Across cultures, mirrors have been used by soothsayers, sorcerers and witches for scrying, divination and attempts to peer beyond the visible world. In folklore and occult practice, the mirror is not merely reflective but permeable — a portal where something might appear, or someone may return.
Even the postmodernists have their own warnings. In 1967, Michel Foucault darkly described the mirror as a kind of threshold, a mix between a fantasy world, a utopia and some weird other place on the margins — which he called a “heterotopia.” The mirror is one such strange place because we discover our presence and our absence at the same time. “I see myself there where I am not,” he wrote, “in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface.”
Some other heterotopias, according to Foucault, include the honeymoon trip, psychiatric hospitals, vacation villages, prisons, the theater, the cinema, museums, libraries, brothels and the cemetery. In these settings, the normal order of things breaks down and certain truths are exposed. Each of these places could serve as an apt metaphor for the screens, monitors and social media applications that relentlessly reflect us back to ourselves. This technology is a mirror, but it is also a museum, a theater, a prison.
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Closely tied to mirrors and the uncanny is the idea of the double, or doppelgänger, a theme long explored in literature and film, from Dostoevsky’s novella “The Double” to Jordan Peele’s horror movie “Us.” In German and Eastern European folklore, the doppelgänger is an omen, a usurper, the shadow self, and a sign that identity is unstable. The self is split, haunted, mimicked and stalked by its own likeness.
Today, we treat our own image — both in the mirror and online — as something psychologically protective: a way of stabilizing our identity, managing our reputations and securing a coherent sense of self.
But all of this suggests the opposite possibility: The more we try to stabilize ourselves through repetition, doubling, self-observation and — I’ll say it — posting to the grid, the more uncanny and fragile we become. A preoccupation with the stable self produces instability. These days, we don’t approach our doubles with caution; we invite them, and go so far as to curate them.
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Mirrors encourage us to choose the fantasies of ourselves over the realities of others. It’s best we look away.