Prior to the mimetic turn in posthuman studies and different areas of critical theory that are currently re-turning to the timeless realization that humans are mimetic animals, this might have sounded like an unusual dialogue. Mimesis is, after all, an ancient Greek concept that looks back to the origins of western thought rooted in an anthropocentric tradition that singles out humansâ unique ability to represent the world via aesthetic fictions. Posthumanism, on the other hand, is a contemporary concept that deconstructs the ontological binaries dividing humans from nonhumans, the mind from the body, nature from culture, the âtrueâ world from technological âsimulationsâ that already inform and transform a multiplicity of subjects in the digital age.
And yet, as this volume reaches an end, it should be clear that these perspectives are not opposed. The plurality of voices animating homo mimeticus 2.0 makes strikingly clear that there is much to be gained in joining these two concepts to further the now entangled fields of posthuman studies and mimetic studies via the intersectional field of mimetic posthumanism. Once traditionally restricted to hierarchical forms of imitation that set up oppositions between the original and the copy, or to stable notions of representations that mirror the external world, the Greek concept of mimÄsis turns out to be a troubling, untranslatable, and destabilizing concept central to a new transdisciplinary theory of imitation located at the intersection of philosophy, aesthetics, and politics, now stretching to inform and transform the posthuman imagination as well. As this dialogue shows, there are ample reasons to continue bridging mimesis and posthumanism from the pluralist angle of what Francesca Ferrando calls âphilosophical posthumanismâ and Nidesh Lawtoo calls âmimetic posthumanism.â
nidesh lawtoo: Contributors to this volume have been joining forces to establish a link, or better, a bridge between the ancient concept of mimesis and the contemporary notion of the posthuman. I call it a bridge in order to foreground a Nietzschean genealogy that connects mimetic studies and posthuman studies in general, and our respective works on homo mimeticus and philosophical
That said, the number of contemporary voices attentive to an immanent conception of mimesis that flows rhizomatically, on a horizontal plane of immanence, generating mirroring reflexes, contagious affects, plastic transformations, and spellbinding influences, is gaining traction in different areas of critical theory, including posthuman studies. This led us to speak of a mimetic turn, or re-turn to this ancient yet protean and metamorphic concept. In your work on philosophical posthumanism, while you did not explicitly rely on the concept of mimesis itself, you have also been very sensitive to the affective, contagious, and embodied flows internal to what we now call posthuman mimesis, drawing creatively and conceptually on a materialist tradition that goes from Nietzsche to Deleuze to Braidotti to other figures internal to Homo Mimeticus as well. You published a book titled Philosophical Posthumanism and my first questions are: Could you remind us of what differentiates philosophical posthumanism from other posthumanisms (critical, cultural, etc.)? And given your philosophical focus on posthumanism
francesca ferrando: Thank you for suggesting this timely and, perhaps, timeless dialogue in the first place. I think that the pandemic we have recently experienced as a species generated a historical crisis; yet, it also brought numerous insights. In my case, it has deeply transformed both the ways I see academia and the way I think of posthumanism. After the pandemic, it is no longer possible to think of theory just as theory; the ivory tower of academia was contaminated, to use your definition of mimesis as a contagious force, by the covid virus, so to speak. If we donât get this message, we are not getting the message of existence; we simply remain in our mimetic bubble and continue turning in the same loop. The first effect of the pandemic crisis for us academics is to see ourselves not only as part of society, but of our species. Yes, we are all uniquely diverse, but we are also part of the same species; the self operates on many different levels, collective and individual, conscious, subconscious and unconscious, among others; these levels constitute the self, which is always in connection to alterity. We can call this, the mimetic post-conscious, a dynamic knot of an existence that is permeable and in co-evolutionary relationships with others. We are constantly changing, we are like rivers; the power of water is the mimetic us that is shifting, like in the Daoâflow is an essential dynamic of existence. In that sense, there are indeed numerous connections between the posthuman and the mimetic turn. One of the main takeaways of the pandemic experience is a better understanding of our agency at different levels, including the bodily and virtual ones, and the realization that we are all connected because we are a relational, intersubjective, and, in this sense, mimetic species.
