The Death Wish of Modernity and the Politics of Mimesis
On February 15, 2003, just before the war in Iraq commenced in full, antiwar activists marched and demonstrated across the world. RETORT celebrates these displays of widespread and simultaneous opposition. I share its enthusiasm for the global aspirations and thrilling relay of 2/15 as political moment and act, but the activists’ failure to generate a vibrant and differentiated political movement needs to be acknowledged as well. All the more so as we enter the sixth year of the war. RETORT sees the problem as wrongheaded analysis — “blood for oil” — and its interrogation of the limits of this understanding exposes a much more diabolical set of circumstances. The war in Iraq is to be located in the fatal crosshairs of “permanent war, capitalist accumulation, and the new enclosures” all taking place “under conditions of spectacle” (AP, 43). I agree completely but also want to suggest that the limitations of the antiwar actions of 2003 go beyond the flawed analysis that spurred them. In part the problem was the historical flatness of a movement with global aspirations that reached across differentiated space but did not reach back through time even two years to engage the broader issues of capitalist globalization addressed by the anti – World Trade Organization (WTO) movement before fractions of it were stopped in their tracks by the spectacle of 9/11. This flattened time-space of politics rehearsed its own kind of enclosure.
Susan Buck-Morss distinguishes certain political practices and moments as mimetic, produced iteratively across time and space.1 As examples she cites the rolling thunder of 1968 and, more recently, the anti-WTO movement. Both of these movements, she suggests, were produced in the course of repetitions that drew on, rehearsed, and remade earlier iterations of material social forms and practices of opposition and political engagement. Mimetic politics builds over time as it works across space. Its temporality and spatiality are infused with action and the kind of relayed sociability that changes as it goes. Within the mimetic act — where seeing and doing are embodied practices — is the possibility of transformation, of learning from history, of remaking space. As particular political engagements move through time and space, transformations that tend to be minor can be amplified and attenuated. Mimetic politics is a realm and material social practice in which it seems at least possible to reassemble our afflicted powers.
In my own work I have been interested in children’s play as mimesis, wherein seeing, doing, copying, and making are fused. If play works in this way — and some of it does, especially dramatic and constructive play — the realization that all things or acts are constructed is intrinsic, and thus it becomes possible to recognize that they could be made otherwise. Within mimesis (of play, in this instance) an uncolonized imagination may be called forth. For Walter Benjamin, this playful — and potentially revolutionary — imagination is coiled in us and can be tapped or sprung loose in our creative or political work.2 The mimetic faculty may thus be the antithesis of the “death wish of modernity.” But how does this translate to questions of political action? At one level, seeing, doing, copying, and making were essential to — even constitutive of — the oppositional movements that at some times darted and at others sprawled through the middle of the 1960s and culminated in 1968, by turns gathering steam, ideas, inspiration but also discouragement, wisdom, setbacks, and redefinition. The same was true of the anti- WTO movements from the late 1990s up to 2001.
This sort of iterative labile politics is substantially different from what Buck- Morss calls a metonymic space of politics, in which the time-space of action is compressed and contained, more a space of contiguity or coappearance than shared and shifting goals and ideas. What RETORT talks about as spectacle can be imagined in this way, but so can the limits of 2/15. And here I mean not only the limits and wrongheaded positions of “no blood for oil” but also the limits of its admittedly exciting simultaneity. Organized in virtual space, the actions on 2/15 took place in essence simultaneously in hundreds of places and made a powerful statement worldwide, but then there was no relay. The event was its own compression, so that its exaltation was its grand and profound simultaneity, which then foundered on how to move or build beyond it as an event — as spectacle. February 15 became contained by its own spectacularness, in every sense of the term. This is not to say that there is no antiwar movement — of course there is — but it is limited by its relatively narrow focus on blood for oil, which is a way of marking its failure to take on capital accumulation and imperialism as integral to this war, and permanent war as the grist of military neoliberalism. But it is also hobbled by its own metonymic enclosure. The instantaneousness of virtual organizing may bring millions together at once, but the process does not necessarily lend itself to developing the means of exchange through which participants might learn from one another to build a shared project that extends beyond the immediate issues that joined them in a particular space and time.
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