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Warbling J Turpitude's avatar

" 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"

Could you, dB, further clarify/expand on that part, perhaps? I cannot think of a single instance in which such a "glimpse" ever presented itself or became possible. Whilst your exploration of the mimetic here is of course highly stimulating and first-rate, i STILL feel as if i am suspended thereby in theoretical animation, without the slightest recourse to any obviously 'corroborating' worldly experience that i can point to. And i don't really 'get' your use of "normative" and "authoritative' there. And who could ever be identified as specific *model* for s/he who is hooked on a screen? Did not in effect 'the screen get there first'? Or wouldn't the.. trail of models amount to a sort of reductio ad absurdum?

Another of the several questions that arose as i read was, but did anyone actually "talk (explicitly) about (the fundamentality of) imitation" prior to the "foundational" "breaking off" of postmodernity?

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