#Misrecognition

[polyanthea]

He thought he saw an Elephant, That practiced on a fife: He looked again, and found it was A letter from his wife. "At length I realize," he said, "The bitterness of Life!"

-Lewis Carroll, "The Mad Gardener's Song"

[impoliticwestie]

Psyrri, Athens, 2022. I didn’t recognise our street. New dogs in the old houses answering to the name of Airbnb.

[elwenyere]

Crunching on another tasty-to-me "Rix Road"/"Who Are You?" parallel: the way in 1.12 Syril and Dedra are both on Ferrix looking for Cassian, who ends up playing almost no role in the riot that brings them together, but who does bust Bix out of Imperial detention vs.

the way in 2.08 Cassian is on Ghorman looking for Dedra, and he ends up playing very little role in the massacre other than inadvertently separating her from Syril - even though neither Syril nor Dedra knew Cassian would be there - and then stealing Kay from Imperial possession

[harbingersecho]

misrecognition is not ignorance

[iceybot]

Mistook the ball of yarn in the first image for a melon god damn it

Started a new vest project this week ! Test swatch + bottom section ⛪🌿

[marwyn]

Heroic masculinity is a cultural alignment of behaviors formulated to be adopted and promulgated—a powerful vision of masculinity that, in order to be offered as a mode of living, must also acknowledge its artificiality, its constructedness, its adoptability. Heroism organizes the masculine ‘body in pieces’ into a cultural coherence represented as invulnerable (because it must not fail) and always in danger of decapitation, dismemberment, and fragmentation (because no identity, predicated on a misrecognition, can hope to hold—even if that originary mistaking is a socially necessary one).

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and the members of Interscripta, “The Armour of an Alienating Identity”

[communistkenobi]

do you have a favorite book? anything you'd recommend to anyone? i'm itching to read something but i just finished my list of stuff to read hehe

ummmmmmmm I don’t have a favourite book per se but right now I’m really enjoying Richard Minear’s Victor’s Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial (archive.org link) where he works through two fundamental contradictions in the Allies’ conception of justice & law directly post-WWII:

All justice is victor’s justice: victory (and therefore power) over one’s enemy produces the necessary conditions under which justice may be achieved in the first place, and

Victor’s justice is not actually justice at all, as understood within liberal legal thought: victory is what legitimates the moral & legal superiority of the victors and, by the same token, confirms the moral & legal bankruptcy of one’s enemies - as one of the Allied representatives at Nuremberg said, there can be no outcome but one. Long before you step into a courtroom, the guilt of the Nazi representatives (or the representatives of Imperial Japan) is already well known. There is no circumstance under which a Nazi would ever be acquitted, and this is a conclusion reached outside of the law, and is therefore not a legal conclusion at all.

Minear then talks about these trials as liberal show trials - not in a derogatory sense, or to argue that the Allies’ punishment of the Axis powers was morally indefensible (it was defensible, unequivocally), but that it is legally contradictory under the terms of liberal understandings of fair and transparent legal proceedings - the justification for the Nuremberg Tribunals (as opposed to executive action, ie, the immediate execution of every top official of the Nazi government) was to both prevent the Nazi officials from becoming martyrs, and to also demonstrate to the public at large the legal and moral legitimacy of the Allied powers. A free and fair trial of the great enemies of history demonstrates the reason of law itself.

But Minear says this is not the case! This is a misrecognition of the operations of power as well as deeper conceptions of justice itself. And as a consequence, this contradiction can be generalised to a more fundamental critique of big-L Liberal thought re: the conception of justice as administered through the burgeoning international law that emerged after the war

[the-bi-library]

Here are bisexual books of July!

Books listed:

Exes & Foes by Amanda Woody

Abbott: 1979 by Saladin Ahmed

Rise by Freya Finch

The Loudest Silence by Sydney Langford

The Seduction of James Gray (Moonlight Falls, #1) by Colette Rivera

Long Live Evil (Time of Iron, #1) by Sarah Rees Brennan

Heads Will Roll by Josh Winning

The Princess and the Thief by Mary Lynne Gibbs

Bitterbound by A.Z. Louise

These Deathless Shores by P.H. Low

Loser of the Year by Carrie Byrd

Between Dragons and Their Wrath (The Shattered Kingdom, #1) by Devin Madson

Anyone's Ghost by August Thompson

The Viscount's Forbidden Love by M.M. Wakeford

Home Ice Advantage (Penalty Box #3) by Ari Baran

The Sky on Fire by Jenn Lyons

A Rose by Any Other Name by Mary McMyne

Misrecognition by Madison Newbound

Rare Birds by L.B. Hazelthorn

The Ghostkeeper by Johanna Taylor

Portrait of a Shadow by Meriam Metoui

Chaos Station by Jenn Burke, Kelly Jensen

Lonely Shore by Jenn Burke, Kelly Jensen

Skip Trace by Jenn Burke, Kelly Jensen

Cursed Under London by Gabby Hutchinson Crouch

The End Crowns All by Bea Fitzgerald

Young Gothic by M.A. Bennett

What Blooms in the Dark by Audrey T. Carroll

[friendcrumbs]

