Imitation as an ethic for today? Some po-mo babble

The value of imitation as an ethic has its detractors. Is the imitation of an example a feasible approach to ethical thinking today? Gender theorist Judith Butler, in an essay entitled “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”, argues in the context of sexual – and particularly homosexual – self-identification that the rhetoric of imitation is dependent on an ordering of the inferior and derivative copy to the superior and authentic original:

[R]econsider then the homophobic charge that queens and butches and femmes are imitations of the heterosexual real. Here “imitation” carries the meaning of “derivative” or “secondary”, a copy of an origin which is itself the ground of all copies, but which is itself a copy of nothing.

For Butler, however, imitation is dubious because the so-called imitated is dependent on the imitator for its status as the original:

Logically, this notion of an “origin” is suspect, for how can something operate as an origin if there are no secondary consequences which retrospectively conform the originality of that origin? The origin requires its derivations in order to affirm itself as an origin, for origins only make sense to the extent that they are differentiated from that which they produce as derivatives…the entire framework of copy and origin proves radically unstable as each position inverts into the other and confounds the possibility of any stable way to locate the temporal or logical priority of either term.

Butler seeks thereby to subvert the entire logic of imitation by undoing the precedence of the original. She cites in particular Jacques Derrida’s riff on Mallarme’s “Mimique”, his “The Double Session”. Derrida’s strategy is to show that an imitator, such as a mime artist, does not in fact imitate some prior thing, but instead actually constitutes the spectre of the original in and through the mime:

[H]e represents nothing, imitates nothing, does not have to conform to any prior referent with the aim of achieving adequation or verisimilitude. One can here foresee an objection: since the mime imitates nothing, reproduces nothing, opens up in its origin the very thing he is tracing out, presenting or producing, he must be the very movement of truth. Not, of course, truth in the form of adequation between the representation and the present of the thing itself, or between imitator and imitated, but truth as the present unveiling of the present... but this is not the case.... We are faced then with mimicry imitating nothing: faced, so to speak, with the double that couples no simple, a double that nothing anticipates, nothing at least, that is not itself already double. There is no simple reference... this speculum reflects no reality: it produces mere "reality-effects"... in this speculum with no reality, in this mirror of a mirror, a difference or dyad does exist, since there are mimes and phantoms. But it is a difference without reference, or rather reference without a referent, without any first or last unit, a ghost that is the phantom of no flesh...

Further, the structure of imitation, for Derrida, is radically compromised because the imitation can only exist insofar as it is not a perfect imitation. If imitation succeeds too well, then it dissolves itself:

For imitation affirms and sharpens its essence in effacing itself. Its essence is its non-essence…A perfect imitation is no longer an imitation…Imitation does not correspond to its essence, is not what it is – imitation – unless it is in some way at fault or, rather, in default. It is bad by nature. It is only good insofar as it is bad.

Imitation undoes itself. Derrida is mainly concerned with mimhsij in the aesthetic sphere, as in Plato and Aristotle; Butler, by casting human identity as performative, appropriates Derrida’s deconstruction of mimetic ideas for what is essentially an ethical discussion.