Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 6 Number 1, April 2005

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The Self as Other

By  

 Efrat Biberman

Tel Aviv University

What is the relation  between my self-image and me? To what extent is this specular reflection that I see in the mirror in front of me, similar to the way I recognize myself, despite the fact that a situation could arise in which I observe that image and yet am surprised by what I see? Is there any difference between the way I see the other and the way I look at what I know apriori is supposed to be identical to my own image? I would like in this discussion to locate these epistemological questions in the aesthetic realm, and to examine their embodiment in the pictorial genre of self-portraiture as well as to consider some interpretations that have been given to them.

What is  a self-portrait? Is it a perfect copy that accurately illustrates the image in a way that completely hides whatever might be behind it? And does it match the specular imaginary reflection of how the ego percieves itself? Or is it a reverse operation in which the image does not embody the perfect cover, but rather that the image of the self-portrait stresses the gap between itself and the painter’s appearance in the eyes of the beholder, be it painter or observer.  

In order to elaborate these questions, I will first consider how some  theories of art deal with the nature and status of self-portraiture, and will show how these theories adopt two different views of self-representation: the first proposes the representation of the self as other, as a separate self-entity from the one that paints, while the second attempts to achieve maximum congruence between the self  that paints and the painted image. After discussing some problematic issues these theories raise, I will turn to the psychoanalytic discourse and  show how Freud’s concept of the uncanny (1914) adresses these problems, as demonstrated in Mladen Dolar’s discussion (1996). I will then show how Lacan’s concept of the gaze undermines the distinction between the self as other and the self as a specular image, based on his claim that  the object of observation is always inseparable from the gazing subject (1998 [1964]). The self-portrait, I will argue, is the painter’s endeavour  to cope with his own image. Embarking upon this enterprise of creating a self-portrait actually highlights the impossibility of the whole project. Creating a self-portrait is a paradoxical task in which the very decision to act dooms it to failure, despite the contrary declaration of the act itself.

Art Theory: The theatrical and the specular models

Some theories of art explore self-portraiture by proposing two distinct interpretive models for understanding that genre, each model relevant for a different type of self-portrait: the theatrical model, in which the painter paints himself as embodying some character, and the specular model, in which the painter is congruent with his mirror reflection.[i] A paradigmatic designation of the theatrical model arises, although not uniquely for self-portraits, in Svetlana Alpers’s research on Rembrandt (1988). According to Alpers, Rembrandt, whose major work was done indoors, created a sort of ‘inner world’ which he painted, a world that was inhabited by dozens of students, models and assistants (p. 43). Rembrandt, in Alpers’s view, planned complicated scenes which he directed and painted, while the sketches he made are reminiscent of the work of a stage director (p. 44).[ii] Similarly, one can comprehend the way Rembrandt paints or directs himself. In his Self-portrait with Dead Bittern, (1639, see Figure 1), Rembrandt holds the legs of a big bittern in front of him, shadowing his face. Here, according to Alpers, ‘Rembrandt identified with both the slayer and the slain’ (p. 81). A similar interpretation arises from  Joseph L. Keorner’s examination of Dürer's self-portraits (1993). Keorner claims that the similarity between Dürer’s Self-portrait of 1500 (see Figure 2) and visual representations of Christ is not coincidential, and that Dürer depicts himself as God in order to make a statement about the artist’s status and the position of his art (pp.76-79).

The specular model is a mode in which self-portraits aim to create the perfect specular reflection, an accurate embodiment of the appearance of the painter as observed in the mirror in front of him.[iii] A complicated development of that model occurs in Michael Fried’s analysis of the early self-portraits of Courbet (1990), from the nineteenth century. According to Fried, these self-portraits of Courbet are characterised by ‘a physical proximity of the painted image to the surface of the painting and, beyond that surface, to the beholder’ (p. 58). Fried, it seems, assumes a kind of imaginary surface existing in any painting, separating the picture from the viewer. In Courbet’s early self-portraits, the distance between this imaginary surface and the viewer is reduced to the minimum. As a result, Courbet’s self-portraits such as The Wounded Man (1844-45, see Figure 3), question the ontological status of the picture plan, and call into question the the impermeability of the border which ostensibly exists between the painted surface and the world beyond it. According to Fried, it appears that by doing so Courbet challenges the picture’s two dimensions and reexamines its relation to the beholder.

