Christoph Wulf - Historical Anthropology - Mimesis, Imagination, and Emotion

Mimesis, Imagination, and Emotion

Cultural learning as mimetic learning: in a study about mimesis carried out together with Gunter Gebauer. For culture, art, and society, it was about the reconstruction of mimetic phenomenon, beginning in antiquity and ending with Derrida. This study was not about developing a history of mimetic thought. The research was instead carried out in the sense of the concept of family resemblance (Wittgenstein) with the objective of investigating how mimesis and mimetic processes were understood in various eras and in different contexts. Here it was found that the richness of the mimesis concept is in the fact that it has no narrowly delineated meaning, but that it changes and further develops in the course of historical development in the sense of family resemblance. It was about showing how mimesis was understood in the various historical contexts. For this reason research was carried out into how mimetic phenomena were conceptualized in antiquity and how these concepts changed in the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance, and in the modern era. The reconstruction and analysis of the mimesis concept of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Jacques Derridas were particularly interesting. Mimetic processes also have as their aim an assimilation to the work of art, which allows the work of art to remain as it is and which gives the person who is behaving mimetically the opportunity to include the forms of the work of art in her imagination. With the mimetic appropriation of works of art, an assimilation to an exterior and an incorporation of the exterior into the world of the imaginary occurs. This process also takes place in the opposite direction. Mental images are brought to the outside and objectified in a mimetic process. This happens with artistic works, but also with text and action plans. The mimetic process is a bridging process that on the one hand converts the exterior world into the interior world and on the other hand conveys the interior world into the exterior world. In the mimetic process, what occurs is not just an assimilation to a work of art or another person to which one mimetically relates in order to become the person that one is or can become through this assimilation. In mimetic processes, one does not become like the other, but one needs the other in order to be able to develop in relation to the other. In the relationship between children and parents, these processes play a central role. Because children want to grow up, they first need to become like their parents. Mimetic processes take place not just through seeing and hearing. Experiences of touching, smelling, tasting are also mimetically processed. Mimetic processes contribute to the partial overcoming of the subject/object split. In the mimetic process, the person emerges from himself and clings to an exterior. This often occurs pre-consciously and without thinking. This approaching of an assimilation to the other is an important form of appropriation of an exterior, an alterity. These processes take place even before thinking and speaking develop. They are physical processes, often sensuous ones, which take place even before the question of whether something is right or wrong is asked. Mimetic processes are polycentric. People hardly know what is happening with them when they are in a mimetic relationship and appropriate something in the process. What is mimetically learned can change again in response to later references and stimuli. Mimetically obtained knowledge is not clearly definable knowledge. In mimetic learning, a figure or a totality that is often not yet differentiated in the mimetic process is acquired. The mimetic movement aims at taking a symbolically generated world and interpreting a prior world that itself is already interpreted. A new interpretation of an already interpreted world takes place. This applies even to the repetition. The gesture of reproduction creates structures of meaning different from the prior givens. It isolates an object from the general context and establishes a perspective of reception that is different from the one perceived in the prior world. Isolation and change of perspective are characteristics of aesthetic processes that tie in with the close relationship between mimesis and aesthetics that has been seen since Plato. The mimetic new interpretation is a new perception, “a seeing as,” as formulated by Wittgenstein. The mimetic action involves the intention of showing a symbolically generated world in such a way that it can be seen as a distinct one. Mimetic processes do not just relate to other people. The recognition that cultural life is largely mimetic learning goes back to Plato and Aristotle. Plato already spoke about how there is a mimetic dynamic that one cannot resist, especially as a child and adolescent. We need to imitate other people, images, and models. According to Plato’s interpretation, the (young) person cannot resist the power of the mimetic, but is subject to it. For this reason the negative occurrences and images from the ideal state need to be disregarded. Homer, who was long seen as a master teacher of the Greeks, should no longer play the central role in the education of the youth, but instead the philosophers. In contrast to Homer, who reported about the misdeeds of the gods, thereby creating negative role models, the philosophers were to become role models of the youth exclusively as models of the good. Aristotle set a different accent. He pled not simply for the exclusion of the negative, but instead demanded an examination of it in order to immunize the youth against the negative. In spite of points of view that differed, Plato and Aristotle agreed that the human is a “mimetic animal” and that culture is learned in mimetic processes. Here mimesis becomes a synonym for upbringing. Mimetic processes do not just aim at creating a copy like a photocopier. In the mimetic process, children, adolescents, and adults are active. They relate to an exterior, assimilate it, and become similar to it. For example, if children mimetically relate to a teacher that they really like, these children do not become like their role model. But they need this role model to which they can relate in order to be able to develop certain traits to bring themselves forth as they would like to be. These insights about the central role of mimetic learning are also supported today through Michael Tomasello’s research, which shows that mimetic processes allow children who are just eight months old to understand the intentions of adults before they are manifested. Non-human primates are never able to do this. The neuroscientific research about the mirror neuron system makes the importance of mimetic processes clear. In this research it is shown that when people carry out an action, such as when they hit someone, neural processes occur that are similar to those of people watching these actions. Thus when people see an action, their brain reacts in a manner that is similar to if they had carried out this action themselves. When people dissipate in social situations and see how other people react, this generates nearly the same processes, with the only difference being that they are more weakly articulated. Several different methodologies support Wulf’s theory that cultural life largely takes place mimetically.

