The Double

Definition

The double (der Doppelgänger) is Freud's figure of the self encountered as another — and, in its "typically duplicitous fashion," as the self's own mortality. Freud's "typically duplicitous" formulation, quoted by Fuss and Sanders: while the double "first emerges in our psychical lives as a 'preservation against extinction,'" it "soon reverses itself: 'from having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death'" (SE 17: 235). The double is thus the uncanny's primary figure: the self doubled into a rival, a specter, a statue. In the wiki's sources the double has a built medium: "For Freud, every self-reflection reveals a death mask, every mirror image a spectral double" (Fuss & Sanders) — mirrors, portrait-sized frames, statues, photographs and death masks are the double's architectural media, each immobilizing and framing the image so that the self is encountered as an object among objects ("homologous… to the stone heads filling the table"). Freud's corollary completes the concept: because one's own death cannot be visualized ("whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators"), "the mirror that memorializes also reincarnates, reconstituting us as phantom spectators, witnesses to our own irreplaceability" — the double as the interior's device for surviving one's own death, the Etruscan mirror's "window onto immortality."

Key Thinkers

• Sigmund Freud — the double's theorist: "'The "Uncanny"'" (1919), the double's reversal from insurance to harbinger; "Medusa's Head" and the petrifying gaze (quoted via Fuss & Sanders).
• Diana Fuss & Joel Sanders — the double's architecture: the mirror as death mask and spectral double in Freud's office; the phantom spectator "witness[ing] our own irreplaceability" (1996/2006).
• Lee Edelman — doubling of the gaze: the uncanny as the experience in which the subject "senses himself unexpectedly observed," viewing himself "through the eyes of another person or thing that seems… to usurp his subjectivity" (1996/2006). See mens-room.
• Ann C. Colley — the double welcomed: the Victorian child who brings the revenant into his own space, "the uncanny domesticated at the child's own invitation rather than returning unbidden" (1999/2006). See aesthetic-body.
• Anthony Vidler — the uncanny's architectural theory, within which the double operates (1992). See uncanny.
• Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar — the double as ally of escape: the woman behind Gilman's wallpaper "is both the narrator and the narrator's double," freed by joint work ("I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled") — the Freudian double redeployed from harbinger of death to the agent of the woman writer's liberation (1979/2006). See the-madwoman.

Related Concepts

• Doubling (Butler's Baudrillard) — the separate third term: theory's doubling of the world, not the self's double (see the Source Support entry for the automaton/robot distinction Butler draws inside the simulacra-history).

• The Uncanny — the double's affective home: the familiar turned strange; "every mirror image a spectral double."

• Mirror — the double's chief instrument: the surface that fixes, frames and severs the image.

• Mirror Stage — the double's formation scene: the self assumed as an image, "the statue in which man projects himself."

• Castration Anxiety — the double's price: "the subject's 'optical erection' could only be achieved at the price of its castration"; self-reflection petrifies.

• Being-Toward-Death — the double's philosophical neighbor: the impossibility of visualizing one's own death; the phantom spectator "witness[ing] our own irreplaceability."

• (Funerary media, not yet paged — see log: the death mask and the Etruscan mirror as the double's funerary architecture.)

