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Girard Digest 2: Imitation
Mar. 7th, 2019 08:49 pmHumans are fundamentally imitative creatures. Imitating our family – and later, peers and others in our social group – is how we learn to speak, walk, dance, write, tie our shoes, ride a bike, play Beethoven, go vegan, order a grande skinny frappuccino, etc etc. Imitation is so fundamental to our nature that even when we just watch someone doing something else, the parts of our brains which would make us do that thing fire as if we were doing it. Imitation serves us well in transmitting culture, social bonding, and survival skills; it's also how we pick up biases, perpetuate the cycle of abuse, and normalise other toxic behaviours. It's two sides of the same coin that makes us human.
Imitation also becomes reciprocation: you punch me, I punch you back. I can rationalise it by claiming it's justice, but fundamentally I am imitating you – I do exactly what you did, back to you. Of course, this then invites you to imitate me imitating you, and before we know it we're having a brawl: two of us, mirrors of each other, punching and kicking and generally trying to out-do the other replicating and amplifying the violent act that started it all.
Some imitation is conscious, but most is unconscious. You may decide one morning to dress like a Victorian sailor because you liked the Victorian sailors in the show you watched last night, but far, far more often, you are picking up on little things and adopting them into your own behaviour without even realising it. The gut response to punch back is unconscious, as is all that childhood learning. You don't set out to learn your mother tongue the same way you pick up a German phrasebook for your business trip to Berlin. Bad habits picked up from unconscious imitation have to be consciously unlearned, which is a lot harder. Even when you're imitating someone without those habits, it feels like a completely different process than the unconscious learning that got you those habits in the first place.
To differentiate this conscious learning from the unconscious kind, and to preclude the assumption that “imitation” necessarily means there's a conscious will involved, Girard prefers to use the word mimesis for the unconscious absorption of influences. That sounds very academic and Latin, but it has the same root as “meme”, which all of us use online – “meme culture” is just the latest permutation of a human faculty that has been rolling along since we stood on two legs. All culture is meme culture, because culture – a formalised set of human behaviours – is founded on imitation.
Girard Digest 3: Inverse Imitation
Imitation also becomes reciprocation: you punch me, I punch you back. I can rationalise it by claiming it's justice, but fundamentally I am imitating you – I do exactly what you did, back to you. Of course, this then invites you to imitate me imitating you, and before we know it we're having a brawl: two of us, mirrors of each other, punching and kicking and generally trying to out-do the other replicating and amplifying the violent act that started it all.
Some imitation is conscious, but most is unconscious. You may decide one morning to dress like a Victorian sailor because you liked the Victorian sailors in the show you watched last night, but far, far more often, you are picking up on little things and adopting them into your own behaviour without even realising it. The gut response to punch back is unconscious, as is all that childhood learning. You don't set out to learn your mother tongue the same way you pick up a German phrasebook for your business trip to Berlin. Bad habits picked up from unconscious imitation have to be consciously unlearned, which is a lot harder. Even when you're imitating someone without those habits, it feels like a completely different process than the unconscious learning that got you those habits in the first place.
To differentiate this conscious learning from the unconscious kind, and to preclude the assumption that “imitation” necessarily means there's a conscious will involved, Girard prefers to use the word mimesis for the unconscious absorption of influences. That sounds very academic and Latin, but it has the same root as “meme”, which all of us use online – “meme culture” is just the latest permutation of a human faculty that has been rolling along since we stood on two legs. All culture is meme culture, because culture – a formalised set of human behaviours – is founded on imitation.
Girard Digest 3: Inverse Imitation
