Utopian Spontaneity: Adorno's Concept of Mimesis and Surrealist Automatic Writing

This essay discusses how surrealist automatic writing may break an impasse in the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno’s work. 1 Adorno argues that, since the advent of instrumental rationality in modernity, the subject has repressed an aspect of her self— mimesis—that expresses the desire to attain proximity to an object through imitation rather than conceptualization ( Aesthetic Theory , 145–46). This aspect, which is a mode of experience, is employed so that the subject may cognize the object without discursive control. However, since the promise of modernity—to emancipate the subject through rational freedom—has been broken and distorted by late capitalism, the status of mimesis has been thrown in doubt. Adorno argues that mimesis is marginalized in modernity: instead of occurring in epistemological cognition, it now has been forced into aesthetic experience (that is, the experience of natural beauty as well as artistic objects) (69, 146). 2 Mimesis is reduced to imitating reified and damaged life (through artistic technique, which develops according to the vicissitudes of historical experience), which means that any intimation of metaphysical transcendence (such as materialist utopian hope) must be negative. For instance, in the Dialectic of Enlightenment , Adorno and Max Horkheimer argue that mimesis is an irrational subjective impulse—which, when coupled with rationality, could become redemptive: “The chaotically regular flight reactions of the lower animals, the patterns of swarming crowds, the convulsive gestures of the tortured—all these express what wretched life can never quite control: the mimetic impulse. In the death throes of the creature, at the furthest extreme from