Читать книгу Vol. 1(1). 2018 - Сергей Анатольевич Дзикевич - Страница 7

Abstract

Young children learn to make sense of the world through mimetic processes. These processes are focused to begin with on their parents, brothers and sisters and people they know well. Young children want to become like these persons. They are driven by the desire to become like them, which will mean that they belong and are part of them and their world. Young children, and indeed humans in general are social beings. They, more than all non-human primates, are social beings who cannot survive without the Other. In mimetic processes the outside world becomes the inner world and the inner world becomes the outside world. The imaginary is developed and the imaginary develops ways of relating to the outside world. In a mimetic loop, this in turn affects the inner world of the imaginary. These processes are sensory and governed by desire. All the senses are involved which means that the imaginary has multiple layers. Since there is an intermingling of images, emotions and language, these processes are rooted in the body and at the same time transcend the body as they become part of the imaginary. Human beings create images of themselves in all cultures and historical periods. They need these images to understand themselves and their relationship to other human beings and to develop social relations and communities. Images of the human being are designs and projections of the human being and his or her relationship to other people and to the world. They are formed to visualize representations of individuals or aspects of them. They arise when we communicate about ourselves. They support us to live with diversities and to develop similarities and feelings of belonging with other people. They are the result of complex anthropological processes, in which social and cultural power structures play an important role.

Key words

Mimesis, images, the imaginary.

Young children learn to make sense of the world through mimetic processes. These processes are focussed to begin with on their parents, brothers and sisters and people they know well. Young children want to become like these persons. They are driven by the desire to become like them, which will mean that they belong and are part of them and their world. Young children, and indeed humans in general are social beings. They, more than all non-human primates, are social beings who cannot survive without the Other. There are several anthropological conditions behind this.

One of these is neoteny, or the fact that human beings are born at an embryonic stage in their development. In other words human beings are born unfinished or incomplete. Their development has to take place once their life has started, and for this to happen they need people who are close to them, people they desire and who they want to be like. Unlike other non-human primates and animals, children are not governed by their instincts. They are equipped only with residual instincts which are not strong enough for them to be able to survive if they are not kept alive by the people close to them.

We can see this clearly if we compare a young child to a foal. A foal is capable of living just a few hours after its birth, whereas it takes young human beings years to reach that stage. Neoteny and the decrease in the instincts are inextricably linked. As Philosophical Anthropology has also indicated, this explains why human beings are able to grasp the «suchness» (Sosein) of phenomena, in other words the world, whereas animals are only able to perceive an environment determined by their instincts (Wulf 2013a, chap. 2)

It is through mimetic processes that children make their early discoveries of the world. It is not only that children try to become like other people whom they desire. It is also their discovery of the world that is mimetic. These early processes of perceiving the world that are of such central importance in the development of the imaginary, are frequently mimetic. In other words, at a very early stage young children develop an active relationship to the world. They adopt relationships to objects which are conveyed to them largely by the people whom they desire to emulate. For example children follow adults’ movements when adults give them a bottle filled with tea. They perceive the objects «bottle» and «tea» and the movement of the person they love giving them something to drink. As children mimetically appropriate the way the adults they love give them the tea, they feel and appropriate both the act of giving the tea and also the warmth and caring this expresses, over and above the act of tea giving. As children appropriate the action there is an interplay between the object that quenches their thirst (the bottle) and the child’s appropriation of the emotional aspect of the action, the caring. Young children perceive these processes at an early age, and at this point it is the receptive aspect that is dominant. It is the adults who perform the actions and the children who perceive them. A few months later this changes and the active side of perception becomes more important. A child’s perception of the world is socially transmitted very early on. Since the medium for this is culture, the child becomes «encultured» while very young. This happens via the movements of persons close to the child. These movements convey meanings, even if these are not yet conveyed in words. Children understand the gesture of someone giving them tea (Wulf, and Fischer-Lichte 2010). It contains a meaning, even though this meaning is not articulated verbally. This is because gestures, as non-verbal acts, still convey meaning. What conveys the meaning here is the movement of the body, driven by the senses, which children perceive at a very early age and then repeat, also very early on, in mimetic processes (Gebauer, and Wulf 2018).

