Splitting the Image
In one of his numerous works of genius, this one ostensibly about the Cinema, but actually about time, Deleuze considers the nature of a mirror. A mirror and its reflections, are never simply an image of what peeps into them. Here three distinct layers of difference might separated out. On the simplest level of the mirror, one is of course very used to the idea that a mirror inverts as it reflects. What is there within it, is then both myself, and yet not myself at all; the difference between us might be a mere sliver, but it is in such miniscule differences, that the distinction between memory and actuality, or perception and reality also lies; for they too are apparently faithful images of things in the world, and yet in being images, must be so very different from that which they capture; for how else would they capture it at all? Secondly, a mirror is very different from a camera, or writing for that matter, in that it records in real time. Some kind of dynamic exchange (Deleuze calls it a circuit) is then set up between reflection and reflected. The individual looks upon their own image, and changes how they behave, according to what they see. The image then again responds, as reflection, inspiring slightly different actions on the part of the reflected. The point might seem daffy enough, and yet behind it is a very real problem.
If I am responding to an image, I am changing my behaviour while thinking that I am in charge. In a sense, then, I see only myself and not the fact that I have been reflected at all.
Finally there is the very sophisticated problem of who is actually reflecting whom. Of course we say, we are in control. The world, or at least our images of it, are ours, and the mirror merely responds. And yet the mirror might reply, without me, your visual image of yourself is a thousand scattered perceptions, and surmises. It is then only the mirror itself which focusses all these shifting feelings (and their attendant hopes) into one clear, reflected image. For the Mirror at least, then it itself is the reality, and everything else merely the stuff which it reflects.
All of which a sceptic or ‘practical person’ might claim is all very very well, and very poetic, without being remotely relevant to day day living. A reasonable remark, and one which Deleuze certainly answers. His point, in this model is not poetry, so much the problem of where, in a world where God, and identity have become difficult concepts to simply allow, one might still might find not only values, but a sense of worth. Hence his argument is not simply that one does without the idea of identity itself, but rather that one needs to reconsider what exactly it is in that idea that always made it matter so much to the humans who espoused it. What matters, then Deleuze is saying, about identity, was never the fact that our being was, in its name squeezed into a box simply labelled US; so much as in thinking any identity, we always necessarily insert a miniscule difference, a point of reflection, between everything that we are, and that reflection which we call ourselves. Or to put it another way, that to be conscious is not the same as being self-conscious. Moreover for Deleuze, it was this point of exchange which was the creative aspect in the thinking of ourselves, and therefore if one can think it apart from the necessity of capturing it within a single exchange, it offers strange aspects within which we might understand our minds as possessing a creative dynamic.
All of which I admit seems still very esoteric, and yet it is within the three axes of reflection and their ramifications within the individual configured by them, that much of what passes for modern life can be caught, and scrutinized; a move which is at once overtly political, for all that it is philosophic. In the rest of this piece the political dimension of such scrutiny will be examined.
The stuff of reflection lies not in the simple imposition of an image, so much as that that image can only be given, if the surface which records it faithfully or otherwise, remains in itself distinct even as it is reflective. One reflects one’s rules then, in seeing them within an other, whether that other, are peoples or animals or even environmental systems. The entire world becomes then our mirror, within which we see a part of ourselves. Take, the example the desire to save ‘cute creatures’ (such as the Panda, the Rhino or the Tiger). This desire has nothing to do with the creatures themselves as they are in themselves. And perhaps after all, if they could be allowed to understand the question, many of these species would actually prefer extinction, to the kind of life which we offer them in Zoos: extinction is after all, almost the norm for animal species; and is certainly the price everything pays (including ultimately ourselves) when its environment is destroyed. But all of this is of course very far from what we want animals to reflect.
This reflection has at its heart a number of troubling elements. Firstly, to reflect at all, one needs a smooth and responsive surface. One does not reflect on individual so much as species. One campaigns to save to the PANDA, the TIGER or the poor ESKIMO, but, like the nature of Tennyson’s poem, cares almost nothing for the individual fate, but only as that fate ‘crystallizes the wider debate’, whatever that might mean… Secondly all reflections are complex. Species will only be saved not simply because they are ‘cute’ (although we seldom save the BUG or the MAGGOT), but also because we imagine that in saving this species we are performing some wider good. We are also saving other wildlife (out of our beneficence): But more than that, we are telling ourselves in watching the behaviour of animals, some beautiful moral tale, about the importance of motherhood or the impropriety of aggression: the animals that are ‘helped’ then, are expected to conform to a somewhat chaste ‘middle class’ morality. So reflection is never simple therefore, and many times one loses sight in all this complexity, of exactly what is being reflected upon, and why. Thirdly such benevolence is configured by vanity. We all know what happens, when a mirror ceases to tell us we are the most beautiful of them all. We save the Panda or the Koala, and feel so very virtuous in the process; and do so in spite of the fact that the problem is often created by our own actions in the first place. Fourthly, each mirror, while perfect in itself, is assuredly a tile rather than a single mirror. Each then is designed as a mere facet of a ‘truth’: all these truths are then caught up together in the overall reflecting surface of the mind. Ultimately reflection takes the form of a spinning mirror ball, rather than a limpid pool; As it reflects the dizzying laser lights of reality, by scintillating them into a thousand shards, for our collective wonder.
