Jim The Office Face
Some notes on the camera-as-mirror and failed processes of identification.
We’ll call it “Jim The Office Face.” The televisual trope captures an essential truth of the self’s narrativization through images and image-making in the 21st century. Of course, the situation is not entirely new. Following Jonathan Crary, it was with the advent of the physiological study of optics in the 19th century that the subject of modernity initially became an observer. Since then, the observer has taken on the duties of the prosumer, first creating videotapes for America’s Funniest Home Videos, then posting visual media on MySpace, YouTube, and Instagram. Jim epitomizes some of the most central characteristics of a Millennial prosumer-observer, not despite, but precisely because of his overriding banality.
Inescapably finding himself in a tragicomedy of errors, no matter the context, Jim frequently reminds us that he knows he has spectators. When the story gets to be just a little too much, he looks up and turns toward the camera, fixes his eyes on the invisible cameraman’s delicate machine. Charlie Chaplin, too, acknowledged the camera, understanding he was being observed. However, a crucial distinction lies in the fact that viewers of his time couldn't readily create and disseminate videos of themselves doing the very same thing. (It has been speculated that Krasinski is a real-life CIA operative, induced by the powers that be to promote the military industrial complex central with his Jack Ryan series and Michael Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi.)
In this paradigmatically cringe moment, Jim briefly transcends his circumstances. Sapience clicks and suddenly he’s spectating his own life through the camera, through our eyes, feeling in the dark for the limits of the picture plane as it bounces around off satellites, between earth and the exosphere. Jim wonders, then realizes, that he knows what it feels like to be us. He attempts to seek mutual recognition. He is a profoundly sad man. Not only must he endure constant misfortune, he must watch himself being watched while helpfessly watching it all unfold. Trapped in a comfortable white, middle class life, working on a computer without knowing how it or the internet works, how anything works, stewing in Pennsylvanian junkspace. The other characters on the show are more or less content to go along for the ride, but Jim sees his reflection in the narrative and feels the need to set himself apart, at a remove. He is cursed by the desire to reposition himself in the eyes of the spectator, trying and failing to locate his own individuality in the process. His entreaty is occasioned by the mediation of the camera-as-mirror, and its central role in the show’s reality TV-esque cinematographic style.
You can see it in his eyes: Jim doesn’t want to be a double anymore. His character never asked for this job. Kittler: “Cinematic doubles demonstrate what happens to people who step into the firing line of technical media.” Once you step into the fray, things can never go back to the way they were. This doubling is itself a restaging of the imaginary identification process constitution of Lacan’s mirror stage, whereby the subject finds itself before another. It is for this reason that the original doubling of all doublings is a constitutively failed process of identification.
The process is always failing for the simple reason that that with which the becoming subject has begun to identify is not itself and, thus, the self that the becoming subject is in the process of forging is necessarily alien. The self it takes itself to be is predicated on an identity with something other than itself. Its self is other. (Calum Neill, “Do Electric Sheep Dream of Androids?” from Lacan and the Nonhuman)
Nonetheless, this uneasy identification becomes the ground for the subject’s sense of self-assurance. One thinks of Marleau-Ponty’s famous meditation on the destabilizing experience of beholding another’s face, upside-down. The phenomenologist concludes that “to turn an object upside-down is to deprive it of meaning,” describing such an encounter as both “unnatural” and “terrifying.” This account belies an urge to experience sociality as a recognizable afterimage of the originary mirror encounter; mirroring becomes associated with a sense of wholeness and comfort. In a consideration of both Lacan and Marleau Ponty, Yves-Alain Bois identifies entropy’s dissipating force in the experience of seeking and not finding the self-assurance afforded by the familiar reflection of a mirror. “Without consciousness of ‘mirror symmetry’ the subject would dissolve into space, and the world, anthropocentric for the Gestalt-oriented human, would be stripped of its qualities, made characterless, isotropic,” he writes.
Marleau-Ponty becomes agitated because his mental model’s top-down predictions and expectations regarding what will come to pass fail to conform with the bottom-up model of his lived sensory observations. According to neuroscientist Karl J. Friston’s free energy framework, this unease is a symptom of the irruption of surprisal. The framework proposes that living systems seek self-preservation through the systemic reduction of error signals – e.g. surprisal – in sensory observation. These predictive processing systems pursue patterns of action and perception that minimize unexplained sensory data, working tirelessly to counteract the universal entropic tendency toward disorder and death. In other words, living systems do not seek out “truth,” but rather the avoidance of unfamiliarity. Indeed, recursively updating a model to be more correct requires an entirely different set of heuristics than making it less wrong. Probing the strange operations of reflection and identification, Dan Graham’s 1975 video work Performer/Audience/Mirror emphasizes the strain and ultimate impossibility of establishing symmetry between model and world. The performance dramatizes the failures of description as a means of recognition, as if parodying the very act of basic cognitive activity.
Everywhere, we see ourselves situated within visual narrative forms; for Jim, the story always ends the same way. If somebody told you they “felt like Jim,” they would be making a dumb joke. Nobody wants to feel like Jim. And yet, the more you insist you are not Jim, the more Jim-like you become. The moment you truly realize this you will look into the camera and make Jim The Office Face.