Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 14 Number 1, April 2013
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Garrels, Scott R. (ed.), Mimesis and Science. Empirical Research on Imitation and the Mimetic Theory of Culture and Religion, East Lansing, Michigan State University Press, 2011. 266 pp., ISBN: 9781611860238, Paperback $US 24.95
Reviewed by
University of Queensland
Mimesis started life as a theory of culture and religion. Latterly, with the discovery of mirror neurons in monkeys, it has been taken into the field of neuroscience and neuropsychology where, as a theory of consciousness, it appears to shed light on a range of mental states including autism. Mimesis accordingly shows promise as a theory that purports to demonstrate – against Freud and Piaget – that the human being is inter-subjectively oriented from earliest life and committed to the society of others as a condition of being. Disturbances in this inter-subjective outlook, which are described by spectrum disorders like autism and Asperger’s syndrome, thus appear as disturbances in the operation of the mimetic impulse that, as mimetic theory has long postulated, is somehow pre-subjectively “given”. The extension of the theory from the domain of culture, in which, in the pioneering work of René Girard, it arose five decades ago, to the domain of science, where recent applications have been found, is the trajectory that this engaging and stimulating collection of essays wishes to highlight. Once dismissed as no more than a speculative, and somewhat contrived, theory about the origins of human culture, theories of mimesis are thus moving front and centre in a debate that seeks to disclose the secret drivers of human emotions and the cognitive potential they appear to contain.
It is no surprise, given this complicated genesis, that present-day applications of mimetic thinking are necessarily also philosophical and psychological. But mimesis is more than just psychology and philosophy. From the beginning – notably in Girard’s impressive staking out of intellectual territory for the concept in a series of brilliant and diverse disquisitions on the topic since the 1960s – it has been concerned to break with the habits of older philosophical problems and to transform them. Mimesis, in its postulation of the priority of social cognition in the human being, accordingly presents a competing account of mind that moves consciousness research beyond impasses registered in both the analytic and continental traditions of philosophy. For those interested in these impasses and what might be offered against them, this collection of essays provides stimulating material throughout.
The highlights of the book are too numerous to cover in a brief review of its contents. It must be stated at the outset that there are no weak chapters in the collection; every article is nuanced and interesting, taking mimesis both backwards to its originator Girard in insightful ways and reaching forwards at other times in suggestive and often compelling fashion into areas such as infant research (Andrew N. Meltzoff), social identification theory (Vittorio Gallese) and cultural anthropology, in particular in two chapters on the cultural origins of violence and war contributed respectively by Mark R. Anspach and Melvin Konner. There is also an informative introduction by the editor Scott R. Garrels as well as a protocol of interviews with René Girard that concludes the volume. Both the introduction and the interviews serve as a good – and readily comprehensible – entry into the theory and the problems it addresses for those not familiar with mimetic thinking.
Among a rich and varied offering where it would be churlish to single out one essay for special attention (as if it were possible to pass over the rest – it isn’t!), one essay carries the discussion about mimesis with particular authority into the scientific domain. This is the penultimate chapter in the collection by Jean-Pierre Dupuy entitled “Naturalizing Mimetic Theory”. Dupuy’s piece does two things. First, he relativizes the “a priori” claims of mimetic theory – the argument that mimesis is a pre-subjective and pre-cognitive “disposition” in the human make-up – by viewing it as one of the “emergent effects” (p. 201) of self-organizing subjectivity. This allows the view, against Descartes and Leibniz, that “the attributes of subjectivity are not attributes of individual subjects: they are emergent effects produced by the functioning of subject-less processes” (201). This view, in turn, suggests why mimesis research must now push into the domain of science: our knowledge of subjectivity and what it occasions cannot do without knowledge of certain processes which have nothing (or not much) to do with subjects. Dupuy, secondly, argues that mimetic theory may have an important role to play in updating our understanding of evolution where chance and order seem mal-aligned in many versions of evolutionary theory. Dupuy argues for a more complete account of evolution where convergence and emergence are two sides of a mimetic dynamic that “seems to be guided by an end that preexists it … but is in reality the dynamic itself that brings forth its own end” (209).
In sum, this collection of essays is indispensable for those who have long been fascinated by Girard’s work but never quite been sure of how (and how far) to take it. The essays in this volume suggest that mimesis has an explanatory value that is both pre-psychological and post-philosophical. Yet in the manner of all good speculative theories, mimesis will only be as good as the areas of human life it can properly illuminate. In the new applications of mimetic thinking presented in this volume, these areas pertain directly to human consciousness – just as the theory might have been taken to imply from the beginning. This is a consciousness not restricted to individual agency or tied-off from the consciousness of other subjects; rather, it presents as a consciousness and a subjectivity linked to other subjects by definition. Just how the sense of these other subjects impinges on what was assumed until recently to be the private domain of individual subjectivity is what recent mimetic theory, now being applied under experimental conditions, promises to reveal.