ABSTRACT
This chapter emphasizes how mimesis, as either an unadorned human faculty or one revived in modernity by mimetic machines, is a capacity that alerts one to the contactual element of the visual contract with reality. It expresses that just as mimesis as a necessary part of thinking the concrete involves world history, especially that confluence of colonial factors resulting in primitivism, so by definition world history cannot be thought of outside the mimetic faculty itself. As the nature that culture uses to create second nature, mimesis chaotically jostles for elbow room in this force field of necessary contradiction and illusion, providing the glimpse of the opportunity to dismantle that second nature and reconstruct other worlds—so long as one reach a critical level of understanding of the play of primitivism within the mimetic faculty itself. The chapter also emphasizes the worldliness of world history—in which the sails as images develop into concepts according to how they are set.
