Fall 2000
Volume 27, Number 1

By means of a camera connected to the World Wide Web [Jennifer Ringley] deliberately exposes the interior of her room to the eyes of strangers. At any time of day or night anyone who can log on to the web may look into Jenni's room.

[...]

It is perhaps significant that Ringley made her bid for attention on the eve of her twenty-first birthday and in her final year of college, occasions which in Western society are charged with exceptional ritual significance. Both mark the transition from a prolonged state of familial dependency to an adult life free of parental supervision. In the words of an old music hall song, "I've got the key to the door, never been twenty-one before!" Mingled with the jubilation is a certain anxiety as to what might lie beyond the door. Such rites of passage from the protective circle of the family to a potentially hostile outside world may easily revive anxieties and responses derived from earlier separations--most particularly, the originary separation from the mother. In the earliest months of life objects are, strictly speaking, subjective. The infant has no means of distinguishing between his or her psychical reality and the external world.16 Lacan's essay on the mirror stage describes how the infant first forms an idea of his or her body as distinct from external reality. The infant unifies certain objects within a bounding outline, the newly drawn frontiers of the subject. Other objects--the "not me"--are simultaneously exiled to the other side of the border, the outside of the skin.17 But the unitary self-image formed in the mirror stage is not a snapshot. The distinction between the self and objectively existing things is not achieved in the blink of an eye. It takes time. The piece of blanket or tattered teddy bear to which the small child clings with a special fervour is, in Winnicott's terms, a "transitional object" in that it marks the passage of the infant or small child into that differentiated world in which he or she exists separately from his or her mother.18 Its function is to assuage the anxiety that accompanies the process of differentiation. The more general concept of transitional phenomena is at the foundation of Winnicott's notion of play, a fundamentally important stage of which is what he calls "being alone in the presence of someone".19 At this stage, he writes, "The child is now playing on the basis of the assumption that the person who loves and who is therefore reliable is available and continues to be available when remembered after being forgotten. This person is felt to reflect back what happens in the playing" ("P", pp. 47-48; my emphasis). In "The Capacity to Be Alone", Winnicott therefore remarks that "the basis of the capacity to be alone is a paradox; it is the experience of being alone while someone else is present".20

16. According to Winnicott part of the mother's early role is to instill a sense of omnipotence in the infant by providing his or her objects there at the moment and in the place where the baby hallucinates them. The primary example of this occurs when the mother anticipates the infant's need for the breast and provides it more or less where and when the infant tries to summon it into being. Infantile omnipotence is the origin of the confidence with which the child will later explore the world once it has come to distinguish between his or her body and his or her objects.

17. See Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego, trans. Chris Turner (New Haven, Conn., 1989). Catherine Clément succinctly characterizes the mirror stage as "the moment when one becomes oneself because one is no longer the same as one's mother" (Catherine Clément, The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, trans. Arthur Goldhammer [New York, 1983], p. 76).

18. Winnicott writes: "Of the transitional object it can be said that it is a matter of agreement between us and the baby that we will never ask the question: 'Did you conceive of this or was it presented to you from without?' The important point is that no decision on this point is expected. The question is not to be formulated" (Winnicott, "Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena," Playing and Reality, p. 12).

19. Winnicott, "Playing: A Theoretical Statement," Playing and Reality, p. 47; hereafter abbreviated "P".

20. Winnicott, "The Capacity to Be Alone" (1958), The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (London, 1965), p. 30; my emphasis.

Victor Burgin is professor in the history of consciousness department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His most recent publications are the "book of the video" Venise (1997), the theoretical work In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (1996), and the photo/text book Some Cities (1996). His books also include The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity (1986) and Between (1986). Amongst his current projects is a major retrospective of his visual work for the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona.