Beauty
You are beautiful and you are reflecting: The beauty of the act of recognition




The image is positioned in a physycal environment. It comes to have a fixed but partial, limited perspective on itself through the externalization provided by the mirror; and it is or can become the object of another’s perspective.

The capacity of representing oneself to oneself, mirror reversals, the obsession with symmetry, and the division of the subject into both subject and/or object...

This project started by producing a number of photographs in 35 mm film on the theme of beauty as a quick exercise for the initial working visuals. For this purpose, I bought two disposable cameras for my daughter and for me, and together we produced a set of photographs in different contextual surroundings.
My initial concept to define beauty is set around the readings of those photographs taken by my daughter and myself. In this essay I will try to express my notion of beauty by analysing these photographs.

In the nineties, artists, curators and critics began to question the meaning of beauty. The contemporary context of beauty has opened a discussion on whether we need a new definition of beauty in the forthcoming century since our understanding of it has undergone a fundamental change during the last decades.

Are there accepted standards of beauty, or do they just exist in the mind of the beholder? Is beauty eternal or is it a temporary, sociallyconditioned
experience subject to fashion?

The standards of beauty only exist in the mind of the beholder which is conditioned by the exertions of the society. In his work “Critique of Judgment” Kant discussed the nature of the aesthetic response to beauty and affirmed its significance as a product of the human mind.

My criteria of beauty are not based on a set of rules within the aesthetic judgments such as the classical ideal beauty in respect to human body. Therefore my analysis of beauty is not a formalist analysis of visual experiences. It is also not sublimity as opposed to the notion of beauty. However, my study covers a broader definition of beauty from psychology to intelligence.

I am not preoccupied with the nature of beauty but with questioning and expanding our conceptions of beauty within our life experiences, within art and design.

The specific individual experience through which I try to interpret my criteria of beauty reflects the concept of relating to the environment and to the products of human culture, to bring a higher understanding of our process of thinking and of our self/ego.

In psychology the ego is not an entity or psychical content, it is constitued by relations to others. The ego’s self-identity is not given through feeling, sensation, or experience, but is always mediated by others and its own body.1 The recognition of the mirror image in child development signals the moment of the child’s recognition of the distinction between self and the other and it is the origin of the ego.

If the ego is based on relations between others to relate is the recognition of the other. When relating to the other/environment we can create a metaphorical mirror effect to recognise ourselves by our perception of the other. The methaphorical, the analogical and the visual representation of this concept is the mirror image (self-asother).

Liberated from social exertions and aesthetic judgments, the notion of beauty is not restricted to some particular content. Anything that moves our senses and motivates and illuminates us is positive, and in my perception any positive drive brings the notion of beauty with itself creating a particular relation between the observer and the observed.

I will try to analyse the photographs which illustrate my concept of beauty from a psychoanalytic perspective because the recognition of beauty is closely related to central fields of psychology such as ego, intelligence, creativity, the psychology of thinking, the psychology of aesthetics, self-identity.

The photograph I analysed in terms of beauty is a photograph of my daughter taking a photograph of her own hand with the disposable camera. As the Operator I took this photograph very quickly without intellectualising about it because initially I was struck with her
sudden striving (drived from a frustration of not comprehending her connection to the camera) to understand the relation between her and the camera. I also noticed a change in her mind and in her frame of perception that now I can describe as being alert and sensitive. It is this awareness that made me take this photograph.

Once the film was developed and printed, I realised that beyond the aesthetic judgments in terms of beauty this image revealed a different notion of beauty to me. I started to investigate the nature of the photograph —referring to Barthes’ photographic analysis and his Reflections on photography in Camera Lucida— in order to find out what strikes me as beautiful in it.

I started my investigation by asking friends if the photograph pleases them, interests them or intrigues them. A friend responded with the following:

It is a casual photograph taken at a casual place. It’s a photograph of a little girl who would like to discover things on her own way, as many children of her age do. It is an ordinary photograph. An ordinary action at an ordinary time and place. Serkan, 17 May 2001

This is what Roland Barthes refers to as studium. Barthes uses this term in his analysis of photographs and explains that studium includes the cultural intentions of the photographer, and for the spectator the studium is a kind of general commitment without special acuity. He adds that it is by studium that the Spectator culturally participates in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions.2

The studium for Barthes is a kind of education which allows the Spectator to discover the Operator, to experience the intentions which establish and animate his/her practices, but to experience them “in reverse,” (a mirror image) according to the Spectator’s will.3

Looking at it from a different perspective to the Operator’s, now as the Spectator, I have depicted three different points which pricks me or are poignant for me, in Barthes terms.

