Oh My God! I just did my dissertation presentation and I am so relieved! For those who don't know, I'm in an MA program for Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths (lolz) and one of the things we have to do/get assessed (aka graded) on is a 20 minute presentation on our research project/dissertation which we will hand in September.
I have been in tunnel vision preparing for this, practicing it and overcoming my gigantic public speaking fears. Anyways. It's over! It's done! I'm not sure how good it was but I'm so happy to have it done with and it had positive response so yay!
Anyways, with that in mind all I wanna do is jump up and down and drink a pint or four with some mates so instead of a post I'll share with you my little thing.
It will change. I already want to focus my research more on simulation and the body but yeah, this was where my brain was at a few weeks ago.
It's a crazy thing to extend oneself in a way that is small and measurable. To force oneself out of comfort zones, to articulate and potentially defend one's ideas is challenging and character building. I recommend everyone to go out on a limb once in a while. You may surprise yourselves and maybe even a few others.
Till next week, hope all your smarties brains get bigger and that you do something you didn't think you could do.
xx
P.S. It's long, 20 mins of talking is a lot of talking especially if I'm the talker. Also, it reads a bit funny because it was basically my cue cards so please excuse the lexical idiosyncrasies.
Disruption of Desire
For my dissertation topic I would like to focus on the
disruption of desire in the postmodern state, how mimetics impacts this and how
this can be understood and evaluated through science, specifically neurology and
the study of mirror neurons. I want to link these concepts and investigate how
this is explored within contemporary art.
The goal of this is to incorporate new advances in science with
theory and to see how this can evolve the way mimetics is discussed. My theoretical
focus is desire and my three core thinkers to date are Alexandre Kojeve, Rene Girard
and Jacques Lacan. Through the linking of these separate areas, I would like to
explore how mimetics and desire impacts and effects subjectivity.
I believe that the biology of mimetic behavior is one that
will further expand the theories of desire and I would like to use this to ground
and evaluate the social conditioning of our contemporary state. I will do this
by examining how mimetics and desire function in our construction of self and
how that is disrupted and destabilized by external forces.
I will present the work of artists, Jordan Wolfson, Ian Cheng
and Pierre Huyghe to focus this research within contemporary art and use their
work to example how it reflects disruptions of desire and how they can be seen
as imaginings, explorations and synthesizers for the concepts presented in the
evaluation of mimetics, desire, and science.
I will show brief examples of their work at the end of this
presentation but to begin I would like to present the structuring cores of my
research. This will include a brief on the science of mimetics and theories
about desire. I will then go into explaining how mimetics and desire are conditioned
in the post modern state and why I feel it pertinent for there to be a greater
dialogue between these various areas.
The first section I am
presenting is an overview of the science of mimetics.
In 1996 there was a groundbreaking discovery made by the
team of neoroscientists lead by Rizzolatti where mirror neurons and their
functioning was discovered, to quote:
Mirror neurons are a class of
neurons, initially found in the premotor cortex of macaque monkeys, that are
activated both when a monkey performs a specific goal-oriented action and when
it simply observes another monkey (or human) performing the same action.
Premotor activation can be considered the neural basis of an intention to
perform a motor act…
The discovery of mirror neurons should be seen as a new key
in understanding perception, behavior and subjectivity as humans also posses them
and it not only effects motor responses but other areas of the brain which
control emotions such as empathy, pain, and fear.
What exactly do mirror neurons do? Mirror neurons are fired in
the brain when an action occurs, such as grasping a cup, but they are also
duplicity fired when this action is being represented, such as watching another
person grasp a cup or seeing a video of someone doing this.
It has been evidenced in research that mirror neurons not only underpin action
understanding, but they are also involved in the intentions of these actions.
With this it can be hypothesized that human beings are innately wired to identify with each other and that this
process of identification can be cognitively explained through mirror neurons.
In addition, Garrels also speaks of the essential role of the mimetic connection
in contributing to a wide-scale cerebral re-organizination of the brain, which allows
for a co-evolution of complex social abilities in relationship to brain
development.
This idea of the brain’s wiring being linked to mimetics is fascinating
when thinking about how one’s subjectivity is formed. This is an especially
daunting idea when related to research done by Metzloff and Moore in 1977, which showed that infants learn via imitation
immediately from birth - as early as 42 seconds old.
This innate instinct
to imitate is extremely impactful on how we develop both cognitively and
socially as one of our primary means of communicating is through expression and
the understanding of these through imitation. When we witness a facial expression
and comprehend it as an emotional state, we don’t do this through inference.
