Homo mimeticus, Wayward lives, and The biology of adversity and resilience: Early life adversity and the politics of fabulation

At the heart of the science of early life adversity—past and present—is the discursive power of “age.” As a measure of time, age operates not only to separate childhood from adulthood but also to conjure fictions that anchor the temporality of Western modernity, meaning developmental time as the normative gauge of progress and improvement (Ibrahim, 2021, p. 30). The way that early life adversity is narrated today can help us to grasp the extent to which the present continues to move “in the wake” (Sharpe, 2016) of this temporality. As to the question of why this matters, I would simply add the word “still.” The approach to critical inquiry that Horkheimer and Adorno exemplify in their Dialectic of enlightenment (2002), for example, which is comparable to Foucault's archaeology of knowledge (2002, 1972), still matters. What these thinkers share is an attitude of refusal—a refusal to settle for the world as it is, hence the need to take up a critical relationship to the present and to ourselves. If we can grasp how we have come to be who and what we are as subjects, then it might be possible to be otherwise, thereby cracking open a new world from within the shell of the old. This is what Foucault had in mind when he characterized critique as a “historical ontology of ourselves,” meaning an “attitude” that engages critically with the present (1984, p. 49). It has to be said, however, that Horkheimer and Adorno's present was not quite the same as Foucault's, and his present is not ours. So, context changes, yet the questions that critical theory poses endure: What stands in the way of a transformative politics, and how might critical theory respond?

As I aim to show in this article, the contemporary science of early life adversity runs the risk of sustaining the power relations that are entangled in the temporality of Western modernity (which is not to suggest that all associated researchers and practitioners are culpable; this is surely not the case)—power relations that traverse not just childhood and adulthood, but also class, gender, and racialized inequalities. Reading Nidesh Lawtoo's Homo mimeticus and Saidiya Hartman's Wayward lives together offers a critical response to this situation, but there is a “but,” and this concerns Lawtoo's way of figuring an “anti-mimetic” mode of resistant agency.

In what follows I present a three-way dialogue (of sorts), by thinking between and across Lawtoo, Hartman, and the contemporary science of early life adversity, which will be presented as NEAR science, encompassing Neuroscience, Epigenetics, Adverse Childhood Experiences, and Resilience. I caution against the move that Lawtoo makes in aligning the figure of Homo mimeticus to NEAR science, arguing that Hartman's method of “critical fabulism” affords greater critical traction in teasing out of the radical potential of mimesis as a way of thinking a politics of refusal.¹ By way of setting the scene and identifying what is at stake, I begin with an example of how early life adversity has been narrated in the past, and how science fashions a normative fiction from factual claims. This will in turn provide an initial approximation of what I mean by “the politics of fabulation.”

In the preface to volume 1 of Adolescence, published in 1904, G. Stanley Hall—one of the pioneers of developmental psychology in America—introduces the crux of the matter at hand as “adaptive plasticity to new environments” (p. vii). Hall was a neo-Lamarckian, and he aligned Lamarck's theory concerning the inheritance of acquired characteristics through use and disuse (otherwise known as soft inheritance) with recapitulation theory, which is the idea that ontogeny (embryological development in the individual organism) replicates phylogeny (the evolutionary ancestry of the species) (Gould, 1977, p. 82). The environment in question—and this is where the past begins to illuminate the present—was one of accelerating social and cultural change. From the vantage point of Hall's project, this was generating conditions conducive to evolutionary “arrest and retardation in the individual and the race” (Hall, 1904, p. viii). Hence Hall's interest in childhood, which afforded the possibility of taking hold of life before the child's “adaptive plasticity” manifested as immorality, waywardness, and crime.

In terms of what should be done to counteract the danger of developmental “arrest” and evolutionary “reversion,” Hall recommended “protection, physical care, moral and intellectual guidance” (1904, p. 47). Insofar as this suggests social support, in practice it was a mode of child protection backed up by coercive controls aimed at children and families inclined to resist or refuse the offer of help (see Garlock, 1979; Hicks, 2003). I will have more to say about that later. In terms of timing, Hall prioritized adolescence (hence the title of his book) because he believed that the adolescent stage of life was a developmental conjuncture where evolved adaptation was being surpassed by environmental pressures.² To counteract the threat of developmental arrest and evolutionary reversion, “adaptive plasticity” would have to be guided and governed by the self-appointed architects of an envisioned normative future.