These points Barthes names punctum. They are what he adds and what is already there. Barthes says ; “punctum is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.” He continues “...a detail (punctum) which attracts or distresses me...”

Furthermore, in psychoanalytical terms, the three punctum(s) I depicted from the photograph are defined as the moment of recognition. Moment of recognition is the act of, having gone through all different kind of experiences, suddenly becoming aware of reality. In the scientist’s case, Gestalts call this reality moment of truth, and the flash of illumination. It is an intellectual act, an act of (re-)cognition.

The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan explains the moment of recognition in his work The mirror stage as formative of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience as awareness of oneself and as the origin of the ego, he quotes Wolfgang Köhler who describes the moment of recognition as the expression of situational apperception, an essential stage of the act of intelligence.4

The photograph is a snapshot which freezes the moment of recognition of a young human being. For me, punctum(1), is the determinant way she holds the camera and looks at her hand, trying to connect herself to the camera. I recognize her action as an awareness, a moment of recognition, through her desire or her strong derive (will-power) to be illuminated. Her desire is to overcome the absence of knowledge and understanding.

Secondly, the apperception of her moment of recognition was a moment of recognition for myself too, which urged me to take this photograph in a very short span of time without thinking of its aesthetic representation photographically. It was an act which was reflected onto me and in which I recognised myself (mirror image). Punctum(2), for me, is the spontaneity of being responsive to the
situation as an Operator.

The third, punctum(3) is the referent’s act of recognition through the camera, the use of technology as an extension of our bodies, and technology as part of us in our quest of meaning and understanding.

Another response, another puntum, for my daughter’s photograph came from her father who initially was the person to call it a beautiful photograph, and this proved my desire to use it as the focal point for the investigation of beauty:

I find the picture beautiful because it reflects an action, the investigation of a person into the unknown, here represented by a camera that its function, and its result are certainly unknown to the person in the picture. Secondly, an investigation through the camera into an element of her cosmos, certainly also not yet fully investigated. So it is the reflection of this double action, in this picture that is described in such an innocent spontaneous, simple yet powerful way that has so much attracted my attention, and created a very stong emotion in me. The photograph of the hand is not important as it is the result of this investigation. The picture that reflects the action of wondering is more interesting than the photographic result which may often turn out to be dull, or once found is no longer interesting. The action of wondering is perpetual and open, whereas the result is static and closed. H. Mimaroglu, 31 May 2001
The above explanation is the punctum; in this case it is the act of investigation into the unkown and act of wondering through the camera which prick the Spectator.

These punctum come from three levels of mental functioning; as identified by Jacques Lacan: the Symbolic (or discursive), the Imaginary (or perceptive), and the Real (by which he meant the inner, psychic reality of the individual and not what is objectively real).

Lacan’s concept of the mirror phase calls on the Imaginary. This phase occurs between six and eighteen months of age, and is the origin of the ego. The child senses a unified self, but does not objectively comprehend it until he recognises that the mirror image is his own. According to Lacan, the ego resides in a perception of the Other (usually the mother).

Elizabeth Grosz in her study of Lacan’s mirror stage theory explains the ego under the title of:

The Real Preconditions of the Ego
As the thresold of a number of ruptures or divisions which govern the child’s hitherto ‘natural’ existence, the mirror stage is conditioned on:

—The child’s first recognition of a distinction between itself and the (m)other mirror image (self-as-other);

—The recognition of lack of absence, whether this is the absence of the mother, or an absence of gratification of needs;

—Displacing the child’s dependence on the (m)other with a self reliance. The mirror stage is a compensation of the child’s acceptance of lack. It provides a promise or anticipation of (self)mastery and control the subject lacks, and which the mother provisionally covered over in gratifying the child’s needs;

—The genesis of the ego coincides with the emergence of the child’s first psycho-sexual derives —that is, with the substitution of a part of its own body and auto-erotic pleasure, for that originally given by the now absent mother;