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Berggasse 19: Inside Freud's Office (Fuss & Sanders 1996/2006) — the concept's defining wiki source: the double's reversal ("the uncanny harbinger of death," SE 17: 235, quoted p. 118); "For Freud, every self-reflection reveals a death mask, every mirror image a spectral double" (p. 118); the phantom spectator (p. 119); the Etruscan mirrors buried in tombs (p. 119).
• Men's Room (Edelman 1996/2006) — the gaze doubled: the subject viewing himself "through the eyes of another person or thing that seems… to usurp his subjectivity" (p. 107); the uncanny as "a toppling of the walls… of the imaginary architecture of a self" (p. 107).
• Bodies and Mirrors (Colley 1999/2006) — the invited revenant: the child who "brings the ghostly figure into his own space so that the revenant sits 'beside him in the reveries of his broken sleep'" (p. 70).
• The Architectural Uncanny (Vidler 1992) — the uncanny's architectural theory within which the double operates.
• Towards a Feminist Poetics: Infection in the Sentence (Gilbert & Gubar 1979/2006) — the double as liberation rather than death: in Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, "the figure creeping through and behind the wallpaper is both the narrator and the narrator's double" (p. 124) — the sub-pattern's "strange, provoking, formless sort of figure… that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design" (p. 123) grows clearer until the narrator enables the double's escape from her textual/architectural confinement: "'I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper'" (p. 124). Where Fuss & Sanders's double (the mirror's death mask) is the self encountered as an object among objects, Gilbert and Gubar's double is the self encountered as an accomplice — the Freudian harbinger of death inverted into the figure of the woman writer's other self, whose joint pulling is the escape itself. See the-madwoman, uncanny.
• Ornament and Order (Soulillou 2002/2006) — the double as a structural, non-psychical relation between practices: the decorative as "the eternal double of ornament, which the latter agrees at regular intervals to denounce, to prevent it from threatening order" (p. 320); "Like a phantom, the decorative always walks in the tracks of ornament, which it doubles and ends up blurring" (p. 320); and the spectral logic — "a logic which could be called spectral, doubling the first" (p. 321) — the decorative's logic doubling the logic of the visible when the founding oppositions re-divide. Where Freud's double is the self encountered as another, Soulillou's is a practice encountered as its own phantom: the double not of a person but of a system, whose doubleness is the order's fragility ("a facade… full of cracks," p. 320). The concept's extension beyond the psychical register: doubling as the structure of any practice that both founds and undermines itself. See the-decorative, phantasmagoria.
• Inside Fear: Secret Places and Hidden Spaces in Dwellings (Troutman 1997/2006) — the double housed rather than mirrored: "Wishes, dreams, fantasies, fears, desires are the inhabitants of the internal boundaries of our everyday environment: the place of the other, the imagined, the double, the dream" (p. 357) — the double listed among the inhabitants of the house's hidden spaces, not among its optical surfaces. Where Fuss & Sanders's double appears in mirrors, statues and death masks (the self objectified at a distance), Troutman's is resident in the house's peripheral rooms — the not-yet-known self as neighbour: "In this hollow between the self I know and see and the one I do not know and cannot yet see, but sense, I test my own limits and learn my own secrets" (pp. 357–358). The double here is developmental as much as spectral: the self one cannot yet see but already senses, housed in the hollow walls until explored. See hidden-spaces, uncanny, childhood-spaces.
• Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — the double's materialization and terminus: the classical double is an imaginary figure ("a phantasm… immaterial") whose power rests on remaining unreal; but "when the double materializes, when it becomes visible, it signifies imminent death." Cloning, for Baudrillard, "changes the game of the double from a subtle exchange of death with the Other into the eternity of the Same" — "the materialization of the double by genetic means," which "radically abolishes the Mother, but also the Father" and substitutes "a matrix." The hologram is its optical twin: "the imaginary aura of the double [is] mercilessly tracked"; "the hologram, perfect image and end of the imaginary." Where Freud's double reverses from immortality to the harbinger of death, Baudrillard's cloned double abolishes both death and alterity — the double without an Other. See cloning-and-the-genetic-code, hologram, simulation-hyperreality.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the double's first-order form in the orders of simulacra: the automaton as "a metaphor for and not an equivalent to the human," moving us "because of the uncanny difference between it and humans" (Butler p. 36, on 'OS', 93–4), against the robot, its second-order counterpart whose "very identicality… means there is no longer any relationship between the two" (p. 38) — the double whose maintained difference is what the double is, and which the series abolishes. Butler's doubling is a further, separate term for theory's operation on systems — see doubling.

Open Questions

• Freud's double is psychical (the reversed insurance); Fuss and Sanders make it architectural (the mirror, the statue, the death mask in the room). Is doubling a designable effect — and do mirrors, portraits and statuary install it deliberately (the classical collection, the ancestor portrait) rather than accidentally?
• The Etruscan mirror "opened a window onto immortality" — is the double then architecture's oldest consolation (the tomb's window), and does the modern mirrored interior inherit the tomb's function without its mythological scenes?
• Colley's child invites the revenant home; Freud's double returns unbidden as harbinger. Are willed and unwilled doubling two designs of the same interior — and which does the domestic interior actually build?
• Gilbert and Gubar's double is pulled out jointly ("I pulled and she shook") — a cooperative doubling. Is there a designable difference between doubles that surveil (the mirror, the men's room's gazes), doubles that petrify (the statue, the death mask), and doubles that free (the wallpaper woman) — and does it lie in whether the double is housed (in frame, in glass, in pattern) or mobile (creeping, cloud-shadow)?
• Soulillou's double is a practice's double, not a person's: the decorative as ornament's "eternal double," denounced to protect the order it simultaneously betrays. Can a designed system (a style, a discipline, an order of rooms) have a double in this structural sense — and is the wiki's uncanny material (Vidler's architectural uncanny) the built form of Soulillou's system-double, the interior haunted by its own decorative other? See the-decorative, uncanny.