The Movement of Mimesis

 

 

 

                                        

    The mimetic element in language can, like a flame, manifest itself only through

a kind of bearer: the semiotic element.

                                                            - Walter Benjamin –

                                               

 

 

Referring to an incident at a conference in Britain for sociologists and anthropologists of religion, where a scholar received a violent reaction to a paper on her work with a gay evangelical church in the US, Simon Coleman observes: “As a form of witness, the paper lacked any analytic framing through which the speaker could reclaim a professional form of personal identity” (2008, 49). Given the intense drive of academia and academics to retain personal identity and authorship in their work, one could read this incident, this aggressive outpouring, as a natural reaction to an attempt to dissolve authorship and hence personal voice and selfhood. As Coleman writes, “What was being presented had entirely merged ethnographic and evangelising voices” (49). Such an intense and violent manifestation of ‘unease’ that a merging of self and other, of ethnographer and evangelist, of the two poles of being and of knowing, serves to reveal the extent to which we lay claim to some form of impenetrability, of autonomy, of selfhood and authority. The participants of the conference were intent on destroying such an example, such a paradigm, so as to ensure that the two poles of self and other retained a ground or foundation of purity, of separable, individual integrity.

 

Before Coleman moves on to give another ethnographic example, in referring to the incident just outlined, he says: “In the example I have just given, the dangerous affinities between the pulpit and the academic podium might seem to be evident” (49). This merging is somehow a ‘danger’, it seems to presents a threat in some way. Perhaps the question we should ask is whether these two poles, in this case the ‘pulpit’ and the ‘academic podium’, are separable. In replacing priests as the saviors of civilization, have academics not established a secular priesthood? Have they not simply taken the same role, the same function, by embodying a different discourse as their veil?

 

In What is Enlightenment Kant explicitly dethrones the priests, the clergy, and passes the torch to scholars, to the priesthood of modernity, to the defenders and preachers of reason, of science and technology. Kant was of course formalizing or theorizing what had been taking shape in Europe for some time, which is why he was able to freely say such things. The scholars, like the Platonic philosopher-kings, now on top, having, with the lordship of reason, supplanted God from his place at the summit of the scala naturae or great chain of being, will bring enlightenment and reason to the people. Kant tries to avoid this top down or hierarchical political ontology, but he fails miserably epistemologically, as his brief text and the subsequent history of the academy has made clear. There are those who know and those who do not and the preponderance of ‘information’ in the modern age cleverly masks the lack of knowledge and hence power available to the secular priesthood’s congregation, to hoi polloi, a lack that is comparable to the ‘ignorance of the Dark Ages’.

 

When Coleman speaks of such dichotomous categories as self/other and here/there or home/field, there always remains some core of permanence, wherein the two poles remain and dictate the play that takes place in between them. He speaks of “blending the Self with the Other” (2002, 76), where some identity for each is retained. Both poles are capitalized, absolutized, so that they might retain some core of identity, of un-alterity; for if there were simply pure otherness, then there would be no self and hence no otherness; identities, authorial prerogative and any and all semblance of purity and power would dissipate. The woman whose paper was received so aggressively, who wholly merged the poles, who stepped beyond polarity itself, had to be violently dragged back into the in-between dictated by the poles so as to avoid a disruption of the structure. What if we do not drag her back? What will her movements outside the structure reveal? 

 

Coleman speaks of mimesis. Mimesis is a copying, a falsifying of an original, of a being that has an internal integrity, which is in itself unrepresentable. Yet what happens in the process of mimesis and what does the work of this movement reveal about the structure of polarity, most significantly about self and other? Is the mimetic task a simple representation of a presentation, a reformulation of that which has an integral formulation, a core of identity, of sameness? In being prompted “to wonder about the nature and direction of mimesis” in his fieldwork, Coleman asks “Who…has been mimicking whom?” (78), but is it not the case that what takes-place, what occupies space, is mimicry itself?

 

Is mimesis “an appropriation of the other” (2008, 42), as Coleman believes? To appropriate is to make ones own, to make the other into oneself: appropriation is a movement of self-creation. The self, the scholar engaged in fieldworker, appropriates the other, that which occupies the field, whatever or whomever it may be, so as to be able to represent the other. There appears to be representation (by the self) of a presentation here, yet the originary movement is itself a presentation that has been represented (by the other). Charles Darwin, “standing on a beach in Tierra del Fuego,” finds the natives mimicking him (2002, 75). In re-presentating their presentation, is he not representing a representation? For Darwin, appropriation of the other becomes re-appropriation of the self. There is always presentation, upon which there is a building of layers of representations. The other, the object of the self’s gaze, is presenting himself to the other; he is aware of the other’s gaze and so becomes other than himself, than his self, assuming something remains behind, that some ‘thing’ is not presented. But Darwin’s story tells us more, it tells us that as Darwin reappropriates his self through the other, the natives of Tierra del Fuego self-other themselves and represent what has been presented to them through a presentation which is itself a representation, which they have appropriated. 