That sense of nearness is heightened, according to Fried, by the main figure, its compositional location on the canvas, and its extreme foreshortening. Fried attributes these pictorial characteristics to Courbet’s ambition ‘to express in and through the medium of the self-portrait a sense or intuition or conviction of his own embodiedness that he could not expound in words’ (p. 64). In order to support this claim Fried suggests that Courbet depicts his own body in a different way from the other painted elements. Thus, in Freid’s view, Courbet made use of compositional and perspective devices in order to reduce the gap between the painted image and the beholder. The significant point that arises from Fried’s discussion is Courbet’s preoccupation with both the nature and status of self-portraiture and the relationship between painter-object-beholder that would achieve a perfect congruence between them.

The problem at this point is that neither of the two models, the theatrical nor the specular model, provide a solution to the problems posited above, regarding the relationship between the subject and his depicted image. In order to achieve a congruence between image and object, Courbet tries to ‘overcome’ the pictorial arena, and to challenge its dual dimensionality, by the extreme foreshortening of the painted figures, while at  the same time trying  to depict himself as closely as possible to the way he perceives his inner self by painting himself with his eyes closed. That is to say, the specular model contains a dialectical relationship between two ostensibly contradictory concepts. On the one hand, there is a wish to create the ultimate copy by cancelling the border between painter and painted image, while on  the other, in order to reach the same goal, an opposing act takes place, in which the painter closes his eyes in order to embody that subjectivity from the inside, in which the closing of the eyes is the outcome of a refusal to identify the visual appearance with the embodiment of that subjectivity. Fried’s interpretation implies that these two contradictory attempts are designed to achieve the same objective of attaining perfect congruence, but it seems that this interpretation, although indicating the dialectical relationship between picture and beholder, does not explain them completely – and the gap between the image and the self-perception it was supposed to represent, still remains.

An opposite problem arises from the theatrical model. Here,  the attempt to designate the self-perception is directed in advance toward embodying the gap between the self and the image and not toward attaining perfect congruence between them. But the way in which the painter disguises himself does not allow him to erase his self-presence, one which arises from the role  he chooses to play.

 These theories of art do, however, point to the complex nature of self-portraits. In the first case it is regarded as the perception of the self as other, while in the second it is regarded as the one and only exact reflection, the ultimate copy. This dual view of self-portraits expresses their intricacy, and the difficulty they pose.[iv] The difficulty is due to the impossibility of deciding about the relationship between the self-perception and its image, in which each choice leaves one aspect unsolved. Furthermore, each choice ultimately embodies its opposition as well; the theatrical model retains the self-image, while the specular model retains the gap between the self and the image. The difficulty is the outcome of the dualistic nature of these art theories, in which the object of representation is perceived as separate and distinct from the looking (or painting) subject.

Camouflage and duplication

I would now like to turn to the psychoanalytical discourse, and to elucidate some of the insights that psychoanalysis has provided about the perception of self-image. The perception of the self and its complexity can be seen in Freud’s discussion  of the uncanny[v] (1962 [1919]). Freud locates this discussion in the aesthetic realm, claiming that although aesthetic discussions usually concern the beautiful, the uncanny relates to an aesthetic matter which is opposed to the beautiful and to sublime emotions (p. 219). The meaning of the term ‘uncanny’, says Freud, lies between the word and its opposite. ‘Heimlich’ in German is something domestic and known. But, among the diverse ways of interpreting this word is one  which matches its opposite meaning, namely ‘unheimlich’, which is intimidating and anxious. One of the meanings of the word thus contains an ambiguity which merges the significance of the word with its opposite, which according to Freud locates the concept of the uncanny in an intermediate zone, in an undetermined situation (p. 226).

Freud begins this discussion by presenting Jentsch’s position, according to which the feeling of the uncanny results from an inability to distinguish between a live body and an object. Later, Freud connects the uncanny effect with duplication,  an unexplained repetition of a detail, event or place,  in which one of the possibilities of duplication is embodied in the phenomenon of the double (p. 234). Freud  thus considers the phenomenon of merging in space and the excessive appearance of the double, as  among the causes of the uncanny effect. Furthermore, Freud connects these two causes by indicating that the motif of the double is related to a withdrawal to archaic times, ‘when the ego has not yet marked itself off sharply from the external world and from other people’ (p.236).

