Mirror Reflex Quotes

God loves the plagiarist. And so it is written, 'God created humankind in His image, in the image of God He created them." God is the original plagiarizer. With a lack of reasonable sources from which to filch - man created in the image of what? the animals? - the creation of man was an act of reflexive plagiarizing; God looted the mirror. When we plagiarize, we are likewise creating in the image and participating in the completion of Creation.

Suddenly, ahead of us, a group of men ran out of the forest and pulled a thick rope across the road. There was no time to look at them properly, but they didn’t look friendly. I still don’t know why, but my reflex reaction was to foot the accelerator and drive straight through – never a good idea on a dirt track, except perhaps for rally drivers. I’m not sure who was more surprised, me or them, but I found myself looking in the rear-view mirror and seeing men lying on the road, I suppose pulled down by the force of the rope.

On turning to the Work in Progress we find that the mirror is not so convex. Here is direct expression--pages and pages of it. And if you don’t understand it, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is because you are too decadent to receive it. You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one almost without bothering to read the other. This rapid skimming and absorption of the scant cream of sense is made possible by what I may call a continuous process of copious intellectual salivation. The form that is an arbitrary and independent phenomenon can fulfil no higher function than that of stimulus for a tertiary or quartary conditioned reflex of dribbling comprehension. . . Mr. Joyce has a word to say to you on the subject: “Yet to concentrate solely on the literal sense or even the psychological content of any document to the sore neglect of the enveloping facts themselves circumstantiating it is just as harmful; etc.” And another: “Who in his hearts doubts either that the facts of feminine clothiering are there all the time or that the feminine fiction, stranger than facts, is there also at the same time, only a little to the rere? Or that one may be separated from the orther? Or that both may be contemplated simultaneously? Or that each may be taken up in turn and considered apart from the other?” Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read--or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.

In a moment of crisis we don't act out of reasoned judgment but on our conditioned reflexes. We may be able to send men to the moon, but we'd better remember we're still closely related to Pavlov's dog. Think about driving a car: only the beginning driver thinks as he performs each action; the seasoned driver's body works kinesthetically . . .A driver prevents an accident because of his conditioned reflexes; hands and feet respond more quickly than thought. I'm convinced the same thing is true in all other kinds of crisis, too. We react to our conditioning built up of every single decision we've made all our lives; who we have used as our mirrors, as our points of reference. If our slow and reasoned decisions are generally wise, those which have to be made quickly are apt to be wise, too. If our reasoned decisions are foolish, so will be those of the sudden situation.

He smiles a little, reflexively. He never actually feels like smiling, but he has survived by the skillful mimicry of expressions for too long to stop doing it now.

Gathering her bags, Alani started around the side of her house to the front door. She drew up short at the sight of Jackson sprawled on her porch steps, a cowboy hat on his head, mirrored sunglasses hiding his eyes. He didn’t move, and neither did she. He had an utterly relaxed look about him. But then, Jackson had perfected a deceptively indolent pose that hid razor-sharp reflexes and phenomenal speed. Last night, all night, he’d been far from indolent. Breathing fast, Alani studied him. His continued stillness suggested sleep. Even when she inched closer, he didn’t move. He was now clean-shaven. A white T-shirt was pulled across his wide chest and shoulders, and hung looser around his taut abs. Awareness stiffened her knees. Memories of touching his body, tasting hit hot flesh, sent a tide of sensation through her veins. She swallowed audibly—and stared some more. He sat with his long legs loose, one foot braced on a step, the other stretched out, his elbows back, his breathing deep and even. Alani licked her lips and started to slowly, silently retreat. “Don’t make me chase you, darlin’.” Shock snapped her shoulders back. The big faker! He’d been watching her watch him. Teeth set, Alani asked, “What are you doing here?” He gave a slow smile. “Whatever it takes . . .