Rather it is understood through the meaning of other’s emotion. This is termed
as a form of “simulation” and an embodiment producing an ‘as-if’ experience by
a shared body state. It is the shared body state that enables direct
understanding.
Further in this
vain, developmental psychology has shown that the mind begins as a shared mind.
In this way mirroring mechanisms and embodied simulation are key components of
what makes our mind this shared mind.
Quoting
Leander, “Mimicry increases people's pro-social orientations in broad and
generalized ways engendering a fundamental shift in
the way people see themselves in relation to others. People who are mimicked
become more agreeable and responsive to others' wants, and they also become
more attuned to their mimicker's viewpoints on social issues. This suggests
that mimicked individuals also become more accommodating to others'
expectancies for behavior—including any stereotyped expectancies that they
assume others to possess.”
This
impacts many socializing factors including stereotypes of gender and race, which
is often perpetuated by unconscious repetitions of mimetic behavior.
Socializing through mimetic behavior is in psychology
called affiliation, which is the desire to be accepted by one’s social group
even if behaviors negatively impact oneself and others. Remember this term
affiliation as it will be a recurrent concept related to understanding desire.
Again to quote
Leander, “individuals who are pursuing affiliation often use stereotypes about
themselves to regulate their social behavior. Mimicry functions as a kind of
“social glue” that brings and keeps people together.” This can be beneficial in
many ways but I believe that this can lead to a destabilization of the self and
it is done through this desiring impulse.
Now onto the next
section which is on the theories of desire and how they link to mimetics.
There are many
thinkers that focus on mimetic theory but at this stage in my research the three
core theorists I have begun to focus on are Alexandre Kojeve, Rene Girard and
Jacques Lacan. All three have distinct yet linked perspectives on mimetics and
desire and I will present some of their ideas to give a foundational base on my
current research areas and how this can be linked to the science of the brain
and how it impacts subjectivity.
Let us being with
Alexandre Kojéve who can be viewed as an anticipator of the notion of mimetic
desire. In his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel from 1947, he
introduced the notion of the ‘desiring I’ as being a void that is filled by
positive content from the negation and destroying of the desired non-Self and
its assimilation.
He emphasized the difference between the desire of animals and humans with
the main difference being that human
desire is mediated by the desire of others.
According to Kojéve,
the desire that defines the human condition is the desire directed towards
another desire and it is only through this type of interaction that self-consciousness
can be achieved.
To further
understand Kojeve I will introduce the thinking of Rene Girard who is an
inheritor of Kojeve’s notions of desire. Girard speaks directly of mimetic
desire, and stresses that from this comes aggression and violence which
characterizes our species.
In relationship to
my area of interest though, Girard’s concept of appropriative desire has the most resonance and can be linked to
affiliation.
For Girad
appropriative desire is the compulsive tendency of humans to imitate others’
desires, so that what is really desired is what others desire. This links
directly back to Kojeve. For both, the intrinsic value of the objects of our
desire is not as important as the object itself.
I would also like to
emphasize that Girard is very clear in drawing a distinction between desire and
appetite. While appetite is the outcome of instinctual drives, desire not only
requires an object, but also another individual, a mediator.
Kojeve and Girard’s
notions of desire relate to the affiliative tendencies produced by mimetic
behavior and can be seen as a conditioning structure that these desires
manifest and become targeted.
To desire another’s
desire and to be the target of others’ desire, means to gain social
recognition. This is substantial in thinking about how mimetics functions
and what is creating this process.
Lastly I will touch on some of Lacan’s thoughts on desire
and suggest that there might be a greater need for expansion within established
theoretical discourse in light of scientific research.
Lacan’s notion of
desire was expounded in his first two Seminars, 1953 through 1955. In these he
gives a detailed discussion of the species-specific preconditions that allow humans
to speak and establish symbolic pacts among individuals.
Lacan states that
human desire is the repetitive pursuit of the fulfillment of desire and that it
is ultimately a “desire for nothing”, the desire of the other’s desire as an
irreducible lack.
He also speaks about
the human subject and how they are a discordant by the fragmentation of their
ego, and consequently “cannot desire without itself dissolving” and undergoing
alienation. Psychoanalysis thus regards the human subject as a “being in
becoming.” This is an interesting concept and one that elucidates the mimetic
structuring of desire, but there are also other ideas of Lacan, which I have
issue with, and that is his thinking on language and the creation of the
desiring subject.
In Seminar I, Lacan
emphasizes that, “at first there is language, already formed” and that a child
is thus “passive” before the “universe of symbols.”
