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Feb 20, 2009 - to this mimetic faculty 'the correspondences', in which human beings can. The act of writing in the light of what Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). 17, Special Walter Benjamin Issue (Spring, 1979), pp. Published by: New. That mimetic faculty which responds to them in human beings. Benjamin, Walter. 'On the Mimetic Faculty,' Reflections. Or so I tell myself. Like Benjamin, Michael Taussig thinks that “ the mimetic faculty is the nature that culture uses to create second nature, the faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore differences, yield into and become Other. The wonder of mimesis lies in the copy drawing on the character and power. Stewart's exegesis builds on Benjamin's theories, especially when she asserts that the mimetic faculty is 'profoundly and archaically related to physical gesture, sound, and body' (90). In her estimation, the body and its psychosomatic conditions become the nexus for grasping the similarities embedded in the circulation of collective signs.
In Theory, New in Ceasefire - Posted on Thursday, April 4, 2013 0:00 - 5 Comments
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Walter Benjamin stands out as one of the leading theorists of the 1920s-30s wave of Marxist-inspired critical theorists. Like many of his generation, Benjamin writes from the standpoint of an outsider. His story is also a tragic one. Having already fled Germany for France, Benjamin killed himself after being captured by the Nazis while trying to flee occupied Europe. In his lifetime he wrote one book, the vast Arcades Project notes, and a large number of intriguing fragmentary writings which have inspired and puzzled scholars and radicals ever since.
Benjamin worked at the intersection of Marxist cultural theory with qabalah, a mystical variety of Jewish theology. Practitioners of qabalah believed that the messianic dimension cannot be reached in the mundane world. They sought limit-experiences through meditation, prayer and asceticism. Within Marxist theory, Benjamin was pulled between two schools of Marxism: the abstract ‘high theory’ of the Frankfurt School, and the more down-to-earth strategies of consciousness-raising pursued by Bertolt Brecht.
Scholars and students are most likely to have come across Benjamin via one of his short works, such as “On the Concept of History”, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, “Critique of Violence”, or “The Task of the Translator”. These texts are widely used in cultural studies, although appreciation of Benjamin’s radical politics is uneven.
Many of Benjamin’s works take the form of travelogues, in which he recounts his impressions of particular places. These are like reports on flânerie, the practice of wandering aimlessly in public places which Benjamin celebrates. Others are cultural criticism, dealing with specific texts. His longest works deal with particular areas of literature – baroque mourning-plays, Goethe, Baudelaire, and so on. He also wrote large numbers of short articles and fragments, many of which are so full of profound, ambiguous statements that they have been interpreted endlessly. Benjamin’s work is typically fragmentary, and has a kind of mosaic or montage structure based on juxtapositions.
In politics, he frequently focuses on the issue of sovereign violence. He is a major influence on Agamben. He seeks to design a materialist alternative to religious redemption and profane power-struggles. Across various works, he portrays capitalism and the state as a religious or metaphysical system based on fate and guilt. Benjamin writes mainly within a Marxist tradition, and some of his work has disciplinary overtones. However, his ‘orthodoxy’ clearly declined over time, and his main interest is in claiming expressive emotions for the revolution.
He is unusual in that he actually failed his exams by being too smart for his examiners – a claim which for most, is a handy excuse! Students wishing to emulate this performance might be interested in Benjamin’s instructions for authors. He is also notable for the argument that things or objects have some kind of language, perception or subjectivity. In an early text, he suggested that things propel us into the future.
Benjamin is one of the founders of cultural studies. Much of his work focuses on material from outside the main canon of literary studies – whether this be unrecognised literature like the German baroque plays, or popular culture such as newspapers and flyposters. Along with contemporaries such as Bloch, Adorno and Gramsci, Benjamin pioneered the view that the study of culture should not focus mainly on ‘great’ works. Everyday, popular cultural works – from mass-market paperbacks to the layout of streets and the content of adverts – are important in understanding the history and politics of culture. This makes Benjamin one of the co-founders of modern cultural studies, as distinct from the older forms of artistic study.
This position is often parodied by conservatives as the claim that “the latest advert is as great as Shakespeare”. This misses the point. The argument is not that these works are as beautiful or historically lasting as ‘great’ works. The idea of inherent value is alien to many cultural studies authors, but most continue to prefer thoughtful, erudite works. The reason for the study of what conservatives see as ‘low’ texts is that the criteria of aesthetics are replaced by an emphasis on the social and political importance of cultural texts.