The Greenland fjords are peculiar for the spells of completely quiet weather, when there is not enough wind to blow out a match and the water is like a sheet of glass. The kayak hunter must sit in his boat without stirring a finger so as not to scare the shy seals away. Actually, he can only move his eyes, as even the slightest move otherwise might mean game lost. The sun, low in the sky, sends a glare into his eyes, and the landscape around moves into the realm of the unreal. The reflex from the mirror-like water hypnotizes him, he seems to be unable to move, and all of a sudden it is as if he were floating in a bottomless void, sinking, sinking, and sinking.... Horror-stricken, he tries to stir, to cry out, but he cannot, he is completely paralyzed, he just falls and falls.

It isn't just the idea of a woman in a truck. At this point, they're everywhere. The statisticians tell us today's woman is as likely to buy a truck as a minivan. One cheers the suffrage, but the effect is dilutive. My head doesn't snap around the way it used to. Ignoring for the moment that my head (or the gray hairs upon it) may be the problem, I think it's not about women in trucks, it's about certain women in certain trucks. Not so long ago I was fueling my lame tan sedan at the Gas-N-Go when a woman roared across the lot in a dusty pickup and pulled up to park by the yellow cage in which they lock up the LP bottles. She dismounted wearing scuffed boots and dirty jeans and a T-shirt that was overwashed and faded, and at the very sight of her I made an involuntary noise that went, approximately, ohf...! I suppose ohf...! reflects as poorly on my character as wolf whistle, but I swear it escaped without premeditation. Strictly a spinal reflex. [...] The woman plucking her eyebrows in the vanity mirror of her waxed F-150 Lariat does not elicit the reflex. Even less so if her payload includes soccer gear or nothing at all. That woman at the Gas-N-Go? I checked the back of her truck. Hay bales and a coon dog crate. Ohf...!

I feel I should be moving away from the question "Am I still fair?" toward a more existential question: "Am I still here?" You'd think seeing myself in a mirror would be somewhat reassuring. And yet, recently I've noticed that when I catch sight of my face in a shop window, I'm quick to look away. When I brush my teeth, I'll often turn my back to the mirror, or focus on a detail of my reflection, a blemish or a spot, rather than on my aspect as a whole. It's not that I don't like what I see, although that's often part of it. Rather, it's more that I don't quite recognize myself in my reflection anymore, and so I'm always startled. Averting my gaze is a reflexive reaction, a kind of uncanny valley response to the sight of this person who is no longer quite me. It's not polite to stare at strangers.

Starting from Descartes’ commitment to a few absolutely certain innate ideas and reason’s ability to determine some facts about reality a priori, Leibniz ended up making all ideas innate and deducing how God must have set up the universe. On the other side, Hume continued Locke’s emptying out of the mind until there was no longer a there there, that is, not even a substantial mind to be emptied. Far from being rationally justifiable, Hume demonstrated that most of our beliefs are determined by an arational reflex, a process that has roughly the epistemological status of digestion. Perhaps Kant’s greatest accomplishment was reconciling these deeply heterogeneous schools, weaving a seamless system out of ideas taken from both sides. The linchpin of this synthesis was what he called his Copernican Revolution: the epoch-making claim that the mind actively processes or organizes experience in constructing knowledge, rather than passively reflecting an independent reality. To speak metaphorically, the mind is more like a factory than a mirror or soft wax. It is this idea that enabled Kant to incorporate the empiricist dependence on experience into the rationalist ideal of universal and necessary knowledge.