The lack of differentiation between self and environment is implied  in the discussion of the theatrical model and the specular model. The theatrical model assumes that I represent someone other than me, that I am absorbed  in the image of the other, while the specular model assumes that it is possible to create an identical image of myself, and thus create my double. I suggest reading self-portraits through those two modes of the uncanny: on the one hand as a camouflage, a total merging of the organism with its environment, and on the other hand as the phenomenon of the double. This enables me to  describe the relations of observation as they appear in self-portraits, and to claim  that these relations can be attributed to ocular relations in general. Reading self-portraits through these two manifestations of the uncanny and linking them with the concept of an inward-outwards relationship in their psychoanalytical articulation will  allow me to answer  questions  that had previously been overlooked.

In his essay about the mirror stage, Lacan describes how  the infant, at the age of six months, recognizes his specular image for the first time (1977 [1949]). This moment, in which the infant identifies with an external object, is a constitutive moment for his subjectivity. Henceforth he will bear this gap between the fragmentary and incohernet way in which he perceives himself and the whole symmetrical image that is attributed to him (p. 2). The self-image is always inverted, both metaphorically and literally, and contains an alienated aspect. Two distinct relationships exist between the subject and his image - on the one hand identification and congruency, and on the other total alienation. The relationship between the subject and his image is complicated, impossible to describe in terms of inward-outward relationships, but rather of absorption in something external, while simultaneously discharging something internal. This merging of inside and outside is described in the psychoanalytical discourse as the relationship of the infant to his enviroment, expressed through the absorption of materials from the outside, such as nursing milk, together with an opposite process in which undesirable materials are discharged from the body. The point is that something external had been absorbed which became internal, and vice versa. The subject of Lacanian psychoanalysis is split between ego and unconscious. This split is the embodiment of this inward-outward relationship, in which the ‘inside’ of the subject comes from the other, determining the subject as such, while the ‘outside’ is embodied through repression. 

A similar procedure occurs in seeing. Contrary to the subject in art theory, which observes its object from a sovereign viewpoint[vi], the subject in psychoanalysis gazes at a picture that looks back at him, and finds in the picture something of himself, the embodiment of his own gaze. The Lacanian concept of the gaze assumes an antinomy between the eye and the gaze, in which the eye is the subject’s eye and the gaze is the object of observation, of the scopic instinct (1998 [1964]). While the eye expresses the vision related to the imaginary order, the reality perception of the subject as an ego, the gaze according to Lacan, is something of the real which eludes articulation and cannot be represented (p. 73).

At this point we can look back at  how Alpers suggests reading Rembrandt’s Self- portrait with Dead Bittern, in which, as she puts it, the painter is simultaneously the slayer and the slain. In other words, while Alpers percieves the bilaterality of that portrait as a complicated case of the theatrical model, the Lacanian vision will assume it to be an expression of the divided subject, split between the ego and the unconscious. The subject of the self-portrait is simultaneously subject and object, an observer who is also the object of his own gaze. Similarly, we can re-observe the way in which Fried viewed Courbet’s portrait with his eyes closed, while the tension which Fried attributed to the gap between how Courbet perceives himself from the ‘inside’ and  how he perceives his external image, can be reconsidered in Lacanian terms as the subject who simultaneously sees himself both as himself and as an object. Lacan explains this intricacy in reference to Roger Callois’s reasearch into mimicry and camouflage in insects. Callois perceives the idea of camouflage in insects as existing in the organism’s perception of space and its relation to it (1984 [1935]).   

The traditional way of understanding mimicry in insects, claims Callois, is in human terms. Theories claiming that certain organisms camouflage themselves in order to defend themselves and survive, follow that logic. Callois cites contradictory cases, such as animals that camouflage themselves and yet are still killed, or animals that by camouflaging themselves are exposed to new hazards which did not threaten them previously. Thus, understanding camouflage as an act of defence is an interpretation of a human beholder, and does not necessarily describe the phenomenon of camouflage itself. The act of camouflage does not belong to the intersubjective realm but relates to the organism and its self-perception (p. 25).