Benjamin’s Method: The Epistemo-Critical Prologue
Benjamin’s first major work, and only completed book, was his work The Origin of German Tragic Drama. This was originally his dissertation for a postdoctoral degree, which would qualify him to teach in German universities. He was failed because nobody could understand it!
The work is an analysis of German baroque theatre in the 16th and 17th centuries. Instead of focusing on ‘great’ baroque authors such as Shakespeare, Benjamin focuses on relatively unknown German writers whose work was widely rejected as aesthetically inferior (partly because of its crudity and violence). Benjamin wasn’t interested in the quality of the work, but in what it said about German history and society. He saw them as creating a new genre, distinct from classic tragedy and connected to the issue of sovereign violence. He argues that this work converts history from a question of Christian eschatology (ultimate destiny or meaning) into a power-struggle, as in Realist IR theory. The trauerspiel or mourning-play is seen as a new type of drama created in the baroque era. It is allegorical, and uses a form of time which is more musical than dramatic. Its unresolved relationship to time is peculiarly modern.
The issue of the baroque for Benjamin focused on questions such as why extravagant allegories were so common at this point, and what the satisfaction was in ‘mourning’. He argues that there is a relationship between baroque and the Protestant disconnection of worldly actions from salvation (Luther’s view that faith alone determined salvation). This view also reflects the transition to capitalism, which drains the world of meaning. This disconnection disenchants the world and causes melancholy (depression). The world becomes a stage and a coffin because it is disenchanted. Mourning plays mourn the transition to capitalism. The only remaining hope is that meaninglessness can itself be redemptive.
In the introduction to this work, the Epistemo-Critical Prologue, Benjamin lays out the approach to research which guides his later work. Benjamin advocates a method which lacks an ‘uninterrupted purposeful structure’, relies on digression, and constantly re-thinks new beginnings by returning to its goal ‘in a roundabout way’. The work is to be like a mosaic, composed of ‘fragments of thought’ indirectly related to the guiding theme. A modern reader might conclude that Benjamin was trying to torment the fixation on methodology exhibited by modern scholars. Actually, he was responding to different kinds of methodology of his own day, particularly positivism and traditional aesthetics.
According to Benjamin, science is an accumulation of knowledge-claims. Its purpose is therefore analysis, rather than representation (in the fully ‘mimetic’ sense). This accumulation of knowledge is useful, but Benjamin criticises those who see it as grasping the truth. The truth is an indivisible unity which cannot be grasped through the accumulation of knowledge. Rather, science itself requires philosophical inspiration to seem valid. It is a process of producing ‘concepts’, which group phenomena together.
Inductive theories are prone to being engulfed in scepticism, even when they recognise a need for systematisation. Deductive approaches are also criticised, because they assume a logical continuum among ideas. According to Benjamin, each idea is ‘original’ and ideas in general are a multiplicity. The experience of ‘truth’, in contrast to the accumulation of knowledge, is almost a mystical experience. It is something in which one is totally immersed, losing intention. It is reminiscent of Deleuze’s time-image and of mystical accounts of meditative, trance-like states.
The experience of truth occurs in a field made up of ideas. Ideas are not the same as concepts, which group phenomena. Benjamin also differentiates them from Platonic Forms as usually understood, which he considers deified concepts (in fact he also questions this standard reading of Plato). Rather, an idea carries the symbolic function into language. It is a bearer of the magical power which language inherits from superstition and sorcery. Following Leibniz, Benjamin argues that every idea contains an image of the whole world. Ideas have self-consciousness, distinct from outwardly-directed communication. One might think of Benjaminian ideas as expressive uses of language, creating zones of meaning rather than communicating. The intelligible world depends on the pure ideas, which are distant from one another and exist in a harmonious relationship. The perception of this relationship is what is termed ‘truth’.
Philosophy, in contrast to science, is all about representation. It is thus wrong to place it too close to science. The main purpose of philosophy is to restore the primacy of the symbolic aspect of language. Art, meanwhile, is about expression, rather than intuition.
Walter Benjamin On The Mimetic Faculty Pdf Example
Philosophy is to have its own postulates of method. It should seek interruption instead of deduction, tenacity instead of single gestures, repetition of themes instead of ‘shallow universalism’, and affirmative fullness instead of polemic. One effect of such postulates is the avoidance of technical terminology. The words over which philosophers argue are taken to be ideas in the full sense. The history of philosophy is a history of different configurations and juxtapositions of ideas.
Philosophy deals with the ‘realm of ideas’. Phenomena and objects enter into the realm of ideas only partially, through their essences. (A phenomenon, literally an observable occurrence, refers in philosophy to empirical things, objects, events, beings and so on). For Benjamin, this process is a kind of transubstantiation which redeems phenomena and objects. It rescues them from their construction as part of the existing system, and allows them to be reinscribed in new mosaics and combinations.