[...]Telecomputer Man is assigned to an apparatus, just as the apparatus is assigned to him, by virtue of an involution of each into the other, a refraction of each by the other. The machine does what the human wants it to do, but by the same token the human puts into execution only what the machine has been programmed to do. The operator is working with virtuality: only apparently is the aim to obtain information or to communicate; the real purpose is to explore all the possibilities of a program, rather as a gambler seeks to exhaust the permutations in a game of chance. Consider the way the camera is used now. Its possibilities are no longer those of a subject who ' 'reflects' the world according to his personal vision; rather, they are the possibilities of the lens, as exploited by the object. The camera is thus a machine that vitiates all will, erases all intentionality and leaves nothing but the pure reflex needed to take pictures. Looking itself disappears without trace, replaced by a lens now in collusion with the object - and hence with an inversion of vision. The magic lies precisely in the subject's retroversion to a camera obscura - the reduction of his vision to the impersonal vision of a mechanical device. In a mirror, it is the subject who gives free rein to the realm of the imaginary. In the camera lens, and on-screen in general, it is the object, potentially, that unburdens itself - to the benefit of all media and telecommunications techniques. This is why images of anything are now a possibility. This is why everything is translatable into computer terms, commutable into digital form, just as each individual is commutable into his own particular genetic code. (The whole object, in fact, is to exhaust all the virtualities of such analogues of the genetic code: this is one of artificial intelligence's most fundamental aspects.) What this means on a more concrete level is that there is no longer any such thing as an act or event which is not refracted into a technical image or onto a screen, any such thing as an action which does not in some sense want to be photographed, filmed or tape-recorded, does not desire to be stored in memory so as to become reproducible for all eternity. No such thing as an action which does not aspire to self-transcendence into a virtual eternity - not, now, the durable eternity that follows death, but rather the ephemeral eternity of ever-ramifying artificial memory. The compulsion of the virtual is the compulsion to exist in potentia on all screens, to be embedded in all programs, and it acquires a magical force: the Siren call of the black box.

The anti-technological hysteria that holds broad sections of the Western world in its grip is a product of metaphysics’ decay: it is betrayed by the fact that it clings to false classifications of beings in order to revolt against processes in which the overcoming of these classifications has already been carried out. It is reactionary in the essential sense of the word, because it expresses the ressentiment of obsolete bivalence against a polyvalence that it does not understand. That holds above all for the habits of the critique of power, which are always still unconsciously motivated by metaphysics. Under the old metaphysical schema the division of beings into subject and object is mirrored in the descending grade between master and slave and between worker and material. Within this disposition the critique of power can only be articulated as the resistance of the oppressed object-slave-material side to the subject-master-worker side. But ever since the statement ‘There is information,’ alias ‘There are systems,’ has been in power this opposition has lost its meaning and develops more and more into a playground for pseudo-conflicts. In fact, the hysteria amounts to searching for a master so as to be able to rise up against him. One cannot rule out the possibility that the effect, i.e., the master, has long been on the verge of dissolving and for the most part remains alive as a postulate of the slave fixated on rebellion—as a historicized Left and as a museum humanism. In contrast, a living leftist principle would have to prove itself anew by a creative dissidence, just as the thinking of homo humanus asserts itself in the poetic resistance to the metaphysical and technocratic reflexes of humanolatry.

The other problem with empathy is that it is too parochial to serve as a force for a universal consideration of people’s interests. Mirror neurons notwithstanding, empathy is not a reflex that makes us sympathetic to everyone we lay eyes upon. It can be switched on and off, or thrown into reverse, by our construal of the relationship we have with a person. Its head is turned by cuteness, good looks, kinship, friendship, similarity, and communal solidarity. Though empathy can be spread outward by taking other people’s perspectives, the increments are small, Batson warns, and they may be ephemeral.71 To hope that the human empathy gradient can be flattened so much that strangers would mean as much to us as family and friends is utopian in the worst 20th-century sense, requiring an unattainable and dubiously desirable quashing of human nature.72 Nor is it necessary. The ideal of the expanding circle does not mean that we must feel the pain of everyone else on earth. No one has the time or energy, and trying to spread our empathy that thinly would be an invitation to emotional burnout and compassion fatigue.73 The Old Testament tells us to love our neighbors, the New Testament to love our enemies. The moral rationale seems to be: Love your neighbors and enemies; that way you won’t kill them. But frankly, I don’t love my neighbors, to say nothing of my enemies. Better, then, is the following ideal: Don’t kill your neighbors or enemies, even if you don’t love them. What really has expanded is not so much a circle of empathy as a circle of rights—a commitment that other living things, no matter how distant or dissimilar, be safe from harm and exploitation. Empathy has surely been historically important in setting off epiphanies of concern for members of overlooked groups. But the epiphanies are not enough. For empathy to matter, it must goad changes in policies and norms that determine how the people in those groups are treated. At these critical moments, a newfound sensitivity to the human costs of a practice may tip the decisions of elites and the conventional wisdom of the masses. But as we shall see in the section on reason, abstract moral argumentation is also necessary to overcome the built-in strictures on empathy. The ultimate goal should be policies and norms that become second nature and render empathy unnecessary. Empathy, like love, is in fact not all you need. SELF-CONTROL