This horticultural conception of childhood was by no means new (see Mintz, 2018), but this is not about originality. It is about scripting a compelling story that moves people to act. In the context in question, a range of actions spanning educational initiatives, scientific research, and social work coalesced as a child study movement (Siege & White, 1982; also Platt, 1969). Neither was Hall the first to claim that the causes of future crime and vice lay in early life experiences and environments (e.g., Carpenter, 1851; McCulloch, 1988). It turns out he would not be the last either. Over the past century or so, the explanatory framework issued by Hall has transitioned from an emphasis on phylogeny to ontogeny, inaugurating a renewed interest in plasticity as embodied in childhood (Ryan, 2020, 2021), as well as growing interest in early life experience as the source of future behavioral problems (see Two Fuse, 2022).

Today, early life adversity is the focal point of a fledgling scientific paradigm sometimes communicated through the acronym NEAR science and is given narrative form as The biology of adversity and resilience (Boyce et al., 2021; Shonkoff et al., 2021a). As was the case with the child study movement a century ago, the contemporary science of early life adversity fabulates the facts through stories that clothe a quasi-fictional childhood born from the aggregation of data. This fabulated aggregation is imbued with a normativity that spirals back through the archive. If we listen to that history—as we should and as we will in what follows—then we find reason to be wary, because NEAR science shares with its historical antecedents an orthopedic³ response to deviations from the norm(al), which is deeply imbricated in the biopolitics of childhood.

As a way of taking up a critical vantage point on the contemporary science of early life adversity, I am going to present a close reading of Hartman's Wayward lives (2019) and Lawtoo's Homo mimeticus (2022c). Hartman's method of “critical fabulism” flips the lens on delinquency and waywardness. Mabel Hampton, for example, is one young woman who was experiencing what is now framed as early life adversity when the child study movement was in its heyday, and I discuss her story (as presented by Hartman) in detail below. For now to note that in narrating Mabel's story—one of the many “intimate histories of riotous Black girls, troublesome women, and queer radicals” that populate Wayward lives—Hartman also fabulates the facts, but in a way that makes for a stark contrast with fabulated science. Hartman's method assumes, from the outset, that it is not possible to retrieve the lives of those who have been written into the margins of history through the use of normative categories such as “wayward.” To counter the ways in which lives coded in this way have been silenced requires an altogether different strategy, one that fabulates the evidence not as an unacknowledged by-product of scripting a normative fiction, but as a method that entails writing history “with and against the archive” (2008, pp. 11–12).

The last point is crucial to the main concern of this article, because what Lawtoo is suggesting is an agentic conception of mimesis (see also Bowman, 2021). As we will see, this “anti-mimetic” capacity goes some way toward figuring a politics of refusal but, as I will argue, not nearly far enough. Part of what gets in the way is Lawtoo's willingness to align his project to the field of neuroscience, and in particular research on mirror neurons (2022c, p. 33), which lends empirical weight to what Lawtoo calls “mimetic mirroring” and “affective contagion.” In what follows, I caution against this move, which sidesteps the important question of what happens as the science of early life adversity is carried into the field of practice. In short, there is a danger of history being repeated, with NEAR science sustaining rather than transforming the extant order of things. The Homo mimeticus project is thus faced with a decision concerning the story it wishes to convey and the politics of fabulation—whether to enter into an alliance with NEAR science or partner up with critical fabulism. I argue for the latter, and this article explains why, beginning with the temporality of Homo mimeticus (Section 2), before returning to The biology of adversity and resilience in more detail. The final section looks at Hartman's Wayward lives and her method of critical fabulism, making a case for this as a companion to the speculative philosophy of the Homo mimeticus project, an ally moreover that can maintain critical distance from the biopolitics of applied NEAR science.

Early life adversity is not in fact a stated concern of the Homo mimeticus project, but it arguably should be, not least because childhood continually drifts in and out of focus in Lawtoo's account of Homo mimeticus, as does—albeit in a less explicit manner—the significance of adversity. Children “are imitative creatures in both theory and practice” we are told, and in a more emphatic restatement of the same point, Lawtoo refers to “those mimetic subjects par excellence who are children” (2022c, p. 140). Childhood fades into the background as the discussion shifts to “prelinguistic communication” and the “mimetic unconscious” (2022c, p. 31, 47), but even as this happens, the axioms of developmental psychology come into sharper focus. Indeed, when Lawtoo takes on the task of writing a genealogy of the mimetic unconscious (2022c, pp. 112–124), it becomes apparent that we are encountering a temporality that forms a historical arc that passes retroactively through Hall's Adolescence to the contemporary field of NEAR science.