dan cain and death: putting the romance into necromancer

TWs: discussion of necrophilia/attraction to death

this is the “the C in Cain stands for Corpsefucker” meta. apologies. i think reading the first meta about dan, grief, and the uncanny provides a lot of good context, but it should still be understandable without it.  wordcount: 1.7k

dan and death

dan's terrified of death. it’s trite to say but it makes up a large part of his motivation in the first movie: he’s introduced as he’s attempting CPR long after it’s deemed fruitless. similarly trite: instead of avoiding it, he confronts it, wants to fight it. he’s both repulsed and fixated and drawn to it. on a meta/genre level, it makes sense: doctor-scientists who butt heads over methods and morality but are united in their goal of defeating death. dan has to take an active role in the plot for this dynamic to be effective. (even if you want to argue that he’s purely manipulated/mislead into helping, herbert still leverages dan’s fear/fascination with death to do so). similarly, dan’s both repulsed by corpses, and yet extremely curious; he’s disgusted by the ‘full house’ in the morgue, and yet, when he comes upon a hill doing a dissection, he can’t tear his eyes away, to the point that halsey startles him. (admittedly, very normal for a med student/doctor). he’s just as fascinated and willing to push the boundaries of acceptable practice as herbert, even if he needs convincing/being manipulated (take your pick of description) first. 

however, unlike herbert, dan’s not without guilt and shame about the process. while in the first movie, he’s willing to stand up for herbert (to the dean and to meg alike), in bride, he differentiates himself from herbert at every turn (“this is your madness,” being visibly annoyed/trying to distance himself from herbert in front of gloria and francesca, telling herbert to get angel with the human arm “out of here”). he’s willing to go along with the experiments (the initial agreement to make the bride aside, as i understand it can be contentious whether he’s in his right mind, there’s still the experiments in peru, the line of “where’s our cadaver?” (emphasis mine), and dan’s continued participation in obtaining body parts of the bride), but only in secret. herbert is on that grind blind to the haters doesn’t care about his reputation; he believes in the work and that he will be vindicated. the ends justify the means, etc. there’s no shame or guilt to be had. dan, on the other hand, greatly cares about how he’s perceived. he’s unable to reconcile the experiments and his curiosity with the ‘kind, caring doctor’ part of himself. he represses all that has to do with death (a point i make in the other meta), but it doesn’t make him more normal, it makes him Weirder and Worse. NOW. despite the title, i don’t think that ‘dan wants to literally have sex with literal corpses’ is an argument defensible on canon alone. however, i think that it’s undeniable that he’s drawn to the dead/corpses in a way that he’s just… not to alive people, in a way that exceeds simple scientific curiosity/duty of care as a doctor. 

dan’s dead women

during the run of bride, dan has three dead women he’s “in love” with. meg, gloria, and the bride. i choose to differentiate between meg and the bride as well as gloria and the bride for the purpose of this argument, and also because they function as separates in the narrative. dan’s cry of ‘it’s meg!’ is treated as an obvious delusion/psychological break, a horrifying misrecognition. gloria is never equated to the bride, despite being her ‘form’/face (literally). there is no hint that gloria’s brain will inform the bride’s personality or memories—instead, all of those ought to come from meg’s heart.  

meg exists only as a memory/ideal without a body, and as i argued in the previous meta, is not actually the same meg from the first movie, but instead a distorted, stripped-down version that dan chases over and over again. she is perfectly lovable in death, lacking any of her flaws, unable to do any harm or mistakes, frozen as a victim and lost lover, not a person. dan, who in the first movie prioritized the work (and herbert) over meg is suddenly firmly devoted to her. dan’s more drawn to the dead version of meg than he was to the alive one. 