When I first received your invitation, I wasnât sure what you really meant by mimesis, because this concept comes out of a classical tradition structurally rooted in a hierarchical notion of the human (which can be exemplified in the educated, privileged, white, patriarchal canon). But your distinction between a major and a minor mimesis mediated by figures like Nietzsche, Deleuze, and other thinkers allowed me to understand much better what you mean. The possibilities of connection with philosophical posthumanism are many. The first one is that we are constantly permeated by others and intra-changing with others. In that sense, we are constantly playing the game of mimesis, which is not something that we are taught once, and then we simply passively repeat or reproduce. This brings the question of agency into our existence, for we have the power to generate radical transformations. Existence is never dichotomic; it is more like a rainbow of possibilities calling for radical imagination and
We have not only agency, but also response-ability. Think, for instance, of the social role of academia. We are not only developing abstract ideas. People can use these ideas, mimetically so to speak, and these ideas can change peopleâs lives for better or worse, including forging and sustaining different types of discrimination. We can go as far as mentioning that unjust laws and regulations are often based on theories written earlier. Academics do not only bear responsibility for the pasts (in the ways they are studied and portrayed) and for the present, but also for the futures. Racist and sexist ideas, for instance, can be ingrained in society and mediated via (formal and informal) education. The media, movies, advertisements, etc. have the power of mimetically (in)forming subjects. In that sense, yes, I think we are mimetic animals. At the same time, this mimesis can be fully agential. It is not only neutral or passive, in the sense that we adapt to the colors or environments around us. There is always an act of agency in the way we adapt (or not) to familial, social, and national norms, among others. In that sense, it is crucial for academics to understand the deep mimetic effects and affects that we generate with our work.
As a last point, let me say that we may be giving the wrong message to our students as we emphasize the intellect only in relation to the books they read. We talk about going beyond the mind/body dualism, but if, as teachers, we address the mind only, we fall short of going beyond it. Already for Plato, teaching was part of a context in which people were dialoguing and moving in space: from the agora to his academy, the path was rich in trees, rocks, and nonhuman elements. As we teach in Zoom, we may talk about going beyond the mind/body dualism, yet we are only addressing the mind, forcing the body into stale positions, as if it was not intelligent or as if the mind was not embodied. We need to address posthuman mimesis not only in what we teach, but also in the ways we teach, for we educators are responsible for developing existential awareness not limited to the noosphere of the mind, but comfortably awake to the creative plasticity of this dimensional materializing.
Indeed, what you say resonates strongly with the practical, ethical, and political implications of the mimetic turn. It is in fact no accident that as Plato first theorized the concept of mimesis in books ii and iii of Republic, he did so in the context of his ethical and pedagogical concerns with education (paideia). He realized that models, be they real or fictional, have a formative, or deformative power on the material foundations of that malleable and plastic subject matter that is childrenâs souls. In this pedagogical context, his critique of Homer was not
On the question of agency, I fully agree with you that educators and academics should take responsibility for the work they produce. True, the influence of academics in general and the humanities in particular might be minor in a world dominated by more quantitative and profit-oriented ideals and practices, Iâm afraid. The recent developments in ai, most notably ChatGPT, may even generate worries that teachers and pedagogues will soon be replaced by chatbots that effectively simulate language online but lack consciousness, let alone embodied consciousness, offline. A focus on the still embodied nature of homo mimeticus 2.0 reveals important differences between artificial and human intelligence, which does not mean the two cannot effectively cooperate and supplement each other. As you note, through teaching, we are nonetheless in a privileged position to use our mind-bodies as a medium to produce performative, and in this sense, mimetic effects on studentâs receptive imagination. While few will continue with an academic career that is becoming increasingly difficult to pursue, ideas live on outside academia and can hopefully help bring about transformations across professions.
