This week's reading dealt with a interesting tradition of the critique of modes of representation and an interrogation of representation as a practice. Taussig mentions that in Benjamin's work he "liken[s] the process of opening the optical unconscious to the surgeon's hand entering the body and cautiously feeling its way around the organs" (31). The "optical unconscious" which is acted upon through an "interpenetration" of body and image. In this sense its not only visual but also tactile, a synesthesia. Taussig notes that in the "penetration" there is also a "transgression" of the taboo: "the body is entered, the organs palpated" (ibid). If Taussig suggest through Bataille that the "function of the taboo is to hold back violence," and that "this tactile knowing of embodied is also the dangerous knowledge....damned by the taboo," then is this to say that the mimetic faculty either is a violent act or is that which enables violence? Can we read Derrida's notion of the arche-writing as a "violence" as a reading of the "mimetic faculty"? Is there a violence or penetration (in reference to Taussig's first chapter) in the magic of representation that gives power to the individual who represents over the represented?
One moment we would particularly like to interrogate comes from Benjamin's essay "On the Mimetic Faculty." Here Benjamin attributes a "history" to the "mimetic faculty" in two senses: "the phylogenetic" and "the ontogenetic." Benajmin states for the "ontogenetic sense" of the mimetic faculty's history that,
play is for many its school. Children's play is everywhere permeated by mimetic modes of behavior, and its realm is by no means limited to what one person can imitate in another. The child plays at being not only a shopkeeper or teacher but also a windmill and a train. (OMF, 160).
Benjamin thus sees an originary or development of the mimetic faculty from "play" and particularly exposes this in his example of the "child." Is this theoretical move a reduction of the mimetic faculty and mimesis to "nature," "the primitive," and "the child?" What then would be at stake in such a grouping? How does Taussig support or resist this grouping in his own writing?
-SS SF
Response to close reading of Benjamin's essay "On the Mimetic Faculty.":
ReplyDeleteTaussig addresses the alleged primitivism of the mimetic faculty in chapter 15 His Master’s Voice when discussing the Cuna mola of the Talking Dog trademark. The value that westerners place on this mimesis is in “restoring the aura to the opening up of the optical unconscious achieved by those machines” (231). He suggests that this magic/ cult value is re-imposed by the conception of the Third World as permanently outdated –“where future meets past in the dying body of the commodity” (232). This regressive state of the obsolete appeals to the children’s play of mimesis Benjamin introduces and seems to espouse that mimesis is primitive insofar as it restages the economies of meaning of the fetishized object. We should think about how the interplay of contact and imitation allow for this reappropriation/altered valuation.
What intrigued me about the Benjamin text "On the Mimetic Faculty" was the choice of words used and how this relates to the grouping mentioned in the close reading. Mimesis, going back to Plato, always has been rooted in a hierarchical view of the world. When we look at the words Benjamin uses to describe mimesis, we notice two trends. First, the "mimetic faculty" is described in organic and biological terms, something that can "decay" or go through "transformation" (p. 161). This biological aspect of mimesis is further emphasized when it is linked with "historical change" (p. 161), from some "remote past" (p. 161) to the now "we" (p. 162) experience. This contains the assertion that mimesis must change to fit the environment it is in, showing an evolutionary character assigned to mimesis, i.e. if it is to survive and not die out, it needs to adapt to the context surrounding it. This characterization of mimesis is linked with the second way it is described, as something that is linked to "higher functions" of man (p. 160) and something that is progressing, becoming more complex and rising to some higher "level" (p. 163). Since evolution is always towards something better, something more useful and something that has more value, what does mean for mimesis and also about humanity in general?
ReplyDeleteWhen we think about the world as discussed in this text, we notice it and everything in it based on an evolutionary model of hierarchies. In terms of human behavior, for example, it progresses from simple to more complex, from past to present and from child to adult. But why is it changing? Who is changing it? We see that what is eliminated in this evolutionary models is human agency. Any change is only done by natural selection, is done because it makes sense for it to adapt to the world around it. The reason "we" (p. 162) do the things "we" do is because natural selection makes this behavior more valuable. Nowhere in his text does Benjamin actually consider the lived experience of a particular person or even group of people. For him, the "we" he describes lives and exists in the same historical space and time, only distinctly different from an imaginary "we" in the past. In this past stage, we can see the roots of our current behavior. In children, nature and the primitive, we see glimpses of this past. Going back to agency, we can see that these groupings lack any of it, since the progress he describes seems predetermined, unavoidable and inevitable. The past is stuck on lower level and the child, the primitive the animal is stuck in the past or on one certain path towards "our" future.
The question this raises is what is at stake in this hierarchy and is mimesis as universal as the author describes it? Also, since mimesis is seen as differing within this system of hierarchy, what exactly are the levels of this hierarchy and how are they determined? Lastly, if we consider the notion of "center," around which mimesis is built, how are the different levels and the groups contained within them located around this center?
Btw, I noticed I might have gotten hung up on a very small and quite unimportant point about mimesis or just completely missed a key point. If this is the case, I apologize. But as an anthro major, I just always have some sort of problem if things are described without context and without human agency. If my point wasn't clear, that's essentially what I am trying to critique.
ReplyDeleteI thought the way Ben looked at mimesis was really interesting; I think that the critique to include lived experiences is a good one, however I feel like setting the mimetic faculty as a biological trait can turn up to be a little problematic. If we are to take Taussig's claim that the mimesis is a way of othering seriously, then shouldn't the mimetic faculty run parallel to and not be subsumed by evolutionary selection? Can our ability to other be seen as an adaptive function itself? Is Othering/Mimesis a way of extrapolating natural selection into the social sphere in a non-Capitalistic way (as opposed to what the term "social Darwinism" is taken to mean)?
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, mimesis, like natural selection, is based around and gets its power from contingency. In fact it is not an ability to Other that makes a species for survival (to keep up with the environment, aka nature, which is constantly Othering)