What the reader is presented with here is speculation laced with the axioms of NEAR science. Fair enough, this allows Lawtoo to track a philosophical discourse on mimesis and human plasticity back through Nietzsche to antiquity and thus to argue that plasticity and mimesis have long been joined at the hip (see Lawtoo, 2017; on the genealogy of plasticity, see Meloni, 2018, 2019). However, to take this step draws Homo mimeticus into the vexed history of developmental psychology (there is a clear vestige of G. Stanley Hall's recapitulation theory in the above quote) which potentially—depending on how this weave of philosophy, science, and history is interpreted/narrated—implicates Homo mimeticus in a fabulated science that once provided justification for racism, classism, and gender inequality (Gould, 1977, pp. 128–131). I will briefly review that history before presenting a critical account of NEAR science in the next section, which will focus on the extent to which the contemporary science of early life adversity is moving in the wake of a past that is still—to some extent at least—present.

At the turn of the 20th century, the child study movement posited childhood not merely as a window on human evolution (Hall, 1904, p. viii; Sully, 1903, pp. 234–235; also Siege & White, 1982) but also as providing evidence of superior and inferior “races,” which in turn informed eugenic approaches to crime and vice (Lombroso, 2006; Lombroso & Ferraro, 1895). As a means of acting through and upon life, this is but one chapter in the biopolitics of childhood. Half a century previously, the focus had been on “moral” training and education as a response to “demoralizing” habits and associations. In the context of the child study movement, the emphasis shifted to biosocial plasticity, with an emphasis on the biological. So, a degree of historical discontinuity, but also continuity in that childhood has long been posited as a means of governing developmental/historical time (Chronos) and an opening or opportune moment to be seized (Kairos) (see Foucault, 2010, pp. 224–227). We can look to the archive for evidence of this dual temporality whereby the biopolitics of childhood is framed both as an urgent means of countering moral decline and/or evolutionary degeneration (Hall's “arrest” and “reversion,” see also Pick, 1989) and as a long-term undertaking aimed at engineering envisioned futures (Ryan, 2020).

In anticipation of the discussion below on Hartman's method of critical fabulism, three practices in particular stand out (the focus here being the Anglophone world from circa 1850 through to the early decades of the 20th century). These practices supplemented each other by promoting reformatory education and industrial training for the children of the “perishing and dangerous classes” (Carpenter, 1851), and by seeking to counter waywardness, incorrigibility, and promiscuity among the slum-dwelling poor. It is also important to note that these innovations aimed at deterring pauperism (or what would today be called welfare dependency), crime, and vice were born from good intentions and a desire to help, sentiments directed at children in particular (see Platt, 1969). Why children? The answer to that question is twofold. In part because children are the future of society, but also—and this is an unbroken thread linking past and present—because the human animal is apparently most plastic during the early years and thus can be programmed in the mold of the compliant, industrious and law-abiding citizen, a strategic political objective glossed in the depoliticized language of public health, hygiene, and social defence (Foucault, 2003, pp. 304–318; Rose, 1990). The catch, of course, is that there may be a cost to refusing the help attached to the practices in question: the penal reformatory school for wayward minors; the settlement house movement (Adams, 1911; Hill, 1875); and scientific charity, which pioneered the case file and the technique of the professional “friendly visitor” tasked with orchestrating “uplift” and “betterment” among the poor (Henderson, 1901, pp. 160–168; also Steadman Jones, 1971, pp. 271–280). To resist or to refuse to comply with the agents of uplift was to be branded stubborn, promiscuous, and incorrigible, and thereby a candidate for more coercive methods of control (Garlock, 1979).

Lawtoo is correct in arguing that the historical relation between plasticity and mimesis is much older than NEAR science; indeed, it could be suggested that mimesis has long powered the biopolitics of childhood and continues to do so today. Let us turn to that issue now.

As a way of narrating early life adversity, the brief history of The biology of adversity and resilience, which is anchored in the birth of NEAR science, reads like a dramatic story replete with heroic efforts to support vulnerable victims of adversity. Science leads the way in this noble cause, which confronts the deleterious health and behavioral consequences of early life adversity. The envisioned happy ending is a world where children are endowed with “resilience,” thus equipped to endure the “toxic stress” that would otherwise “derail” healthy development and precipitate a life of crime, welfare dependency, drug/alcohol dependency, and poor health (Shonkoff & Bales, 2011, pp. 25–27; also Essex et al., 2013, p. 58). If that seems like a hackneyed way of dismissing a reputable movement that has been gaining momentum for some three decades, bear with me, because this is a movement that understands the importance of fabulating the facts. Indeed the advocates driving this movement have gone to some trouble in shaping the narrative, positioning themselves in a way that resembles the “physician of the soul” tradition (Lawtoo, 2022c, pp. 55, 153), knowing full well that if the science is going to have an impact (make a difference) then it must be communicated as a story that spans affect and reason, or as the ancients who figure in Lawtoo's genealogy might put it, a story that encapsulates mythos, pathos, and logos.