—The advent of an internalized psychic (as opposed to neuro-physiological) sensory image of the self and the objects in the world. It marks the child’s earliest understanding of space, distance, and position.
It marks a first stage in the child’s acquisition of an identity independent of the mother, the genesis of a sense of self or personal unity, the origin of the child’s sexual drives and the first process of social acculturation.
Libidinal relations establish the ego through a fantasized identification with others, particularly the mother, and an illusory corporeal cohesion, founded on a (mistaken) identification of the child with its visual gestalt in the mirror. The ego is partially a consequence of idiosyncratic and socially structured psychological relations between itself, others, and its body image. Lacan hovers between seeing the mirror stage as a purely internal, biologically regulated process; and as a linguistically structured, socially regulated relation.

There is also a reversed concept of the mirror stage in this photograph: the displacement between (m)other and child. The child’s independence and self discovery, self mastery and control puts the mother (and the father) into a separation from the child’s dependence. For the parents it becomes a fantasized identification with the child, a vision and the specular image as in the mirror. The child’s self mastery is perceived “in reverse” by the parents.

This stage is also a Proustian déjà vu, in which, as adults, as parents, we re-experience the childhood sensation of discovery, and identification with the child causes time to collapse. This corresponds to Freud’s view that there is no time in the unconscious, and to Barthes’ response to the photograph as a collapsing of time.

The third punctum(3) is the act of recognition through the technology which separates human baby behaviour from that of a young chimpanzee. Her self awareness has a direct connection to the camera. She tries to
understand the camera —which is a representational apparatus of the eye— by using it, thus the camera becomes in extension of her eye.

The child as early as six months old starts to recognize his or her image in the mirror. Lacan claims that this is an intellectual act, an act of (re-)cognition and not a non-conscious or uncontrolled behaviour. Lacan also compares the child’s development to a chimpanzee by refering to W. Kohler’s study in the
mentality of Apes.
Once the chimpanzee recognises that it is simply his image in the mirror and not another chimpanzee, it loses interest and develop an instrumental relation to it. By contrast, the child retains its fascination with the image, even intensifies it, when it learns of its representational status. A drawing or photograph may be even more pleasing than what it represents.

This extract of the ego and imaginary, from the book called, Jacques Lacan: a feminist introduction by Elizabeth Grosz is interesting, for it proves a huge distinction between the animal mind and human mind. It is the human request for meaning, and human interest and fascination for representation, that creates the signifier and the signified to constitute the sign. In other words, all human products are representations/reflections of human mental concept.

At this point, moving away from Lacan’s psychoanalytic study of ego towards technology, Marshal McLuhan wrote of media theory:

All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered.
The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.
All media are extensions of some human faculty—psychic or physical.
The wheel is an extension of the foot...
The book is an extension of the eye...
Clothing, an extension of the skin...
electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system
Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one senses alters the way we think and act— the way we perceive the world.
When these ratios change, men change.

Marshall McLuhan’s concept that all media are extensions of some human faculty, psychic or physical, means the media are only reflected images, (mirror images) of some human mental activity. As in the example, my daughter shows an interst in the camera and she relates/ connects to it. Consequently the camera becomes the extension of her eye and her mind. In fact the camera is the extension of her outer (eye) and her inner (thinking process) because the camera is a conceptual expression and/or repesentation and/or extension of the organ eye.
As McLuhan says the extension of her sight sense (augmented with the camera’s representational status) alters the way she perceives her body (her hand).

Any product of human culture is the outcome of the mental functioning, it calls on the Symbolic and the Imaginery, Saussure calls them binary opposites ; the former is based in language, and the latter in the self-image. To explain this further, we have to go back to the mirror stage of the child. Before the mirror stage the child forms a syncretic unity with the mother and cannot distinguish between itself and its environment. The child’s recognition of absence evolves around the mirror stage which is explained by Grosz in the ego and the imaginary:

The child is propelled into its identificatory relations by this first acknowledgement of lack or loss. Only at this moment does it become capable of distinguishing itself from the ‘outside’ world, and thus locating itself in the world. The ‘fullness’, the completeness that the child experiences through the maternal supplementation of its needs is interrupted by lack... From this time on, lack, gap, splitting will be its mode of being... This gap will propel it into seeking an identificatory image of its own stability and permanence (the imaginary), and eventually language (the symbolic) by which it hopes to fill the lack. The child loses the ‘pure plenitude’ of the Real and is now constitued within the imaginary (ie. the order of images, representations, doubles, and others)in its specular identifications. 5