More completely than lights, shadows, and reflections, the mirror image anticipates, within things, the labor of vision...The mirror appears because I am seeing-visible, because there is a reflexivity of the sensible; the mirror translates and reproduces that reflexivity. My outside completes itself in and through the sensible. Everything I have that is most secret goes into this visage, this face, this flat and closed entity about which my reflection in the water has already made me puzzle... Artists have often mused upon mirrors because...they recognize...the metamorphosis of seeing and seen which defines both our flesh and the painter's vocation. This explains why they have so often liked to draw themselves in the act of painting (they still do—witness Matisse's drawings), adding to what they saw then, what things saw of them. It is as if they were claiming that there is a total or absolute vision, outside of which there is nothing and which closes itself over them.

Self-awareness: facing mirrors that pass through the universe, gathering new images on the way—endlessly reflexive. The infinite seen as finite, the analogue of consciousness carrying the sensed bits of infinity.

An After eye reflects 3 mirrors in a painted ball of a room.

This final but unknown “truth valid in infinity” is somehow perceived or felt by us as an ideal, for in countless years of observation we have formed a series of less and less false, more and more nearly true “ideas” about the phenomenon. The “ideas” are reflexes of the phenomenon, reflected in our midst as in a mirror; the reflexes may be distorted, as in a convex or concave mirror, but they suggest [pg 052] an ideal reflex valid in infinity. It is of the utmost importance to realize that the words which are used to express the ideas and the ideals are the materialization of the ideas and ideal; it is only by words that we are enabled to give to other human beings an exact or nearly exact impression which we have had of the phenomenon.

While as a “body out there” the body as a concept-thing and the embodied self as a concept-thing coincide, as concept-things they not only do not coincide, they have no data points in common, although if the two are examined simultaneously there are many data points that immediately and directly correlate. It is this direct correlation between two conceptually completely distinct things that causes the appearance of the “Problem of Consciousness” as Chalmers states it. By now the degree of nonsense inherent in a view of reality such as that of Daniel Dennett should be obvious – as concept-things both the observed body of another or of oneself via a mirror or a camera playback and the direct experience of one's own embodied self only exist for a self insofar as it is conscious, and conscious in a specific mode. The notion of there being a difficulty in positing another as similarly conscious only exists in that reflective, abstracted mode, in our usual intuitive mode, the way in which we “get along” in realty as it presents itself to our experience, there is no difficulty whatsoever in distinguishing between non-conscious, conscious and reflexively self-conscious beings.

The popular religion and culture of peasants in a complex society are not only a syncretized, domesticated, and localized variant of larger systems of thought and doctrine. They contain almost inevitably the seeds of an alternative symbolic universe—a universe which in turn makes the social world in which peasants live less than completely inevitable. Much of this radical symbolism can only be explained as a cultural reaction to the situation of the peasantry as a class. In fact, this symbolic opposition represents the closest thing to class consciousness in pre-industrial agrarian societies. It is as if those who find themselves at the bottom of the social heap develop cultural forms which promise them dignity, respect, and economic comfort which they lack in the world as it is. A real pattern of exploitation dialectically produces its own symbolic mirror image within folk culture…. The radical vision to which I refer is strikingly uniform despite the enormous variations in peasant cultures and the different great traditions of which they partake…. At the risk of over-generalizing, it is possible to describe some common features of this reflexive symbolism. It nearly always implies a society of brotherhood in which there will be no rich and poor, in which no distinctions of rank and status (save those between believers and non-believers) will exist. Where religious institutions are experienced as justifying inequities, the abolition of rank and status may well include the elimination of religious hierarchy in favor of communities of equal believers. Property is typically, though not always, to be held in common and shared. All unjust claims to taxes, rents, and tribute are to be nullified. The envisioned utopia may also include a self-yielding and abundant nature as well as a radically transformed human nature in which greed, envy, and hatred will disappear. While the earthly utopia is thus an anticipation of the future, it often harks back to a mythic Eden from which mankind has fallen away” (1977:224–226).