Without suggesting a singular origin, one of the roots of The biology of adversity and resilience is Presidential Proclamation 6158, when US President George W. Bush proclaimed “the decade beginning January 1, 1990, as the Decade of the Brain” (OFR, 1990). The vision was one where research in the fields of neuroscience and molecular genetics augmented programs supported by private foundations and industry, working alongside healthcare professionals to “conquer brain disease.” What would this look like in practice? The answer to that question was ambitious and sweeping: Not only drugs to treat Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease, depressive disorders, and stroke; the brain sciences would also be recruited as an asset in the “war on drugs,” which is how the “first three years” movement makes an appearance. Framed by the Decade of the Brain, the neuro-war on drugs would be waged by “preventing the harm done to the preborn children of pregnant women who abuse drugs and alcohol” (OFR, 1990). The anticipated scope for mother-blaming would prove to be prescient (see Richardson et al., 2014; also Sharpe, 2016, pp. 63–65).

An important thing to note is that the words enunciated by Reiner and Clinton are not mere signifiers that can be tested against a reality that exists independently of its representations. This type of diffuse discursive authorship produces what it names (Butler, 2011: xxi), partly by crafting stories that move people through the power of what Lawtoo calls pathos-logies (2022c, p. 278), which is how Lawtoo re-presents the notion of pathology as a conjoined pathos-logos. Bridging affect and reason, this suggests that the mimetic contagiousness of discourse is not necessarily constrained by verifiable facts or empirical “truth,” which in turn connects to Lawtoo's argument that Homo mimeticus is “Janus-faced.”⁵ While this assumed imbrication of pathos and logos goes some way to explaining the embodied and socially embedded qualities of discourse, a more complete picture requires an understanding of how signifying practices enter into a constitutive relation with the materiality of the referent, which in the context of the present discussion, concerns early life adversity.

An example of what I am alluding to, and this has an important bearing on how the first three years movement gained momentum and political traction, is the CDC–Kaiser Adverse Childhood Experiences study (Felitti et al., 1998), which reported on the consequences of childhood exposure to abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction. It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence of the “ACE study” as it is now known, the reach of which has been augmented in at least four ways. One way concerns dissemination and simplified replication of the primary research. Otherwise put, what began with detailed questionnaires and complex statistical analysis has been crunched into a DIY quiz available on numerous websites. Comprised of ten questions, the quiz delivers an ACE score of zero to ten, and the higher the number, the greater the alleged risk of negative outcomes later in life (for critical appraisals of the application of the ACE study see Edwards et al., 2017; Macvarish et al., 2014; Winninghoff, 2020).

A second way the ACE instrument has been augmented marks the dawn of the postgenomic era (see Meloni, 2019). This has shifted the analytical focus away from genetic programming and toward environment, experience, and neuroplasticity (re-turning to Hall's “adaptive plasticity”). The third augmentation looks beyond the family to “stressors outside the household,” specifically violence, racism, poverty, discrimination, and lack of social and public services (CDCHUa; also Shonkoff et al., 2021b). This is something The biology of adversity and resilience shares with the Homo mimeticus project, and Lawtoo is more than aware of the “pathologies” of “mimetic contagion” and “unconscious mirroring tendencies” that generate/sustain “racist oppression, class disadvantage, and social discrimination” (2022c, pp. 30, 37, 192; on the dangers of mimetic contagion as “racist misrecognition” see Baum, 2015, pp. 424–425).

Framed in this way, the story of early life adversity evidenced in the earlier quotes by Clinton and Reiner turns a corner, with the statistical probability of negative outcomes that await in the future now countered by “hope.” Without suggesting that this note of optimism is entirely misplaced, and it is important not to lose sight of how trauma-informed approaches to early life adversity can help and support children (see Müller & Kenney, 2021), it is still crucial to ask the question of what exactly hope attaches to in a situation where “stressors outside the household” prevail? The mimetically contagious answer to that question is “resilience.”

