The Mirror Stage and the Performative

How is it that individuals allow themselves to simply dissolve into notions of collective agency? Why is the "I" held up as something so important, while constantly integrating itself at the cost of its very existence, into larger unities?

Lacan poses the opposite question: how is it that the "I" comes into being at all. He notes that young children respond to their own reflection, and terms this identification the "Ideal-I". This Ideal-I "situates the agency of the ego [. . .] in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone, or rather, which will only rejoin the coming-into-being of the subject asymptotically, whatever the success of the dialectical syntheses by which he must resolve as I his discordance with his own reality" (2). In other words, maybe collective agency isn't the problem. Maybe the true problem is these questions posed in ways that favor the naturalness of either the social or the individual.

Here I wish to propose a dialectical relation between individuals and societies. Societies are constantly coming into being at the cost of individuals, while individuals regularly sever themselves from their larger group identifications. As Lacan notes, one can only "asymptotically" approach the Ideal-I; our selves are always somewhat stuck in the world around us.

Lee and LiPuma illustrate how Marx argued this dialectic working in the opposite way. The "integration of first-person [worker] and third-person [Capital] perspectives [. . .] produces a sociohistorically specific performative subject that produces the notion of totality" (199). Thus the pricing and commodification of labor allows for the mapping of the entire system of Capital.

I would like to note that these authors are writing on extremely different topics. Lacan on developmental psychology, and Lee and LiPuma economics. And, indeed, in those respective contexts their points of interest in the individual and the totality (respectively) are rather legitimate. But surely this conflict between individual/group can't simply be dismissed as something perspectival. People imagine themselves as members of these groups, and that is as much a psychological fact as it is a sociological or economic one.

Lee and LiPuma make a gesture towards the "social" as opposed to "society". As capitalism is founded on a contract model, it tends towards total integration and totalization. The creation of a single global market. However, in gift based economies, such a totalization is not necessary. Would this provide some sort of rich ground, from which the Ideal-I could spring?

However, it is the act of totalizing in capitalism which most resembles the "Gestalt" of the individual's image (Lacan 2).

It seems to me that we are playing a sort of game. We are attempting to stabilize terms which are in constant interaction. Lacan is well aware that the self is always fragmentary, at best, asymptotically approaching a whole. Lee and LiPuma avoid this by focusing on the performative gesture. It is the act which contains the whole within itself. Making a whole out of a fragment.

Does this mean we face the decision between no totality, and a totality trapped within "the ritual process [. . . of creating] the very marcrocosm it represents?