Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2001 02:36:02 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: The rearview mirror stage


I am going tot ake this somewhere else . The image of the rear-view mirro
mirror. Marshall Mchluan -- did I spell that right? - take this
image as pertaining to how we see backwards into the
future
. Like the driver riding his car alongthe highway glancing from
time to
time in her mirror to see the road behind. For MM this is an example
how we are hpnotised by media, excuse me, by new media; we see the
novel media in terms of the past medias;And
because we do that,
we read the present becoming future in terms of its past;
in Lacacan if I recall rightly,--- unlike MM where we have a nostalgia of
the future via the past becoming past and our glancing backward,
unlike Jacques where the Letter is the sign of the unconscious
and therefore trapped as she is by thediscourse of its limitation
we are spent inthe past of a castrated and castrating unconscious that
sees no further than its nose and arse; the child is made
paranoid by the glance ofthe Mother whose gaze has been
made by the Father; thus all knowledge can be seen as
a form of paranoia; Archer makes this suggestion in
this book he wrote about the Rennaissance body; which
title I dont recall; in Winnicott the baby's gaze into the mother's face
is assuring and confirming as RD Laing might put it;
it is self-validating for the person in later life; the look
of love as the songs say it; in the works of Guattari the mirror
is taken to yet another place; it is displaced by the factory
of an orphan unconscious; so, if a person were to say I am an
orphan. or I am the daughter of so an so they would not be speaking
literally or symbolically or neither, but across a line of flight;
a threshold,  a passage.


Yours truly,

Clifford Duffy