We live in a world dominated by images. Media forms like television, magazines, newspapers, advertisements, and websites provide a continuous stream of images that are coded in myths of sex, age, beauty, fashion, and many other collective norms of our body politic.
Semiotic theory is a particularly insightful approach to analyzing the influence and power of these images. One relevent and key idea in semiotics is the distinction between signifiers and referents. A signifier is any communicative tool, including images, texts, or spoken words, that effectively points to an idea. The term "chair," for example, is a signifier for a particular kind of thing on which one sits, which is conveniently shaped so as to make sitting its primary use. The actual object here would be the referent, and the word "chair" would be its signifier- the word "chair" itself is not a part of the functionality or the inherent nature of the object, and there is no particular reason why the phonetic sound or written appearance of the word "chair" is matched with it. The word "chair" is only a sign, devoid of meaning until one assigns it the meaning of the referent: that thing we sit on. Our discussion of the word "thing" as a "gathering" is analagous to the gathering of referents that might be implicated in a given signifier (i.e. a stop sign is a signifier for police, government, order, safety, etc.).
The way that this sign theory comes into play with regards to the mirror is that images have the power to construct what is perceived to be real. Michel de Certeau, in his The Practice of Everyday Life, makes a compelling argument that signifiers and referents are easily conflated in a society that contains so many coherent texts. The coherence is de Certeau's key point: the power to define comes from a multiplicity of signifiers that all point to the same referent. There is only one paradigm (for the most part) for ideas like beauty or age in popular media because there is power in a coherent network of meaning and representation. De Certeau claims that it is the constant onslaught of different texts - magazines, billboards, TV - with similar signifiers for beauty, age, gender, etc. that drives the myths surrounding those norms (Certeau 188). Seeing homogenous signs for beauty and age expressed in a variety and multitude of media creates the illusion that those signs are the real, empirical meanings of beauty and age. When this illusion is successfully constructed, "the assumption crumbles that an invisible immensity of Being...lies hidden behind appearances" (de Certeau 187). Instead, one prevalent image paradigm of an idea like beauty takes on the meaning of beauty itself.
This is a very striking quote that resonates profoundly with body image. Is there not an "immensity of Being" that is behind and beyond a person's appearance? Yet in this day, age, and society, people spend a great deal of energy aligning their body images (perhaps with the aid of a mirror) with what they perceive to be their inner personality and character (this is personal style in a nutshell). Intersubjectivity also informs this process - if one accepts body image as a signifier for the referent of the inner personality, then it is a fair expectation to be judged back on the same merit. Again, this relates to de Certeau's argument that this plane of interaction is highly influential because there are so many actors in it.
The next section will be devoted to different body images, and how people use mirrors to construct a visual identity (the signifier) in relation to an inner identity (the referent).
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