antagonist

Baudrillard, in The Mirror of Production, syncopated to Rousseau’s beat, writes ‘everywhere man has learned to reflect on himself’. Like Narcissus in the pond, we are shackled by our own image. The shackles are the "scheme of production which is assigned to [man] as the ultimate dimension of value and meaning". He then conjures up Lacan’s mirror. While man reflects himself in the mirror he comes to consciousness – this is emphasized by Baudrillard again and again – in the imaginary, which is to say that man’s struggle for recognition of himself is constituted by production, labor and (use) value. The mirror, Baudrillard continues, is an operational mirror. It works, it labors to produce a ‘productivist ego’. In the mirror the organic body is recasted, thrown back into the world, reflected as an image- body, a screen-body, easily and eagerly replicated across the globe at breakneck speeds. What I like about the mirroring at work in the communicational sublime as I understand is that it retains this Lacanian/Baudrillardian notion of the mirror, its captivating and productive power. But, instead of the mirror of production being shattered as Baudrillard implores us to do, this mirror remains and when we look past the mirror, over our shoulders,we find the echos of objects and the simple further observation that we if we ‘irreduce’ them a sense of melancholy takes over.