Em mir al mirall, no em veig. El reflex no té memòria.

Lotte Berk and Lydia Bach, too, acknowledged the sexual dimension of a barre class. But these days, most studios do nothing of the sort. Unlike most other forms of group exercise, in barre there’s a heavy element of affective discipline: you are expected to control your expressions and reactions. This is one of the reasons, I realized at some point, that barre feels natural to me, as my only athletic experience has been in feminized, appearance-centric activities in which you are required to hide your effort and pain. (This may in fact be the ugliest facet of my attraction to barre, and the reason I took to it so quickly after witnessing the Ann Arbor queef attack: I value control almost as a matter of etiquette—as an aesthetic—even when I can feel that instinct tipping into cruelty and reflexive disgust.)

A mirror reflection gives light to a reflex in the past time.

A stone calls for a mirror in a white reflex of Eyes.

If the consumer society no longer produces myth, this is because it is itself its own myth. The Devil, who brought Gold and Wealth (the price of which was our soul), has been supplanted by Affluence pure and simple. And the pact with the Devil has been supplanted by the contract of Affluence. Moreover, just as the most diabolical aspect of the Devil has never been his existing, but his making us believe that he exists, so Affluence does not exist, but it only has to make us believe it exists to be an effective myth. Consumption is a myth. That is to say, it is a statement of contemporary society about itself, the way our society speaks itself. And, in a sense, the only objective reality of consumption is the idea of consumption; it is this reflexive, discursive configuration, endlessly repeated in everyday speech and intellectual discourse, which has acquired the force of common sense. Our society thinks itself and speaks itself as a consumer society. As much as it consumes anything, it consumes itself as consumer society, as idea. Advertising is the triumphal paean to that idea. This is not a supplementary dimension; it is a fundamental one, for it is the dimension of myth. If we did nothing but consume (getting, devouring, digesting), consumption would not be a myth, which is to say that it would not be a full, self-fulfilling discourse of society about itself, a general system of interpretation, a mirror in which it takes supreme delight in itself, a utopia in which it is reflected in advance. In this sense, affluence and consumption – again, we mean not the consumption of material goods, products and services, but the consumed image of consumption – do, indeed, constitute our new tribal mythology – the morality of modernity. Without that anticipation and reflexive potentialization of enjoyment in the ‘collective consciousness’, consumption would merely be what it is and would not be such a force for social integration. It would merely be a richer, more lavish, more differentiated mode of subsistence than before, but it would no more have a name than ever it did before, when nothing designated as collective value, as reference myth what was merely a mode of survival (eating, drinking, housing and clothing oneself) or the sumptuary expenditure (finery, great houses, jewels) of the privileged classes. Neither eating roots nor throwing feasts was given the name ‘consuming’. Our age is the first in which current expenditure on food and ‘prestige’ expenditure have both been termed consumption by everyone concerned, there being a total consensus on the matter. The historic emergence of the myth of consumption in the twentieth century is radically different from the emergence of the technical concept in economic thinking or science, where it was employed much earlier. That terminological systematization for everyday use changes history itself: it is the sign of a new social reality. Strictly speaking, there has been consumption only since the term has ‘passed into general usage’. Though it is mystifying and analytically useless – a veritable ‘anti-concept’ indeed – it signifies, nonetheless, that an ideological restructuring of values has occurred. The fact that this society experiences itself as a consumer society must be the starting point for an objective analysis

In winter Time I have seen a curtain wave a small Hope.

