ABSTRACT
The concept of identification was only one important version of mimesis to arise out of the late nineteenth-century renewal of interest in this ancient problem. Like Freud and other psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists also looked to imitation as a way of understanding human social and cultural life. The theory of mimesis helped social theorists to explain the origins of language, the nature of groups and the transmission of culture over the generations. As early as the mideighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose theory of acting we discussed in chapter 4, asserted that mimesis lies at the very foundation of human social life. For Rousseau, as for Plato, imitation is at once necessary and deceptive, a way of pretending to be what we are not, and a cause of dangerous and unreasonable emotions. In his influential work of educational theory, Emile (1762), Rousseau follows Plato and Aristotle in suggesting that mimesis is an integral part of human nature, but he also argues that this faculty is perverted in society by envy and vanity:
Prior to the formation of societies, according to Rousseau, human beings lived entirely within themselves. Once they became part of a collective, however, they began to look at others, and to want others to look at them. Henceforth, people would imitate not to learn or to improve themselves, but ‘to make an impression on others’, or to bring what is better down to their own level. ‘The foundation of imitation among us’, he concludes, ‘comes from the desire always to be transported out of ourselves’ (Rousseau, 1979: 104). Imitation is at once a primary social bond and a weak link in human nature that undermines individuality and makes us no better than apes.