Imagination: Wulf’s research shows that mimetic processes are enabled through imagination. The imagination is a conditio humana. Without it a person cannot become a person, neither phylogenetically nor ontogenetically. In this recourse to antiquity, imagination and fantasy can be described as the power that makes the world appear to people. “Making something appear” on the one hand means that the world appears to people in a way dictated by the conditions of being human and is perceived accordingly. On the other hand, it means using mental images to conceptualize the world and creating it according to these conceptions. The imagination is the energy that connects people with the world and the world with the people. It has a bridging function between outside and inside and between inside and outside. It is chiastic and expresses its significance in this function. In Roman thought, fantasy becomes imagination. This concept expresses another characteristic of imagination: the transformation of the outside world into images and their transformation into a “mental” image world. In the German language, imagination is translated by Paracelsus with the word “Einbildungskraft,” that is, as energy that the world puts into the person and thereby makes his notions “worldly.” Without this possibility there would be no human cultural world, nothing imaginary, and no language. Without imagination, there would be no memory and no projections of the future. Imagination is the ability to imagine an object in the imaginary even when it is not present. The discussion about imagination made it clear that imagination is more than the capability of bringing what is absent into the present and imagining the world. What is no less important is the possibility of imagination of restructuring existing orders and creating something new. Imagination makes it possible to invent things and develop creativity. The question regarding the extent to which imagination is bound to the conditions of nature and culture in the generation of its works remains unanswered. Even if one assumes that artists behave like natura naturans, i.e. like the creative force of nature, this does not yet clarify how originality, creativity, and innovation come into being. The creativity of imagination is based on the act of inventio, which oscillates between actio and passio and is shifted to the subject. Imagination shows itself not just in images, as the etymology of the term suggests. It is no less important for perception and production of tones and sounds. The “nearby” senses of smell, taste, and touch, as well as the sense of motion, rely on the imagination. The same applies to synesthesia and the sensus communis. Here a differentiation must be made between three types of images: 1) the image as a magical presence, 2) the image as a mimetic representation, and 3) the image as a technical simulation. Another perspective that was further developed by Wulf focuses on mental images in which the human imagination becomes visible. On the one hand, the mental image world of a social subject is dependent on the collective imaginary of his culture, and on the other hand, it is dependent on the uniqueness and unmistakability of the images that come from his individual history; ultimately it is also dependent on the mutual overlap and penetration of both image worlds. Here seven types of images can be differentiated with a heuristic intention: images as conduct regulators, orientation images, images of ideals, images of will, images of memory, mimetic images, and archetypal images.

Emotions: In the context of his role as the principal investigator in the “Languages of Emotion” cluster of excellence, Wulf increasingly turned his attention to research on emotions in recent years. This above all involved researching the historical and cultural character of emotions within a broad spectrum of emotions. Thus exploratory investigations were carried out regarding the connections between emotions and movement, emotion and memory, emotion and rituals, and emotions and imagination: Studies regarding the happiness of the family in Germany and Japan, regarding emotions in the Muslim world, and about the formation of feelings and emotions were carried out. Finally, an ethnographic investigation of recognition and appreciation in school was carried out. The following studies were carried out in particular: -Emotions As Motion, with Valerij Savchuk, Goulnara Kaidarova, and Russian colleagues in St. Petersburg; -Emotions and Memory, with Chen Hongjie and Pan Lu and colleagues from Peking University in Beijing; -Emotions in Rituals and Performances, with Axel Michaels and Indian colleagues in Goa; - Emotion and Imagination, with Norval Baitello and Latin American Colleagues in São Paulo; - Emotions in a Transcultural World, Especially in the Arab and in the European Culture (Beirut) - The Formation of Feelings, with Ute Frevert (Max Planck Institute for Human Development); -Emotions, special issue of the Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft; -Recognition and Appreciation in Upbringing, Education, and Socialization. An ethnographic study in Berlin; -The Happiness of the Family. Ethnographic Studies in Germany and Japan (with Shoko Suzuki, Jörg Zirfas, et al.).