Jacques Lacan's investigation of the mirror's role in developing and structuring the individual's ego starting in infancy - reportedly one of his major contributions to the field of psychoanalysis - brings to mind Rosalind Krauss' seminal essay of 1976, Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism (October 1, Spring 1976). In this text Krauss discusses, among other artists' works, Centers, a video by Vito Acconci.
"... by its very mise-en-scene, Centers typifies the structural characteristics of the video medium. For Centers was made by Acconci's using the video monitor as a mirror. As we look at the artist sighting along his outstretched arm and forefinger towards the center of the screen we are watching, what we see is a sustained tautology: a line of sight that begins at Acconci's plane of vision and ends at the eyes of his projected double. In that image of self-regard is configured a narcissism so endemic to works of video that I find myself wanting to generalize it as the condition of the entire genre."
Acconci commented on his work: "pointing at my own image on the video monitor: my attempt is to keep my finger constantly in the center of the screen—I keep narrowing my focus into my finger. The result [the TV image] turns the activity around: a pointing away from myself, at an outside viewer." (Body as Place-Moving in on Myself, Performing Myself, Avalanche 6, Fall 1972.
Acconci indeed points away from himself, but towards the monitor which shows his own pointing at the monitor. A loop, in a sense. So he points back at the image of the artist himself, who, ultimately, is that "outside viewer". This work, like a mirror - or two mirrors facing each-other - thus performs in a sort of claustrophobic closed-circuitry.
For Lacan, the Mirror stage, which starts in early childhood, extends that initial period and persists throughout one's entire life:
"As Lacan further develops the mirror stage concept, the stress falls less on its historical value and ever more on its structural value. "Historical value" refers to the mental development of the child and "structural value" to the libidinal relationship with the body image [...] "the mirror stage is far from a mere phenomenon which occurs in the development of the child. It illustrates the conflictual nature of the dual relationship". The dual relationship (relation duelle) refers not only to the relation between the Ego and the body, which is always characterized by illusions of similarity and reciprocity, but also to the relation between the Imaginary and the Real. The visual identity given from the mirror supplies imaginary "wholeness" to the experience of a fragmentary real." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_stage)
These observations, in particular the "relation between the Imaginary and the Real" give us a foretaste, in a sense, of more contemporary and art-themed discussions such as Hal Foster's Obscene, Abject, Traumatic, which also uses other Lacan texts such The Split Between the Eye and the Gaze.
Another interesting idea of Lacan's is the contrast between the image the infant sees in the mirror which is, in a sense, complete - this would be a strictly visual perception of the self and the body - and the lack of coordination of his/her body on a motor level, thus leading to a sense of fragmentation of the body. From Merleau-Ponty's point of view, for instance, how would this fragmentation be approached?
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