It is through the looking glass of resilience that Homo mimeticus can be said to appear on the scene front and center. Leading the field in promoting a science of resilience as a counterweight to adversity is the Centre on the Developing Child at Harvard University. Established by Jack Shonkoff in 2006, and aware of the tendency among nonexperts to associate resilience with self-reliance and rugged individualism (Shonkoff & Bales, 2011, p. 26), Shonkoff and his team entered into a partnership with the FrameWorks⁶ Institute to develop a “core story” of child development, replete with “metaphors” designed through the application of a proprietary research methodology,⁷ to communicate the science of adversity and resilience to a nonspecialist public and to policymakers (Shonkoff & Bales, 2011). I will mention three metaphors that were crafted in formulating this core story. The first, which figures in the blurb for the KPJR film quoted above, is “toxic stress,” which is a simplified way of communicating stress-induced cortisol and hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis regulation (NSCDC, 2014). Alongside this are “serve and return” and “brain architecture,” which tap into the experiential knowledge of playing ball games to communicate how “back-and-forth” interaction is “fundamental to the wiring of the brain, especially in the earliest years” (CDCHUb; also NSCDC, 2015). The central idea is that parents and primary caregivers can “buffer” children in ways that cushion the harmful health and behavioral effects of toxic stress. It is this relational conception of resilience that most closely resembles Lawtoo's thoughts on the mimetic unconscious and mimetic mirroring. When threaded together as adversity–buffering–resilience, this is a story that summons the need for supports and interventions aimed at mimetically engineering health and behavioral outcomes that exist in the future.

So what is at stake exactly; why be concerned by The biology of adversity and resilience at all? To return to Lawtoo's insistence that mimetic contagion and the mimetic unconscious are Janus-faced, I propose that the story narrated by the advocates of NEAR science is itself—potentially if not always actually—Janus-faced. Everything hinges on how things play out as the story gains traction in the field of policy and practice, and this is beyond authorial control. To paraphrase Foucault (1984, p. 343), the pathos-logos of NEAR science is not necessarily “bad” (pathogenic), but it might prove to be “dangerous,” depending on how the story it tells is put into practice. By way of an example, I defer to Christina Sharpe. In her In the wake: On Blackness and being (2016, pp. 90–93), Sharpe discusses a New York Times article about a homeless Black girl called Dasani (her real name apparently), who attends a school where children are coached to believe that success comes through sacrifice and by striving to overcome adversity. For Sharpe this is part of a “curriculum” organized around the normative principle of “individual resilience,” which is by no means confined to the school in question, or indeed the field of education. In the context of Sharpe's analysis, the message imparted within the school is “part of a larger curriculum” that assigns children like Dasani a specific part to play in sustaining the myth of equal opportunity. For Sharpe, the question we need to ask is this: “How can the very system that is designed to unmake and inscribe [Dasani] also be the one to save her?” (2016, p. 92; italics in the original).

To drill into the meaning of adversity in the field of NEAR science is to find that it subsumes cruelty, violence, discrimination, exploitation, and racism while also functioning as a placeholder for what follows: resilience. Adversity operates within the frame of NEAR science so that it anticipates resilience in the way that one-half of a dovetail joint fashioned by a cabinet maker awaits its counterpart. Functionally intertwined, the adversity–resilience joint, which is cemented by the mimetic notion of buffering (serve and return), invokes a scenario where blameless stressors impact negatively on individual flourishing, and thus the present order of things is primed to persist into the future. The biology of adversity and resilience is part alibi, part evasion, part acquiescence—an acknowledgment that the extant order of things is not good enough but, at the same time, not bad enough to warrant a transformative politics. As a prescriptive story, The biology of adversity and resilience provides a stamp of approval for the idea that people living with adversity should be supported in their efforts to adjust, adapt, and endure, thereby embodying “resilience.” This is good reason to take critical distance from science that—by fabulating the facts—becomes a normative fiction. A normative fiction moreover that circulates within a context shaped by a deeply embedded neoliberal governmentality that devolves responsibility for social existence to individuals, and in a situation where an increasing number of people subsist through precarious employment and/or contingent social supports (see Brown, 2015; Standing, 2011). With an eye to the current political conjuncture, we cannot afford to overlook the extent to which far-right populism is becoming entangled in the neoliberal intensification of inequality, manifesting as ressentiment and support for authoritarian rule (Brown, 2018). The biology of adversity and resilience all too easily has a generative role to play in this protean social script, lending itself to the idea that individuals living with adversity need to learn to adapt, or at least cope, and if they cannot, or will not, then it is because someone or something is to blame, whether “foreigners,” “immigrants,” or “the deep state.” How then does Homo mimeticus refuse this mode of mimetic contagion? Lawtoo goes some way to answering that question, but arguably not far enough.