although one could argue that it’s simply guilt and regret, dan wanting to ‘make up’ for having failed her/failed to love and protect her adequately, said guilt/grief would only manifest once brought up by herbert—dan’s peru flirtation with francesca was cut from the final film, but a hint of the tension remains. he’s started to move on. yet, when the possibility of combining meg and the work comes up, the dead girlfriend is ‘re-animated’ to him, suddenly taking priority over ‘good, kind doctor.’  

gloria—even while literally alive—is already dead. dan projects an image of meg onto her, through their similarity in being close to death (and blonde, I Guess), saying that he imagines her as “a meg who lived.” she’s a terminal patient, about to die, and dan has no illusions about that—when herbert points out that she’s terminal, he doesn’t try to deny it or say that there’s still hope. he’s repulsed by herbert’s insistence that she could be “of use to us,” and corrects him “not us. you,” once again caught in the repulsion-attraction resulting from his repression. he does not want gloria to die, even if it’s inevitable, but also her approaching death is precisely what draws him to her. not only due to circumstances (meeting in the hospital, being able to replay meg’s re-animation and “win”) but because she ignites the same fear-attraction instincts in him as death does. 

and for bachelorette number three, the bride. this feels the most obvious: herbert presenting dan with the body parts pre-re-animation has been compared to an act of seduction, be it herbert directly seducing dan (sexually or scientifically) or seducing him vicariously on part of the bride. re-animation as sex has been widely discussed, so i do not feel the need to go into details. [quick rundown: “premature re-animation,” phallic symbolism of a syringe while creating life, the white sheet that herbert lays out, “this is very much borders on sexual for herbert” (actor’s commentary), science-is-sex for herbert] but while usually this is used for support of a queer reading of the movie (good! i’m in favor!), it also frames the corpse as a viable, attractive partner for dan. the seduction is succeeds while the bride is dead, but once dan’s confronted with the reality of a living thing, not an ideal, he’s repulsed: idealized parts are better than the whole. a corpse cannot speak, cannot be anything but what he projects onto it, forced into whatever fantasy he sees fit, while a living person (or a re-animate) will always fall short of that imagined ideal. even with francesca as an option, he initially chooses the bride—a corpse.

now, what about francesca? she’s undoubtedly alive, perhaps the most “alive-coded” person in bride. she’s from outside arkham, untouched by the half-dead/half-alive atmosphere. she cares for animals, she cooks and eats, she’s shown sleeping, she has sex. she’s the antithesis to herbert in the first movie, who meg questions as a “fully alive” person (paraphrasing bc i don’t remember the exact quote: “does he sleep? does he even eat?” right before they look for rufus). dan comments on this “aliveness:” “so soft, so warm,” he says, leaving the “unlike a corpse” implied. he’s repressing his attraction to death but it’s still present in the denial. yet, even in this high moment for dan “i love you alive girl” cain, death still lurks: dan forgot about the date because he was constructing his corpse wife in the basement, and there she remains, unfinished—if we want to get symbolic, still in his subconscious, present, even when invisible. the second break is herbert’s voyeurism, implying an obssession death into the scene: even if we merely take him as contrast or a villain, his voyeurism serves one purpose—getting information on how to better sell dan on the bride. similarly, despite having more moments with francesca throughout the film’s runtime, dan returns to herbert and the corpses time and time again, right until the end. 

he seemingly stays with francesca, committing to her for good—but only once he has dragged her limp body out of a grave.   

herbert’s dubious status as an alive person

as the entire previous segment hinges on bride of re-animator, and mostly does not apply to re-animator, who is the corpse in the first movie? well. it’s herbert.  

i’ve already proposed francesca’s aliveness as an antithesis to herbert’s corpseness (doesn't eat, doesn't sleep, contemptful/confused about biological reproduction), but a lot of his traits usually ascribed to neurodivergence can also be read as corpse-like: he’s not social, solely focused on work, and considered weird and off-putting in a subconscious way for most people. moreover, herbert is at his most comfortable in the morgue/amongst the dead. in the integral cut/deleted “sandwich and a fix” scene, he sustains himself with the same substances that re-animates corpses. furthermore, herbert is marked as different through his connections (or lackthereof) with other people. unlike meg with her father and dead/absent mother, or dan, who mentions an aunt, herbert has no biological lineage, just an intellectual one. he comes from nowhere, and has no past and no future outside of wanting to bring the dead back. his presence invites death into the narrative/"causes doom." and, perhaps most importantly, he ends up dying in a moruge in re-animator (though it is later retconned), and in a gravepit in the finale of bride, as if the narrative finally sorts him into a place where he belongs, among his kin. 

