Natural, Un-Natural and Detached Mimicry
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Natural, Un-Natural and Detached Mimicry John Pickering 1 Received: 10 April 2018 / Accepted: 27 September 2018 / Published online: 5 October 2018 # The Author(s) 2018
Abstract Natural mimicry is ubiquitous. Plants mimic animals, animals mimic plants, animals mimic each other and animals may even mimic counterfactual states that deceive or distract other animals. Almost all natural mimicry is based on iconicity which hence anchors it in real world resemblances. The vast majority of natural mimicry is done unconsciously but when humans mimic, they know what they are doing. As Merlin Donald suggest, mimicry may in fact have played a crucial role in the emergence of the human condition, allowing new forms of cognition to emerge. Here it is suggested that the role played by mimicry may have involved the evolution of a capacity for metaphorical perception, where an object may not only be seen ‘as is’ but also ‘as if’ it was a functional mimic of something else. This new form of mimicry made possible new forms of communication, co-operation and creative engagement with the environment. Once these developed to the point where they produced symbolic systems and other cultural tools, the nature of human mimicry expanded radically. No longer anchored in resemblance, it became detached and qualitatively distinct from natural forms. The consequences of this detachment are now becoming clear. Keywords Iconicity . Affordance . Metaphor . Gibson . Donald . Baudrillard
Introduction
Nature creates similarities. One need only think of mimicry. The highest capacity for producing similarities, however, 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. Perhaps there is
* John Pickering [email protected]
1
Psychology Department, Warwick University, Coventry, UK
116
Pickering J.
none of his higher functions in which his mimetic faculty does not play a decisive role. (Benjamin 1986, 333). Walter Benjamin notes that mimicry is natural. In claiming that human beings have the highest capacity for producing similarities he seems to give it an important role in defining the human condition. But the human condition is not wholly natural. While it has deep evolutionary roots which embed it in nature, the unique cultural setting in which human being develop sets them apart from nature at the same time. Mimicry played a key role in the emergence of this paradoxical state of existence and continues to play a role in maintaining and developing it. What will be suggested here is part of what this role might be, using a biosemiotic approach to mimicry and the notion of affordance as put forward by James Gibson. These, in combination with theories of the evolutionary and developmental origins of human cognition, will be used to examine the relationship, or lack of it, between natural and human mimicry. Human beings may have the highest capacity for mimicry, but there was mimicry before there were human beings. The many example
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