Page 106 - Decoding Culture

SITUATIN G SUB E C TS 99
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even then only in the most schematic and restricted form. This will
be sufficient to the task in hand, that of characterizing the basic ele­
ments of Screen theory.
Lacan reconstructs Freudian theory in terms of the insights
afforded by structural linguistics and by structuralism more gen­
erally. There are many points at which one might begin an
exposition, but since we have already had a passing encounter with
it in the context of Metz' semiotics, the 'mirror stage' will serve that
purpose here. The account of the mirror stage grew, for Lacan,
from 'the startling spectacle of the infant in front of the mirror'
(Lacan, 1977: 1) . The infant (prior to the age of 18 months) encoun­
ters and responds enthusiastically to its image in the mirror. It
sees itself, misrecognizes self as an ideal ego, as a whole, in the
image. Lacan (ibid: 2) puts it thus: This jubilant assumption of his
specular image by the child at the infans stage, still sunk in his
motor incapacity and nursling dependence, would seem to exhibit
in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is pre­
cipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic
of identification with the other, and before language restores to it,
in the universal, its function as subject.'
This passage leads out to many of the key features of Lacan's
thinking which played a part in Screen theory. In the mirror phase,
'the I,' Lacan says, 'is precipitated in primordial form'. In effect, the
infant's encounter with the mirror image is the first step along the
road toward the constitution of a subject, a self. It is a pre-linguistic
and pre-symbolic step, taken in the subjective domain that Lacan
speaks of as the Imaginary, but it is also a misrecognition (Lacan's
term meconnaissance carries additional meanings relating to mis­
knowing) of the 'Ideal-I' as unified. Later, in the infant's encounter
with language and, more generally, with what Lacan calls the
Symbolic, the process of subject constitution is continued. This is
customarily formulated in relation to the f o rt-da game. Freud

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