dan, unlike the other characters, is not instinctually repulsed by herbert's corpse-ness, but drawn to it, fascinated. he defends him to meg (“just a little cracked”) without any proof or any good reason to do so, even prior to the re-animation. he disregards meg’s warnings and rufus’s behavior, giving into the curiosity-attraction pull of his fascination with death. he keeps on choosing herbert over meg, perhaps most notably when he forgets about his proposal entirely, too caught up in the work and herbert, already thinking about conducting another experiment. the tension between herbert and dan, whether interpreted as sexual, romantic or intellectual, thus stems more from herbert's corpse-like status than anything else. 

tldr: dan cain is not normal about alive people and he’s certainly not normal about dead ones. play T.S.O.L -- code blue. 

if you've made it to the end---feedback+crit is always welcomed

[polyanthea]

The phenomenon of transference—how we all invent each other according to early blueprints—was Freud’s most original and radical discovery. The idea of infant sexuality and of the Oedipus complex can be accepted with a good deal more equanimity than the idea that the most precious and inviolate of entities—personal relations—is actually a messy jangle of misapprehensions, at best an uneasy truce between powerful solitary fantasy systems. Even (or especially) romantic love is fundamentally solitary, and has at its core a profound impersonality. The concept of transference at once destroys faith in personal relations and explains why they are tragic: We cannot know each other. We must grope around for each other through a dense thicket of absent others. We cannot see each other plain. A horrible kind of predestination hovers over each new attachment we form. “Only connect,” E. M. Forster proposed. “Only we can’t,” the psychoanalyst knows.

-Janet Malcolm, "The Impossible Profession"

[jstor]

Is there any work being done on using OCR (optical character recognition) technology on older works that have been saved as PDF images? I use speech-to-text to read, and I have often had to OCR documents myself, which sometimes ends up with problems like character misrecognition, headers and footers being read as text, the Jstor attribution at the bottom of each page being read as text, etc. It would be nice to have properly-formatted PDFs with full text available to download, even if it were a slow project to update them over time.

Hi there, thanks for sharing this! We're aware that older PDFs can be a struggle in terms of accessibility via OCR.

Our team is currently exploring how to best identify these documents so that we can begin making necessary changes. There are many documents in the repository, so this will take time, but our goal is to host documents that are easily accessible for everyone.

For now, we usually recommend the Natural Reader or Read Aloud extensions for Chrome, but we realize these may not work for every document on the platform. More to come!

[helenvaughans]

[...]To save themselves, the tech-oligarchs must attack the very notion of universality as such—hence their abandonment of liberal universalism for racism, nationalism, masculine domination, etc., because they represent a conspiracy, a shrinking, exclusive interest against a larger one. They are attacking first and foremost the State and the Bureaucracy, the civil servants: everything that Hegel identified in The Philosophy of Right with the universal, general interest of the whole society against the particularity of “bourgeois society,” the chaotic mass of self-interested businessmen. They want the State to appear just as particularistic as they are and destroy its legitimacy. Indeed, they have to attack the system of recognition—meritocratic honors rather than mere wealth and power—and of right—the rule of law and regular administration. They are the “rich rabble” par excellence that thinks “it can buy anything.” Musk’s total idiocy is structural: it goes back to the very origin of the Greek term idiotes, a person who cannot understand the shared political life of the city. These people cannot understand that their wealth and power are not their sovereign creations but the shared product of the wider state and society that supports and sustains them. Cryptocurrency is the perfect embodiment of this structural misrecognition: its advocates say it represents wealth outside of the state and society, but its notional value is wholly determined by its price in fiat money, created and sustained by the state. (It also functions a lot like “race” and “IQ:” as a repository of social value that provides a haven from degradation, but I’ll address that another time.) Here’s the thing: They can only see corruption around them because they are wholly corrupt. [...]

[grandwitchbird]

I saved some of this from my longer rundown on thematic elements and textual approach because now we’re getting into the stuff everyone knows. We’re just actually getting into it.

The Witcher is Polish. It’s also a kind of fairytale.

Obviously. Everyone knows that. The folklore, visual sensibility in the 3rd game especially, everyone knows this is a Polish series with Polish creators. But do they really? Because I see a lot of Americans misreading this series (including whoever was behind the show). Here’s what was happening when these stories were first written:

And this isn’t a new thing. Polish resistance based on broad coalitions and the regimes they oppose stretch back basically forever. The brand of humane cynicism that kind of environment creates is distinct.

