I've always struggled to understand the term mimesis. I understand that the term mimesis is derived from the Greek mimesis, meaning to imitate; or as the OED defines mimesis, as "a figure of speech, whereby the words or actions of another are imitated" and "the deliberate imitation of the behavior of one group of people by another as a factor in social change". Once upon a time human beings were mimetically adept--eg., mimicry in dance and ritual life in aboriginal culture. Children playing today would an example of the mimetic faculty--the ability to mime and become and behave like someone else.

My difficulties come with the 20th century approaches to mimesis by authors such as Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Girard, and Derrida. They have have defined mimetic activity as it relates to social practice and interpersonal relations, rather than as just a rational process of making and producing models. Their approach emphasizes the body, emotions, the senses, and temporality. I kinda get that; sort of. But it eludes me.

The return to a conception of mimesis as a fundamental human property is most evident in the writings of Walter Benjamin who postulates that the mimetic faculty of humans is defined by representation and expression. But what does that actually mean for us today?

The resurfacing of the primitive in modernity? Modernity provides the cause and context for the resurgence of the mimetic faculty. So how does the story go?

The University of Chicago's useful keywords glossary of media terms comes in handy. The mimesis entry written by Michelle Puetz states that Adorno's discussion of mimesis originates within a biological context in which mimicry (which mediates between the two states of life and death) is a zoological predecessor to mimesis.

Animals are seen as genealogically perfecting mimicry (adaptation to their surroundings with the intent to deceive or delude their pursuer) as a means of survival. Survival, the attempt to guarantee life, is thus dependant upon the identification with something external and other, with "dead, lifeless material". Magic constitutes a "prehistorical" or anthropological mimetic model - in which the identification with an aggressor (i.e. the witch doctor's identification with the wild animal) results in an immunization - an elimination of danger and the possibility of annihilation.

With the rise of the Enlightenment in modernity we have the emergence of a world of restricted thought and suppressed alternatives. Rather than bringing forth a new age of human emancipation, the rise of Enlightenment reason has led to new forms of domination, it has become its opposite, it has reverted to myth. The dominance of positivist thinking reduces the space for critical experience and for rational consideration of the social and historic roots of present social structures and systems of knowledge.

Puetz goes on to say that in Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, mimesis (once a dominant practice) becomes a repressed presence in Western history in which one yields to nature (as opposed to the impulse of a [positivist] Enlightenment science which seeks to dominate nature) to the extent that the subject loses itself and sinks into the surrounding world. They argue that, in Western history, mimesis has been transformed by Enlightenment science from a dominant presence into a distorted, repressed, and hidden force. Artworks can "provide modernity with a possibility to revise or neutralize the domination of nature".

Michael Taussig's discussion of mimesis in Mimesis and Alterity is centered around Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno's biologically determined mode in which mimesis is posited as an adaptive behavior (prior to language) that allows humans to make themselves similar to their surrounding environments through assimilation and play. Through physical and bodily acts of mimesis (i.e. the chameleon blending in with its environment, a child imitating a windmill, etc.), the distinction between the self and other becomes porous and flexible.

Rather than dominating nature, mimesis as mimicry opens up a tactile experience of the world in which the Cartesian categories of subject and object are not firm, but rather malleable; paradoxically, difference is created by making oneself similar to something else by mimetic "imitation". Observing subjects thus assimilate themselves to the objective world rather than anthropomorphizing it in their own image