Civilized subjects project their own repressed mimetic impulses onto others as repellent remnants.
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
Categorization
- DEFINE: Clarifies the Adorno-Horkheimer concept of ‘mimetic heritage’ — the pre-civilizational imitative impulse that bourgeois production represses and that then resurfaces as disgust toward others.
- XREF: This is the Dialectic of Enlightenment ‘Elements of Anti-Semitism’ thesis explaining how domination of nature re-emerges as domination of other people. — connects to: Civilization condemns as repellent the very mimetic gestures it once enforced.; Suppressing unwanted traits causes people to project them onto others, relieving their own discomfort; Repressors project threatening traits onto others because they suppress unwanted thoughts (+7 more)
Broader Connections
- Suppressing unwanted traits causes people to project them onto others, relieving their own discomfort
#expands(0.95) - Anti-Semitism projects the subject’s own repressed impulses onto the victim
#exemplifies(0.95) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 147 - Europeans project their repressed evil onto the racialized Other
#exemplifies(0.95) - Repressors project threatening traits onto others because they suppress unwanted thoughts
#expands(0.90) - Suppressing a stigmatized trait causes people to project it onto others.
#expands(0.90) — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 2358 - Prejudiced people disown their own negative traits and project them outward
#expands(0.90) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 543 - Projection lets prejudiced people condemn in outgroups the traits they secretly possess
#expands(0.90) — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 2345 - Repressors project their denied traits onto others more than nonrepressors
#corroborates(0.85) — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 2356 - Projecting badness onto others protects the self from internal contradiction.
#expands(0.80) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 646