Mimesis and Alterity

ArtForum, Dec, 1993 by Jimmie Durham

Ah Love! could you and I with fate conspire To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire, Would we not shatter it to bits--and then Re-mold it nearer to the Heart's desire?

--Omar Khayam, Rubayat

Europe, or the Western World, or Civilization, has been going around watching everyone for some time now. The good part of this is a kind of self-observation, so that we have complicated novels to read, and art that attempts self-exploration and intervention in the given narrative and, at the same time, a little distance. The bad part is that the Western World has not observed itself observing. It has not seen how active, how transforming, its watching has been for itself. The West (I can't keep writing the "Western World," though "the West" is even more ambiguous) has not imagined itself as defined by its colonial enterprises and engagements. Instead, it has continuously imagined barriers and borders between itself and constantly reenforced Others.

But listen to this: "The border has dissolved and expanded to cover the lands it once separated such that all the land is borderland, wherein the imagesphere of alterities, no less than the physiognomic aspects of visual worlds, disrupt the speaking body of the northern scribe into words hanging in grotesque automutilation over a post-modern landscape where Self and Other paw at the ghostly imaginings of each other's powers." It's Michael Taussig, in his book Mimesis and Alterity. When I first saw the title I thought it was awkward and academic, but that's because I didn't know the word "alterity." (I'm afraid I suffer from the American disease that causes anger at things, especially fancy words, one doesn't know.) After reading the book, though, I wrote to Taussig to tell him he had written things I'd always intended to think but had been unable to.

Maybe what I meant was that the book is timely in the sense that it addresses discourse that will be necessary in the future. Taussig writes, for example, "When it was enthusiastically pointed out within memory of our present Academy that race or gender or nation . . . were so many social constructions, inventions, and representations, a window was opened, an invitation to begin the critical project of analysis and cultural reconstruction was offered. And one still feels its power even though what was nothing more than an invitation, a preamble to investigation has, by and large, been converted instead into a conclusion--e.g. 'sex is a social construction,' 'race is a social construction,' 'the nation is an invention,' and so forth. . . . The brilliance of the pronouncement was blinding. Nobody was asking what's the next step? What do we do with this old insight? If life is constructed, how come it appears so immutable?" Taussig is kind of practical, then, but not in the way of self-help books; he's more like a hands-on, activist observer. He is an anthropologist who sees anthropology itself as the most important case history today. He makes the study seriously, not simply to expose the racism of anthropologists or some such known quality; he wants to see what those monkeys are really up to, and how they are up to it.

In Mimesis and Alterity Taussig investigates the contacts between anthropologists and subjects and the world created therein, and then does follow-up studies that show where we all are today. It is not a simple book but a properly difficult one. Among Taussig's premises are that mimesis always comes in conjunction with alterity, or "otherness"; and that we each mimic not only the other but the other's mimicry of us, so that we have a mass of mimesis that constantly creates and destroys alterity. So he jumps. On one page we are in Panama with Cuna Indians and their white studiers and their white spirit figurines. On the next, we're back home in our machinery: "mimesis, as either an unadorned human faculty or one revived in modernity by mimetic machines"--Taussig is excellent on the complex mimesis in photography and advertising--"is a capacity that alerts one to the contractual element of the visual contract with reality."

The style of the book, its logical jumps, seems to be trying to catch by mimesis what Taussig perceives as the slipperiness of both mimesis and alterity. As I read, I began to laugh with him, as nervously as he. "It is here, where words fail and flux commands, that the power of mimetic excess resides as the decisive turning point in the colonial endowment of the mimetic faculty itself." (You see, I'm trying to follow him; I'm trying to be him.) Another of his premises is that mimesis is a human given; when it is repressed, sublimated, or taken over, the repression only creates more "mimetic excess." Taussig provides an involved history of the ways in which we begin to escape control, to play with invented reality, with "quaint necessities"--an account of "mimesis as the nature culture uses to create second nature," a second nature that is "foundering and highly unstable."

At the core of the book are the anecdotal sections that make up the bulk of the text--stories about the contemporary fetish objects of different Indian groups, and about the very strange histories of contacts and expectations among different populations. These are the proofs, the (un-)realities, upon which Taussig's theoretical insights are based. His stories are not easily describable, but he knows them well. Besides the book's other strengths, his accounts have the tactility one gets from a good storyteller.