, one feels the “desire to return to the primary narcissist stage in which I and other were still inseparable”, but the very awareness of oneself renders this forever impossible (ibid.). As in the myth of Narcissus then, the Mirror Stage’s awareness of reflection results in a paradoxical combination of self-love and self-alienation: we can love our ‘self’ because we are able to see it as an ‘other’ (reflection) in the world, while at the same time this objective image is sustained precisely because we put so much love (i.e. libidinal energy) into it – or, to continue the Narcissus metaphor, drain our strength by hanging over the water. Now, as implied in the above, these reflections of ourselves are shaped not just in literal mirrors, but, more fundamentally, in the responses, reactions, and appraisals others provide us with. Lacan and his followers in fact argued that the ‘mirror’ wherein the infant first recognises itself may be constituted by the ‘eyes of the mother’, which “reflect... back to the child a configuration of its own presence” (Lichtenstein, 1966: 115). By mimicking the appreciative and recognising look of its parents, the infant comes to recognise and appreciate itself as a self. (Accidentally, Ovid’s myth of Narcissus even seems to anticipate this aspect of Lacanian psychoanalysis, as the boy’s father and mother were respectively a river god and water nymph, thus symbolically linking the pool’s mirroring surface with the parental gaze.) At a superficial level, this means that, as Harry Sullivan elaborated in his ‘interpersonal theory of psychiatry’, the self develops “on the basis of reflected appraisals from others”, i.e. by internalising the way it is identified by others (Sullivan, 1953: 73; cf. Tutter, 2014: 1248). In this light, Erik Erikson emphasises that for the preservation of a stable sense of self it is imperative that one keeps receiving a fair amount of ‘tangible social recognition’ throughout life (1967: 70-1). In fact, we desire to see ourselves reflected as perfectly as possible, as the inevitable split between subjective self-experience and Ideal-I 13 In Lacan’s theoretical schema then, from the moment Narcissus recognized his own mirror-image, he actually

left behind the comfortable self-other harmony of Freud’s ‘primary narcissism’ and entered into the Mirror Stage.

Referenties

GERELATEERDE DOCUMENTEN

Kwok Sylvia, Department of Applied Social Sciences, City University of Hong Kong Kwok Tsz-ying, Social Welfare Department, Hong Kong Lai Kelly, Department of Psychiatry, The

Future studies can and should include a consideration of the voting mechanisms in the Hugos and related awards, as well as the cultural significance of particular arguments

Onder andere de complexiteit van deze media, de vrijheid van gebruikers om iemand of meerdere personen te zijn en om zelf data of informatie toe te voegen, het gebrek aan inzicht

Hieruit blijkt, dat ook al lijkt (op basis van het < r > profiel) de situatie voor een bepaald perceel niet ernstig, op langere termijn wel degelijk duidelijk

In de hetelucht/koude teelt van 1990 zijn enkele rassen van het gewas Spaanse peper in een eerste beoordeling op hun gebruikswaarde voor de praktijk getoetst.. Voor dit

De hoge concentraties aan chloride en ammonium in de Waver, de Oude Waver en de Amstel worden voor een belangrijk deel veroorzaakt door de uitslag van dit gemaal.. Ook heeft

In Nederland zijn ruim 4.000 boomkwekers actief, waarvan ruim 2.500 de boomteelt als hoofdberoep uitoefenen. Het totale areaal boomkwekerijproducten bedraagt ongeveer 10.000 ha.

between personal goals and resources available for goal pursuit. Furthermore, their retrospective reports indicated a development in strategy use of time. Three goal management