- Walter Benjamin On The Mimetic Faculty Pdf File
- Walter Benjamin On The Mimetic Faculty Pdf Online
- Walter Benjamin On The Mimetic Faculty Pdf Free
- Walter Benjamin On The Mimetic Faculty Pdf
Nature creates similarities.
One need only think of mimicry.
Mimesis For Walter Benjamin the bourgeois cosiness of the nineteenth century domestic interior is a. Benjamin, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty', in Reflections, New. Walter Benjamin on the Mimetic Faculty - Download as PDF File (.pdf), Text File (.txt) or view presentation slides online. Jun 21, 2018 Mimetic faculty Mark Hansen on Walter Benjamin 'Benjamin's historical account of mimetic practice forms an experiential correlate to his strongly technological conception of natural history 5. In a swerve from the Aristotelian tradition as he understood it, Benjamin situates mimesis not as an imitation (or supplement) of nature but as an.
- Walter Benjamin On The Mimetic Faculty Pdf Average ratng: 8,9/10 2584 reviews Walter Benjamin, 'On the Mimetic Faculty' Benjamin commences with the argument that man has the greatest capacity for 30 or more walter benjamin on the mimetic faculty documents discovered in hostgeni's.
- Stewart's exegesis builds on Benjamin's theories, especially when she asserts that the mimetic faculty is 'profoundly and archaically related to physical gesture, sound, and body' (90). In her estimation, the body and its psychosomatic conditions become the nexus for grasping the similarities embedded in the circulation of collective signs.
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.
Bomber crew download for mac. 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.
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.
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.
Walter Benjamin On The Mimetic Faculty Pdf File
Graphology has taught us to recognize in handwriting images that the unconscious of the writer conceals in it.
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.
This bearer is the semiotic element.
Thus the coherence of words or sentences is the bearer through which, like a flash, similarity appears.
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.
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.
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.
Walter Benjamin On The Mimetic Faculty Pdf File
Graphology has taught us to recognize in handwriting images that the unconscious of the writer conceals in it.
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.
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.
Walter Benjamin On The Mimetic Faculty Pdf Online
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.
Walter Benjamin On The Mimetic Faculty Pdf Free
Later the mediating link of a new kind of reading, of runes and hieroglyphs, came into use.
Walter Benjamin On The Mimetic Faculty Pdf
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.
