Homo Ecologicus: Animism, Historical Materialism and Planetary Mimesis

The contemporary return toward mimesis turns in at least two directions. The first doubles down on Plato's suspicion of mimesis as a contagious threat to rationality and the healthy functioning of the polis and in this sense advocates, at the level of human behaviour, a turning away from mimesis and the pathological, all-too-human nature of homo mimeticus. The second form of the mimetic turn is a more wholehearted turning towards mimesis, seen not as contagious pathology but as cure, as planetary solution to our all-too-human modes of being in the world. This essay is interested in this second, utopian turn towards mimesis, charting the dialectical re-emergence of homo mimeticus as homo ecologicus in Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment and Noongar novelist Kim Scott's That Deadman Dance.