 

The movement of mimesis is complex and the question of ‘who mimics whom’ is lost amidst this problematic flow of self and other, of presentation and representation. What appears is the possibility of a pure movement of representation and hence only of reappropriation, which precludes any reference to an originary presentation or appropriation. We are led to ask where there is some essential residue that remains in this complex movement of representation and reappropriation, whether we can locate a presentation and hence appropriation, which assumes a core of identity. If to appropriate, to make ones own, is a process of self-creation, then does this not reveal to us that the self is itself  a creation, an assemblage of appropriated ‘material’? This would mean that presentation and appropriation are always already representation and reappropriation and that the self is entirely mimetic.

 

Yet, this movement appears counterintuitive, since there seems to always be some form of conflict or tension created in the encounter between self and other. This is where the importance of spatiality emerges. There is an encounter between self and other, but it is not an encounter between identities, between grounded poles. The encounter takes-place between grounding beings, not between grounded poles. The encounter is not one of givenness, of essentiality, but one that actively takes-place. The self has its world, its dwelling place, what has taken-place over time, over its existence. This world is always limited because of its horizonal finitude. Consequently, each self necessarily encounters otherness, others with different worlds, different dwellings. The difference of degree of the otherness that the self encounters in various others depends on the content that the self has made its own. The otherness that Coleman encountered in Sweden, as he himself notes, was more familiar than, say, the otherness encountered by Chagnon among the Yanomamö. This is not a difference of essence, of identity, but of space. Any ‘integrity’, any ‘identity’ or ‘self-sameness’ emanating from the self arises from its location, its place of dwelling, where it has taken-up its created and creating ground. Through this logic self-creation and mimesis become movements of representation and reappropriation of otherness, which is only other, and this to varying degrees, because of its necessary distance from the self. The self thus becomes entirely mimetic.

 

Just as the finitude of the self limits the space that it can occupy through the mode of spatiality, it also limits the time that it can occupy through the mode of temporality. Each self lives through a history, which becomes its own, which it reappropriates for itself. Each self is limited to its history, what it has made into its own history, which arises out of its necessary historicity brought about by the mode of temporality dictated by finitude.

 

The self, through its finitude, spatially and temporally conceived, is its lived experience, its finite actuality. There is nothing essential about this. The ‘self’ bespeaks nothing more than its finitude. Yet finitude is more than its finite actuality, it also manifests an infinite potentiality, a potentiality that can take the self so far afield that it can transcend itself and become wholly other, to entirely merge with an otherness that is infinitely other to it. Chagnon, who had never witnesses such an intense otherness as when he first encountered the Yanomamö, “abandons the ethnographic task of collecting genealogies and begins to act like a human in Yanomamö terms” (n.3). The self becomes the other.

 

In the 1999 film Instinct, based on the novel Ishmael, written by Daniel Quinn, the infinite potential of finitude becomes immanently vivid. An anthropologist, having disappeared for sometime, reappears accused of murder and is deemed to be too violent and dangerous to even be considered for reassimilation into the human population. Through the keen work of a young psychologist, we come to know that the anthropologist had lived among gorillas to the extent that he had become one of them, not as a human being among gorillas, but as a gorilla among gorillas. The human being had become his other, he had shed his self and taken-up another of another species. In the end the anthropologist escapes the ‘human world’, what was no longer his dwelling place, what had become other to his self, and returns to his world, to his being among the gorillas.   

 

It would be fitting to recall the life of Jane Goodall here, even though she, unlike the anthropologist in Instinct, has never abandoned her human self and continues to dwell among human beings. However, it is significant that her task, after two decades of dwelling (to varying degrees) among chimpanzees, has become one of bringing the self and other, the human and the chimp, closer together – her task has become to chisel away the space and history dividing the two species. Perhaps this is the unending, unachievable adventure of finitude, of its infinite potentiality: to overcome its finite actuality, and not, contrarily, to veil itself in a mythical identity and false sense of security. Perhaps this is mimesis.

~ by Babak on December 7, 2008.