Of Mimicry and Man, 2

“The effect of mimicry is camouflage”

“If colonialism takes power in the name of history, it repeatedly exercises its authority through the figures Of farce.”

“In this comic turn from the high ideals of the colonial imagination to its low mimetic literary effects Mimicry emerges as one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge.”

“Within that conflictual economy of colonial discourse which Edward Said describes as the tension between the synchronic panoptical vision of domination - the demand for identity, stasis - and the counterpressure of the diachrony of history - change, difference - mimicry represents an ironic compromise.”

“colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite”

“the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference. The authority of that mode of colonial discourse that I have called mimicry is therefore stricken by an indeterminacy: mimicry emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal”

“Mimicry is, thus the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which ‘appropriates’ the Other as it visualizes power”

“What they all share is a discursive process by which the excess or slippage produced by the ambivalence of mimicry (almost the same, but not quite) does not merely ‘rupture’ the discourse, but becomes transformed into an uncertainty which fixes the colonial subject as a ‘partial’ presence”

“By ‘partial’ I mean both ‘incomplete’ and ‘virtual’”

“the effect of a flawed colonial mimesis, in which to be Anglicized is emphatically not to be English.”

“The figure of mimicry is locatable within what Anderson describes as ‘the inner compatibility of empire and nation’. It problematizes the Signs of racial and cultural priority, so that the ‘national’ is no longer naturalizable. What emerges between mimesis and mimicry is a writing, a mode of representation, that marginalizes the monumentality of history, quite simply mocks its power to be a model, that power which supposedly makes it imitable.”

“Mimicry repeats rather than re-presents”

“We pretended to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New World, one unknown comer of it, with all its reminders of the corruption that came so quickly to the new.”

“Despite their intentions and invocations they inscribe the colonial text erratically, eccentrically across a body politic that refuses to be representative, in a narrative that refuses to be representational.”

“The desire to emerge as ‘authentic’ through mimicry - through a process of writing and repetition - is the final irony of partial representation.”

“Mimicry conceals no presence or identity behind its mask: it is not what Usaire describes as ‘colonization-thingification’ behind which there stands the essence of the présence Africaine”

“The menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority. And it is a double vision that is a result of what I’ve described as the partial representation/ recognition of the colonial object”

“But they are also, as I have shown, the figures of a doubling, the part-objects of a metonymy of colonial desire which alienates the modality and normality of those dominant discourses in which they emerge as ‘inappropriate’ colonial subjects. A desire that, through the repetition of partial presence, which is the basis of mimicry, articulates those disturbances of cultural, racial and historical difference that menace the narcissistic demand of colonial authority. It is a desire that reverses ‘in part’ the colonial appropriation by now producing a partial vision of the colonizer’s presence; a gaze of otherness, that shares the acuity of the genealogical gaze which, as Foucault describes it, liberates marginal elements and shatters the unity of man’s being through which he extends his sovereignty.”

“If we turn to a Freudian figure to address these issues of colonial textuality, that form of difference that is mimicry - almost the same but not quite - will become clear. Writing of the partial nature of fantasy, caught inappropriately, between the unconscious and the preconscious, making problematic, like mimicry, the very notion of ‘origins’, Freud has this to say: Their mixed and split origin is what decides their fate. We may compare them with individuals of mixed race who taken all round resemble white men but who betray their coloured descent by some striking feature or other and on that account are excluded from society and enjoy none of the privileges.”

“Almost the same but not white: the visibility of mimicry is always produced at the site of interdiction.”

“The question of the representation of difference is therefore always also a problem of authority. The ‘desire’ of mimicry, which is Freud’s ‘striking feature’ that reveals so little but makes such a big difference, is not merely that impossibility of the Other which repeatedly resists signification. The desire of colonial mimicry - an interdictory desire - may not have an object, but it has strategic objectives which I shall call the metonymy of presence.”

“These instances of metonymy are the non-repressive productions of contradictory and multiple belief. They cross the boundaries of the culture of enunciation through a strategic confusion of the metaphoric and metonymic axes of the cultural production of meaning.”

“In mimicry, the representation of identity and meaning is rearticulated along the axis of metonymy. As Lacan reminds us, mimicry is like camouflage, not a harmonization of repression of difference, but a form of resemblance, that differs from or defends presence by displaying it in part, metonymically. Its threat, I would add, comes from the prodigious and strategic production of conflictual, fantastic, discriminatory ‘identity effects’ in the play of a power that is elusive because it hides no essence, no ‘itself’. And that form of resemblance is the most terrifying thing to behold”

“Mimicry does not merely destroy narcissistic authority through the repetitious slippage of difference and desire. It is the process of the fixation of the colonial as a form of cross-classificatory, discriminatory knowledge within an interdictory discourse, and therefore necessarily raises the question of the authorization of colonial representations, a question of authority that goes beyond the subject’s lack of priority (castration) to a historical crisis in the conceptuality of colonial man as an object of regulatory power, as the subject of racial, cultural, national representation.”

“mimicry rearticulates presence in terms of its ‘otherness’, that which it disavows. There is a crucial difference between this colonial articulation of man and his doubles and that which Foucault describes as ‘thinking the unthought’ which, for nineteenth-century Europe, is the ending of man’s alienation by reconciling him with his essence. The colonial discourse that articulates an interdictory otherness is precisely the ‘other scene’ of this nineteenth-century European desire for an authentic historical consciousness”

“Such contradictory articulations of reality and desire - seen in racist stereotypes, statements, jokes, myths - are not caught in the doubtful circle of the return of the repressed. They are the effects of a disavowal that denies the differences of the other but produces in its stead forms of authority and multiple belief that alienate the assumptions of ‘civil’ discourse.”

“If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses Of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to ‘normalize’ formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.”

“The ambivalence of colonial authority repeatedly turns from mimicry - a difference that is almost nothing but not quite - to menace - a difference that is almost total but not quite.”