Mirror

Definition

The mirror is the interior's reflexive surface — the designed object that returns the occupant's image and thereby makes the interior see itself. The wiki's sources organize the mirror around two opposed regimes. (1) Mirror-as-window: on an opaque wall, a mirror "has the capacity to act as a window; it dematerialize[s] and dissolve[s] architectural edges, creating the illusion of extension and expanding the spatial boundaries of the interior" (Fuss & Sanders, p. 119) — the decorative tradition's mirror that enlarges and unifies the room (de Wolfe's mirrored walls "to produce visually unified interiors," via the Intimus editors). (2) Mirror-as-containment: mirrors substituting for windows in windowless rooms "satisf[y] the eye's desire for depth of field by returning its look to itself" — a self-reflexive enclosure that models the subject "as container of space" (Edelman's men's room, p. 103). The third, psychoanalytic regime is the mirror that blocks the window: hung on a window frame, it "redirects the gaze inward," "visual access is obstructed rather than facilitated," and the subject is forced "to confront an externalized gaze relayed back upon itself" (Fuss & Sanders). Across all three regimes the mirror's deeper operation is the same: it immobilizes and frames the image, so that every self-reflection "reveals a death mask, every mirror image a spectral double" — the mirror as the interior's memorializing surface, and self-reflection's petrifying risk.

Teyssot's chapter adds a fourth regime — mirror-as-window-equivalent — and the mirror's two canonical failure scenes. In Hummel's Drawing Room in Berlin (c. 1820–25) the reflections multiply until "both mirrors and windows, because they acquire the same luminosity and chromatic weight, become the same kind of object within this painterly representation. And, if the windows are mirrors, perhaps the exterior is a total illusion: there is no outside world" (p. 346) — the equivalence not as illusionistic device (regime 1) or containment (regime 2) but as an interior's solipsist truth-claim: "One exists only within this Innerlichkeit, this inwardness" (p. 346). Its failure scenes: the fogged mirror, where self-recognition is defeated by the recognizer's own living body — "as the individual approaches the self reflected upon the glass, the mirror fogs with one's own breath. The self disappears; an attempt is made to wipe the mirror, yet one cannot help breathing" (p. 346) — and the mirror turned into boredom, Mallarmé's Igitur searching for himself in vain in the glass as "past, present, and future merge to form the pure time of boredom, crystallizing only at the instant of death" (p. 347). Adorno's verdict gives the regime its social signature: "The window mirror testifies to objectlessness – it casts into the apartment only the semblance of things – and isolated privacy. Mirror and mourning hence belong together" (p. 347). See inwardness, melancholy, aesthetic-boredom.

Key Thinkers

• Diana Fuss & Joel Sanders — the mirror's architectonics: the mirror on Freud's window that redirects the gaze inward; the head "decapitated by the frame of the mirror," the reflection as bust, death mask and spectral double (1996/2006). See mirror-stage, the-double.
• Lee Edelman — the containment regime: mirrors substituting for windows in the windowless men's room, "returning its look to itself"; the self-reflexive interior as "a principle of containment" (1996/2006). See mens-room.
• Iain Borden — the mirror as corporate gate: Broadgate's threshold as "a form of mirror, by which the visitor is ultimately returned not a view of Broadgate but… of themselves playing a role within it" (1996/2006). See thick-edge.
• Ann C. Colley — the mirror's childhood register: mirrors as the surfaces among which the Victorian child's body and interior exchange ("Bodies and Mirrors," 1999/2006).
• Georges Teyssot — the equivalence regime: windows and mirrors acquiring "the same luminosity and chromatic weight" in Hummel's Biedermeier interior; the fogged mirror (the self disappearing in its own breath) and Igitur's "mirror turned into boredom"; Adorno's window mirror of objectlessness and mourning (1996/2006). See inwardness.
• Jean Baudrillard — the mirror as production's imaginary: "through this scheme of production, this mirror of production, the human species comes to consciousness [la prise de conscience] in the imaginary" (The Mirror of Production, Preface, p. 18) — production as a mirror stage at the scale of the species, with representation as its second mirror (Preface, pp. 19–20). See mirror-of-production.

