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May 25, 2010
When the sun goes down, mythology surfaces in the rituals and anxieties of modern life – in beautiful sunsets no less than deepening shadows of despair. At night when the sun seems to travel below the earth, sleep, too, brings its tossing and turning as journey through strange continents of being.
This talk by Michael Taussig at Monash University in Melbourne as part of an interdisciplinary dialogue called Thinking Through Colour and Light addresses twilight, the witching hour when light transforms itself and the basis of the image, such that other worlds are possible.
All of this has something to do with mimesis.
Taussig's concern in Mimesis and Alterity is to reinstate in and against the myth of Enlightenment, with its universal, context-free reason, not merely the resistance of the concrete particular to abstraction, but what he deems critical to thought that moves and moves us-----namely, its sensuousness, its mimeticity.
The reference here is Adorno and Horkhimer's argument in the Dialectic of Enlightenment that the Enlightenment rationality (logical positivism) has become the dominant structure of rational thinking that has become synonymous with rationality itself is founded on a repression of alternative possibilities such as mimesis.
Adorno rejects the option of regressing back to mimetic forms of thought – predicated as they were on humanity’s objective powerlessness, these forms of thought would no longer be appropriate to a human community that had attained a level of genuine material mastery. Adorno suggests, there might be a potential to move forward – to preserve the “conceptual” elements within thought alongside a differentiated, heterogenous perception of nature.
Michael Taussig in Mimesis and Alterity suggests that these conceptual elements were mapped by Walter Benjamin's ideas of the optical unconscious associated with film cameras and the resurgence of the mimetic faculty. These conceptual elements are a two-layered notion of mimesis:----a copying or imitation, and a palpable, sensuous, connection between the very body of the perceiver and the perceived.
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Miko Elo in Walter Benjamin on Photography: Towards Elemental Politics in Transformations (no.15, November 2007) spells out what Benjamin meant by the optical Unconscious:
In the “expanding field of photography,” the eye is likely to encounter images that exceed its capacities of reading. It has to learn how to read.
The reason is that photography opens new “image-worlds” that need to be interpreted in the same way as psychoanalysts interpret dreams: