Exhaustive Imitation

Working consistently with mimetic theory would assume everything we do is imitation and should therefore be described in those terms, or in terms that could readily be converted into mimetic ones. The implications of this are, for example, that rather than asking about the “ideas” of thinkers like Rene Girard and Eric Gans we would ask whom they are imitating, and how. Mimesis is two-sided: first of all, it is unconscious and discovered (if at all) after fact, usually through some unpleasant revelation; on the other hand, more deliberately, it is a way of approaching others from the outside so as to take on their attributes and their power. Perhaps the most constructive approach to mimesis would be to narrow the gap between the two by detecting early on who is getting under your skin and getting under theirs. But I rarely see such exhaustive approaches. Gans wrote a couple of Chronicles a little while back that were the first few chapters of a prospective memoir, and so one would think the narrative would proceed from model to model, but that’s not the case at all—it’s autonomous individual all the way, even as a young child. Much imitation, maybe, in a sense, all imitation, involves getting imitation wrong—falsifying or distorting the model. That question opens up a vast field of inquiry into learning, first of all, and also into cultural difference. Mimetic theory focuses primarily on imitation that leads to rivalry, that then leads to crisis, but this itself distorts the field—that trajectory probably accounts for a tiny number of (admittedly extremely important) imitative acts, and itself must be understood against the background of less sensational imitations. If everything you do can’t be described as an imitation, or you’re unwilling or unable to engage the question, that seems to me to falsify or limit mimetic theory—the demand that the theorist account for his “subject position” is far more urgent here than in the victimary sciences.

So who, you might ask, do I imitate? Pretty much everything I read, for starters. I read to acquire language, and you acquire language through immersion which means trying out all the implications of a particular way of thinking until you’ve exhausted it and to some extent it has become part of your repertoire. That means I read one thing and therefore imitate the voice in that text, or its logic of composition, through other texts that I am imitating as a reader. It’s imitation all the way down—I can’t be the only one who sees this, because if I were, that would make me the only real mimetic theorist. In most cases, if asked, I could do a fairly good job anatomizing the stances I take up in a particular piece of writing or personal interaction and in most cases would not mind doing so. I’ll give you an example: when I started advancing rather uninhibited critiques of some of Gans’s Chronicles a few years ago (i.e., when I started being impolite) it was in the course of a strong dose of Wyndham Lewis, whose vigorous aggressive style I wanted to try out, in part as a way of figuring out what, exactly, Lewis was after (I’m still not sure). Along the way I started channeling the polemical stances of a very engaged Marxist professor I had back in grad school, albeit from a diametrically opposed political position. Am I “inauthentic,” then, never having developed my own real self? Which is another way of asking whether I can be trusted, whether I have grown up, etc. But those questions can be answered in the same vein—insofar as I’ve adopted and mis-taken adult models and apprehended their modes of operation, testing them in unanticipated situations, yes, I’ve got my own self and have grown up; and if I have, say, adopted and synthesized sturdy models, whether from literature or “life,” that both enabled me to see through and find revolting the evasions and charades of others and furthermore embodied bravery (or at least a bit of audaciousness) and a willingness to confront adversity then, yes, I’ve got a perfectly good and trustworthy self. There is also the question of whether I’ve shaped my practices so as to provide imitable models for others.

I’ve pointed out before as have others the shamefulness, in the modern world, of confessing to being an imitator. And imitation is certainly closely connected to, and is really the source of, shame. Getting that glimpse of yourself from another, normative and authoritative position (a position, that is, you see as original and unmediated by imitation), and finding yourself to be other than you imagined and sorely lacking, is, of course, a thoroughly mimetic affair. Whether one wants to contribute to the shame elements of culture or reconstruct them, without simply replacing them with shamelessness, is also a mimetic question. Who do we take as a model as we take up such a question? It should be the mimetic theorists, but are they any help? Do they want to be, or do they want to be appraisers of cultural artifacts? I’m not asking for help for myself, even if 35 years ago I could have used some—I’ve got a stable stable of models to work with and want to help others, if I can. Of course, we are often more of a pastiche than imitators of a single model—if I ask myself who I imitate when I write I realize I’d need a bibliography and a whole new project which I consider less important than the ones I’m currently embarked on. And we don’t always know—sometimes we’d need to treat own writing or, for that matter, our own selves, in the manner of archaeologists or philologists, and follow up traces and anomalies. I think very few people would like to be pressed on these matters, and that’s precisely because the obligation to be original has become a modern imperative so imitation has become shameful. (Shouldn’t we really be talking about nothing other than our models?) Previously the notion that one acts imitatively would have been a given, making the major pedagogical and political problems the creation, promotion and inculcation of worthy models. Who were those foundational modern thinkers who proposed breaking off the individual from his fixed role in the universe imitating? Maybe they were imitating rebelliously, acting out of resentment (what kind of imitation is involved in resentment—that of the Devil’s Advocate, the “adversary”?), in this case in the sense that their rightful place had been usurped, and they were going to usurp in turn. Modernity is really just a case for endless usurpation on the dubious grounds that you have always already been usurped. Most of mimetic theory seemed to be against “postmodernism,” but what accounts for the preference for modernity, for, say the realist novel that presents a world for the reader to enter imaginatively over the novel that abolishes boundaries between reader and writer, fiction and reality? Is it that the former seems to be doing the same kind of theory the mimetic theorists take themselves to be doing (that is, the kind of writing and thinking they are imitating?), while the latter take away (usurp) any external position from which to undertake the analysis, so your imitative and derivative status is exposed?