According to Lawtoo, Homo mimeticus is at once vulnerable to the dangers of mimetic contagion, yet also capable of practicing what (from Nietzsche) he calls pathos of distance, which concerns “anti-mimetic” critical distancing (2022a, pp. 11–14). Hence the notion of a Janus-faced scenario. Lawtoo is very clear in identifying the importance of critical distancing in the context of “unconscious mirroring tendencies” that produce and reproduce “racist oppression, class disadvantage, and social discrimination” (2022c, p. 192). However, while taking us to the brink of being able to grasp what this might look like in practice, Lawtoo looks to generic models, and this creates a problem.

The problem begins to arise as Lawtoo presents critical distancing as a capacity to “actively resist the powers of imitation” (2022c, p. 37). Here, Lawtoo makes conceptual space for conscious, deliberate, tactical distancing from the ever-present dangers of “oppressive forms of dominant herd behavior” relating to “the pathologies of mimesis,” that is, racism, sexism, xenophobic nationalism, demagoguery, and neofascism (2022c, pp. 30, 37). Without suggesting that this is out of step with the concerns of the Homo mimeticus project, it invites an interpretation of the individual subject of volition that sustains the fiction of Homo sapiens, noting that Lawtoo uses that familiar figure of thought as shorthand for a conception of the subject modeled on “autonomy, free will, and rational presence to selfhood” (Lawtoo, 2022c, p. 35). One of Lawtoo's objectives is to displace this normative fiction along with the ease with which it is invoked within the entangled fields of philosophical and political discourse, and it would indicate a point of failure for the Homo mimeticus project should he inadvertently reinstate it.

While there is scope to interpret the notion of actively resisting the powers of imitation, this narrows as Lawtoo models the pathos of distance on Nietzsche's idea of “plastic power,” or “the capacity to develop out of oneself in one's own way” (2022c, p. 148, here quoting Nietzsche directly: 2007, p. 62). It narrows again when Lawtoo looks to Lacoue-Labarthe's (1986) idea of “auto-poesis,” presented as “the faculty of self-growth and self-accomplishment” modeled on the actor as “a virtuoso mimetician who generates artistic characters” in a theater setting (2022c, p. 145). What is missing here, I propose, is down to the shortcomings of modeling, which stops short of tackling the “when,” “why,” and “how” questions—when and why does distancing occur (under what conditions?), and how is it enacted? Without answers to these questions, there is the danger of sustaining the fiction of the “autonomous, self-possessed, and fully rational subject qua Homo sapiens” (2022c, p. 11), and thus, by extension, the subject presupposed by neoliberal governmentality.

Otherwise put, and regardless of age, we are always in relation and vulnerable to each other (Cavarero & Lawtoo, 2021). This relational vulnerability envelops situations where the mimetic bond is reproduced within the flow of everyday social life, as well as situations where mimesis resembles the polarity of a magnet—not only desiring or succumbing to the pull of mimetic attraction but also being repelled or pushed away (on mimetic desire and relations of power, see Lev, 2022). If, as Lawtoo proposes, the lure of the mimetic bond is Janus-faced, it is also more than that, and the issue of adversity throws the relational contours of mimesis into stark relief. It is not simply a binary situation of being included within, or excluded from, the mimetic circle, whether configured as a nation, ethnic group, “race,” class, gender, or some other marker of identity and belonging. The mimetic ties that bind us are more than an insider/outsider duality, which brings me back to the importance of context and the history of the child-saving movement sketched above. We need to consider situations where inclusion becomes insistent and tolerates nothing short of compliance, producing justifications for cajoling, even coercing the wayward, the errant, the deviant into their designated place, noting that this may well be orchestrated in the name of helping, supporting, or indeed “buffering” those who are perceived to be victims of circumstance. It is here, in this complex mimetic field of in/exclusion, which is saturated with power relations, that we can begin to grasp the ways in which adversity can become a catalyst for mimetic figurations that take different forms—not necessarily limited to the binary logic of a Janus-faced pathos of distance, meaning a “constitutive tension between mimetic and anti-mimetic tendencies” (Lawtoo, 2022c, p. 37). The mimetic bond can also be configured as an alter-mimetic politics of refusal.

To return to and refine my earlier question posed at the end of section 3: How does Homo mimeticus practice refusal, and what would it take to name and narrate the experience of adversity otherwise? Hartman's critical fabulism offers a compelling response to these questions, and a response that is more than an anti-mimetic pathos of distance. What can be gleaned from Hartman's Wayward lives is an alter-mimetic politics of refusal that takes us beyond the normativity of NEAR science.