Why then do organisms camouflage themselves, asks Callois. He concludes that camouflage is a temptation to merge within space, while the search for a resemblance to the surroundings is an intermediate phase for the purpose of achieving the final objective of total absorption. Camouflage is an act of absorption that succeeds beyond expectation when the organism totally loses its sense of selfness (p. 27). In other words, camouflage, according to Callois, is not a defensive mechanism, but rather an expression of the inseparable relation between the organism and its environment.  Lacan adopts Callois's views in order to explain the gap between the subject and its specular image. Just as the insect strives to merge with its environment, so the subject strives to unite with the ego ideal, which he sees in the mirror, an effort that can never succeed. At a later stage, in his discussion on the gaze, Lacan again refers to Callois when he draws the analogy between the act of mimicry by insects and the act of painting by humans.

The organism’s absorption in the environment exemplifies the Lacanian notion of vision in the sense that the object of observation is not separate from or external to the subject but is a part of him, his own gaze looking back at him. This situation contradicts traditional  assumptions of Western thought of  dualism between the subject and his distinct, separated field of vision, and, similarly, contradicts the common notion that regards camouflage as a defensive device. Thus both Callois and Lacan, each for his own purposes, articulate an alternative structure of relations which  is not based upon this duality.

Following Callois, Lacan claims that the butterfly, on whose wing appears what seems to be a huge image of an eye, does not enchant another insect by this effect, a phenomenon that is often understood to be a camouflage technique, but rather by the resemblance to the image of an eye (1998 [1964], p. 74). In other words, one has to distinguish between the function of the eye and the function of the gaze. This can be understood in the following way: Viewing the image of a large eye on the butterfly’s wing as if it were the eye of a huge and intimidating animal belongs to the imaginary order, to the concept of camouflage as a defensive procedure, when the subject is separate from his object of observation. Simultaneously,  however, another procedure is taking place, that of the gaze which belongs to the real: the  large eye is perceived as the gaze of the observer which turns upon him, an unseparated part of himself. This process is not intended to undermine the boundaries between the organism and its surrounding space, but rather a priori this perception rejects this distinction: the distance between the imagining and the imagined is undefined, and the question as to whether an object is a thing or just a camouflage, an empty image with no substance, remains open. Thus, Lacan claims, the huge eye on the butterfly’s wing is enchanting not because of its similarity to a large animal’s eye, but because of its resemblance to a representation of an eye (p.74). This implies  that the relation between the organism and the other is undetermined: the image is perceived as intimidating, yet, simultaneously there is a wish to domesticate it, to absorb it and possess it in order to neutralize the uncanny effect. However, these operations are not unequivocal, but rather coexisting twofold operations. Through the act of camouflage, the one who is imagining is also the imagined. In this sense, the act of camouflage illustrates the idea of being in a mediating area, which Freud points to in discussing  the twofold  nature of the uncanny.  

Viewing self-portraits with the camouflage model shows that the image of the self-portrait contains the dialectic between the self-image as familiar, routine and known, and the self-image as the other. This  explains the uncanny effect that  these portraits create. The subject of the self-portrait is simultaneously the seducer and the seduced. That is to say, the dichotomy between the other and me that art theory articulates through the distinction between the theatrical model and the specular model, is undermined from the psychoanalytical point of view which  assumes that the object of observation is not separated from the viewing subject.  

The self-portrait and the double 

Mladen Dolar exposes the imaginary aspect of the process of falling in love as it is perceived in Western culture, namely a fateful moment of free choice – and shows that it is in fact a process of forced choice, in which the subject acts under the illusion of freedom (1996). As I will show, Dolar draws an analogy between love relations and the narcissistic relations which exist between the subject and his double, a procedure which he connects to the Lacanian mirror stage. Dolar’s views will enable me to explain, through the concept of the double, the relations between painter, object, and image which are relevant to self-portraiture.  