The purpose of this method is to aspire to an essence or truth which direct argument cannot reach. This philosophical task is incommensurable with the pursuit of knowledge. The truth is never identical to the object of knowledge. Truth is to be reflected upon, and has an inherent unity at the level of its essence.
Arguments for this separation of truth from knowledge include the distance between beauty and knowledge, with beauty often carrying an experience of truth, and the fact that past theorists whose knowledge-content has been surpassed – such as Aristotlecontinue to seem relevant at the level of truth. Such theories retain a feeling of relevance because of their systematic nature as an ‘order of ideas’. They are of interest as systems, rather than knowledge-claims.
Phenomena are redeemed through ideas. Ideas, for their part, need representing in the world of phenomena. The human mimetic faculty is the means to bring ideas into the world. Concepts simply group individual phenomena while leaving them as individuals. Redemption transforms individual phenomena into totalities, through conceiving their relations.
Phenomena are not incorporated in ideas. Rather, ideas are virtual. They are the objective, virtual arrangement of phenomena. At the same time, they belong to two different, incommensurable worlds. Ideas represent phenomena in terms of something radically other. ‘Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars’. Phenomena limit how they can be represented by ideas. But ideas are necessary to symbolically construct relations among phenomena.
The main role of the idea is to represent the context in which phenomena – especially their extreme, and most telling, cases – coexist and interact. Ideas are obscure unless phenomena actually ‘gather round them’. Just as phenomena need salvation, so ideas need representation – their expression in phenomena.
Culture should be observed in its ‘origin’, its process of becoming. This process must be seen in the finished work, and seen as something incomplete. If a work or genre is original, it expresses a new determination of an idea (we might say, a new zone of becoming) which has not previously been expressed or which was revealed less completely before. Origins cannot be seen directly in works. They can be seen in the history and later development of a work or genre. Philosophy, furthermore, is the attempt to perceive ‘the becoming of phenomena in their being’.
It is through this idea of origin that Benjamin differentiates himself from the idealist attitude he attributes to Hegel: philosophers study essences, and if the facts don’t fit the essences, then so much the worse for the facts. For Benjamin, an idea is only interesting if it is ‘authentic’, and it is only authentic if it expresses a real process of becoming, at the level of observed phenomena.
Benjamin analyses the story of the Garden of Eden in terms of a fall from immediacy in language. In Eden, words directly express what they name. There is no need to struggle to communicate.
Philosophy is portrayed as a renewal or rediscovery of this primordial situation. Naming should not seek to conceptualise similarities. Rather, it should form connections between differences, between extremes.
Literary studies is criticised for classifying things into genres (concepts), without sufficient attention to ideas. Literary ideas become apparent only in extreme cases, at the limits to concepts. They cannot be found in deduction from the rules of genres. Effective contemplation instead focuses on the smallest details of a work.
The idea cannot be encountered through inductive observation of, for instance, the things tragedies have in common or the emotions they provoke. Inductive processes tend to remain within the field of habitual experience (Deleuze’s sensorimotor, Bourdieu’s habitus, psychology’s schemas). This experience always happens within one’s own historical period and worldview. Hence, there is a tendency to fail to see differences between, for example, the German baroque and ancient tragedies. They are treated as similar based on the similar reaction of a modern viewer, or even simply of an individual critic.
Benjamin is critical of the tendency to read back modern issues into older controversies. He argues that the ‘spirit of the present age’ is particularly prone to seize on past phenomena and ‘take possession’ of them without any feeling for their content, incorporating them into the self-absorbed fantasies of modernity. The historian is here seen as performing a substitution in relation to the creators of art – often disguised as empathy, or an emphasis on the author.
The special qualities of a genre, especially its historical forms, are obscured by conflation with more recent or more numerous examples. Benjamin here associates ‘form’ with the action or inner life of a text or genre. It is implicitly connected to its social context, the connections it retains with its social origins. Art in general, and drama in particular, can be understood only through its historical resonances.
In the case of German baroque or tragic drama (Trauerspiel), the topic of the book, Benjamin argues that it is misunderstood. It is either classified as tragedy, and fused with better-known classical works, leading to a misunderstanding of both, or classified as Renaissance theatre, and simply denounced for stylistic shortcomings. For Benjamin, these alleged shortcomings are actually characteristic features central to its analysis. Stylistic concerns prevented an ‘objective’ (historical or philosophical) understanding of German tragic drama.