With respect to the major forces at play in a neoliberal society dominated by economic, political, industrial, and corporate greed with the power to infiltrate, via new algorithmic technologies, posthuman subjects and transforming mimetically, or as I call it, hypermimetically, the desires, pleasures, and activities of new generations of digital natives, I see a double bind at play in mimetic posthumanism. On the one hand, new technologies are consciously and intentionally developed by engineers who program algorithms that can be put to use in advertisements, on social media, but also in politics, going as far as generating violent, contagious insurrections that start online yet, via a hypermimetic feedback loop, generate real effects on homo mimeticus offline, as we have seen in the case of January 6, 2021, in the US, and in an aggravated form in the information war that
On the other hand, since mimesis operates on the unconscious register of homo mimeticus 2.0, the question of a fully conscious, rational, and volitional subject is also problematized by the mimetic turn. Let me clarify that with the unconscious I do not mean the dominant psychoanalytic unconscious, which, in its Freudian, Lacanian, or other variants tends to privilege an Oedipal myth based on incestuous familial desires and the repression thereof as a via regia. Rather, I mean a pre-Freudian unconscious that, for fin-de-siecle philosophers like Nietzsche, but also modernist writers like Joseph Conrad or Virginia Woolf and marginalized psychologists such as Hippolyte Bernheim and Pierre Janet, had mirroring, bodily, relational, involuntary, and in this sense unconscious reflexes as a starting point.
The discovery of mirror neurons in the 1990s did much to bring this model of the mimetic unconscious, as I call it, back on the theoretical scene. Our neuronal system is wired to unconsciously respond to affective and infective actions with pathos, which does not mean we cannot set up a distance from it in theory, if not always in practice. I think of the unconscious as a spectrum with different degrees of conscious awareness, from the fully conscious to the semi-conscious to a trance-like, hypnotic, suggestible state where full agentic control escapes. My fear in practice is that the hypnotic power of mimetic models who cast a spell on the masses of the past, as in the case of fascism and Nazism for instance, can be reloaded in the digital age to generate (new) fascism as we see on multiple political fronts. This would take us too far afield, but the question of agency and responsibility you rightly foreground for those in a position of power becomes more difficult to diagnose when the mimetic unconscious of people under the spell of charismatic leaders, hypnotizing ideologies, or spellbinding algorithms is at play in the vita mimetica of posthuman digital subjects. As we felt intensely during multiple lookdowns, we risk being chained to simulations without referential reality yet with magnetizing powers that chain a significant part of the population in mythic caves, to use Platoâs analogy of the Cave.
This is perhaps also because this volume started by stressing the importance of creativity and critique, which are not opposed, just as the pathos of mimesis is not opposed to the logos of philosophy, but can mutually reinforce each other, via what I call patho-logy. This interplay between creativity and critique is equally
This is a very important question. I think that radical imagination is one of the most powerful capacities we have: It cannot be taken away. I love a concept that is perhaps not well known in the west, which is the one of âleelaâ (लà¥à¤²à¤¾) in Hindu cosmology. According to this notion, we are in a big cosmic play in which we are the actors, the people who are writing the script, but also the stage, the audience, the props: everything. As opposed to a theocentric approach based on the idea that âGodâ created âus,â we are the poietic co-creators who are staging one of many cosmic games. The element of the game is very important. Think of young children: We have all been children at some point; all young children really like to do is play. Everything is a game for them. The realization that we are co-creating our cosmic game is very powerful in relation to radical imagination: What is the kind of life that we would like to live?
I am glad you mentioned Nietzsche early on; Nietzsche changed my life. When I was a teen, I studied Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The idea that our life could come back eternally, in an endless repetition of the same, has forged my life since. I kept it as an existential thought experiment throughout all major mo(ve)ments of my being. Every time I would make a decision, I would ask myself: Would I say âYesâ to my life, exactly the way it is, forever and ever? This is a powerful step in our path toward self-realization. We are actually creating archetypes of existence; hence, if we just keep going with the uncritical acceptance and repetition of the archetypes that we were given, based on our caste, gender, class, skin color, or sexual orientation, among many others, we only limit our unlimited potential. We are always unique manifestations. This is where the notion of creativity comes in at the ontological level. Poiesis, that is existential creativity, is present at all levels of manifestation. Biological agency, for instance, is based on creativity: evolution does not move toward hierarchical complexities, but in rhizomatic diversifications. This is in harmony with the notion of leela, the game, but also, the art; for art is poiesis, creation. This understanding unveils that we are already ontological co-creators (which does not mean dominators, as domination requires a dichotomic misconception: Who am I dominating, if we are everything?).
And yet, we are rarely invited to think of ourselves in those terms; rather, we are taught to be part of a religion, of a nation, of the embodied history of
Your passionate appeal to the uniqueness of human imagination is a manifestation of the importance of fostering creative, affirmative, and productive, rather than simply reproductive, communities of researchers opening up new frontiers of knowledge. It is also a reminder that the pathos of emotional creativity can be supplemented by the logos of critical thought and that both are vital for opening up new perspectives on posthuman mimesis beyond western traditions as well.