Of course, television is not alone in being confronted with this destiny - this vicious circle: the destiny of all those things which , no longer having an objective purpose, take themselves for their own ends. In so doing, they escape all responsibility, but also become bogged down in their own insoluble contradictions. This is, however, more particularly the critical situation of all the current media. Opinion polls themselves are a good example. They have had their moment of truth (as, indeed, did television), when they were the representative mirror of an opinion, in the days when such a thing still existed, before it became merely a conditioned reflex. But perpetual harassment by opinion polls has resulted in their being no longer a mirror at all; they have, rather, become a screen. A perverse exchange has been established between polls which no longer really ask questions and masses who no longer reply. Or rather they become cunning partners, like rats in laboratories or the viruses pursued in experiments. They toy with the polls at least as much as the polls toy with them. They play a double game. It is not, then, that the polls are bogus or deceitful, but rather that their very success and automatic operation have made them random. There is the same double game, the same perverse social relationship between an all-powerful, but wholly self-absorbed, television and the mass of TV viewers, who are vaguely scandalized by this misappropriation, not just of public money, but of the whole value system of news and information. You don't need to be politically aware to realize that, after the famous dustbins of history, we are now seeing the dustbins of information. Now , information may well be a myth, but this alternative myth, the modern substitute for all other values, has been rammed down our throats incessantly. And there is a glaring contrast between this universal myth and the actual state of affairs. The real catastrophe of television has been how deeply it has failed to live up to its promise of providing information- its supposed modern function. We dreamed first of giving power - political power- to the imagination, but we dream less and less of this, if indeed at all. The fantasy then shifted on to the media and information. At times we dreamed (at least collectively, even if individually we continued to have no illusions) of finding some freedom there — an openness, a new public space. Such dreams were soon dashed: the media turned out to be much more conformist and servile than expected, at times more servile than the professional politicians. The latest displacement of the imagination has been on to the judiciary. Again this has been an illusion, since, apart from th e pleasing whiff of scandal produced, this is also dependent on the media operation. We are going to end up looking for imagination in places further and further removed from power - from any form of power whatever (and definitely far removed from cultural power, which has become the most conventional and professional form ther e is). Among the excluded, the immigrants, the homeless. But that will really take a lot of imagination because they, who no longer even have an image, are themselves the by-products of a whole society's loss of imagination, of the loss of any social imagination. And this is indeed the point. We shall soon see it is no use trying to locate the imagination somewhere. Quite simply, because there no longer is any. The day this becomes patently obvious, the vague collective disappointment hanging over us today will become a massive sickening feeling.

When you turn the mirror back, you see the reflex of Time.

Reflex originally means the intercepting and reflecting of a light ray by a mirror. Trans- ferred to living creatures, the reflex is conceived as the reception of an external stimulus by a receptor and the stimulus-elicited response by the effectors. In the process the stimulus is converted into nervous excitation, which has to pass through several stations on its way from the receptor to the effector. The course thus described is referred to as a reflex arc.

a hunched, cloaked figure peered back at her, and she reflexively went for her rapier: the hunched figure swiftly—identically—went for its own. Good going, dickhead! thought Gideon, straightening up. It’s a mirror.

Creatures of infinite adaptation as we are, our historic accommodations with the world constitute a prejudicing of each new moment, and a potential sabotage of the developmental challenges of later life. It is humbling to realize that what worked for us historically, now limits us to the disempowered, constricted messages of history. Given that relinquishing our protections causes unacceptable anxiety, we are predisposed to repetition, rationalizations, and stuckness. Only when we recognize this reflexive claim upon us from our past, can we access the resolve to break through into the growth the soul is asking of us.

The Mirror Test isn't about finding some essential human quality that AI can never touch (that's a losing game—every year, the machines mirror more). It's about developing what we might call reflexive muscle—the practiced ability to see both the mirror, and yourself seeing the mirror.