Mirroring

Mirror, speculum, speculation… “Mirror” has three distinct turns over time from origins in Latin and Nordic usages to more recent ones. So, the Latin origin gives us “to wonder, admire,” from the Vulgar Latin mirare, "to look at," variant of the Latin mirari, "to wonder at, admire.” The Latin speculum or its Medieval Latin variant speglum) is the source of words for mirror in neighboring languages: Italian specchio, Spanish espejo, Old High German spiegal, German Spiegel, Dutch spiegel, Danish spejl, Swedish spegel. The Nordic yields a distinctive turn toward a sensibility of melancholy and darkness. So, the Gothic skuggwa, Old Norse skuggsja, Old High German scucar, which are related to Old English scua "shade, shadow." And then come the later figurative aspects of mirroring as a model for behavior (to model oneself on) and a mirror image as both reversal and twin, "something identical to another but having right and left reversed.” Concerning this last figuration, we might speak as well not simply of plain reflection, but of interpretation and distortion, of the chiral and the chimerical. In each of these, the catoptric (Greek katoptrikos, from katoptron "mirror," from kata "against" and optos, "seen, visible") quality of observation toward both characterization and action glimmers in sociological, psychological, and political optics that transact between world-as-speculum and speculum-as-world. Both orientations of reflection lie atop the fact of vulnerable bodies, whether flesh, architecture, or larger topoi of domination, subservience, and resistance. They can even manifest as the speculum as a haunting of rituals. And, of course, we can think of research as a speculum, the archive as speculum, and the speculum materialized in artifacts of many kinds. The texts I’ve chosen here all address these various types of mirroring that reflect our desires to capture the world and its tissues of subjectivity, tumbling our bodies in the pit of being: turned in the light, turned in the shadows, held up and emptied out, violated and admired. Each of these texts, in their reflections on artistic production and/as social apparatuses, are also intentional or inadvertent speculations on objectification, and therefore on the “museum-ing” of people, populations, and things, or all as things: displayed; historicized and memorialized; “de-feralized,” which is to say schematized as a condition of the dead—static and no longer able to live in the struggle.