Or so I tell myself. Like Benjamin, Michael Taussig thinks that “ the mimetic faculty is the nature that culture uses to create second nature, the faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore differences, yield into and become Other. The wonder of mimesis lies in the copy drawing on the character and power. Walter benjamin on the mimetic faculty at greenbookee.org - Download free pdf files,ebooks and documents of walter benjamin on the mimetic faculty. Slavery, Spirit Possession, and Mimesis. Perhaps there is none of his higher functions in which his mimetic faculty. Spirit Possession and Mimesis amongst the. Faculty' Benjamin shows us how the human mimetic gift (faculty) entered into writing and language. To understand his concept of language based on the mimetic faculty of human beings, it is worth considering Benjamin's differentiation between the 'sensuous similarity' and the 'nonsensuous similarity' of the mimetic faculty of human beings. Download On The Mimetic Faculty Pdf free software. Walter benjamin on the mimetic faculty at greenbookee.org. This Portable Document file is fur. Mimesis in Walter Benjamin’s writing, as indeed in Adorno’s work, would appear to be a. Psychoanalytic term, taken from Freud, that refers to a mode of identifying with the external. 66 Benjamin mimetic faculty of perception, has disappeared from certain areas, perhaps in order to pour forth into others. It might not be too bold to presume that on the whole a uniform direction can be perceived in the historical development of this mimetic faculty. At first glance, the direction might seem to lie in the increasing.
Nature creates similarities.
One need only think of mimicry.
The highest capacity for producing similarities, however, is man’s.
His gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else.
Perhaps there is none of his higher functions in which his mimetic faculty does not play a decisive role.
This faculty has a history, however, in both the phylogenetic and the ontogenetic sense.
As regards the latter, play is for many its school.
Children’s play is everywhere permeated by mimetic codes of behaviour, 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.
Of what use to him is this schooling of his mimetic faculty?
The answer presupposes an understanding of the phylogenetic significance of the mimetic faculty.
Here it is not enough to think of what we understand today by the concept of similarity.
As is known, the sphere of life that formerly seemed to be governed by the law of similarity was comprehensive; it ruled both microcosm and macrocosm.
But these natural correspondences are given their true importance only if seen as stimulating and awakening the mimetic faculty in man.
It must be borne in mind that neither mimetic powers nor mimetic objects remain the same in the course of thousands of years.
Rather, we must suppose that the gift of producing similarities–for example, in dances, whose oldest function this was–and therefore also the gift of recognizing them, have changed with historical development.
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The direction of this change seems definable as the increasing decay of the mimetic faculty.
For clearly the observable world of modern man contains only minimal residues of the magical correspondances and analogies that were familiar to ancient peoples.
The question is whether we are concerned with the decay of this faculty or with its transformation.
Of the direction in which the latter might lie some indications may be derived, even if indirectly, from astrology.
We must assume in principle that in the remote past the processes considered imitable included those in the sky.
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In dance, on other cultic occasions, such imitation could be produced, such similarity manipulated.
But if the mimetic genius was really a life-determining force for the ancients, it is not difficult to imagine that the newborn child was thought to be in full possession of this gift, and in particular to be perfectly molded on the structure of cosmic being.
Allusion to the astrological sphere may supply a first reference point for an understanding of the concept of nonsensuous similarity.
True, our existence no longer includes what once made it possible to speak of this kind of similarity: above all, the ability to produce it.
Nevertheless we, too, possess a canon according to which the meaning of nonsensuous similarity can be at least partially clarified.
And this canon is language.
From time immemorial the mimetic faculty has been conceded some influence on language.
Yet this was done without foundation: without consideration of a further meaning, still less a history, of the mimetic faculty.
But above all such notions remained closely tied to the commonplace, sensuous area of similarity.
All the same, imitative behaviour in language formation was acknowledged under the name of onomatopoeia.
Now if language, as is evident, is not an agreed system of signs, we shall be constantly obliged to have recourse to the kind of thoughts that appear in their most primitive form as the onomatopoeic mode of explanation.
The question is whether this can be developed and adapted to improved understanding.
“Every word–and the whole of language,” it has been asserted, “is onomatopoeic.”
It is difficult to conceive in any detail the program that might be implied by this proposition.
However, the concept of nonsensuous similarity is of some relevance.
For if words meaning the same thing in different languages are arranged about that thing as their center, we have to inquire how they all–while often possessing not the slightest similarity to one another–are similar to what they signify at their center.
Yet this kind of similarity may be explained not only by the relationships between words meaning the same thing in different languages, just as, in general, our reflections cannot be restricted to the spoken word.
They are equally concerned with the written word.
And here it is noteworthy that the latter–in some cases perhaps more vividly than the spoken word–illuminates, by the relation of its written form to what it signifies, the nature of nonsensuous similarity.
In brief, it is nonsensuous similarity that establishes the ties not only between the spoken and the signified but also between the written and the signified, and equally between the spoken and the written.
Graphology has taught us to recognize in handwriting images that the unconscious of the writer conceals in it.
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It may be supposed that the mimetic process that expresses itself in this way in the activity of the writer was, in the very distant times in which script originated, of utmost importance for writing.
Script has thus become, like language, an archive of nonsensuous similarities, of nonsensuous correspondences.
This aspect of language as script, however, does not develop in isolation from its other, semiotic aspect.
Rather, the mimetic element in language can, like a flame, manifest itself only through a kind of bearer.
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This bearer is the semiotic element.
Thus the coherence of words or sentences is the bearer through which, like a flash, similarity appears.
For its production by man–like its perception by him–is in many cases, and particularly the most important, limited to flashes.
It flits past.
It is not improbable that the rapidity of writing and reading heightens the fusion of the semiotic in the mimetic in the sphere of language.
“To read what was never written.”
Such reading is the most ancient: reading before all languages, from the entrails, the stars, or dances.
Later the mediating link of a new kind of reading, of runes and hieroglyphs, came into use.
It seems fair to suppose that these were the stages by which the mimetic gift, which was once the foundation of occult practices, gained admittance to writing and language.
In this way language may be seen as the highest level of mimetic behaviour and the most complete archive of nonsensuous similarity: a medium into which the earlier powers of mimetic production and comprehension have passed without residue, to the point where they have liquidated those of magic.