Hartman describes her method of “critical fabulism” as “history written with and against the archive” (2008, p. 12), and the objective is to “interrupt” the present (Hartman, 2008, p. 4). In the case of Wayward lives, which is set in the US during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, what begins with tracing the life of “a minor figure” (2019, p. 13) expands to encompass an ensemble of lives imagined collectively as a “chorus” (p. 297). Wayward lives is also populated by figures endowed with one or another type of authority: sociologists, settlement house reformers, philanthropic agents of “uplift” and “betterment,” probation officers, social workers, “friendly visitors,” vice investigators, journalists, and psychiatrists (pp. 33–34). This is the trail that Hartman follows—a textual trail of words that pronounce judgment and codify behavioral prognoses; words that once claimed factual accuracy and objectivity but now read as slurs; words often spoken before being recorded on paper and in case files; words at times laced with the smug confidence that accompanies the power to control, coerce, and punish with impunity. Critical fabulism is rigorous in its mode of inquiry and in its attention to historical detail, yet at the same time it is speculative—a type of “listening” that “reads against the grain” of the documentary sources that provide its material substrate (2019, p. 34).

Among the wayward lives that Hartman fabulates are stories that fit snugly within the contemporary frame of ACEs. These are the hardest to read, and the most painful to know about. One such story is the life of Mabel Hampton (see Hartman, 2019, pp. 297–311), whom I mentioned earlier. Mabel's mother died a month after giving birth to the child in 1902, and Mabel was raised by her grandmother until the older woman died suddenly from a stroke. Adopted by an aunt living in New York, eight-year-old Mabel entered a loveless household. Her stepfather—a reverend who held service in the family living room—made the child sleep on the kitchen floor or the coal bin, and when Mabel was allowed on the bed, it was to be raped (pp. 310–311). Mabel fled to New Jersey and was taken in by a family who cared for her as she began to make her own way in the world.⁸ Without losing sight of the hardships endured by this child or the violence inflicted on her young body, Hartman tells a story rich in the beauty of experimental and experiential pleasure. It is not a story that anticipates a happy ending, but it is the story of a beautiful life, nonetheless.

Mabel evaded a life of servitude in “the kitchen or the factory or the brothel”—which was the fate endured by many girls she knew—by auditioning for a musical revue at Coney Island, landing a part in the chorus line (2019, p. 298). Joining the chorus was, as Hartman interprets it, to practice the “art” of “choreography” (p. 299). For a young Black woman at that time, this was more than rehearsing and performing a scripted part before an audience. Through the lens of critical fabulism, the chorus echoes “the flight from the plantation, the escape from slavery, the migration from the south, the rush into the city.” The art of choreography is “an arrangement of the body to elude capture, an effort to make the uninhabitable liveable, to escape the confinement of a four-cornered world … it was the way to insist I am unavailable for servitude, I refuse it” (p. 299, original emphasis). Whether it was the cabaret, private party, or music hall, “Mabel tried to dance her way into feeling free, to compose a wild and beautiful life, to step onto an errant path that might guide her to the wonderful experiences afforded by Harlem” (p. 305).

The life that Mabel Hampton scripted was neither smooth nor seamless. Hartman hints at an episode concerning a vice sting that saw the young woman—like many Black girls at that time—wrongfully arrested for prostitution and sentenced by the Woman's Court to serve time at the reformatory at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in New York State.⁹ The larger significance of this episode is captured in the title of Hartman's book. “Wayward” was codified by statutes that empowered magistrates to sentence girls to reformatories in the name of “protective measures” that would regulate sexual offenses without “the stigma of the conviction of crime” (p. 222; also Garlock, 1979). The “dragnet,” as Hartman calls it, was enforced by undercover police armed with impunity when it came to breaking into peoples’ homes, spying in clubs, apprehending girls on the street, and acting on the basis of judgments such as “potential prostitute” and “danger of becoming morally depraved” (p. 221). At risk of being apprehended and deprived of their liberty were “those who dared refuse the gender norms and social conventions of sexual propriety,” meaning monogamy, heterosexuality, and marriage (p. 221). The Code of Criminal Procedure (p. 222) brought the weight of repressive judgment to bear not only on what had taken place or had crossed the threshold of crime but on what might transpire in the future, according to those who took it upon themselves to police the emerging Black ghetto. To be in the sightline of the “child savers’ zeal” (Garlock, 1979, p. 390), and thereby fall foul of a status offense such as “stubbornness,” “incorrigibility,” or “promiscuity,” it was sufficient to be seen drinking, dancing, dating (interracial liaisons most notably), partying, and roaming the streets (Hartman, 2019, p. 224).