Dolar claims that falling in love originates in a paradox caused by the convergence between something that is accidental and external to the subject, and something that is the most intimate and of internal concern (p. 129). The paradox of love, he claims, lies in the imperative to love things which we cannot choose, like parents or homeland. This imperative is parallel to the principle of forced choice, in which the subject ostensibly can choose between two things, yet the choice is actually forced upon him in advance. A paradigmatic case of a forced choice in Lacanian discourse is the statement ‘your money or your life’ in which the real meaning of that sentence is that you ought to choose life, since if you choose money, you would actually be relinquishing both (Lacan, 1998 [1964], p. 212). A similar principle, according to Dolar, is activated in falling in love.  All the classical stories incorporate a chance encounter in which a man’s and a woman’s “eyes meet”, an encounter that turns out to be fateful:

It becomes the fundamental moment that has the power to entirely transform the subjects who assume the contingent as the very essence of their being, something to rule their destiny, and no power can be equal to it. (p. 131)

Dolar shows that, paradoxically, in many stories the moment of recognition, which is supposed to be a moment of a free choice, is actually a forced choice, governed by fate. The solution, he claims, is to accept the forced choice retroactively, which means accepting the other’s decision as your own. The choice is made retroactively but this is a strange temporality, since it is a situation of a retroactive decision, as if the act itself never existed. 

In falling in love, according to Dolar, three things occur simultaneously: something accidental and external to the subject turns out to be an acceptable object; the acceptable object has not changed but the subject’s attitude towards it has changed; a procedure of forced choice has occurred, in which something that was forced upon the subject is presented as his own choice. The meaning of this forced choice does not lie in the absence of choosing, but rather that the possibility to choose is offered and rejected at once, and the subjectivity emerges out of that empty gesture.  One of the well-known myths in literature and cinema is that of the first encounter, the moment when the lovers’ eyes meet. This is the moment that embodies the gaze and its reflection is a critical moment of the encounter. This is the moment of recognition, when someone recognizes what ‘had always been there’, while all existence is retroactively re-organized around that moment. (p. 132) This moment of discovery organizes everything that preceded it, and simultaneously creates a new target, a new future to look forward to. ”The lack of sense of a contingent fate, the haphazard string of events, was in that moment suddenly filled by the gaze” (p.134). In other words, contrary to the common assumption according to which an event is a consequence of a former event, Dolar relates to a contingent series of events on which the gaze had been focused and which explains the series of events retroactively as a causal sequence. We can understand this in two ways: on the one hand a situation of awakening, in which for one instant someone really sees things instead of just looking at them, or, on the other hand, as a sight, which exists only at the price of blindness:

The gaze comes to fill the lack of sense in that senseless fortune, it also creates it by filling it, for it is only looking backward that one sees the lack, and only as a lack destined to be filled. Life didn’t ‘make sense’ before, but now, suddenly, it does. (p. 134)

The moment of the encounter, described in the literature by the words ‘their eyes met’, actually relates to the domestication of an object that arouses desire, an object through which the subject sees something of himself turning back upon him.  

I suggest that the same logic of a forced choice, of a retroactive articulation through which it is possible to organize an allegedly objective reality, exists between the painting and the beholder in general, and between a self-portrait and its observer in particular. If we return to  the theatrical and the specular models as paradigmatic interpretive models in art theory, we  see that they are based upon an approach toward a painting in which the observer constructs pictorial meaning according to the visual details that he sees. Activating the logic of the forced choice upon vision entails an opposite order of events, in which the pictorial meaning is not perceived as a product of the picture, but rather the encounter between picture and beholder, giving it a meaning which explains the painting retroactively. In other words, while the traditional encounter between picture and beholder assumes a beholder constructing the pictorial details which reveal a meaning that was inherent in the image, and which the beholder arrives at after activating a suitable code, understanding the encounter in terms of the logic of the forced choice assumes that it is a contingent encounter, in which the beholder sees something of himself, of his own gaze staring back at him, which brings him to a retroactive articulation of meaning resulting from that encounter. Thus, the order of events is reversed: pictorial meaning cannot be attained  through meticulous observation; on the contrary, only a contingent gaze leads retroactively to  the construction of a meaning.