Related Concepts

• Mirror Stage — the psychoanalytic operation the mirror hosts: the subject's formation through identification with its own immobilized image ("the statue in which man projects himself," Lacan).
• The Double — the mirror's spectral product: "every mirror image a spectral double"; the double as "the uncanny harbinger of death."
• The Uncanny — the mirror world's affect: Borch-Jacobsen's statue-museum as "the most inhuman of possible worlds, the most unheimlich."
• Voyeurism — the mirror's watch: the surface that shows the occupant to himself turns every occupant into the observer of his own display.
• The Men's Room — the containment regime's room-type: mirrors where windows are forbidden.
• Inside/Outside Dialectic — the mirror's spatial ruse: on an opaque wall it opens an imaginary outside; on a real window it seals one.
• The Picture Window — the window's visual regime the mirror-on-window inverts: where the picture window grants "visual distantiation," Freud's mirror grants none — the view turned back on the viewer.
• The Gaze — the mirror as the gaze's relay: "an externalized gaze relayed back upon itself."
• The Mirror of Production — the mirror as production's imaginary: the "scheme of production, this mirror of production" through which "the human species comes to consciousness in the imaginary" (Preface, p. 18).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — the mirror's psycho-sociology (Part A, ch. I): "the mirror is an opulent object which affords the self-indulgent bourgeois individual the opportunity to exercise his privilege – to reproduce his own image and revel in his possessions"; "The clock is to time as the mirror is to space"; and the mirror's disappearance with the functional interior — the bathroom's unframed mirror "liberated from the graces and glories of domestic subjectivity."
• Berggasse 19: Inside Freud's Office (Fuss & Sanders 1996/2006) — the defining source: the mirror-on-window that "redirects the gaze inward" (p. 119); mirrors as windows when "placed against opaque walls" (p. 119); "Head substitutes for mirror" (p. 117); "every self-reflection reveals a death mask, every mirror image a spectral double" (p. 118); the Etruscan mirror as "a window onto immortality" (p. 119).
• Men's Room (Edelman 1996/2006) — the containment regime: "Substituting mirrors for windows, satisfying the eye's desire for depth of field by returning its look to itself" (p. 103).
• Thick Edge (Borden 1996/2006) — the mirror-gate: the corporate threshold as "a form of mirror" returning the visitor's own role-played image.
• Bodies and Mirrors (Colley 1999/2006) — mirrors as the childhood interior's object-dialogue surfaces.
• Suitability, Simplicity and Proportion (de Wolfe 1913/2006) — the mirror's decorative regime: "her design principles of light-hued surfaces and mirrors to produce visually unified interiors helped to establish her as America's first female professional interior decorator" (editors' introduction) — the mirror-as-window tradition's decorator's pole; also the failed mirror's placement, "a mirror as far removed from the daylight as possible" (p. 82), against her light-placement program.
• Boredom and Bedroom (Teyssot 1996/2006) — the equivalence regime and the failure scenes: "Both mirrors and windows, because they acquire the same luminosity and chromatic weight, become the same kind of object within this painterly representation" (p. 346); "if the windows are mirrors, perhaps the exterior is a total illusion: there is no outside world" (p. 346); the Brunotte "principle of mirroring and doubling" as German interiors' rule (p. 346); the fogged mirror — "the mirror fogs with one's own breath. The self disappears" (p. 346); Igitur searching "in vain in 'the mirror turned into boredom'" (p. 347); Adorno's window mirror — "objectlessness," "isolated privacy," "Mirror and mourning hence belong together" (p. 347). The mirror as the interior's truth-apparatus: what Freud's study redirected inward by design, the Biedermeier room performs by saturation. See inwardness, aesthetic-boredom, melancholy.
• The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975) — the mirror's conceptual register added to the page's spatial ones: the book's governing trope is Lacan's mirror stage transposed to the species — "At the level of all political economy there is something of what Lacan describes in the mirror stage: through this scheme of production, this mirror of production, the human species comes to consciousness [la prise de conscience] in the imaginary" (Preface, p. 18). Its second mirror is representation: "The discourse of production and the discourse of representation are the mirror by which the system of political economy comes to be reflected in the imaginary and reproduced there as the determinant instance" (Preface, pp. 19–20) — so that what the page reads at the scale of the room (self-reflection, doubling, containment) reappears as the structure of an entire conceptual system. See mirror-of-production, mirror-stage.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).
• source-notes/baudrillard-1994-simulacra-and-simulation

Open Questions

• De Wolfe's mirrored walls, Freud's mirror-on-window, Edelman's mirror-filled washroom and Borden's mirror-gate: are these one instrument with four programmes (unify, analyse, contain, administer) — and can interior design choose between them, or does the mirror always at least double the occupant?
• The mirror's decapitation ("head and shoulders severed from the body… a statuary fragment"): is the mirror intrinsically fragmenting (frame, scale, angle) or is the fragmentation a property of this study's portrait-sized mirror?
• Does the mirror-on-window produce a genuinely new spatial condition — a seeing that is neither transparent nor reflective — or does it collapse back into the inside/outside dialectic's play of values?

Stub note: This page was created from the Fuss & Sanders 1996/2006 ingest with three already-ingested companions and requires fuller treatment — de Wolfe's mirrored walls proper, the mirrored-wall history of the European interior, and the speculum literature.