Wankery
If you're like me, you like Lacan.
Jacques Lacan wrote a lot of structuralist psychoanalystic theory, which is mostly weird and dense and possibly ridiculous. But one thing he's particularly known for his writing on the "mirror stage". He didn't invent the concept, but he introduced what had been mostly a psychological concept into the social sciences.
The mirror stage is the point in a human's life, around 2 years of age, then they begin to be able to reconise themselves in a mirror. This is actually quite significant accordin to Lacan. He contends that it's when everyone's made to see themselves as a discrete object. Previously, babies think of themselves as universal, without borders, looking at the world and examing it and getting pleasure from it. But seeing and recognising themselves in a mirror makes them realise they have borders, and are a themselves something to be looked at and examined.
Another theorist who is interesting to me is Louis Althusser. He was a neo-marxist structuralist dude who died in 1990. He wrote about interpellation, which is the way our society and the structures in it make you think of yourselves as a certain thing. As a boy, girl, child, student, worker, good, insane, sane, smart etc... I mean, that's how I interpret it.
Anyway, I was thinking about those two because I found an old livejournal of mine today. It was a little bit embarrassing (I friends only-ed most of the entries after discovering it... www.livejournal.com/users/enmacdee. And I was interested that I actually had forgotten about it, even though the latest entry is only a year old. The fact that I only ever did 18 entries in there might have something to do with its falling out of my brain (and salacious some of them are! dayum I was such a slut).
And my finding it combined with something a random hottie said to me today, about looking at the past like we look at other cultures: some superficial things are different but people are basically the same. And it made me think of thinking about myself in the past as just another person you met, who is superfically different but of course is basically the same person (becuase we're all the same, really).
And so maybe it's part of this fallacy that mirrors give us: the I am one person, and am the same individual I used to be. But it's not necessarily true, is it? I mean, putting aside the issue of the body for the moment, who's to say that I'm the same person I was last year? I don't mean "person" in the artsy-fartsy sense like, "oh after quitting alcohol I have become a different person". I mean *literally*. You don't have to be embarrassed about something you did because, regardless of what the mirror or your friend or your passport says, it wasn't you.
And so rather than looking at your progression through life like a car going along a road, maybe it's worth thinking of it as a what's up on your computer screen. You can surf around and come to something different, and there's no relationship between the what the screen looks like now and what it looked like when you were lookin at Dustin Lance Black's n00d pics. Aside from the actual material casing of the monitor, which we're ignorin for the moment. And the history button, which is only there because microsoft thought that parents would want to know if their kids were looking at pr0n. Actually the history button is, for all intents and purposes, is basically like the mirror and the state who keep records on you and tell you you're responsible for what you once did.
The prison only works because by limiting stimulus, people are sort of forced to be the same. I mean, you become a different person by changing, and you can't change that much if your life is exactly the same in every little way for 20 years, can you? So they look people up both physically and they stop them from turning into a different person, and not being culpable. Actually I guess the whole *you're not just one person* thing is a pretty strong argument for correctional rather than punitive justice systems.
And I guess to end I'll acknowledge that a) this might all have been logically false and stupid, and b) it's probably been thought up before by someone who put it much more eloquently than me.