While quite specific to this case, one could also imagine Benjamin’s critique being applied to conservative critics of cultural studies. Popular novels, film, television and so on have historical importance as organising logics within particular life-worlds. They construct systems of meaning and have considerable social importance. To dismiss their importance because of their failure to conform to canons of style, or to treat them as inferior instances of ‘high’ art, is to repeat the errors Benjamin criticises.
However, Benjamin also argues that some works of art are genuinely creative, and others not. He believes there are periods of ‘so-called decadence’, when original, non-imitative creativity seems out of reach. The period of German baroque literature is for Benjamin one such age. It was also an age ‘possessed of an unremitting artistic will’. This will was able to grasp the forms of artistic production, but not to produce outstanding individual works.
The period was also driven by a desire for a vigorous language matching the violence of historical events. The literature of the period thus captured aspects of its historical spirit. It was, like today, a period of global war and widespread questioning. It was an era when fixed certainties were collapsing and new theories coming into being, yet also in which this emergence was blocked. It was also arguably the period of the rising bourgeoisie, in which what are today mainstream ideas began to be articulated. Benjamin is thus excavating the origins of the contemporary world.
Benjamin’s concept of ‘essence’ is not the same as Derrida’s, nor is his concept of ‘representation’ akin to Deleuze’s. There are certainly cases where Benjamin would call ‘representation’ what Deleuze calls ‘non-representational’ or expressive, and where Benjamin would term a revelation of essence what Derrida terms a deconstruction of essentialism.
Science and analysis simply observe the present; they are of limited use in constructing a different future, as the contours of the future cannot be observed or tested. This is the basis for Benjamin’s separation of the ‘idea’ or ‘essence’ of objects from knowledge of them. The danger of analysis is that it reduces objects to their functions and hence can’t escape the present. ‘Essence’ here belongs to the future, like Marx’s species-being, and not to the present. ‘Essence’ here serves to release objects from their functional inscriptions, giving them something of a unique and recombinable value. The background implication here is the belief in a lost or future paradise, in which everything has its proper place.
It is not clear why Benjamin assumes the aspects of objects which are retained in their re-use, or reconfigured differently, are essences of the objects. Nor is it clear why classical philosophical concepts are particularly likely to serve as ‘ideas’ – as opposed to new concepts (as in Deleuze). In his reliance on essentialism, his theory arguably falls short of others which similarly emphasise the experience of the contingency of present arrangements.
However, Benjamin stands out for the aspiration or hope for a world where everything fits. This could be seen as a variant on the desire for abundance, or as a dangerous fantasy of imagined fullness. In practice, it is productive for Benjamin’s theory. Like the not-yet in Bloch, Benjamin’s aspiration for redemption fuels an experimental outlook and a dissatisfaction with social closure, the happy consciousness, and settling for the present. To accept a flawed world, and not aspire in a redemptive and revolutionary manner for its transformation, is to renounce the human capacity for mimesis and salvation, to settle for “hell”.
It is debated in the secondary literature whether Benjamin believes that a redeemed world is truly possible (as a post-revolutionary society), whether it is an absent horizon which must endlessly be pursued, or whether it is simply a change of perception, akin to a religious experience of Nirvana. His politics and many of his examples suggests it is possible: objects can in fact be rearranged, not only imagined differently. But does this leave him open to the objection that he must settle at some fixed order, which is then repressively imposed as ‘full’ and ‘complete’?
I would speculate that a ‘redeemed’ world is a world where the contingency and freedom of relations is permanently recognised and actualised in social, material and ecological relations – including relations to spaces, objects, images and time. Redemption happens, for instance, when factories are occupied and self-managed, or turned into squats; when roads are turned into gardens; when the wilderness overgrows the cities.
Redemption is disalienation – the recreation of direct relations. It is an expressive rather than instrumental world in which things relate directly, through their becomings, rather than indirectly, through their appearances. The ‘idea’, in such a world, is the intuition of the becomings of the other, as in the case of Athabascan hunters who can track animals by intuiting their likely movements.
Benjamin’s approach is also inflected by his critique of the order of ‘fate’. Things, and people, are sullied by being located within an order of things dominated by alienation. But things and people are open to a kind of profane illumination or redemption through their appreciation and reconfiguration outside dominant contours – out of sequence and out of tradition.
We see this kind of gesture recur across Benjamin’s work, as the function of allegory in literature, of flânerie, of collecting, of messianic time, of Surrealist art. The gesture in all its forms constitutes a glimpse of another world through the experience of something apart from its usual social connections, arranged in other combinations or without combination.