Mabel Hampton continued her beautiful experiment after she was released from the Bedford Reformatory, but where did her errant path lead? In 1936, ten years after she appeared with Florence Mills in Blackbirds of 1926 at the Alhambra Theatre, Mabel Hampton “entered the market for day labourers,” otherwise known as The Bronx Slave Market (p. 343). We can ask a question of this story: have we been offered a glimpse of a beautiful, courageous, defiant life that ends in tragedy, or if not that, then defeat? Here we confront an inescapable decision. Whether to wring our hands, or else figure out how to carry the story forward, not to its terminus, as though all stories must come to an end, but forward in the sense of beyond the place where Hartman leaves us (more on this below). All things considered, perhaps the lesson from Mabel's story is that it would be less painful in the long run to walk the straight and narrow from the start (Orthopædia); maybe one should adapt to circumstances and make the best of one's assigned place in the deeply unequal distribution of places and parts. Maybe one should just learn to be resilient in other words. If we shift our perception slightly however, then what matters is how a life is lived, and on whose terms, and in whose company. In this way, and amidst the pervasiveness of social “adversity,” we can grasp the radical potential of what Hartman calls “beautiful experiments.”

Insofar as this is anti-mimetic, it is also alter-mimetic. The alter-mimetic chorus is born from the shared experience of what is known in the field of NEAR science as adversity, but this is better understood if what it encloses and attempts to corral is kept out in the open: cruelty, suffering, violence, exploitation, and racism, extending to the experience of being subject to well-meaning intentions aimed at orchestrating uplift and betterment, but also courage, defiance, solidarity, and mutuality.¹¹ In contrast to the normative thrust of “resilience,” which sustains the present order of things by supporting children in being able to endure and adapt to “adversity,” Hartman offers us “revolution in a minor key” (p. 217).

It could (reasonably?) be argued that the normalizing techniques of “uplift” and “betterment” belong to a bygone era; that we have moved on and learned from past mistakes. A comforting thought perhaps, but also one that risks succumbing to the fallacy of progress. To borrow once more from Christina Sharpe (2016), my claim is that the mimetic techniques of NEAR science are “in the wake” of a past that continues to haunt the present, and so, by way of concluding, I want to reflect on the status of the Homo mimeticus project relative to NEAR science at the time of writing this essay. If we are to move into the future in the wake, then it is imperative to take stock of where we are now.

Homo mimeticus might—and this is the wager Lawtoo is making—become an extension of NEAR science, coded in the language of research “findings,” “data,” and “evidence,” thereby reinstating the meaning of mimesis as resemblance and representation. In other words, if Homo mimeticus helps us to understand biological processes that operate at the cellular and molecular levels, then it makes sense to recruit representational techniques in order to describe, narrate, and translate the science, thereby making it accessible to a nonspecialist audience or public. It is not difficult to imagine this merger between speculative philosophy and NEAR science staged as a site-specific installation along the lines of research-based art (see Bishop, 2023). Incorporating a blend of visual and textual language, the installation would describe, map, and model the science of Homo mimeticus through neuroimaging techniques, graphic portraits of DNA methylation and histone modification, descriptive accounts of the HPA axis, and so on. This imagined display would include a section on the application of NEAR science to real-world problems such as “early life adversity,” and here the truth claims of the science would serve as a summons for the kinds of judgments that Hartman re-presents and refuses through the method of critical fabulation. As Claire Bishop (2023) puts it, to assemble “an unforgettable story-image” can be a powerful world-making process. The advocates of NEAR science know this, which is why The biology of adversity and resilience is a blend of mythos, pathos, and logos. I need to stress this point: Hartman's work serves as a cautionary tale of what is at stake in how social adversity is discursively coded, communicated, and organized into social practices, and in particular what can happen when alter-mimetic inclinations and relations are perceived by the self-appointed custodians of order—armed with the authoritative currency of expertise—as “promiscuous, reckless, wild, and wayward” (Hartman, 2019, p. xvi). Better to fabulate than capitulate to the currency of data-driven truth, as though this does not also embellish the facts, noting too that the figure of the “resilient” child anchors a compromised semiotics of “adversity” that sustains its own material existence.

Hartman's work addresses a lacuna in the Homo mimeticus project. The lives that Hartman fabulates trace an alter-mimetic pathos of distance that opens out possibilities—for other lives, for other worlds—otherwise foreclosed. To echo Foucault, to forge an errant path in the face of cruelty and injustice is to practice an “aesthetics of existence” (2011, p. 190). To practice an aesthetics of existence collectively through a relational, embodied, and affective alter-mimesis is to inhabit the threshold between politics and aesthetics. It is, as Hartman proposes, revolution in a minor key.