The world is configured within these mirrors, each of which reflects a complex image, which itself is only formally conjoined within the reflecting surface itself. Elements of morality, biology, ecology, and politics become caught within the same limpid truth. And yet what motivates this truth is less the desire for clear reflection, so much as the creation of a scintillating light surface, in which a thousand mirrors reflect different images, and of course we are always caught looking so good, so smug in their reflected light.
The second aspect of reflection, lies in a dynamic exchange. A reflected image is then never frozen or fixed, it responds, and we respond to it. And yet this exchange is oddly invisible. A ballet dancer therefore, owns the image as themselves, even as they respond to it, and are modified by it. Each side of a mirror image feels then that the exchange is about them, and them alone. The classic example here is surely the Middle East. The West (including Israel) reflect upon themselves and their inner worth, in looking on the Arab and Persian states. They see in that glass not only their own integral value (in relations to the other) but also those actions ( I mean irrational bombs cutting off power or aid) that they must perform in order to keep that image looking the part. On the other side of the glass, of course, the Arabs and Persians see in us only their own reflection. In this case, it is our apparent inability to behave decently to them, that has caused their poverty and misery: Hence the feeling that they can only restore their own self image in the destruction (whether by bombs or oil prices) of the West. To demand that the world reflects only you is therefore to lose sight of the very act of exchange within which oneself is constituted. We insist that other countries should adopt ‘democracy’ (and therefore should be mirrors of ourselves), and fail to appreciate how democracy is changing constantly, as it is reflected within the glass of other countries, where democracy is lacking, merely rudimentary or simply works differently: a fact never lost on the other side, which sees in our shifting values a confirmation of its own position. Russia and Europe look at each other askance therefore and each other’s abuses and never their own…
Mirror lines are therefore more than merely lines of scintillation - by which the world is broken apart, but also they insert absolute division in the very point of exchange, between oddly unreflexive reflections. In looking on another, we therefore hook up that other into our own circuits; losing sight of what they are within our desire to be ourselves.
The final problem of reflection, is by far the deepest, and yet the one which we are perhaps most aware of, as we live in its constant shadow. The mirror, the reflection, demands that its ability to focus the world into a single complex bright point in fact is the truth. It makes no sense then to look for a point beyond such focussing, and the medium (and media) that induces it. Thence the old fashioned scientific (but also theological) dream that the world might be reducible to a number of simple axioms, that build up truths layer upon layer, is lost under the need to create single prisms, single centres in which a simple bright truth lies.
Take, for example, what might on the face of it appear the most likely theory to concoct a modern account of truth based on simple axioms; genetic theory. Amongst all the nonsense about rules, blue-prints, recipes, and ‘Book of Life’, a move of great consequence is effectively concealed. Take as an example the idea that there might be a ‘gay gene’. Perhaps there is. That is - perhaps there is, in our current configuration of sexuality, a small length of DNA whose presence allows a degree of predictive power as to the sexuality of the individual involved (in the jargon it ‘predisposed, without necessitating’). One might then be able to modify the proteins manufactured by this DNA. All this is possible, but does not affect for an instant, the fact that homosexuality is also a highly textured social phenomena, with an elaborate history of its own. The same length of DNA might then very easily have done something different, not just a couple of million years ago, but also last century (when how one understood one’s sexuality was different), and might well do something totally different in the next century. It exist then in the current world, as a ‘gay gene’ not as a solid biological reality, so much as a node, upon which some of the endless anxieties associated with the configuration of modern sexuality, can be focussed. What is reflecting, becomes simply unanswerable. Everything is at once watching its own reflection in another, as it is gathered within some other’s reflection; and is caught once again in a witch ride of identity.
This last point leads one back to the crux of Deleuze’s argument. For him, and for us, the problem of modernity is not that identity has collapsed, and that meaning has vanished, so much as that it has been fundamentally blown part. The world houses a surfeit of identities all of which do not only jostle uneasily with one another, but also, in their inception in reflection, fail to grasp how they, and the others which they reflect, have always been caught up on one another’s gaze. His gentle challenge, is that one simply accepts this last fact, whilst his far harder wager, is that - if we do not, then we will not be able to produce another theory capable of allowing myriads of others also to be.