Benjamin’s philosophical method is designed to produce and prolong such glimpses. Yet the glimpses are not simply sublime moments of something unachievable. They involve an imperative force to overcome the order of things. Benjamin aspires to a change in perception such that the glimpses produce an entirely different world. The world is redeemed in revolution. This is most likely what Benjamin speaks of in terms of the ‘politicisation of art’. Art is politicised when it performs the function of producing glimpses of redemption.
[Part Two will be published next week. Click here for other essays in this series.]
Andy McLaverty-Robinson is a political theorist and activist based in the UK. He is the co-author (with Athina Karatzogianni) of Power, Resistance and Conflict in the Contemporary World: Social Movements, Networks and Hierarchies (Routledge, 2009). He has recently published a series of books on Homi Bhabha. His 'In Theory' column appears every other Friday.
The study for a redemptive world is to be welcomed especially in light of globalisation, austerity and ever decreasing natural resources.
Walter Benjamin On The Mimetic Faculty Pdf Download
Indeed 🙂
You’ll find a lot more on those parallels in Part 4 when it appears.
[…] Walter Benjamin is one of the most influential critical theorists of the early twentieth century. His writings include original theories of the state, fascism and revolution. […]
[…] Phenomena are redeemed through ideas. Ideas, for their part, need representing in the world of pheno… […]
by Mike Mowbray
The ‘mimetic faculty’ is an elusive concept, foregrounding a human inclination to mimic or to imitate, to produce symbolic forms, representations and artefacts that mirror and also perhaps transform their objects. In essence, the notion may be described as referring to a capacity to produce and to recognize similarity. Although it is difficult to identify any essential origin or core that is preeminent and enduring in the cultural and intellectual history of the concept, it is possible to reach back to Greek antiquity for a pre-platonic root of the term mimesis. The term, derived from the word ‘mimos’, meaning mime or mimic, then (as now) revolved around questions of imitation, representation, and expression. The root term makes some of its earliest recorded appearances, for example in the Delian hymn or in a fragment from the philosopher Aeschylus (c. 525-456BC), in the context of music and dance – prompting some scholars to fix an early meaning in reference to acts of representation through dance. This view is disputed, however, as others refuse such a narrow definition, even in this early context (Gebauer and Wulf 1995: 6, 25-30). Gerald Else, for example, suggests three possible implications associated with the term ‘mimesis’:
1. ‘Miming’: direct representation of the looks, actions and/or utterances of animals or men through speech, song or dancing…
2. ‘Imitation’ of the actions of one person by another, in a general sense…
3. ‘Replication’: an image or effigy of a person or thing in material form (cited in Gebauer and Wulf 1995: 28).
In Doric Sicily, words from this family were associated with theatrical mime, a tradition of performance consisting either of individual recitations or dramatic productions which tended to simplify or caricature everyday life (ibid: 28-29). A double-meaning appears to have existed around the 5th century BCE, whereby the verb mimos could designate a) a type of patterned action implying artistic expression (i.e. performace of ‘mimos,’ a type of play, or b) behaviour similar to that of a mime (i.e. behaviour like that performed in the play called ‘mimos’). Over time, the second meaning gained currency at the expense of the first, coming to include within the range of its connotations the act of “representing something animate and concrete with characteristics of other phenomena” (ibid: 29).
Mimos, or mimesis, may be said to generate impure, adulterated, or creatively inflected representations, or imitations, which exaggerate or project qualities that are nonetheless essentially similar between the object and its representation through mimetic endeavour. Such a view finds echoes in Aristotle, who concerned himself mainly with mimesis’ role in image-production and literary creation. For Aristotle, such processes have a tendency to simultaneously produce the possible and the general, to give rise to the literary fable or plot, to render their objects as fiction (as adulterated or creatively-inflected representation) in which only a mediated reference to ‘objective’ reality persists. In so doing, mimesis is a “process of re-creation,” which introduces “embellishment, improvement and the generalization of individual qualities” (ibid: 26). In contradistinction to Plato’s concern that mimetic endeavors pose a danger of giving rise to a world of appearances or illusory images,1 which could erode adherence to the strictly conceptual models (or Ideas) that he saw as a preferred basis for social ordering and education, the view which arises in Aristotle appears to give license to the positive and creative potentiality of a human capacity for mimesis.
