Those that are looking out of the mirror at us are other ones. Rubén Díaz de Corcuera, 1992. Super icons.

Instead of other thing.
Semiotic on extremes.

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The author and his wife in the reflection of a mirror.

Díaz de Corcuera, Rubén: "Those that are looking out of the mirror at us", 1992. Image source: author's collection.

Those that are looking out of the mirror at us.

Sign: what arises from the necessary otherness in signifier in respect to its object. Signifier: the presence of an entity that someone takes instead of another, the object. Object: surrogate entity, ie, the absent thing.

There is always in sign the awareness of the presence of something, the signifier, and of the absence, in the act, of another thing, its object. Although the object towards which we must necessarily pass through, as sometimes happens in iconic signs, was at hand, or even making one with its signifier.

According the principle of otherness, an old rule of logical semantics, nothing can be simoultaneously a sign and the object of this sign. Then there would be no sign there. And because objects are constituted as such, partly through its own signifier, it is necessary to place the object itself, we might say its heart, on a different plane.

I contemplate, as an extreme example of this, the preceding image. A photograph of a mirror on a train taken during a trip to Barcelona that my wife and I probably would do it in the early nineties. It therefore captures the enduring picture of a fleeting reflection, almost forgotten, old.

It registers, however, a special circumstance, that I Know, the moment in which that couple are looking out of the mirror (he: intrigued; she: fun and mocking) at other world, where suddenly, extraordinary coincidence, another couple (he: intrigued; she: mocking) have been surprised.

This watch (us) watching (them) to us, already involves a principle of otherness of the mirror image in respect to its object, authorizing it as a sign. We are not "we" but they are, in any case, "we", those who watch us. Those others "we" who we are watching and that they are watching us, must necessarily be ones different "we".

Because although we were identical to our mirroring image, we are not, we can not be, neither in image, in none way, the same. To be identical is not to be the same. This "we" never is going to fully coincide with that other "we". Only ourselves we can be ourselves for ourselves. Perfect tautology that the mirror does not deny but confirm.

Rubén Díaz de Corcuera.
Super icons.
October 26, 2009.