I quoted the textbook, Practices of Looking, about the mirror phase of infants. There are actually some interesting points in this theory besides what I mentioned in class.
“In the mirror phase, Lacan proposed, infants begin to establish their egos through the process of looking at a mirror body image… [t]he infants recognize the mirror image to be both their selves and different. Although infants have no physical ability to grasp or control this mirror-image, it is thought that they fantasize having control and mastery over it…The mirror phase, as described by Lacan, is an important step in infants’ recognition of themselves as autonomous beings with the potential ability to control their worlds… The mirror phase thus provides infants with a sense of their existence as a separate body in relationship to another body, but it also provides a basis for alienation, since the process of image recognition involves a splitting between what they are physically capable of and what they see and imagine themselves to be. There are two contradictory relationships here to the image—infants see that they and the image are the same, yet at the same time they see the image as an ideal (not the same). Hence, the mirror phase is also about recognition and misrecognition.”
The autobiographies Stein is mocking by her book can be compared to the infant’s first sight of its reflection. Autobiographers write as though they are whole beings; they have an illusion of controlling their life and presenting as a finished story. In this sense, I think The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is Stein’s attempt to reach into her own reflection, represented by Alice B. Toklas first, by giving into the fact that life is blurry, chaotic, and therefore impossible to be recollected and organized into a completed tale, and second, by giving the reflection (Toklas) a chance to look upon her rather than her one-sidedly defining the reflection.
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The idea in this theory sounds like it could have come from Gertrude Stein. Throughout her book she is constantly referring to ideas that appear to be contradictory but can in fact work together. I believe Stein was probably incredibly smart and thought a lot about the meanings of words and their potential congruencies. On page 159 Alice (Stein) states "It was a strange winter and nothing and everything happened." I think Stein included these statements in her book to slow the reader down (further) and make them contemplate. Unfortunately, I don't think my brilliance is quite up to Stein's level, and I think this makes it difficult to understand her works. To be able to see the similarities in so-called opposites takes a powerful mind, one which I believe Stein had.
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