The Scoia’tael are a broad political coalition amongst nonhumans in the books. They’re losing. The novels are not sympathetic to this in the way you’d expect if you’re misreading them as a ‘noble savage’ trope or some other misrecognition. Here, losing to the authoritarians is just the sort of thing that happens. Ciri is sympathetic (and Geralt; he’s just old) because Ciri sees them through the eyes of a child who has lost her home. She’s projecting when she first encounters the Scoia’tael and promptly gets attacked by them. She’s not wrong. There is something noble in their fight, even as they’ve been driven to banditry and attacking our heroes (who are also all from marginalized groups and mostly nonhuman). There’s always something noble in fighting your own demise. But Ciri is young. She is projecting. And she’s really not wrong. Being right just isn’t enough.

This is no ‘both sides are bad’ defense of status quo. This is a resigned and honest look at the costs of fighting a war of attrition. How do you deal with it when you know the tyrants always find a way to win? When trade deals are more important than ‘human’ rights? When even fighting strips you of everything you were and could be? Because these novels are so specifically Polish, so grounded in their real loyalty to the resistant position from a materially-informed history, they hold up under these inquiries. There’s no flinching away from examination here.

This also acts on a literary level because everything here is a literary metaphor or allusion. Elves specifically are truly fae here. They’re not nice. They’re not the half-hearted attempts to reclaim an illusory wild past you see in most fantasy. They’re the terrible tyrants of an older age. They’re the fear of the other. They’re the desire for the other. The recognition of the other in self and the self in other. They’re what fairytales are actually meant to do for us, psychologically. Ciri’s focus on the elves is that series of recognitions. She’s seeing herself because she’s literally the resistant will made manifest and all the terror of potential tyranny. She’s Lara Dorren’s legacy carried through every human regime. Maybe Lara won after all.

[azspot]

Musk’s total idiocy is structural: it goes back to the very origin of the Greek term idiotes, a person who cannot understand the shared political life of the city. These people cannot understand that their wealth and power are not their sovereign creations but the shared product of the wider state and society that supports and sustains them. Cryptocurrency is the perfect embodiment of this structural misrecognition: its advocates say it represents wealth outside of the state and society, but its notional value is wholly determined by its price in fiat money, created and sustained by the state.

What Happened Here

[battyaboutbooksreviews]

🌈 Queer Books Coming Out in July 2024 🌈

🌈 Good morning, my bookish bats, and happy July! Pride Month may be over, but remember: Read Queer ALL Year. Here are a FEW of the stunning, diverse queer books you can add to your TBR before the year is over. Happy reading!

[ Release dates may have changed. ]

❤️ Earth to Alis - Lex Carlow 🧡 Cursed Boys and Broken Hearts - Adam Sass 💛 The Sky on Fire - Jenn Lyons 💚 The Meaning of Liberty - Sage Donnell 💙 Making It - Laura Kay 💜 The Black Bird of Chernobyl - Ann McMan ❤️ A Map of My Want - Faylita Hicks 🧡 The Devil You Know - Ali Vali 💛 The White Guy Dies First: 13 Scary Stories of Fear and Power - Various 💙 The Second Son - Adrienne Tooley 💜 Cursed Under London - Gabby Hutchinson Crouch 🌈 Forbidden Girl - Kristen Zimmer

❤️ Rise - Freya Finch 🧡 Undercurrent - Patricia Evans 💛 Online Rebellion - Blue Matt Jeff 💚 Wolf Gift - T.J. Nichols 💙 Cash Delgado Is Living the Dream - Tehlor Kay Mejia 💜 Miller: Origin - Starr Z. Davies ❤️ The Shadows Beyond - T.J. Rose 🧡 The Ones Who Come Back Hungry - Amelinda Bérubé 💛 Their Viscountess - Jess Michaels 💙 Fast Holiday - Kerry Lockhart 💜 The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky - Josh Galarza 🌈 The West Passage - Jared Pechaček

❤️ The Hades Calculus - Maria Ying 🧡 Misrecognition - Madison Newbound 💛 One Last Summer - Kristin Keppler 💚 Waypoint Seven - Xan van Rooyen 💙 Hiding Him - Adam Hattan 💜 Thousand Autumns - Meng Xi Shi, Me.Mimo ❤️ The Adventure Zone, Vol. 6: The Suffering Game - Various 🧡 Rowan & Aldred - Lucie Fleury 💛 Yoke of Stars - R.B. Lemberg 💙 Casting Vows - Ariella Talix 💜 Count Felford's Vessel - S. Rodman

