ABSTRACT

Nature creates similarities. One need only think of mimicry. The highest capacity for producing similarities, is man's. His gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else. Walter Benjamin's theses on mimesis are part of a larger argument about the history of representation and what he chose to call "the aura" of works of art and cult objects before the invention of mimetic machines such as the camera. Optical unconscious is precisely because of the two-layered character of mimesis: copying, and the visceral quality of the percept uniting viewer with the viewed—the two-layered character so aptly captured in Benjamin's phrase, physiognomic aspects of visual worlds. Habit offers a profound example of tactile knowing and is very much on Benjamin's mind, because only at the depth of habit is radical change effected, where unconscious strata of culture are built into social routines as bodily disposition.