In reference to ‘colonial mimicry’, the “exclusion-yet-retention” of the racial other is through an encouraged but deferred mimicking, that always refutes an actual embodiment of the colonial power by the colonized. There is always both an anxiety and discrepancy between being English and being Anglicized, and looking at Dobson's work, being a machine, and being mechanized.
What was interesting in Blendie was that the blender, the machine, doesn’t practice mimetic behavior, rather the human seems to make some sort of performative re-articulation of machine behavior through sound. But the mimicry in its explicitness seems to indicate Blendie’s consciousness as not solely an artificial intelligence, but a specifically non-human one. What we currently know as artificial intelligence has evolved past solely cognitive simulation, but is now anchored in an ability to mechanize abstract reasoning and problem solving, even ‘artificial’ imagination and creativity.
I’m wondering if in Blendie and cyborg narratives specifically are we watching the efforts of the machine to become human, or the human to become the machine, and if so is becoming post human a function of mimesis? A technological mimetic behavior realized in communication or anatomical manipulations e.g. the screambot, or prosthetic limbs?
Or is the (post?)-post human a function of a symbiotic mimesis in which both machine and man practice simulation of the others behaviors, and mental/physical capabilities?
I think the connection between a post post-humanism and mimesis could be understood not in regards to the mechanical or the technological but the digital and the virtual. How does post-humanism relate to something like the virtual cyborg body, especially if we frame that question with notions of projection, subjecthood, and mimicry?
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