The term ‘mimesis’ has, since its apparently contentious and variably interpreted origins, puzzled and been picked up on by a variety of thinkers: Erich Auerbach in literary theory (assessing the possibilities for literary realism), the French social theorist Roger Caillois (who saw a seemingly instinctual mimetic impulse, exceeding evolutionary necessity, ranging from the realm of insects to that of both ‘primitive’ and ‘modern’ societies), Frankfurt School iconoclasts Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (who saw mimesis as an adaptive capacity predicated on a weak separation between subject and object, a primordial basis for reason which is denied and repressed in modernity) and the philosopher Jacques Derrida (interested in questions of similarity and difference in textual representation) are only a handful of the most prominent such figures in the 20th century alone. In the Western tradition, rhetorical or behavioral imitation, theatricality and artistic realism all remain associated with the term, though such a list can barely contain the ‘thematic complex’ (Gebauer and Wulf 1995) which emerges in any examination of the ways in which mimesis has been conceptualized and employed (for a critical view of the historical development of the concept, see Gebauer and Wulf 1995 and Potolsky 2006).
A key 20th century intervention is that of the German critical theorist Walter Benjamin. Although others, from Aeschylus to Auerbach and beyond, have addressed the subject of mimesis, Benjamin focused attention specifically on a posited ‘faculty’ of mimesis, the mimetic faculty. Benjamin’s thinking on the notion of the mimetic faculty is presented in the succinct (posthumously published) essay “On the Mimetic Faculty” (1999/1933), itself a revision of an earlier fragment, titled “Doctrine of the Similar,” which was composed the same year (Rabinbach 1979: 60). The revised essay begins with a strong claim for the scope and significance of the posited faculty. As Benjamin puts it:
Nature produces similarities; one need only think of mimicry. The highest capacity for producing similarities, however, is man’s. His gift for seeing similarity is nothing but a rudiment of the once powerful compulsion to become similar and to behave mimetically. There is perhaps not a single one of his higher functions in which his mimetic faculty does not play a decisive role (Benjamin 1999/1933: 720).
For Benjamin, the mimetic faculty is historically dynamic; he mentions historical change in both “mimetic powers” and ”mimetic objects” – in the ability to produce and to recognize similarities. “[T]he perceptual world of modern man contains,” he writes, “only minimal residues of the magical correspondences and analogies that were familiar to ancient peoples” (ibid: 721) Such correspondences (that is, the perceived, felt and culturally relevant mutual connections which cast human and nature, self and other as part of an intimate and causally interrelated cosmological whole) are highlighted in mimetic production through dance (its “oldest function”) or in occult practices, “entrails, the stars,” magic, which sought – and produced – a mystical connection between macrocosm and microcosm, individuals and objects. The basic human impulse to such production is illustrated in children, who play “not only at being a shopkeeper or a teacher, but a windmill or a train” (ibid: 720). With regard to its historic transformation, Benjamin suggests that the mimetic faculty is subject to “increasingly fragility” in light of its displacement or permutation into the spoken and written forms of language.
Walter Benjamin On The Mimetic Faculty Pdf Book
Rather than the ‘sensuous similarity’ (which Benjamin still holds to provide an original basis of language formation, through something crudely akin to onomatopoetic utterances) of ‘primitive’ mimesis, a world dominated by linguistic representations and correspondences increasingly dwells in ‘non-sensuous similarities,’ such as (in his example) that which may be said to exist between a written word and its signified. But rather than simply being a system of arbitrary signs (as proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure), Benjamin suggests that language represents an increasingly disenchanted and codified extrusion of mimetic production. Moving from the mystical or occult realm of microcosm and macrocosm, where astrology both affects and reflects earthly human affairs and where incantations are forms of action, through the intermediary stage of runes or hieroglyphs, towards its contemporary form, “language may be seen as the highest level of mimetic behavior and the most complete archive of non-sensuous similarity: a medium into which earlier powers of mimetic production and comprehension have passed without residue, to the point where they have liquidated those of magic” (ibid: 722).
Taking up Benjamin’s ideas (and those of fellow Frankfurt School theorists Adorno and Horkheimer) sixty years later, Michael Taussig, in Mimesis and Alterity (1993), re-articulates the idea of that “famous ‘sixth sense’ […] a formidable mimetic faculty, the basis for judging similitude” (Taussig 1993: 213). This faculty, Taussig suggests, is “the nature that culture uses to create second nature” (ibid: xiii), implying an undecided space between the role of “sensuous” and “non-sensuous similarity” (and a ‘natural,’ pre-linguistic ‘sense’ which furnishes the bases upon which humans generate and discern resemblance or correspondence) in human experience and cultural systems. In essence, his project seeks avenues of recovery and possibility for aspects of the “powers of mimetic production and comprehension” which Benjamin sees as having been effectively “liquidated” (Benjamin 1999/1933: 722). Against the distance (and disvalue) imposed by historical developments that have overemphasized the representational primacy of language and Enlightenment rationality, he insists that symbols matter, that the human capacity for image-based, sensuous communication provides an alternate (and valuable) means of apprehending and acting upon the world.
