The image looks at me and something in it strikes me. Having been looked at by it, I want to look like it. I make my own image in the image of the image. My image circulates, goes looking for others. Others make their own images, in its image, and those images look back at me. As images, we become not only like one another but also like ourselves.
From the ABC to the BBL,1 mimicry is all around us. Mimicry is the means by which we learn about the world and come into being as individuals. It is not only children who learn by repetition: adults are compelled by acts of repetition, too. Mimicry stays with us, haunting our sense of individuality. Even as adults, we are not rational actors but mimics, driven to act like others. After making what I believe was a conscious choice, I will often find I have been influenced. It might even be that I do not exactly imitate someone else, but my environment. It is often through mimicry that the environment is seen to act on us. It is surely through some obscure process of mimicry that a crowd might be led to some collective act of joy or violence.
The animal world provides insights into this disturbing process. In the 1930s, some influential thinkers turned to non-human mimicry in an attempt to understand mass politics and, in particular, the contagion of fascism. The French intellectual Roger Caillois (1913-1978) studied animals, insects and rocks, and his research offers important insights into human behaviour. He argued that mimicry is not a narrow strategy for survival, as assumed within Darwinian biology, but a dangerous, luxurious, and open-ended activity. Caillois’ writings, not well-known today, informed the work of Georges Bataille, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Jacques Lacan, among others, and remain an important archive for understanding the role of mimicry in modern society.
In the twenty-first century, we are faced with new forms of fascist mimicry. These do not necessarily assume the familiar guise of the mob raging in the streets or the troops regimented at a rally. Instead, it is often a disparate set of actors believing themselves to be individuals, with distinct preferences and experiences, who enact fascism’s imperatives. Mimicry is no less fundamental to this phenomenon, and an analysis of the contemporary forms of fascism might learn from theories of mimicry. At the same time, technologies of mimicry are becoming ever more complex, skillful, and autonomous, becoming themselves agents of mimicry. Today, mimicry reveals itself most obviously on social media, where we represent ourselves in conventionalized images that bind us to others and to our environment. It is here that we most carefully curate our own self-image and here that we are most vulnerable to contagion. Seeing images mimic each other, we witness a kind of mimicry that is outside human agency.
Art has traditionally been a place where the human impulse to mimic is most visible. But it is not so simple. Here, we should distinguish between two different activities: on the one hand, a conscious act of representation, which we could call by the Greek term mimesis, and on the other hand, an unconscious impulse, shared by humans and animals, which we will call mimicry. Mimesis has been a major topic of art theory, from the Ancient Greeks to the modern age, whereas the not-exclusively-human activity of mimicry has had a more elusive role in art. Caillois invites us to see animal mimicry as a basis for reconceptualising human aesthetics. What might the artist and the chameleon tell us about each other?
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At a house party in Malibu, a philosopher and a comic are standing together when another guest - an actor - makes an early departure. Absent-mindedly, the philosopher extends a hand to bid the actor farewell, only to realize that in the place of his hand is a prosthetic iron claw. Shaking the actor’s claw, the philosopher experiences a wave of shock, which he quickly masks with a polite expression. No sooner has the actor turned his back, than the comic begins to imitate the philosopher’s embarrassed cover-up with his own cartoon grimace, the mimic drawing attention to the forms of mimicry that are fundamental to social life.
Recalling this experience some years later, the philosopher Theodor Adorno writes of the comic Charlie Chaplin: “All the laughter he brings about is so near to cruelty; solely in such proximity to cruelty does it find its legitimation and its element of the salvational.” Here we see how theories of mimicry have been elaborated against the background of fascism: Adorno was a Jewish refugee from fascist Europe, and he notes in his remembrance that the actor in question had lost his hand in the Second World War. In Adorno’s retelling, Chaplin’s act illustrates how art’s playful mimicry might work against the mimetic impulse to cruelty, as was manifest in the mobs of Nazi Germany. And here Adorno guides us to see in the art of mimicry a kind of salvation. In recognizing that we are mimetic creatures rather than individuals, we might recognize how much our fates are bound up with one another and our environment.
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The new print issue of Effects is devoted to mimicry’s special and expansive functions. Whereas the first two issues of this journal were devoted to thinking about aesthetic effects, their social and political histories, this issue focuses on the activity of mimicry not only within art but a wide array of intellectual disciplines. It includes materials from artists, psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, critics, and poets. Thinking about mimicry dissolves the boundaries between humans and animals, sociology and entomology, aesthetics and biology, and generates a dazzling array of new metaphors (if they are metaphors) for human behaviour. For example, what if we were to see certain human facial expressions as patterns for warding off predators?
The contributors to Effects 3: Mimicries show how the study of the non-human world sooner or later betrays the myths of human exceptionalism, exposing us to our dependency on our environment, and in doing so illuminating new ways of relating to it and to each other. The editors of this special issue, Jeffrey Stuker and Jan Tumlir, point out in their ‘ABC of Mimicry’ (pages 166-201 of Effects 3: Mimicries) that Freud’s discoveries were published in a journal called Imago, which is also the term for the last stage of an insect’s metamorphosis. They speculate that the name of Freud’s journal was inspired by a nineteenth-century journal of entomology, entitled Psyche. Stuker and Tumlir write: “There would be no psychology without psyche—in Greek, the word for soul and also for butterfly.” And we could also say, there could be no art without mimicry.