Thoughts on the Much-Maligned So-Called "Reflection Theory" of Literature and Art (201908291003)

In the nearly two centuries since Percy Shelley wrote of poetry as--in addition to an "aeolian lyre" and "sword of lightning, ever-unsheathed"--a "mirror," it seems that no small amount of intellectual energy has been applied to the task of denouncing any idea of art as mere reflection. This labor has not been in vain, for it has prouced myriad theories elucidating art's previously invisible dimensions, yet it is grounded in what might be called a hopelessly naive theory of the reflection, and through many revealing gestures something useful and valuable has been simultaneously concealed. My point of departure is the phrase "mere reflection," for I believe this reveals nothing more or less than a profoundly underedeveloped understanding of the phenomenon signified by "reflection." When I stand before a mirror, I apprehend not myself but an image of myself, and indeed, if I stand with both eyes open, I apprehend not one, not two, but at least three images, which are subsequently prismed through dense conceptual crystalizations whose atomic structures are laced with significations and ideologies. When I stand before a mirror, wave-particles of light strike my flesh where my electromagnetic aura alters and repels them towards a mercury-glass construction, already no longer wholly themselves nor me, but a them-me, a swarm of billions of entities which are themselves something as well as total images of this or that bit of my body, trillions of partial-images of a totality I am perhaps too comfortable describing as "my body," and as this swarm of partial images strikes the mercury-glass each wave-particle is again repelled and directed back towards me, now carrying spectral traces of the mediating surface as they wash over me and through my retina where my optical nerves interpret them as electrical impulses then transmitted through my nerves into my occiptal lobe for processing; as the result of differing spatial orientations to the mercury-glass, the signals transmitted by each eye carry divergent neuroelectrical interpretations of the wave-particle swarm; in my occiptal lobe, the signals from each eye are further interpreted and synthesized, their differences becoming coordinates opening a dimension called "space" or "depth," the resulting synthesized image becoming a higher-dimension simulation running on my hundred-billion-neuron wetware, producing my experience of something called "sight"--yet, this is not all there is to this sight, for this simulation filters through, incorporates, integrates, runs as part of an infinite network of concepts, beliefs, memories, wishes, hopes, desires, ideologies, fantasies, imaginings, signifiers, simulacra, and other simulations running across the finite wetware called a "brain" producing something called consciousness, which exists only so long as it is (re)produced, which possesses neither inertia nor stable identity with itself or anything else; the "image" (a clearly insufficient term for describing the resulting confluence of processes) that something called "I" perceives is shaded by preconceptions of what "I am," compared with desires of what "I wish to be," shamed through contrast with what "I have been" or "I ought to be" or "I should be," rendered within an infinte matrix of ever-proliferating permutations of alternative images, haunted by infinite sub-sets of infinitely-alternative renderings; spawning simulations, arrousing desires, summoning forth judgments and interpellations and ever-unfolding horizons of signification, of meaning, this image, no _these images_, for clearly there is no such thing as a singular image, for any singular image is always-already an infinite matrix, these images interact with all that "I am," all that "I see myself as," all that "I wish to be," all that "I am not," exerting an increasing force upon my consciousness and through my consciousness on my body (and this isn't even taking into account all of the corporeal effects of the neurochemical process itself) a force that irreversibly intervenes in the reproduction of "me," sending my altered consciousness-embodied-through-flesh out beyond myself to circulate, to act; through the mediations of "me," the "mere reflection" enters the complex operations of "the world." When I stand before a mirror, nothing remains as it was, everything is changed, no matter how slight. If this is true of such a simple moment as that before I trim my beard, brush my teeth, style my hair, adjust my tie, how much more complex and profound the reflection apprehended through art, through literature? How can such an event be carelessly cast aside by the judgment of "mere"?