This concept of language is central for Lacan in his discussions about desire
and mimesis and this has been perpetuated in theoretical discourse to this day.
I propose that this trajectory should be paused to incorporate its relationship
to the biology of mimetic behavior and my previous statements on how mimetics
is something that happens preverbally and at infancy. This evidences that the
creation of the subject operates through psychosocial development where
communication with another is non-symbolic.
These three philosophers are currently my focuses as they speak directly
about desire and how that informs subjectivity and in my research I want to incorporate
the lineages of their concepts with the science of mimetics and investigate how
that can be integrated and or realigned. I have also focused on these
particular thinkers as their concepts connote how the situation of
postmodernity influences desire and what that might mean in the formation of
the self.
To speak further
about postmodernity, I will now discuss how this impacts mimetics and desire
and what that might mean.
A good place to
start talking about the relationship of postmodernism, mimetics and how it is a
socializing behavior is the idea of the ‘chameleon effect’ which in psychology
is described as the unconscious mimicry of postures, expressions, and behaviors
of others. These unconscious mimetic
behaviors share a pro-social character, because their occurrence tends to
increase during social interactions, which has affiliative purposes, and let’s
think back to my earlier mention of this concept.
Furthering this
thought, scientists stress that emotional states are not an intrinsic psychological
property of a subject but the relational property of an individual within a
given social context. This means emotions constitute a system of social
communication with its main purpose being social coordination.
Saying this, one can
see the implications of the socialization factor and how the desire to
affiliate and to have social cohesion can lead to homogenization. This to me is
a very evocative idea in trying to understand how the postmodern condition is
perpetuated and what is the result of this in society.
In the formation of
the self both Kojeve and Girard speak of this need to be another and express
that the self is coextensive with the structure of mimetic desire and that the
self is a relational and dynamic phenomenon rather than an essential,
objectively real, or autonomous source of intentions. This connection of
subjectivity to desire and to the mediator is one that I believe is a being disrupted
and molded by the conditions of postmodernity.
Thus this consolidation
of social habits frames the subject deeply into a constructed mimetic and desiring
loop.
Every time we relate
to other people, we automatically inhabit a we-centric space, within which we
exploit a series of certainties and expectations of others. This is an
immediate construction as mimetic behavior is one that is biologically embedded
at the beginning of life.
Additionally, central
to all human social cultures is the notion of social identification. All
levels of social interaction that require social cognition intersects or
overlaps with mutual recognition and with this notion of social identification.
Social
identification is the membership-fee all individuals pay in order to guarantee
the sense of belonging to a larger community. Social identification is
adaptive, because it grants the capacity to better predict the consequences of
behaviors of members within a given social group.
Girard denotes the
adverse influence of mimesis and desire and its impacts on our interactions
with others. For the Girardian subject at some level they recognize that their own
desires are not original and that their being is not produced from themselves.
But this subject still believes that others have real desires and possess self
awareness and worth. As a result of this, the subject consequently operates
from a sense inadequacy, shame, and self-loathing while it regards the other
with envy.
This fundamental
delusion regarding desire and subjectivity results in a self-defeating,
unreflective mimesis, which is one that I believe, is perpetuated in the postmodern
structure, which thrives off this delusion.
It is from this that
I say the phrase “disruption of desire” and it is the postmodern condition
which is the background in which this conflict of the self and desire manifest.
The biological and unconscious mechanisms for mimetic behavior and the desire
that is produced from this is one that should be seen as a source of perpetuation
but also may be a means to examine this imposed state.
I will now present
examples of works by Jordon Wolfson, Ian Cheng, and Pierre Huyghe to discuss
how their work gives insight on mimetics, desire and also the postmodern
subject.
The first artist I will present is Jordon Wolfson and his
piece Female figure from 2014. (Female figure) is an animatronic sculpture that
cost over half a million dollars to construct, possesses forty-eight motors,
motion-detection tracking eyes and has an uncanny real-lifeness that is as fascinating
as it is jarring.
Here is a
video clip of this work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JestwuC1Cik
What
interests me about this work is the queasy embodiment of the female figure and
the representation of what femaleness is. The implicit recreation of
objectified desires and desiring subject is one that I think has very rich
application for investigating and detangling the interpretation of desire and
how the replication and mimicked tropes, in this case gender, is manifested.
With this
work and with the others I will present, the disruption of the desire takes
place through the act of simulation. Simulation Theory focuses on trying to
understand what another is thinking and feeling and it is by embodiment and
empathy this can be actualized.