Imitation plays a critical role in the emergence of literacy, on David Olson’s account: as I’ve reviewed many times, he analyzes the transformation brought about by writing by focusing on the problem of reported speech: in conveying the speech of another on an oral scene, one imitates the voice, tone, gesture, etc., of the speaker so as to convey the full meaning and implication along with the words; one cannot do this in writing, so the metalanguage of literacy is invented so as to refer to realm of the implicit in framing the speech of others. This reduces the intensity of imitation and allows for the emergence of a space of de-escalated imitation that we can pretend isn’t imitation at all. Here is where the problem of “metaphysics” lies—in the pretense that there is a space separable from the desires and resentments unavoidably present in oral spaces where everyone is directly imitating everyone else all the time. Olson and many others see a cognitive revolution in this liberation of the declarative from its ostensive and imperative roots because one can now frame and scenify events natural and human, from outside of the scene, disinvested, untargeted. But writing is ultimately as imitative as speech or any other human activity even if the modes of imitation are delayed and formalized: we are always writing within or proximate to a particular genre or discipline with its models of discourse. The sense of an underlying falseness to metaphysics is therefore correct, and the bill comes due when crises can only ultimately be understood as violations of precisely that imaginary space of reflection produced by the written word. There’s a stylistic imperative here, then, if one wants to pursue mimetic thought to its logical conclusions (i.e., not stop when it starts to interfere with your intellectual and institutional pretensions and drag you onto a scene portending some exposure of the “training data”): each use of some element of the metalanguage of literacy is a kind of machinery put in place to erect the space of writing over overt scenicity, and if you imitate satirically the lifting and maintenance done by all the “suggests,” “implies,” “indicates,” “claims,” “understands,” etc., then you re-populate the devastated communicative landscape with the noise and polyphony of potential scenes, meta-scenes and mega-scenes. The work of deferral delegated to the mandarin class of disinterested bystanders can be transferred to those arranging the betting markets on the future.

It seems to me that Girardian mimetic theory likes to feel it’s playing on the biggest scenes, with angels and devils and apocalyptic crises of nations, while Gansian mimetic theory is content to admit we’re just hooked to our screens if only there weren’t so many ads for the victimary streaming and intruding upon our enjoyment. The pretentiousness and complacency can both be deferred by remembering that technology joins us in the practice of imitation and always had even well before the emergence of the linguistic imitation programmed into Large Language Models. Imitation includes anticipation and prediction, which is both the source of the dangerous conflicts mimetic theory is specialized in detecting but also of the deferral once prediction takes one step beyond “how will he get that thing before I can” to “what if we both try to get it at exactly the same time.” The originary gesture is, of course an imitation, even if it’s a novel action, because what it’s imitating is impending stalemate or deadlock—humanity, in this imitation in advance, was always computational. Only once the sign predicts and thereby cancels the impending confrontation do we have a scene, and what a scene does is choreograph movements in such a way that they predict each other. Prediction, in these terms, is complex: like prophecy, it says what is going to happen in order to shape what will happen and that often includes preventing what is predicted. The first scene is iterated as a ritual scene, which is built so as to commemorate that first scene and make the outcome of similar subsequent scenes more predictable. But the most effective way of doing this is by making room for the unpredictable on the scene, providing it with its modes of expression, its gestures and. postures, and then dissolving it into the completion of the event. The scene includes a study of its composition within itself. We now live within a global infrastructure, which is nothing but a stack of scenes aimed at coordinating human activity in predictable ways. The most useful service mimetic theory can provide for humanity is to enter the fray and help imitate increasingly virtual activities in their furthest extents precisely in order to inflect the machinery towards an apprehension of moves that might seem dangerous from the standpoint of those currently with their hands on the levers but might in fact be precursors of new modes of deferral if choreographed even a little differently. There is an inevitable power struggle involved here, insofar as performing this service will mean imitating those with their hands on the levers who cannot, on the current stack of scenes, well imagine a mode of succession that will “verify” that their hand are, in fact, on the levers. A kind of originary satire is required here, in which one invents the gestures that display the terminal points of actions taken within the oscillation of debt issuance on the one hand, and debt enforcement on the other (roughly, the central banks and the national security/intelligence agencies). Those interested in a negentropic politics will have to imitate those actors in an anticipatory manner, enacting rituals, judgments and modes of knowledge production that at least some of them might want to imitate in turn insofar as they get a glimpse of the succession problem—which is itself a problem of creating and installing durably imitable dispositions.