It is in mimetic processes that children discover the sense of gestural actions, a sense that is implicit and often does not even need to be conveyed because it is has already been conveyed by the body. Such gestural actions form part of our vast silent knowledge, which is so very important in human life but which is often accorded little value in comparison with scientific knowledge which society reveres (Kraus, Budde, Hietzge, and Wulf 2017). Ryle clearly identified the different nature of the knowledge that manifests itself in actions of the body in his distinction between «knowing how» and «knowing that» (Ryle 1990). Learning to ride a bike is a good illustration of this. I can read a whole treatise about what you have to do when riding a bike, but it will be of very little help to me when learning. Learning to ride a bike does not involve «knowing that» but «knowing how». I need to be able to do it, and have to learn it practically, by using my body. There is no other way I can acquire this knowledge, that is far more an ability. Here too, learning to ride a bike is the result of mimetic processes, processes that have to relate to other people but above all to the movements of our own bodies. This is a kind of mimesis of ourselves where we develop a mimetic relationship to our own behaviour in order to improve it.

Now to return to the mimetic processes that take place in young children, by means of which they develop their imaginary. Even before they reach the age of one, they are able to understand the intentions of the people close to them. If someone points at something, for example, then they follow the gesture of pointing, not stopping at the finger itself, but grasping that the aim of the pointing is an object and not the finger itself. (Tomasello 1999). It is already apparent in one year olds that they are beginning to use mimetic processes to make sense of the world and gradually transform it into their imaginary. Through mimetic processes the outside world becomes their inner world. As non-verbal actions addressed by subjects towards objects, gestures play an important role in conveying emotional caring and attachment. This is because they are demonstrative and at the same time directed towards the other person. In a mimetic process they convey a positive social relationship and a relationship to the objects of a cultural world. Both of these become absorbed into a child’s imaginary in the mimetic process, resulting in a complex interlinking of a cultural object (a bottle), the adult’s act of caring and the meaning of this interplay for the child.

In his autobiography, «Berlin Childhood around 1900», Walter Benjamin (2006) illustrated how children incorporate their cultural environments in processes of assimilation. In the course of these processes, children assimilate aspects of the parental home, such as the rooms, particular corners, objects and atmospheres. They are incorporated as «imprints» of the images and stored in the child’s imaginary world, where they are subsequently transformed into new images and memories that help the child gain access to other cultural worlds. Culture is handed on by means of these processes of incorporating and making sense of cultural products. The mimetic ability to transform the external material world into images, transferring them into our internal worlds of images and making them accessible to others enables individuals to develop their imaginary and to actively shape cultural realities (Gebauer, and Wulf 1998, 2018; Wulf 2002; Wulf, and Zirfas 2014).

Even at the age of one, children develop a considerable ability, though the fact that they are very active, to absorb the world around them in mimetic processes. The ability of a child’s body to move around plays an important role in this. This physical moving enables them to alter their relationship to objects in the outside world. Their perspective on the world changes as they move. This applies to the corners where the objects are perceived and even more to the changing bodily encounters with the world. The world is touched by the child’s hands and often by the child’s whole body. As they gradually feel their way around the world children experience two things. One is the active child’s experience of touching the objects. But it is also the discovery that, through the act of touching, the world itself replies. Children now feel the differences in material objects and at the same time experience the world outside them. This dual experience of touching objects and being touched by them is of central importance in the development of the very first elements of a sense of a child’s identity. The child now has the dual experience of being active and passive at the same time, an experience which characterises mimetic processes. Children touch the world and are touched back by it. This becomes a cyclical process of mutual discovery, and I cannot overstate how important this is for the development of the child’s imaginary.

In mimetic processes the outside world becomes the inner world and the inner world becomes the outside world. The imaginary is developed and the imaginary develops ways of relating to the outside world. Again in a mimetic loop, this in turn affects the inner world of the imaginary. These processes are sensory and governed by desire. All the senses are involved which means that the imaginary has multiple layers. Since there is an intermingling of images, emotions and language, these processes are rooted in the body and at the same time transcend the body as they become part of the imaginary (Wulf 2014; Hüppauf, and Wulf 2009; Paragrana 2016).

As we read works of literature, it is mimetic processes that bring to life an assemblage of non-sensory words into sensory ideas and emotions and give them meaning. (Benjamin 1980a, 1980b). It is the same with other products of culture that also require mimetic processes for them to come alive. Such processes are particularly important in the transfer of the cultural imaginary from one generation to the next, since these processes require a metamorphosis to keep forms of living, knowledge, art or technology alive. As mimetic processes are not simply methods of copying or producing worlds that have already been symbolically interpreted but also consist in our taking and then incorporating «impressions» of these worlds, these mimetic relationships always contain creative aspects which alter the original worlds. This creates a cultural dynamism between generations and cultures which constantly gives rise to new things.