Taussig concurs with earlier critical theorists’ contention that the onset of modernity has estranged the mimetic powers of contemporary Western subjects. At one point, he cites Adorno and Horkheimer’s suggestion that Western capitalist civilization has replaced “mimetic behaviour proper by organized control of mimesis”:
Uncontrolled mimesis is outlawed. The angel with the fiery sword who drove man out of paradise and onto the path of technical progress is the very symbol of that progress. For centuries, the severity with which the rulers prevented their own followers and the subjugated masses from reverting to mimetic modes of existence, starting with the religious prohibition on images, going on to the social banishment of actors and gypsies, and leading finally to the kind of teaching which does not allow children to behave as children, has been the condition of civilization (cited in Taussig 1993: 215, 219).
Against this procession, he presents a vision that is also, at times,2 consonant with some of the ideas of his Frankfurt School predecessors. When Taussig describes mimesis as invoking an “optical tactility, plunging us into the plane where the object world and the visual copy merge” (35), or when he invokes the possibilities of “mimetic excess” (“mimetic self-awareness,” (252, discussed further below), his position resonates with Adorno’s description of the mimetic faculty as enabling what he calls “vital experiences” (lebendige Erfahungen), by which creative artistic production and encounters with its products mobilize mimetic capacities to make it “possible for reality to absorb into itself the utopian promise of art and change itself” (Gebauer and Wulf 1995: 268; see also Gunster 2004).
Taussig invokes previous work on the ‘mimetic faculty’ in light of an analysis of ethnographic material describing the cultural worldview and practices of the Cuna Indians of San Blas, Panama. The latter, he suggests, conceive of “two levels of reality, spiritual and substantial […] seen as distinct yet complementary” (121). Thus, the worldview of the Cuna invokes a kind of “magical mimesis” by which “working on the copy, in this case the ‘spiritual copy’ is meant to effect the ‘original,’ in this case the substantial body” (ibid), as in the case of curative ritual and song in the Cuna tradition. Magical practices, such as the carving and ritual treatment of wooden figurines (which, at least since the 19th century, tend to resemble Europeans) for curative purposes, evoke the notion of “a secret sympathy” between objects and humans described by Frazer (1922: 138), “a kind of mimetic network of reciprocal influence” (Potolsky 2006: 138). Frazer, for his part, characterized such ‘sympathetic magic’ as mere superstition. Yet Taussig finds this aspect of Cuna cosmology doubled in theaffective notion of the ‘uncanny’ inFreud (as the “secretly familiar,” a return of the repressed familiarity of the womb) which he evokes alongside the Cuna view of reality as “a façade behind which the spiritual doubles are active” (125) – with the thought-provoking caveat that the Cuna “Origin Histories (equivalent to a thing’s soul/psyche)” (ibid) trace the whole world, rather than the individual self, to such a point of origin.
In his examinations of Cuna ethnography, Taussig notes the practices of appropriation and adaptive (creative or playful) representation of Western images and products in everyday life, in their cosmologies, and materially – for example, in the practice of mola making. The production of mola, elaborate cloth prints on blouses or head coverings, which incorporate all manner of technological artefacts, images from popular culture and trademarks of Western origin in their visual design (suggesting that these “excite the Indian’s imagination” (228)), generated what turned out to be a hot commodity in Western folk art markets – an interesting case of cross-cultural exchange. In a passage evoking a further connection between the cultural practices of the Cuna and their mimetic relations with western commodity-images, Taussig discusses ethnographic accounts of Cuna ritually burning illustrations from trade catalogues and spreading the ashes as a curative. This act “released the soul of the pictures, thus forming,” in the words of one ethnographer, “a vast shopping emporium,” the result of which was that “the evil spirits that were congregating upon a house got so busy looking at all the wonderful things contained in that store that they had no time to spare for [bothering] the sick person” (ibid: 134-135). Thus, the commodities of the West are accorded a special significance (the Cuna ‘kingdom of the dead’ is characterized as replete with Western commodities, the “Indian rich and the white man poor” (133)), but, as Taussig puts it, “[i]t’s as if some perversely nostalgic logic applies wherein the spirit-form can only exist as an active agent through the erasure of its material form” (135). This only serves to foreground the effect by which the “object, be it a commodity or fetish,” (and not just for the Cuna), “spills over its referent and suffuses its component parts with an ineffable radiance” (233).
