Fall To Pieces: Avril Lavigne and The Mirror Stage

Here's part one of the promised piece on Avrilian aesthetics: Fall To Pieces: Avril Lavigne and The Mirror Stage

“I don’t want to fall to pieces

I just want to sit and stare at you”

Avril Lavigne sums up Lacan’s mirror stage in a catchy couplet - almost - for in Lacan the infant ‘unable as yet to walk, or even stand up, and held tightly as he is by some support, human or artificial, he nevertheless overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his support and, fixing his attitude in a slightly leaning forward position, in order to hold it in his gaze, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image’, rather than sitting down. Despite this, Avril Lavigne still manages to sum up the essentials of the mirror stage: ‘the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image’. By looking at the song from this angle we can uncover certain aspects of Avril Lavigne’s position as an artist in the world of commercial pop music and tentatively approach a popular aesthetic running against the post-modern commodification of culture.

The mirror stage is Lacan’s theory of the formation of the subject, the moment when the infant separates itself from the other, when it recognizes itself as a self, as I. The child is captivated by its image in the mirror, ‘he experiences in play the relation between the movements assumed in the image and the reflected environment, and between this virtual complex and the reality it reduplicates - the child’s own body, and the persons and things around him’, leading to a ‘jubilant assumption of his specular image’. The child’s body is given to it only as an image, an image which is in the field of the other. The mirror stage creates an illusion of wholeness, of a subject which is a totality, and yet, as this totality is constituted both from and in the outside, it is essentially alienating:

the total form of the body by which the subject anticipates in a mirage the maturation of his power is given to him only as Gestalt, that is to say, in an exteriority in which this form is certainly more constituent than constituted, but in which it appears to him above all in a contrasting size that fixes it and in a symmetry that inverts it, in contrast with the turbulent movements that the subject feels are animating him.

The subject is constituted as an exteriority: it can recognise itself as a subject only because it has become externalized in seeing itself in the mirror.

It is important to recognise that there is no original ‘subject’ - no original wholeness - which this external image displaces. This is already known by Freud: ‘We are bound to suppose that a unity comparable to the ego cannot exist in the individual from the start; the ego has to be developed’. The mirror stage is this formation of the ego, the subject, which is to say that prior to this the baby should be seen simply as an exteriority; while the baby does not distinguish between its self and its outside it should not be considered as an interiority, as existing regardless of the outside world: ‘Personally, I have never looked at a baby and had the sense that there was no outside world for him. It is plain to see that a baby looks at nothing but that’ [my italics](Lacan). In Seminar XX Lacan goes on to talk of the ‘development of mastery’, in connection with the development of the ego: the creation of the subject, this (illusory) mastery of the ego, also creates the universe qua organized totality. That the ground for the creation of a symbolic universe is present in the mirror stage is stated already in The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytical Experience: ‘the function of the mirror-stage … is to establish a relation between the organism and its reality - or, as they say, between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt’. However, it is not just a relation that is created, it is reality itself: ‘This development is experienced as a temporal dialectic that decisively projects the formation of the individual into history’. Lacan makes clear that the mirror stage, though operating in the field of the imaginary, prefigures the symbolic and so this use of the word history should be seen as meaning more than a personal history, but as the projection of the individual into history, or the world qua symbolic, itself. Which is to say that while the symbolic is that which constitutes the world, the symbolic is always already there and having an effect, even before the assumption of language by the child: ‘These reflections lead me to recognize in the spatial captation manifested in the mirror-stage, even before the social dialectic, the effect in man of an organic insufficiency in his natural reality’. We shall come back to this later.

What Freud calls the ‘unity comparable to the ego’ is an illusion created by the mirror stage. The linking of an image of the body with the ego is already present in Freud’s work, for whom ‘the ego is represented as a psychical map, a projection of the surface of the body’ (Grosz). In Lacan’s mirror stage the ‘assumption of the specular image’, is a contrast, for the child, with its ‘motor incapacity and nursling dependence’, thus is created the ‘mirage’ of the ‘total form of the body’, ‘this form would have to be called the Ideal-I … but the important point is that this form situates the agency of the ego … in a fictional direction’. However, this image of wholeness can not simply be assumed wholeheartedly by the subject: the subject ‘anticipates’ - a wholeness he will never have - ‘in a mirage’ - nor has ever had. ‘This Gestalt - whose pregnancy should be regarded as bound up with the species, though its motor style remains scarcely recognizable - by these two aspects of its appearance, symbolizes the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination’. This is to say that the subject both recognises and misrecognizes its image at the same time - it recognises it as itself, but at the same time, in the fact that the image appears whole and has a mastery that the child’s lack of motor control means it doesn’t have, it is ‘scarcely recognizable’:

If the child simply recognizes the image, we would have another version of Freud’s realist view of the ego - an ego essentially in contact with reality. But if, on the other hand, the child merely misrecognizes its image, it is the subject of error and falsehood, unable to produce knowledge, a subject of ideology. Instead Lacan posits a divided, vacillating attitude that is incapable of a final resolution. (Grosz)

Thus ‘the mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation’: there is no finality or wholeness at either end: what there is ‘the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development’. It is, we could say, under the skin of this ‘armour’ that Avril Lavigne’s song, ‘Fall to Pieces’, wishes to see.

