She's Not There

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Somewhere in his writings, Jaques Lacan talks about the man who owns a flash sports car, driving it on a deserted road. The man puts his foot down on the accelerator, showing just how fast his car can go. But who is he trying to impress? There's no one except himself there.

Why can we identify with films like The Truman Show and The Matrix? Why does mental illness so often take the form of conspiracy theories - or the belief that you're being watched and controlled by unseen forces? Why is it embarrassing to sing at the top of your voice, even when it's your job to do so?

In one of the comic "diary" novels about Adrian Mole, the teenager is left alone in the house one day. He plays his records at top volume and has a bath with the door open, just because he can.

But there are many things he could have done - climb up and down the stairs endlessly for hours, eat a bowl of catfood, watch TV, write poetry, or use a razorblade to cut words into his skin. All these things he's free to do for the day, with no consequences. He could explore his temporary freedom in any number of ways, but the ways he chooses are quite specific.

He's very aware that there's no one to watch him take a bath, so it doesn't matter whether the bathroom door is open or closed. Yet he specifically and deliberately leaves it open, as though not just to explore his freedom, but to demonstrate both the freedom and the exploration. It's as though he were letting someone see what he can do when there's no one there to see.

So who is he showing off his freedom to? Himself? In a sense, yes, but that's not the whole story. He's watching himself break a few minor social rules, but watching himself as though from outside himself. There is an imaginary fragment (or duplicate) of himself, standing just outside the bathroom, looking in, watching Adrian Mole display his nakedness to that fragment.

But the boy in the bath can go much further in rule breaking than he ever would if it were another person standing outside, because the fragment is himself. He is both split in two and unsplit - one person with two viewpoints feeding to the same mind. He needs to be split because without the split there could be no audience to do the watching. And he needs to be unsplit because the only safe, trustworthy audience is himself.

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It's trivially true that we perform to other people. As Desmond Morris remarked in The Naked Ape, a pop fan who screams in delight at a band on the stage might have many emotions if confronted with the band in a quiet room, but they won't scream. Stadium screaming is a communal activity, and it requires the presence of many screamers, who are all aware of each other's participation.

Comedy movies - even unfunny ones - tend to provoke laughter in crowded cinemas, but a DVD watched by half a dozen friends produces less effect, and if watched alone, is generally watched in silence, without even a smile.

The addition of canned laughter to comedy is noticeably ineffective in making home viewers - even in large groups - join in. A studio audience, or a recorded laugh track, aren't part of the viewing group - they're part of the spectacle, though one which isn't part of the comedy itself. Which might explain why is feels so superfluous and annoying.

Being amused ("laughing on the inside") is a sensation. Emitting a succession of loud quaking barks is a communal ritual, done in response sometimes even to jokes which the viewers don't understand - they just know they ought to do it. And the one who refuses to laugh thereby signals to the others that he or she is an outsider.

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There's more than one way to perform to an audience which is absent, but given a halfway presence in the mind of the performer. There's no shortage of people who's parents are safely dead and buried, who don't believe in any kind of afterlife from which the spirits of their parents are watching and judging, yet who can't bring themselves to disregard what their parents wanted, even though they desperately want to.

This is performing to a projection of specific people you're highly familiar with - a projection which has control over you, even though you create and animate the projection. But here the performance consists in doing what you don't want to do, or not doing what you do want.

Obviously this applies even if you're completely wrong about what your parents wanted, or would think.

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It doesn't have to be the parents. The man in the flash motorcar isn't trying to impress his mum and dad. It doesn't have to be a projection of one's self, or a real person, or an imaginary person. It can be something as vague as "society in general", "folks" or "people who matter". This doesn't mean "every individual on the planet" or "humanity".

I think the generic "they" who watch and judge is actually two separate abstractions of real social groups. The first is one's peers, in the broad sense. The second is the largely hidden but powerful people in one's society. Those you want to like you, and those you know (usually in a vague way) have power over you, even though they don't know who you are, or care about you as an individual. Your own class, and the ruling class, respectively.

The latter is god. Some say each of us creates god in our own image. To some extent this is true, but the god of any society, or group within that society, is it's own ruling class, abstracted and amalgamated.

The former is "people" as in the questions "what would people think?" or "what do people say?". Not the whole species, or even the whole population of your country or your town, but the type of people who, even if don't know or like them, you want to respect you.

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So when we perform to an audience of ghosts, there are actually four kinds of ghosts, each with their own demands, which can contradict each other.

The first kind is oneself - the performer using themselves as a mirror. The performer has quite a lot of control over this ghost. Adrian Mole is performing to this.

The second is a projection of certain important people in one's own life - past or present. Parents, lovers, friends, comrades, offspring, employers etc. This ghost is harder to control, and less well defined. Our friend living in the shadow of his dead parents is in thrall to these ghosts.

The third is "people like me", homogenised into a single, featureless viewer that surrounds on all sides. This one is harder still to control, and even more abstract. Our man in the motorcar is trying to impress this ghost.

And the fourth is the most abstract, most difficult to conceptualise, most encompassing and surrounding, and most difficult to fight against. It is not composed of individual powerful people, but has their common in interests and demands - whether it is the monarchy, priesthood, elders, or corporate multimillionaires depends on the society.

We all spent most of our lives performing to this ghost - so much that usually, we don't even realise we're doing it.

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