Reading: Roger Caillois on Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia

Having recently read Roger Caillois’s seminal essay Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia, I’ve gotten to thinking about how to apply these ideas to my analysis of disposable material culture. Charting the richly mimetic natural kingdom, Caillois identifies the problem of distinction as a matter of exercising the ability to select, to identify subject from context. This discussion must have felt timely as modernism attempted to universalize and the scale of urban masses was increasingly recognized through the global circulation of editorial photography. 

As a method of determining distinction Caillois suggests that emphasis be placed on a strict method of classification, based on facts and not interpretation. Anthropocentric tendencies complicate the reading of plant and animal markings. In exploring the matter of resemblance Caillois quotes Cuenot, who says “resemblance is therefore obtained by the sum of a certain number of small details” (65). So, one must ask: How few details of selection does it take to fool the perceiver? 
And, in turn the necessary response: “That depends on how perceptive the investigation is”. 
It very much depends on the degree of detail and mimic’s commitment to performance. If the disguise is sufficient, the investigator's rigorous pole vault of classification may not offer passage onto the opposing shores of distinction, but instead may land her in the river of deception.  

Caillois offers a wondrous phenomenological insight when he suggests that morphological mimicry may be “an actual photography” (65), wherein a subject reflects its context to such a degree that it becomes a near perfect replica, thus dissolving the distinction between subject and object. This unifying process of total simulation, if too perfect, becomes quite dangerous, possibly even violent, as in the case of the stick bug pruned by the blades of the topiarist. 

When Caillois’ argument enters into the territory of sympathetic magic, founded on contagion, which says that like becomes like, it identifies mimicry as a question of space. An environment must effect its contents, for nothing can withstand the weathering of time and space. Mimicry is the imitation of one’s surroundings as an act of locating oneself, so as not to appear out of place. 

At this point the essay takes a strange turn as it introduces the obsolete psychoanalytic term psychasthenia. Caillois describes using himself as a subject of study, inducing a sort of introverted schizophrenic state that reveals the ego’s response to day and night. He writes, "While light space is eliminated by the materiality of objects, darkness is ‘filled’, it touches the individual directly, envelops him, penetrates him, and even passes through him" (72). Caillois attempts to extend his study of the natural world into the realm of “civilized man”. He explains how the permeable ego of the human is confronted by its own dissolution and absorption in the face of mimicry. In this introspective state, one may realize that their position in fact becomes a possession of space, rather than the standard assumption that one’s state of being is in possession of the space around oneself. This is what he explains as “depersonalization by assimilation into space” (72). A rather psychedelic metaphysical meltdown. Thus the act of mimicry results in the feeling of a loss of personality and life, of being subsumed by something greater. Here a tired Adbuster’s argument might appear as a photograph of a suburb next to a pack of punk rockers, with a caption that reads: Homogenization for everyone! 

Exploring my own subjects of research on this blog, I believe that there is an argument to be made regarding how the semiotic pathology of disposable consumer culture can be read as a symptom of mimetic assimilation. Caillois explains earlier in the essay that mimesis produces ornamentation (64). The mimetic consumer engages with disposable material culture as a labour of elaborate self-production. Caillois ends his exploration on a reading of Flaubert, in which he describes Saint Anthony as “suffer[ing] the lure of material space: [Anthony] wants to split himself thoroughly, to be in everything” (88). This being-in-everything is the symptom of a culture without many guidelines for appropriate behaviour, of a belief in infinite growth. The sympathetic magic at the heart of advertising in consumer culture relays a series of prosthetic ideologies, which are temporarily grafted from disposable products, donned for only so long as is necessary, before the culture shifts so violently that it becomes indistinguishable from Italo Calvino’s fabled city of Leonia, who refashions itself anew each morning.