In The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytical Experience Lacan posits the idea that prior to the assumption of the specular image, the child, due to its motor incapacity, feels itself as fragmented. With the mirror stage there is a retroactive effect which creates the idea of an originary wholeness. The fragmented form of the body is thus one which can not be proven to have existed - it can only be assumed from later fantasies: ‘This fragmented body … usually manifests itself in dreams when the movement of the analysis encounters a certain level of aggressive disintegration in the individual’. Is this what we are witnessing in ‘Fall to pieces’? The idea we have of Avril Lavigne, at least in her first two albums, being in conflict with the notion of herself as a created ‘artist’ could well lead us to answer in the affirmative. The original record company conception of “Avril Lavigne” was as a new Celine Dion, when it was discovered that this idea was non-realisable it was necessary to look elsewhere for an “Avril Lavigne”. They found her: Avril Lavigne and “Avril Lavigne” were made one. It is this which has created the insistent tone of honesty and integrity in Avril Lavigne’s songs. It is the attempt to find a space separating Avril Lavigne and “Avril Lavigne” which creates a space in her work for an attempt to find an “authentic” aesthetic - ‘a certain minimal aesthetic distance … the possibility of the positioning of the cultural act outside the massive Being of capital, from which to assault this last.’(Jameson). From this perspective it would be easy to say simply that the strain of this impossible balancing act between Avril and “Avril” has resulted in ‘Fall to Pieces’ and the disintegration of the individual.

However, there are two problems with this simple conclusion:

1) All celebrities are liable to the same problem of identification, indeed everyone, when they assume the mandate of a name must, in some way, be prone to such identificatory difficulties: ‘The paradox of symbolization resides in the fact that the object is constituted as One through a feature that is radically external to the object itself, to its reality; through a name that bears no resemblance to the object’ (Žižek). Thus it would seem that there is nothing special happening in the case of Avril Lavigne. What I would argue is that the difference is in the fact that we have a double naming, a double mandate - on the first level she is already named, symbolized as Avril Lavigne, only later is the second level introduced - that of “Avril Lavigne”. The difference being that, for example, in the case of Britney Spears, she assumes “Britney Spears” as a public persona, a fiction; they are different entities. In the case of Avril Lavigne and “Avril Lavigne” there is an apparent sameness, but a sameness which can only be felt as the Freudian “Uncanny”, summed up by Žižek: ‘what is so horrifying about it is not its strangeness but rather its absolute proximity’.

2) We must be aware that there are two aspects to the song: alongside the exploration of the mirror stage (the song’s approach to her own identity), there is also the level at which the song explores her relationship with a boyfriend (the approach to the other). These two aspects are not mutually exclusive, and, it should be pointed out, this is the same duality which we find in many of Avril’s songs. As we pointed out earlier the mirror stage prefigures the entry into the symbolic, and as such it should be seen that the mirror image operates in the same relationship to Avril as the boyfriend: the image of the self is sustained not just in the mirror, but also in the other. It is not just a matter of different interpretations of the same words either, which is to say that both readings are working together in different parts, in different ways in the song. For instance, in the first verse: ‘Things that you can’t undo’, becomes ‘When I come undone’ in the second verse; the song is not simply about sustaining a relationship with her boyfriend, nor is it solely about the need to sustain her own image for herself, but about the relationship between the two.

The other popular Avril Lavigne motif which is used - the tautology - is, in most Avril Lavigne songs used for emphasis (‘don’t speak words against me’; ‘crying out loud’), however, in ‘Fall to Pieces’ it too is used to show the duality: ‘I don’t want to talk about it/ (and) I don’t want a conversation’. The difference between the two is the presence of someone else: in the first it is only implied, in the sense that all speech is directed to the Other; in the second this is made flesh in the presence of a conversational partner. The apparent tautology thus demonstrates the intertwining of themes in the song.

It can be seen that the simple notion of disintegration does not go far enough - but it is where we shall continue in part 2.