Mimesis
Michael Demers
Mimesis as an ape. Mimesis as a flash. Mimesis as magic, as spirit, mimesis as the RCA Victor dog. Mimesis as Cuna shaman and Western explorer, seeing each other’s reflection in the eyes of the Other. Mimesis as instigator of Panamanian revolution. Mimesis as the blue light bulb.
Mimesis as a hyper-Proustian commingling of the past, present and future. A “revelatory chamber of mirrors.” Mimetic “second contact” dissolving borders between nature and history, mimetic excess providing the opportunity to “live as neither subject nor object of history but as both, at one and the same time.”
Is there anything which mimesis does not do?
“The nature that culture uses to create second nature.” The “copy” drawing upon the “original,” operating the same as Frazer’s “sympathetic magic.” The copy lacking Benjamin’s “aura” of the “original,” in which case the difference leads us to a greater understanding of them both.
“Explore difference, yield into and become Other.” Red Peter. “In some way or another one can protect oneself from evil spirits by portraying them.” Power over that which is being portrayed…
“Sure, The Matrix was great,” my mimetic-Taussig states while sipping his coffee. “The effects were really nice. But honestly – reality is a construct, I grant this, but how does this idea help us go about our lives? A preamble to investigation has been converted instead into a conclusion – sex is a social construction, race is a social construction, the nation is an invention. Nobody’s asking what’s the next step? How is it that, knowing this, we get on living?
“Mimesis is my reality pill. Mimesis also happens to be my rabbit hole, my Alice, my Neo, and my understanding of you through your understanding of this. Do you have any more cream?”
Taussig states that Benjamin’s interpretation of mimesis was that of a compulsion, a compulsion to become Other. And here I’ve been thinking that Benjamin spoke of understanding the relationship between producer and product in a new (industrial/capitalist) age. Is Taussig extrapolating? Is he sensing that Benjamin’s man of the past, after experiencing what Marx termed a removal of the personal through mass production, now seeks to become the Other which has, or at least understands, that relationship? Unless “Other” now encompasses locomotives…
“And what, mimetic-Taussig, about Frazer? How much due should we give him?” I ask, sipping my own coffee in turn.
“Well, my interest began, and still rests, on the power of the copy to influence what it is a copy of. This was a primitivist view of magic. Frazer’s charming charms seduced me too.”
It certainly makes sense. Even our modern mimetic acts are grounded in a “sympathetic magic.” Imitation and contact of a new, mechanically reproduced, kind. And through all of our attempts at comprehension by exploring the differences and similarities between these two things, original and copy, Western and Other, etc., we come to the conclusion that in our search for identity, “there is no such thing as identity,” but that “nevertheless, the masks of appearance do more than suffice. They are absolute necessity.” Because:
“Mimetic excess…provides a welcome opportunity to live subjunctively as neither subject nor object of history but as both, at one and the same time. Mimetic excess is a somersaulting back to sacred actions implicated in the puzzle that empowered mimesis any time, any place – namely the power to both double yet double endlessly, to become any Other and engage the image with the reality thus imagized.”
There is no beginning, and there is no end. Reality as fiction, original as copy. The ties that bind are not really there, the borders have disappeared.
Mimesis as tranquility, harmony, silence.
Note: All quotes in this paper, as well as much (but not all) of the dialog spoken by the mimetic-Taussig, are attributed to Taussig’s Mimesis and Alterity.