Jacques Lacan, from MAPPING IDEOLOGY

Rather than reading this version which is a draft, you can download the corrected and cleaned up text of all the annotations and my introduction to them here now called, "One Possible Narrative of the Concept of Ideology since Marx". 

“The Mirror-phase as Formative of the Function of the I” - Jacques Lacan

The basics of the mirror stage essay (here “mirror-phase”) are so well known that I am tempted to skip over them, but as they do have many and varied consequences for thinking about ideology, I’ll give an extemporary account here without much in the way of quotation. The human infant (infans) is not yet able to speak and suffers from the prematurity at birth that all human experience. As such, it need both care and progressive socialization. Before the infant will enter language there comes a time when it identifies with the specular image. In Lacan’s account this happens before a mirror, though it is worth noting that this is not a requirement, all that is required is that the uncoordinated infact adopts an image as its own imago in a moment of gestalt. This imago, crucially, does not reflect the lived experience of the infant - it does not render it as a body in fragments - but as a discreet, bounded being (though, if in a mirror, also reversed) which is outside the body itself. This imago then serves as support of the Ideal-I as discussed by Freud. This imago develops and changes throughout the person’s life, and is the nucleus of their ego and the support of all successive identifications that they take on. 

This account is pertinent to the concept of ideology in a variety of ways. First, though in Lacan’s view there are nothing but identifications (and no subject ever arrives at a secure “identity”) to the extent that these are attached to the ego, that is, to an imago whose meaning is only found in the Other, while we have no real choice but to adopt such an imago, the ego will always be “an alienating identity, which will stamp with the rigidity of its structure the whole of the subject’s mental development” (96). All identifications are thus bought at a price, and as fundamentally imaginary in Lacan’s sense of that term, they are prone to rivalry and tensions forevermore. That one’s ego, even in everyday speech, can be saids to be hurt or weakened, etc all point to that “price” and the way that as ego we depend on an identity as something virtually ontologically guaranteed, and yet what we have are identifications which can ever only be partial and subject to change. Secondly, This systematic misrecognition of ourselves and others is sustained by a faith in the big Other’s substantiality. That is, that somewhere, out there, the meaning, not of partial and fleeting identifications, but of our identities is secured, and against which both ourselves and others can be judged. The big Other, though nowhere mentioned explicitly in the Mirror-Phase essay is surely pertinent to a consideration of ideology in-itself, for-itself or both in-and-for-itself as our coerced but nonetheless habituated belief in it is what allows us believe that meaning is already established for being and thus to effectively deny that the world must be made to mean. As such, the dehistoriczing gestures of ideology in-itself depend upon the big Other, the material embodiments of ideology (ISAs) masquerade as evidence of its substantiality, and the ‘spontaneous’ judgements about people and things in the world which fall under the in-and-for-itself of ideology - such as the commodity form -  are only sustainable by a belief in the big Other. Though the big Other is not mentioned in the essay, the role of the parents is obviously constitutive and Lacan is quite clear on the social relevance of the mirror stage or “the deflection of the mirror I into the social I” and that this process is dependent upon a “cultural go-between” which Lacan names as the Oedipus complex, but which must also be seen as a structuration of the subject by the symbolic order. Zizek will discuss fantasy in the closing article of this collection and the Mirror-Phase essay does not reach that point, I shall leave this aside for now. 

It is perhaps worth noting that while the imago of the specular image initially appeals to the infans by virtue of its seeming refutation of the body in fragments (that is, that it negates their lived experience), that analysis, when it begins to take effect, often “encounters a certain level of aggressive disintegration” which results very often in dreams and fantasies that return the subject to the fragmented body. We might see this as a unsettling of the analysand’s ideological grasp of their self-as-ego, and thus see psychoanalysis as a tool for combatting the sway of ideology. Here we might also compare this analytic situation to Dews’ summation of Adorno’s analysis of identity-based selfhood, that it “is an illusion which could, in principle, be reflectively broken through by the subject which it generates - although the full realization of this process would be inseparable from a transformation of social relations” (63).