Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1993 | Page 35

Avatars of the Third Other

33

age, so meaningful? What are its psychological benefits for human
beings?
Baudrillard describes the video screens in a night club which
show the dancers to themselves as representing "an effort of frantic
self-referentiality, a short-circuit which immediately hooks up like
with like and, in so doing, emphasizes their surface intensity and
deeper meaninglessness" (37). Put another way, video screens, like
the ones in sports stadiums, provoke existential double takes in
people who see themselves, someone whom they recognize, or even
strangers, on the big screen in center field. Baudrillard suggests that
spectators don't look at the screens as in a mirror to preen or admire
themselves, but to feel significant, authenticated in their existence
among other people on the screen who surround them as part of a
lonely crowd of strangers enjoying a ball game or a night out.
TTie issue is not mere narcissism, in other words, but existential
recognition of being—a blessing bestowed at random via an electronic
medium. Suddenly, someone in the crowd is no longer anonymous, a
blank cipher or signifier. There he or she is, signified on the screen,
"larger than life." And because the screen is immense, it cannot help
but produce a humbling effect, a tendency to numinous awe rather than
narcissistic frenzy. Narcissism is better suited afte r all to small
mirrors, to quiet and privacy, like the setting of Narcissus’ pool in the
woods. The big screen is an oracle for which the invisible camera has
interceded like an electronic angel to bless every man, shrinking his or
her allotted fifteen minutes of fame (in Andy Warhol’s modernist
formula) to a postmodernist fifteen seconds or fewer.
Spectator response to self-recognition on big screens is not usually
one of braggodocio, although that sometimes occurs, especially among
drunken fans. More often the subject is observed to smile and wave at
the camera, or the screen, checking simultaneously to make sure that
his or her electronic doppelgiinger writ large in center field is waving
too. It is a classic instance of the internalized Other: in Michel
Foucault’s idiom, a "twin" to man:
The Other that is not only a brother but a twin, bom,
not of man, nor in man, but beside him and at the same
time, in an identical newness, in an unavoidable
duality (321).