Next is
the artist Ian Cheng and here I will show a brief clip of his work Entropy Wrangler from 2013.
https://vimeo.com/69708433
Cheng’s work is about dematerialization and replication and
he evokes and challenges this. For this work and many of his others, he creates
coding that commands the 3D generated images to interact with each other. It is
a language that is being scripted but it is also giving function as well as
instruction. This results in the coded commands sometimes cannibalizing
themselves while at other times they create divergences. This aliveness or deterioration
through language is fascinating when thinking about its role in the formation
of subjectivity. What also draws me to his work is how Cheng speaks directly about
the concept of simulation.
Quoting from his newly released monograph for his show at
Kunsthalle Dusseldorf:
"What is a simulation? It is a private game we devise
when the aliveness of a situation is too complex to really know. It is drafting
reality through an ocean of forking behaviors to find an optimal end. What is
a live simulation? It is playing this game in public and not
letting it end when the game gets good. Darwin said the greatest live simulation
is nature herself, who incessantly tries and fails aloud, never stopping at
perfection. But nature is often too fast, too slow, too big, too small, for us.
We desire a live simulation at scale with human spacetime, but unending in its
variety and blind to our barometers of quality. A live simulation that we can
feel, but does not give a fig for us."
I find this very compelling and want to further investigate
how his perception of this may link to desire and mimetics.
My last artist example is Pierre Huyghe and his video, Untitled, Human Mask from 2014. Here are
a few still images as I couldn’t source a video clip.
This piece, as you can see has a monkey wearing the mask of
a girl and it has been trained to be a waitress at a restaurant. Although this
is based on an actual true to life situation, the way in which Huyghe presents
it compounds the eeriness of it all. This tone is set by the film’s opening
footage which is of the deserted Fukushima sites. This is followed by scenes of
the monkey being alone in an empty, dark restaurant. There is a dystopian feeling
to it all and this relationship of animal, human, embodiment and control are
all triggers when thinking about mimetics and desire. It is also an interesting
piece in which to evaluate the relationships of human/animal discourse within
science and philosophy in connection to imitation and desire.
I have chosen these three artists to show the breadth of
practice that contemporary artists are creating that are inciting questions,
concerns and interpretations of desire and mimetics. It is through the
bizarreness and uneasiness of these works in which the postmodern is revealed
and has the potential to be disrupted. Through these artists I would like to
research various branches of mimetics and desire which focuses on the body,
cybernetics and anthropormorphism and try to connect the threads of their
shared relationships to mimetics and desire and to also learn more about the
science behind those fields.
To conclude I would
like to quickly overview what I have discussed
I began by presenting an overview of the science of mimetics
and specifically mirror neurons to open up a new way of possibly thinking about
the creation of subjectivity and to show how science can be and should be
incorporated in theoretical discourses of mimesis and desire. Mirror neurons
are I think especially important in discussing art as they illuminate the neural underpinnings about
physical reactions to aesthetic experiences and they are key to understanding
intentionality. The concept of affiliation which dominates behavior and
interactions with others is central to understanding mimcry and is also a
linked concept for desire.
It is desire and the structuring of desire that I think is
pertinent in discussing how one understands themselves. I exampled three
thinkers Kojeve, Girard and Lacan to give a sense of the mode in which I am
thinking about desire and how this is apart of the postmodern condition. The
relationship to desire and mimesis within postmodernism and how that is
reflected in contemporary art is one that I think can help elucidate the
various areas of thinking in order to increase dialogue between these various
fields.
At this stage in my research I am excited and challenged to
see how I can incorporate the science of the mind, mimetics and desire in order
to advance these areas within the discourse of contemporary art theory.
Bibliography
Alison, James, “The
Search for a Theological
Anthropology.” In Girard and Theology.
(London: Continuum International
Publishing Group, 1998), 22-63.
Cheng, Ian, Evers, Elodie, Jaskey, Jenny, Kelsey,
John, and Parisi, Luciana, Ian Cheng. Live Simulation, (Leipzig:
Spector Book, 2015).
Chiesa, Lorenzo, “The World of Desire: Lacan between Evolutionary Biology and
Psychoanalytic Theory,” Filozofski vestnik XXX (2009): 83-112
Erving, George, “Rene
Girard and the Legacy of Alexandre Kojeve.” In Contagion 10 (Spring 2003): 111-125.
Freeberg, David, and
Gallese, Vittorio, “Motion, emotion and empathy in esthetic experience.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11, (March, 7, 2007): 197-203, doi:10.1016/j.tics.2007.02.003
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Vittorio, “The Two Sides of Mimesis
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Introduction to the Reading of Hegel,
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