❤️ The Actor and His Secret - Ben Alderson, Laura R. Samotin 🧡 How To Die Famous - Benjamin Dean 💛 So Witches We Became - Jill Baguchinsky 💚 The Amazing Alpha Tau Romeo and Juliet Project - Lisa Henry, Sarah Honey 💙 The Noble’s Merman - S.S. Genesee 💜 The Loudest Silence - Sydney Langford ❤️ Life is Strange - Brittney Morris 🧡 Bury Your Gays - Chuck Tingle 💛 I Will Never Leave You - Kara A. Kennedy 💙 The Blonde Dies First - Joelle Wellington 💜 Under the Lupine Moon - A. Knightley

❤️ Benji Zeb is a Ravenous Werewolf - Deke Moulton 🧡 Charlotte Illes Is Not a Teacher - Katie Siegel 💛 The Ghostkeeper - Johanna Taylor 💚 Trespass Against Us - Leon Kemp 💙 Exes & Foes - Amanda Woody 💜 The Very Long, Very Strange Life of Isaac Dahl - Bart Yates ❤️ Unbound - J.A. Vodvarka 🧡 StreamLine - Lauren Melissa Ellzey 💛 Time and Time Again - Chatham Greenfield 💙 No Road Home - John Fram 💜 Queen B - Juno Dawson 🌈 A Darker Mischief - Derek Milman

❤️ Beautiful & Terrible Things - S.M. Stevens 🧡 Benvolio & Mercutio Turn Back Time - Elle Beaumont, Lou Wilham 💛 About Last Night - Laura Henry 💚 You Had Me at Happy Hour - Timothy Janovsky 💙 Moonbane - Jamie Jennings 💜 Between Fate & Failure - Amber D. Lewis ❤️ Blessed by the Cupid Distribution System - Robin Jo Margaret 🧡 Between Dragons and Their Wrath - Devin Madson 💛 Twisted Magic - Barbara J. Webb 💙 Rare Birds - L.B. Hazelthorn 💜 At the End of the River Styx - Michelle Kulwicki 🌈 Origin Story - Jendi Reiter

❤️ Eras of Us - Shannon O'Connor 🧡 Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema - Willow Maclay, Caden Gardner 💛 A Wolf in Stone - Jane Fletcher 💚 Toward Eternity - Anton Hur 💙 Portrait of a Shadow - Meriam Metoui 💜 Anyone's Ghost - August Thompson ❤️ Home Ice Advantage - Ari Baran 🧡 Unbelievable You - Chelsea M. Cameron 💛 Incorrect Eyes - Andromeda Ruins

[luxe-pauvre]

What we see in a mirror is always an illusion. Lacan demonstrated that our identification with our reflection relies on méconnaissance, or misrecognition. When we look in the mirror, we see a pleasing image of wholeness and project onto it a mental fantasy—the ego ideal. If you watch someone gaze at themselves in a mirror, you can glimpse this fantasy in action. Some people suck in their lips. Others elongate their neck, or tilt their head into a more flattering light. I am as curious as anyone about the nature of people’s souls, but I can hardly bear to see the naked longing concealed in these gestures. Dickens captures it memorably in Nicholas Nickleby when a servant observes Miss Squeers gazing at herself in a mirror. “Like most of us,” the servant notes, “she saw not herself, but the reflection of some pleasant image in her own brain.” Until recently, one did not find this look in photographs. Unlike the mirror, which flips our image horizontally (an illusion we’ve come to prefer), photos show us how we appear to others. Perhaps for this reason, the expressions we assumed for cameras have traditionally been closer to the affable, unselfconscious face we showed to the world. This has changed, owing to the invention of the smartphone and the new form it has spawned—the selfie—which allows us to watch ourselves as our image is captured. To scroll through the feeds of Instagram and Facebook is to see a gallery of Lacanian méconnaissance; the private longing once reserved for the bathroom mirror has become our most public face. And yet these photos are never as pleasing as we’d like them to be. The forward-facing camera mimics the reverse image we recognize from mirrors, but once the photo is taken, the technology flips the image as it would in a traditional photo. As a result, the still images always strike us as slightly askew: our eyes uneven, our parts reversed, our faces bulging on one side. The popularity of the mirror selfie — the selfie taken in a mirror — speaks of our desperate need to preserve the delusional image, the ideal I that exists in our heads.

Meghan O’Gieblyn, Objects of Despair: Mirrors