who the hell is staring back in the looking glass?
by robert delamar
“Hell is other people” – J.P. Sartre
“I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christians is?” – W. Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice
In Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit a mirror serves to devastate the relationships between the members of a group trapped in a room with no egress, and therefore with one another.
The mirror serves to bring dysfunction to the group, as the characters use it to gain awareness of themselves. With this awareness comes conflict.
What kind of play would Sartre have written if he (or his characters) had knowledge or the use of personal video cameras?
Would it look anything like the following? A motorist captures police officers beating a historically underprivileged member of a minority on videotape. The police are subsequently charged with and acquitted of depriving the motorist of his civil rights. Concomitant with the acquittal the city of Los Angeles becomes a blazing inferno of anarchy.
If self-awareness is defined today by not just mirrors, but also videotape, still- photography, and sound recording, has humanity come to a more enlightened self-understanding?
The cautionary tale of the Los Angeles Riots is that when a mirror is held up to a society of individuals, it becomes a catalyst for destruction.
Sartre characterized human existence as being in a state of radical freedom. Human relationships are a struggle between competing free entities capable of signifying and understanding the world around them. Thus, human relationships in Sartre’s view are in a constant state of tension.
The tensions in Sartre’s play No Exit arise when the signifier capable of understanding the world around her, comes into an understanding of self via the mirror, which is inherently egoistic. When the characters in the room come to realise that they are being characterized in a manner which is inherently different from that which they understand themselves to be, as their understanding of self changes when they can see themselves as others see them externally through the mirror, they begin to fight to control access to the mirror, which is the power to control signification.
When the characters understand that they can control both their ability to understand others, as well as the ability to control how others see them, through the power inherent in the mirror, the French theatrical version of the L.A. Riot takes place.
In modern society, our understanding of self is the result of a complex intermingling of internal and external stimuli. Our individual understanding of self results from the experience of biological and chemical sensations that are regulated by the brain and organized as perceptions. This reception of stimulus and regulation of it through perception becomes the foundation of signification, which is the basis of the mind. The mind is characterized by Descartes as the sum of existence in his famous (and intensely scrutinized) aphorism: cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am).
The mind (the existence of which is much disputed by biological materialists) is a distinct creation of human biology and chemistry, which filters stimuli, organizes them as perceptions, and accords them significance. The understanding derived from the process of signification (e.g. “this is what something is and why”) is the starting point for human experience.
What is curious about modern society is that our human experience is now defined largely by external factors. Though the mind’s primary function is to receive stimulus and accord it significance for our own use (the most important being mere survival), much of our present lives are caught up in manipulating the picture of ourselves that is returned to us through sensation and perception by way mirrors (of which our technology is an example) in order to control the significance that others accord to us (which may be another example of a survival technique).
The powerful know that in controlling the mirror, they control society. Thus, a huge superstructure is maintained that creates an ideal understanding of self (beauty, wealth, power) and sells it to us through images of other selves reflected through T.V., and video. This idealized self in turn becomes the reflection we receive of ourselves in the looking-glass.
Through adopting certain social norms of talk and expression; through dressing in a manner which is acceptable to those who share your understanding of social norms; through curling your hair, or plucking your eyebrows, or refraining from picking your ears on public transit one feels that they are able to gain control over the signification process, that they can control how others characterize and understand them.
Those who do not fit into these modes of understanding, those who are unable, or unwilling to accept and control this process of signification become outcasts. They are said to have a negative “self-image.” They become “Punks” or “Goths” or some other media controlled mode of existence. They sometimes take up arms against their sea of troubles, and by opposing end them.
What is at the heart of this struggle is not the fact that these individuals think that they are somehow disadvantaged or abused because of their difference. They are raging against the power which controls the process of signification. Which tells them they must reflect a certain self, in order to be welcome in a community.
The process of emancipation begins by understanding that those who seek to control through signification are caught in an illusion of their own creation. The illusion is that power is the salve to the tension inherent in the complex relationships arising from a room full of people with no exit and one mirror.
The solution is to first smash the mirror.
The next step is to seek to understand the other rather than to control him.
The final solution, is to forgive when the other is unable to understand and seeks to control as a substitute.
Forgive in the expectation that when you fail, the other will forgive you in return.
Relationship with the other does not have to be one of conflict. If we can recognise that others will sense, perceive and signify us in a manner which is consistent with their own experience and needs, a truce can be called, and we can begin the process which may lead to a certain peace.
The only purpose mirrors serve is to prove that all around the world the other’s eyes, nose, and mouth serve the same function as those staring back at you – to collect sensations.
The attempt by the afraid to control sensation, is as futile as the attempt to stifle a sneeze on a crowded subway train. In both cases, there is no exit. The only solution is to utilize a hanky, and apologize for the inevitable tension that results from the noise and discomfort you’ve caused to those around you.
Copyright © 1999 Robert Delamar All Rights Reserved
Robert Delamar enjoys staring at himself in the mirror in the morning. On those notable occasions when he doesn’t see his reflection, he becomes rather happy, and endeavours to return to his dark room, and to sleep. He is the Managing Editor of *spark-online.