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ictional, story-book characters attempting to resonate emotionally with the viewer. This emotional resonance cannot be described as identification—the identities presented are impossible: the women idealized, the backgrounds obscured—but as an “alter-identification”, an attachment to the image as an Alter-Ego.

 

FASHION AND THE ALTER-EGO

 

The experience of viewing identities within the media—the process of identification with an “Alter- Ego” (Freud’s ”Ego-Ideal” or “Ideal-I”) in media—has been compared to Lacan’s Mirror Stage experience in which the child first identifies both the Other and his Identity (his relationship to the Other). It is noted by Christian Metz that in Film—and from this we can infer all image based media—there is another level of abstraction: we are not seeing a reflection of our world, but a totally fictive, removed world of images.

 

“Thus film is like the mirror. But it differs from the primordial mirror in one essential point: although, as in the later, everything may come to be projected, there is one thing and one thing only that is never reflected in it: the spectator’s own body.” [Metz, p410]. “But the reflection of the own body has disappeared… Like every other broadly ‘secondary’ activity, the practice of the cinema presupposes that the primitive undifferentiating of the ego and the non-ego has been overcome.” [p411]

 

Metz goes on to explore where the point of identification within cinema lies. He disputes that the cinema could only present an objective image of Other, theorizing that the viewer “certainly has to identify: identification in its primal form has ceased to be a current necessity for him, but—on pain of the film becoming incomprehensible, considerably more incomprehensible than the most incomprehensible films—he continues to depend in the cinema on that permanent play of identification without which there would be no social life”[Metz, p411].

 

According to Metz, the experience of media exists in a secondary mirror stage, where instead of the viewer creating the concept of Identity and Other within the mirror, he creates a concept that is neither completely Other nor Self—an Other with which one can identify. This implies that the concepts of Self and Other are “contraries” not “contradictories”, as Rimmon-Kenan describes the basic units (or semes) of Greimas’ Semiotic Square. The negation of these terms, “Self” and “Other”, can be added in order to construct a semiotic square outlining the general spectrum of identity (Fig.3).

 

Here, the combination of “Self” and “Other”—that concept in which Self exists in terms of the Other—is termed “Identity”, which would be that concept developed in Lacan’s mirror stage along with that of the Other. The combination of “No-Self” and “No-Other”— that concept within which we neither find ourselves nor the objective Other— is ter本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。