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