Taussig goes on to reiterate his definition of “the mimetic faculty” as “the nature that culture uses to create second nature” (233), an echo of a more comprehensive version he employs earlier, which describes it as
the nature that culture uses to create second nature, the faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore difference, yield into and become Other. The wonder of mimesis lies in the copy drawing on the character and power of the original, to the point whereby the representation may even assume that character and that power (xiii).
The focus on the commodity (and its image) which often inflects the text, apparent throughout Taussig’s discussion and connecting his concerns with those of Benjamin and Adorno, is especially relevant in reference to the wonderment of Westerners enchanted by the mola, a case where the ‘primitive’ representation of recognizably Western images – case-in-point being the appropriated motif of the ‘talking dog’ image trademarked and made famous by RCA Victor– only further highlights the movement of fashion and novelty inherent in the procession of commodity culture. “What,” Taussig asks, “could better highlight, magnify, and bring out the viscerality hidden in the optical unconscious than the auratic sheen of mimesis and alterity provided by these demure women stitching the West on their chests with the same gesture as they preserve tradition?” (231). At play is the very notion of representation and re-framing across cultural context, the possibility of the West portraying its Other, and in turn being portrayed (and sold to itself) as othered by its Others. As Taussig suggests,
Such interaction created mimetic excess – mimetic self-awareness, mimesis turned on itself, on its colonial endowment, such that now, in our time, mimesis as a natural faculty and mimesis as a historical product turn in on each other as never before […] Selves dissolve into senses and the senses show signs of becoming their own theoreticians as world histories regroup (Taussig 1993: 252-253).
Bringing together both notions of sympathetic magic and the captivation with which Westerners view mola adorned with re-worked representations of images such as the ‘talking dog’ (an image which has its own power in the original, evocative of that which an array of such images may hold over us in excess of their specific content, viewed in detached fashion), Taussig describes an operation which makes the symbolic co-extensive with the material, allowing the action of the former upon the latter. His most basic interest, he writes, is in the “the power of the copy to influence what it is a copy of” (250). Taussig further insists upon the tendency towards a “radical displacement of self” implied by the operations of the mimetic faculty, and sees this radical displacement as potentially positive generative possibility in the present. “Sentience takes us outside of ourselves,” Benjamin writes, and for Taussig, “no proposition could be more fundamental to understanding the visceral bond connecting perceiver to perceived in the operation of mimesis” (1993: 39). This, he concludes, speaks to “[t]he fundamental move of the mimetic faculty taking us bodily into alterity” (ibid: 40).
As one commentator on Taussig’s text summarizes, “The power of the mimetic faculty devolves from its fundamental sensuality: miming something entails contact” (Stoller 1994: 157). This ‘contact,’ however, falls outside of models of perception that cast the senses merely as means of observing a given object. The recognition, as well as the production, of similarity in mimetic endeavors entails a more elemental connection with that which lies outside of the self; albeit historically (and culturally) variable in how it is experienced and deployed, the mimetic faculty is posited as a kind of pre-modern, embodied ‘imagination’ that works against the divide between subject and object and underlies possibilities for understanding and recognition. The appeal to an underlying faculty that renders possible the achievement of any representational act and suggests a more ‘natural,’ visceral component at work is almost endlessly suggestive. It implies, as does the ambiguity that often surrounds the very term ‘mimesis’ from its cultural origins to the diverse treatments it is given by contemporary thinkers, that the play of similarity and difference, imitation and creative action, are somehow both fundamental and fundamentally unclear in their boundaries. The power and fascination that invests image-based, sensuous forms of communication, we may perhaps conclude, lies not, strictly speaking, in any of the five senses recognized by traditional science. Rather, as Taussig suggests, the mimetic faculty may stand for consideration as a kind of “sixth sense” (213).
Notes
1. Indeed, such concerns prompted Plato to suggest a need for limits on mimetic endeavors – as in the case of the guardians of the polis, who were to avoid inessential craft-making, effeminate conduct or the imitation of the sounds of nature. He essentially suggested that they keep their minds on their business, as it were. More broadly, he was concerned to exclude uncontrolled or plural mimetic practices and influences, in favour of those which reinforced functional behaviour and instilled a love of order (Gebauer and Wulf 1995: 6, 25-30). Nonetheless, a remarkable plurality of meanings can be ascribed to mimesis in Plato’s work: “in addition to imitation, representation, and expression, there is also emulation, transformation, the creation of similarity, the production of appearances, and illusion” (ibid: 25).
2.For a view critical of Taussig’s deployment of Benjamin and Adorno, see Jay 1993.
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