Dolar proceeds to argue that a similar situation occurs at the Lacanian mirror stage when the infant suddenly comes face to face with his specular image, and the past and future construction is ordered according to the gaze. In that narcissistic phase something akin to love emerges, since all love is, in some way, narcissistic.[vii] That moment when the baby encounters his specular image has a double meaning. Aside from the narcissistic joy, there is an uncanny effect. Meeting someone who looks exactly like oneself causes fear of impending disaster, since my reflection is at once both me and the other (p. 136). This situation has the uncanny effect of seeing the most intimate thing as alienated. This point exemplifies the congruence between camouflage and duplication, which Freud explained by noting that the double is a regression to an early mental stage, when the ego was not yet differentiated from the external world. According to Dolar, the resemblance between the Lacanian mirror stage and the double phenomenon is based on the sense that in order to be myself I need my specular image:

When I recognize myself in the mirror it is already too late. There is a split: I cannot recognize myself and at the same time be one with myself. With the recognition, I have already lost what one could call the ‘self-being’… The rejoicing in the mirror image … had already to be paid for . . . The mirror double immediately introduces the dimension of castration. . . (Dolar, p. 138)

The Lacanian gaze is precisely the part that is missing, the missing organ. Thus the mirror presents the split between the imaginary and the real. The double is that impossible specular image containing the gaze, an anxious situation in which the imaginary exists alongside the real. The double is the self to which the gaze is added, that unseen part of being which is attached to one’s image. Lacan uses the gaze as a representative of that missing part: one can see one’s eyes in the mirror but not one’s gaze, for that is the missing part that eludes any visual embodiment. If it were possible, for instance, to see my own reflection in the mirror with closed or blinking eyes, then it would be the gaze as an object that appears in the mirror. A similar situation exists with the phenomenon of the double. The anxiety that the double causes is proof of the existence of the gaze. The anxiety is not the outcome of a lack or a loss, but rather, is caused by an excess, by gaining too much.[viii] It is due to the loss of the lack, that loss which constitutes reality, that the uncanny effect arises. (p. 139)

According to Dolar, then, the double phenomenon is an embodiment of the anxiety-arousing excess, which leads to a situation in which the imaginary and the real co-exist. The relevant problem for the current discussion is the connection between the self-portrait, as a representation of the appearance of the subject from his specular reflection, and the double phenomenon.

I return to Courbet’s self-portrait The Wounded Man, in which he paints himself with his eyes closed. As I mentioned above, Fried suggested that Courbet was trying to paint himself from the ‘inside’, as opposed to depicting his external appearance. Dolar interprets precisely the same kind of image, the specular closed-eyed reflection, but gives it a contradictory interpretation: that image does not describe the subject’s closest self-perception, but rather the closed-eyed specular image is perceived as an excess that arouses anxiety, or, in Dolar’s words, ‘gaining one thing too much’ (p. 139). While Fried explained the closed-eyed self-portrait as an attempt to achieve perfect congruence between oneself and one’s representation, interpreting that self-portrait in Dolar’s terms leads to an opposite result, in which the self-portrait reveals the gap between the image and the self.

Lacan claims that realizing  the existence of the gaze does not make it  disappear. Painters like Goya succeeded in conserving the gaze (1998 [1964], p. 84).  Dolar’s description of the mirror reflection as an excess that arouses anxiety elucidates the visual experience according to Lacan, namely, the way the painting can conserve the gaze as something extra beyond the painted image. It is important to recall that Lacan does not explain explicitly how to locate the gaze in a painting, which by definition cannot be visually embodied. The gaze, which is the product of a particular encounter between subject and picture, is meant to emerge from a lack, from something that cannot be represented. I suggest that since the gaze is caused by a subject-object encounter, the way to locate it might be by the interpretations given to pictures, at the point where the reading reveals contradiction and incoherency, or through recurrent attempts to contribute meaning, making coherent that which is incoherent. This point is validated in  Dolar’s analysis by his claim  that the gaze is present by virtue of the anxiety it produces rather than by any pictorial detail.

I began with certain art theory attitudes towards self-portraiture. The theatrical model and the specular model assume that the self-portrait and its pictorial characteristics, like paintings in general, are the basis for the interpretations ascribed to them.  Furthermore, these models assume that there is a distinct separation between  how I paint myself as the other, and  how I try to depict my own appearance. Even if the two could be combined in certain cases,  these theories still assume that they are different procedures. Addopting Dolar’s analysis for understanding self-portraits from a psychoanalytic perspective permits a different reading. The Lacanian concept of the gaze  eliminates the dualism assumed by art theories, a dualism which is characterised by the relations of observation between an active beholder and the passive object of that observation. Lacanian relations of observation occur between a subject and the object which is the gaze that looks back at the beholder. In other words, the distinction between seeing myself as the other or seeing myself as my exact reflection is imaginary; the object of observation is never external to me.