How far has any mimetic theorist taken the notion of mimesis not merely as an originary anthropological concept, and a source of conflict, but as the basis for any morality or understanding of “interest” and “motivation”? Not very far, as far as I know—but I’m willing to be proven wrong. But I’m going to test it out here. In the course of continuing to think through the problem of replacing or dissolving money as the essential economic technology and media, I was confronted with the question: so, if we’re not going to talk about “self-interest” as the all-purpose incentive for economic and other activity (an incentive produced by the transformation of money from tokens distributed by the center for exchange with the center to a product of economic activity delegated so as to enable private actors to loan money to the center, making the center dependent on the “self-interest” of those actors), what do we replace it with? And then the answer presented itself: the desire to be like others—which is really what we want the money we pursue through our “self-interest” for, anyway. So, as always, I want to formulate this in the most radical way possible, and in a way that generates a range of “transitional programs” getting us from money to post-money: everything everyone does is in order to be like someone else, and the entire social order would therefore best be designed so as to leverage and channel this desire. One interesting thing about this approach is that it reveals something essential about liberalism: liberalism’s privileging of the individual is a way of denying, concealing and opposing our basic mimetic nature—in fact, for liberalism, anything about us that can be traced back to an imitation of another is inauthentic and discredited.
In the Image: Towards an Emulation Economy
In the Image: Towards an Emulation Economy
In the Image: Towards an Emulation Economy
How far has any mimetic theorist taken the notion of mimesis not merely as an originary anthropological concept, and a source of conflict, but as the basis for any morality or understanding of “interest” and “motivation”? Not very far, as far as I know—but I’m willing to be proven wrong. But I’m going to test it out here. In the course of continuing to think through the problem of replacing or dissolving money as the essential economic technology and media, I was confronted with the question: so, if we’re not going to talk about “self-interest” as the all-purpose incentive for economic and other activity (an incentive produced by the transformation of money from tokens distributed by the center for exchange with the center to a product of economic activity delegated so as to enable private actors to loan money to the center, making the center dependent on the “self-interest” of those actors), what do we replace it with? And then the answer presented itself: the desire to be like others—which is really what we want the money we pursue through our “self-interest” for, anyway. So, as always, I want to formulate this in the most radical way possible, and in a way that generates a range of “transitional programs” getting us from money to post-money: everything everyone does is in order to be like someone else, and the entire social order would therefore best be designed so as to leverage and channel this desire. One interesting thing about this approach is that it reveals something essential about liberalism: liberalism’s privileging of the individual is a way of denying, concealing and opposing our basic mimetic nature—in fact, for liberalism, anything about us that can be traced back to an imitation of another is inauthentic and discredited.