Posthuman Mimesis

After the shadow and the phantom, the twin and the double, the ancient problematic of what the ancients called, enigmatically, ‘mimēsis’, is returning under different masks and conceptual personae to animate and reanimate posthuman subjects in the digital age. Reloaded by new technologies and media, algorithms and AI simulations, emerging forms of posthuman mimesis do not merely mirror or redouble the human passively. Rather, they form and transform a chameleon species that is not only sapiens but also ludens, not simply economicus but also numericus, not only faber but also plasticus and, we now add, mimeticus as well. This is not a simple adjectival addition to a long list that already qualifies an eminently adaptable, protean, relational and genially metamorphic creature. On the contrary, mimesis is the very principle that makes adaptability, protean transformations and relational bonds possible, thereby bringing a genial yet not always wise species into being in the first place. New avatars of mimesis are now at play in the figures of the cyborg and the android, the hologram and the avatar, robots and increasingly mimetic and creative AI, among other simulations that may appear fictional or hyperreal online; yet, via increasingly intrusive algorithmic technologies, they are now operating hypermimetically on posthuman bodies and minds offline as well, transforming the ongoing process of becoming posthuman.[1]

A mimetic perspective to posthuman studies provides a long genealogical view, or overview, to better analyse, critique and evaluate technologically induced transformations that are already in progress, generating an AI revolution that was long in the making. Posthuman mimesis is, in fact, the latest conceptual avatar in a long genealogy that is ancient in origins, traverses the entire history of western metaphysics, art and religion, informs technics and media, generates virulent quarrels between philosophers and poets, the ancients and the moderns, and, via a forceful overturning of perspectives in the modernist period, reaches into the postmodern period as well, transforming our process of becoming posthuman as well.[2] Let me thus offer a brief and necessarily partial genealogical reconstruction of some of the main steps in a long journey that now leads up to posthuman mimesis.

The history of a protean species I call homo mimeticus takes many twists and turns before it reaches the posthuman turn and cannot be fully recapitulated here.[3] For our introductory purpose, its genealogy can be schematically summarised via the following, admittedly schematic steps:

The different steps I number for convenience should not give the false impression that the genealogy of homo mimeticus rests on a grand linear narrative of progress – if only because the last step brings us back to the question of becoming with which the genealogy starts, albeit with a technological supplement. We are thus not confronted with a circular logic based on sameness but with a spiralling movement that is set in motion by a series of repetitions and differences. Let me articulate each step in some more detail.

Due to deeply rooted mimetic dispositions constitutive of the genealogy of homo mimeticus now amplified by an increasingly thicker network of digital simulations entangling its 2.0 upgrade, we may be living digitally enhanced, immersive and increasingly realistic second lives online; yet we continue to remain radically dependent on increasingly inert mimetic bodies tied to the Earth. I call this spiraling loop in which a hyperreal simulation retroacts on the reality of mimetic bodies and minds hypermimesis. And I do so in order to call attention to the dynamic interplay of hyperreality and imitative behavior constitutive of the mimetic posthuman as well. In an age in which artificial intelligence is increasingly modelled on human intelligence this hypermimetic interplay cuts both ways: posthumans imitate technological models, yet technology also imitates human biology, most notably the brain.[12] What is, in fact, ironic in this mirroring overturning of perspectives is that after the complexity of the brain was often reduced to a computer in the past century, it is now the all too human brain that serves as the model for computers to imitate in the present century. If reductionist approaches to the brain mistook the computer for a model to imitate, posthumanists should perhaps be careful not to simply invert the mirror and turn the brain into a model for technological reproductions.

As the genealogy of homo mimeticus I could just barely sketch here should at least have taught us, the relation between the model and the copy, the original and the simulation, has never been stable in the first place. Rather, it generates spiralling patho(-)logical feedback loops that are hypermimetic in their powers of metamorphosis and which are now massively at play in the protean avatars of posthuman mimesis.

[1] For first steps on ‘posthuman mimesis’, see Journal of Posthumanism 2.2 (2022). For more information on mimetic studies, see www.homomimeticus.eu

[2] See N. Katherine Hayles and Nidesh Lawtoo, ‘Posthuman Mimesis II—Connections: A Dialogue between Nidesh Lawtoo and Katherine Hayles’ in Journal of Posthumanism, 2.2 (2022): 181-191.

[3] See Nidesh Lawtoo, Homo Mimeticus: A New Theory of Imitation (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2022) and Homo Mimeticus 2.0: Posthuman Mimesis in Art, Philosophy and Technics, ed. Nidesh Lawtoo (Amsterdam and New York: Brill, 2024).

[4] Plato, Republic in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, trans. Paul Shorey, eds. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1963), 575–853, 827, 602c.

[5] Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufman (New York: Viking Press, 1982), 463-563, 485.

[6] See Nidesh Lawtoo, The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013).

[7] Jacques Derrida, ‘The Double Session’ in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), 173-286, 186.

[9] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacres et Simulation (Paris: Galilée, 1981), 11 (my trans.).

[10] Lee McIntire, Post-Truth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 123-150.

[11] Nidesh Lawtoo, ‘Avatar Simulation in 3Ts: Techne, Trance, Transformation’, Science Fiction Studies 125. 42. (2015): 132-150.

[12] See Catherine Malabou, Morphing Intelligence: from IQ Measurement to Artificial Brains trans. Carolyn Shread (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021).