Civilization condemns as repellent the very mimetic gestures it once enforced.
Evidence
In the bourgeois mode of production, the indelible mimetic heritage of all practical experience is consigned to oblivion. The pitiless prohibition of regression becomes mere fate; the denial is now so complete that it is no longer conscious. Those blinded by civilization experience their own tabooed mimetic features only in certain gestures and behavior patterns which they encounter in others and which strike them as isolated remnants, as embarrassing rudimentary elements that survive in the rationalized environment. What seems repellently alien is in fact all too familiar: the infectious gestures of direct contacts suppressed by civilization, for instance, touch, soothing, snuggling up, coaxing. We are put off by the old-fashioned nature of these impulses. They seem to translate long reified human relations back into individual power relations: in trying to influence the purchaser by flattery, the debtor by threats and the creditor by entreaty … However, undisciplined mimicry is the brand of the old form of domination, engraved in the living substance of the dominated and passed down by a process of unconscious imitation in infancy from generation to generation, from the down-at-heel Jew to the rich banker. This mimicry arouses anger because, in the face of the new conditions of production, it displays the old fear which, in order to survive those conditions, must be forgotten. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1426 (
#expands, via linked claim)
Civilization has replaced the organic adaptation to others and mimetic behavior proper, by organized control of mimesis, in the magical phase; and, finally, by rational practice, by work, in the historical phase. Uncontrolled mimesis is outlawed. The angel with the fiery sword who drove man out of paradise and onto the path of technical progress is the very symbol of that progress. For centuries, the severity with which the rulers prevented their own followers and the subjugated masses from reverting to mimetic modes of existence, starting with the religious prohibition on images, going on to the social banishment of actors and gypsies, and leading finally to the kind of teaching which does not allow children to behave as children, has been the condition for civilization. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 139 (
#expands, via linked claim)
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Civilized subjects project their own repressed mimetic impulses onto others as repellent remnants. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1426; Civilizational progress converts once-necessary behaviors into taboos and abominations.; Civilization is built on the suppression of mimesis. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 139
Related
- Civilized subjects project their own repressed mimetic impulses onto others as repellent remnants. (similarity 0.87)
- Civilization is built on the suppression of mimesis. (similarity 0.86)
- Jews are hated for displaying mimetic impulses civilization has repressed (similarity 0.80)
Broader Connections
- Civilized subjects project their own repressed mimetic impulses onto others as repellent remnants.
#expands(0.88) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1426 - Civilization is built on the suppression of mimesis.
#expands(0.82) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 139 - Civilizational progress converts once-necessary behaviors into taboos and abominations.
#expands(0.80)