The child invents games, substitutes such as transitional objects to compensate for the lack or the loss. Freud’s fort/da game describes his grandson’s need to control the disappearance and reappearance of his toy which was attached to a reel. When the toy was out of sight, the child made a sound that Freud identified as fort, meaning “gone”, when the child reeled the toy he said da, meaning “there”. According to Freud his grandson was playing at mastering his anxiety over the absence of her mother coming and going.6

The fort/da game in Lacan’s view, substitutes for the mother, the child’s perception of his mother’s absence, which also made him aware of her presence—in Winnicott’s view, the game created by the child is the transitional symbolization. The mirror phase is a compensation of the child’s acceptance of lack.

Winnicott, Lacan, Saussure, Freud, Barthes and McLuhan all studied the products of human culture from psychoanalytical and physical aspects, stressing the issue of presence and absence, (in Saussure’s terms they are binary opposites just like the Symbolic and the Imaginary). They saw the child’s attempts to master his/her anxiety over the absence of his mother as the beginning of all creativity. The significance of the transitional object and the transitional phenomena, the fort/da game, and the mirror stage is their role as a cultural basis for later creative pursuits. The child selects the transitional object for its texture, smell, and appearence and draws it into his/her creative space. They have a prior existence and are selected and given meaning.7 The same factors forms the basis of all human faculties and human mental functioning.

When I selected the photograph for this project, I associated the action and the subject with the notion of beauty to draw it into my creative space. My aim was to prove with this photograph (this photograph being a transitional object and transitional phenomenon for me) that beauty can lie within human activity and human awareness and creativity. It also proves that my criteria of beauty are not based on a set of rules within aesthetic judgments, such as the classical ideal beauty in respect to human body. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the standards of beauty as a set of rules are only in the mind of the beholder which itself is a socially-conditioned experience subject to fashion. This is augmented by Kant, who discussed the nature of the aesthetic response to beauty and affirmed its significance as a product
of the human mind.

As in the photograph and as in the mirror stage, the notion of beauty lies for me in the act of recognition as an essential stage of the act of intelligence. This is the recognition of the self and the other, the recognition of the image. The mirror can be seen as an extension of self and the other, and as an extension of the evironment, in McLuhan terms.

I would like to conclude this project by saying that my notion of beauty lies in the products of human mental faculties because they are creative extentions, expressions and reflections of our mental process, derived from our need to substitue the issue of absence and presence. The only way we can substitue and master this anxiety is by creating representations/symbols which fulfil all of our senses, most of all our sight sense because all other senses are under the dominance of the visual: the look, as Sartre said is the domain of domination and mastery... The sense of sight is the only one that directs us to have a totalized self-image, it is an important means of psychological and artistic control. I would like to refer to Lacan and call it The Power of the Gaze.

Beauty as a theme is also a product of the human mind, a subsitute for absence/presence of visual perfection. Therefore rules or standards are not appropriate to define the notion of beauty. Liberated from social exertions and aesthetic judgments, the notion of beauty is not restricted to some particular content. Any product of human faculty that moves our senses and motivates and illuminates us is subject to an act of intelligence. In my perception the act of intelligence brings a unified sense of self, creating a particular relation between the observer and the observed or the experiencer and the experienced. My notion of beauty lies in, as McLuhan says, whether this particular relation can change our perceptions and alters the way we think and act, this change by itself is an act of recognition.





1 Grosz, E., Jacques Lacan; A Feminist Introduction; The Ego and the Imaginary, Routledge, New York, 190, p 29

2 Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida; reflections on photography, Vintage, 193, p 26

3 Ibid, p 28

4 Lacan,J. Ecrits,
Lacan in his article The mirror stage as formative of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience delivered at the 16th International Congress of Psychoanalysis, Zurich, 1949 explains that the mirror stage (le stade du miroir or the lookingglass phase) conception originates in a feature of human behaviour illuminated by a fact of comparative psychology. (his opposition to cartesian cogito)

5 Grosz, E., Jacques Lacan; A Feminist Introduction; The Ego and the Imaginary, Routledge, New York, 190, p 29

6 Adams, S. L., The Methodologies of Art, Westview Press, 196, p 173 7 Ibid., p. 206

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