If I take some genealogical distance and look at our discussion historically, the following observation comes to mind: It may be true that traditionally, in the west at least, the romantic concept of the imagination has been opposed to the classical notion of mimesis as passive copy, or representation, just as the glowing lamp is opposed to the reflecting mirror, to quote M. H. Abramsâ famous distinction in his account of the romantic imagination; it is equally true that, starting with creative movements like modernism, and, more recently with the mimetic turn, artists and thinkers have been drawing on a tradition of individualist figures that are radically opposed to passive mimesis, but are attentive to the creative power, or pathos, of mimesis, a creative, productive, or re-reproductive mimesis, as the French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe calls it, that does not simply represent or mirror nature but, rather, is at play in the mimetic subject, endowed with the creative ability to re-produce the creative force of nature itself. To put it in Spinozist language, this type of productive mimesis entails not natura naturata but natura naturans. While I think that mimesis complicates the romantic ideal of a solipsistic, autonomous, and somewhat divine genius modeled on the ideal of Godâs creative powers, the Hindu perspective of leela you discussed, and the theatrical language you convoke to account for this creative freedom, is in line with a conception of mimesis that one finds in the theater (mimesis, from mîmos, performance, mime), and thus in play, its genealogical starting point. The recent return
Indeed, the perspectival shift from Homo sapiens to homo mimeticus is also meant to remind us of the importance of games, play, and animistic identifications constitutive of homo ludens. We have all been children, a period dominated by the mimetic faculty. As Walter Benjamin famously put it, and, in case we have forgotten, any parent knows as well, play often entails a strong mimetic element that allows the player to become other, for better and worse: It can lead to imitating stereotypical archetypes such as cowboys and Indians or Barbies and Kens in the past, and violent avatars in games in the present. On one side, they reproduce stereotypical identities with formative pathological powers in adulthood as well in need of critique; one the other, play also allows for less stereotypical identification with humans and, if children are still allowed to play outside, nonhumans as well: windmills, trains, says Benjamin; bears and tigers, roar my children. What is crucial in these experiences is that the player is in touch with an animistic magical participation or methexis that I think is compatible with the notion of radical imagination as you define it, a mimetic imagination, to use an oxymoronic term, that allows for creative/mimetic processes of becoming other.
Let us now go back to a figure who helped me launch the concept of posthuman mimesis: Katherine Hayles. In the dialogue that prefaces this book, we agreed that one of the connecting bridges between the concept of mimesis and the one of the posthuman we are now extending has to do with paradoxes, which are central to both concepts. I mention one. On the one hand, mimesis is a concept that, in its traditional philosophical conception, is perhaps one of the most humanistic and anthropocentric there is, as humans, since antiquity, have been defined as the most mimetic creatures and are uniquely able to represent or reproduce the world via artistic techniques like painting, literature, and now AI simulations. And yet, as the mimetic turn in posthuman studies shows, mimesis is a plastic concept that can be turned contra a patriarchal, humanistic, anthropocentric, and metaphysical tradition by establishing troubling continuities with nonhuman imitations, for instance. On the other hand, your work on philosophical posthumanism, in the company of figures like Braidotti and others, also emphasizes the importance of going beyond oppressive dualisms and anthropocentric conceptions of what the (post)human is or should be. Humans are indeed far from autonomous for we are dependent on human and nonhuman others for survival (the pandemic made that fully clear), which also makes us responsible for finding solutions and alternatives to affirm survival for both humans and nonhumans alike in the age
I was wondering if you could address this paradox that leads posthuman and mimetic studies to move beyond human/nonhuman binaries on the one hand, while on the other we are uniquely accountable as a species for the age of the Anthropocene we have, with different degrees of responsibility, initiated.
Letâs address this paradox by embracing existence through locations and perspectives. Posthumanism underlines that, to manifest in this dimension, there must be some type of embodiment (which can also be virtual): Everything and everyone is embodied, situated, and located. This does not imply that we are only what we are directly experiencing; mystical experiences open to the awareness that, in the extended reality, we are everything. Yet, this doesnât mean to erase our embodied situation in the historical manifestations of spacetime, but to see ourselves as part of the full manifestation, which is happening: We are always contributing, to what is. The location can also transcend the location itself; for instance, in shamanistic practices, the shaman becomes the animal or rather, interestingly enough, in such traditions, animals are considered human, interpreted not as a species, but as the perspective of the subject. We are all humans, and we are all different: We are one and many at the same time. For some, this may sound difficult to comprehend, but in many traditions, the one and the many are not divided; for instance, in the Dao, the transformative (mimetic and creative) power of water, as flow, is the metaphor. This is something Deleuze and Guattari also stressed in A Thousand Plateaus: The self is already multiplicity. Think about your childhood. You have changed; that child is there, but is not alone, and is not the same. If we think of the biota in our guts and all the microorganisms that make us âhuman,â we can approach ourselves as universes, more precisely, multiverses.
We are embodied, situated, and located, but these are not limits, and can be transcended within a broader approach to existing that is not just intellectual. For instance, right now I am at this conference, and my location is remote. My experience in this virtual event is unique to everything that constitutes my current assemblage: my body, the location in which I find myself right now, the technical entities Iâm being through, the perspectives Iâm seeingâfor instance,
Letâs, for instance, address the ways technologies are being designed. Here, it is important to understand technology at the planetary level, from the ways technological gadgets are manufactured in unsustainable ways (for instance, to become obsolete), to its current socio-economic value, in what Shoshana Zuboff defines as âsurveillance capitalism.â This is an important point for the mimetic turn: There is no technology without the intentions behind creating technology. If technological developments opened up some utopian possibilities in the 1990s, now they have also turned into ways for the digital neo-capitalist system of power to experiment on their users. Data is collected, sold, and utilized most often without usersâ awareness or consent. Hence, the importance of bringing economics to the discussion of posthuman mimesis. I used to talk of technology in ontological terms; it is now a priority to consider how big data has revealed itself as the gold of the twenty-first century. We need to become aware of what is happening and challenge it, in posthuman studies; we need to promote change at the legal level as well, in order to protect users from exploitation and manipulation, which can only lead to a general state of existential misery for all the agents involved. This is a paradigm shift that concerns not only economic transparency, but also sociopolitical stability, as well as psychological and physiological sovereignty.
To go back to your question, we need to understand ourselves as a species living in the Anthropocene. We are not just one among many species; our behaviors and becomings are now operating as geological forces, igniting the sixth mass extinction. In this sense, letâs go back to ontological response-ability: What is it that we want to manifest? The destruction of the planet? On some levels, that is what we are currently manifesting. Or are we invested in manifesting something else? Hence, the importance of attaining a comprehensive understanding of ourselves as individuals, as societies, as part of a species and of a planet, among others. In that sense, we understand that the
There is no going back to a pre-Anthropocene situation; still, we can change our anthropocentric habits, right now, right here. Since this is a matter of understanding, our role as educators is fundamental. We are all constantly changing, and changes are not linear. We should help students realize that they are (mimetically and creatively) connected to all these levels, and that they make a difference on planet Earth. Letâs bring this message to our humanity as a shared experience. If we do not change our anthropocentric behaviors, this pandemic crisis wonât be the last one: We are creating conditions that are damaging other species, including our own. As a metaphor, letâs think of this. If I have lung cancer and I keep smoking, I might eventually die; yet, such a diagnosis is also an occasion to let go of harmful habits and heal, becoming the potential for radical transformations. The Anthropocene is calling for a transformation in the way we write and teach, and, most importantly, in the ways we exist. There is no need, nor time, for excuses or apologies; we are in the game of existence and we are always changing, no matter what. This is an existential call to posthuman awareness.
Thank you. This is indeed the life-affirmative metamorphosis the mimetic turn in posthuman studies aims to promote. We are already in good company, as the different voices animating Mimetic Posthumanism showed. Strong of multiple collaborations, we shall continue expanding new mimetic studies in Homo Mimeticus iii: Plasticity, Mimesis and Metamorphosis. Stay tuned.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Graham Parkes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 13.
This refers to the Conference âPosthuman Mimesis,â held at ku Leuven (2021) where this dialogue took place.
References
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Graham Parkes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.