This is a version of the paper given as part of Performance Studies international 13, Happening, Performance, Event, at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, November 7-11 2007. An earlier version of the paper was presented as part of the Repeat Repeat Symposium at Chester University School of Art and Design in April 2007; whilst a much extended version of the essay is due to be published in the online journal, Papers of Surrealism in November 2007. See http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/publications/papers/index.html

Abstract
This paper explores the performative gesture of following another; a mimetic event which can be understood as an articulation of the desire to be led astray or to ‘lose oneself’ through relinquishing or giving over responsibility for one’s own actions. Here the yearning for being lost emerges as a craving to escape from the limits of consciousness in search of the unknown, the unfamiliar or the strange in both the self and one’s surroundings. Seeking to blur the boundary between self and other, as well as that which might differentiate the body from its environment, the performative act of following has the capacity to draw together a number of divergent concerns in relation to the idea of the event as a site of repetition and eternal presence, where the practices of doubling, mirroring, mimicry and camouflage function as forms of disruption or spatial/psychological play which challenge any stable understanding of selfhood and threaten to interrupt the continuum of the present. The act of following as a performative event or happening can be witnessed in a range of artistic practices since the 1950s, but can also be seen at play in the early Surrealist practice of errance. This critical analysis of following might then perform a resuscitative function, establishing new connections to the past and contextualising errance as a critical conceptual or performative tactic which can be credited with a wider legacy in which its repeated gesture is seen as both an embodiment of alienation but also of resistance and liberation.

Transcript
Arguably any chronological or disciplinary reading of the history of practice functions to either eclipse or immortalize moments from the past in favour of the perpetually evolving, as each emerging art form is located firmly in relation to both a history and a still-yet-to-come. In this paper I want to explore how the notion of errance – a form of Surrealist drifting or aimless wandering that emerged in the early 1920s - can be resurrected, and recuperated as a critical precursor of performative practices from the late 1950s onwards.(1) Additionally as a latent subtext perhaps, I am interested in how the gesture of wandering might itself be deployed as a methodology for disturbing the illusion of continuity or coherence within a ‘history’ of ideas. Wandering can be articulated as the desire to meander from habitual lines of enquiry, a gesture of making strange by approaching the familiar from a different perspective or mind-set, or alternatively as a vehicle for intentional distraction through the creation of desirable tangents. Here, - to take on board the manner in which the conference has been pitched - as one ‘drifts’ between practices and ideas, the notion of the not-yet-imagined new might seep into the spaces in-between what has already happened; a futurity unfolding in the gaps as well as along the line of distant horizons. Wandering might also be figured as the gesture of ‘sliding’ that takes place in the space of any interdisciplinary practice; the slip or fall undertaken as the edges of disciplinary demarcation are abandoned in favour of the still unknown. I suppose that my ‘slide’ begins at the site of visual arts practice, an already interdisciplinary terrain, and it is from here that I begin my wander.

At a formal level the practice of errance can be positioned as a part of a tradition of politically resistant spatial navigation or urban geography – where the Surrealist events of the early 1920s can be seen to anticipate the Situationists’ deployment of the dérive as a means to reflect the pedestrians’ experience of the city. Alternatively the notion of collective wandering or the search for the ‘everyday marvellous’ re-emerges as part of the vocabulary of Happenings and early conceptual work; where for example, it is evoked in Allan Kaprow’s description of the ‘Guided Tour or Pied Piper Happening’.(2) However rather than conceptualising a trajectory of practices that share a ‘likeness’ with Surrealist errance, my intent is to approach it from a different perspective that resonates more with the ideas of this conference. More than simply a form of Surrealist automatism; a precursor of Andre Breton’s objective chance, or a symptom of psychologically driven compulsion-repetition, I want to present a case where errance can be understood as a form of proto-conceptual practice or pre-Happening: the moment where innumerable contemporary motifs and critical strategies emerge.(3)

In one sense, Surrealist errance operates as a model of purposefully purposeless repetition, according to the relentless obligation to a rule or system that is absurd, arbitrary or somehow undeclared. Errance thus presents an early paradigm of non-teleological performativity, for its searches are forever unrewarded, its goals always deferred. Alternatively it could be understood as a tactical process of declassification; where at times the relationship between self and other; body and environment, or between art and life becomes blurred through the performative possibilities of ludic role-play or the tactic of following another. Focusing on the nature of the categorical slippage created by the gesture of following within both Surrealist and contemporary practices, I am interested in how this ‘blurring’ can be read as a form of camouflage, rather than as true dissolution or non-differentiation: where it can be understood in both critical and compulsive terms as either a moment of existential crisis or as an experiment performed according to predetermined rules of the game.

The repetition of another’s actions is an ambiguous gesture that operates at the interstice between homage and critique, where it can be performed as a method of both sabotage and recuperation. Such performative duplication can be viewed as form of intentional and involuntary mimesis, where another’s actions might become the focus of ironic imitation or of enamoured obsession, a space for meaningful inhabitation or a mask that can be borrowed for empty acting-out. The act of following another can be witnessed as a strategic mimetic form of performance through which to attempt to be led astray or become lost. It presents a method of relinquishing or giving over responsibility for one’s own actions, where the itinerary of another is borrowed as a device for wilful disorientation.(4) An historical context for the practice of following another can be found in errance; whose transitory existence is documented or inscribed as part of the narrative structure underpinning novels such as Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1924-26), Philippe Soupault’s Last Nights in Paris (1929) or André Breton’s Nadja (1928).(5) Within these Surrealist texts, the notion of following can be identified as a specific type of errance, where the path of another operates as the borrowed instructions or ‘set of rules’ through which to momentarily abandon one’s own direction and become misled.(6) At times, these narratives describe strange or irrational pursuits that often necessitate, however fragile, a relationship between a follower and a person followed; where the protagonist frequently retraces the steps of a female character, whose function might be to act as a siren or guide leading the pursuer into unknown territories. In the semi-autobiographical text Nadja (1928), André Breton reiterates his brief and unpredictable affair with a woman whom he had met on the streets of Paris, and who seemed at first to be the embodiment of ‘the wandering soul’: the perfect emblem of Breton’s own desire to escape the rational.(7) Nadja’s physical and mental wanderings appeared to embody a kind of automatism, traced by Breton as though she were a planchette scoring the surface of the city with her own form of psychic inscription.(8)

In turn Breton’s own actions have been followed by more recent practices which have similarly adopted the gesture of ‘following’ another (9), not least in the work of artist Sophie Calle whose project Suite vénitienne can be understood as pertinent inheritor of Surrealist errance, since it shares significant formal and conceptual links with the text, Nadja.(10) Suite vénitienne began with a chance encounter when Calle was introduced to a man (Henri B.) whom she had previously followed, and who disclosed that he was planning to take a trip to Venice.(11) Calle proposed to track or follow the initially unwitting Henri B., thereby declaring him the subject of her relentless gaze and camera lens. She hijacks his itinerary as a means for pleasurable disorientation, for the “pleasure of following” (12), echoing the manner in which Breton inhabited Nadja’s footsteps.

To follow is thus to rob another of their itinerary; a form of existential kidnap where the other’s pathway is usurped or stolen as a guise through which to play out realities other than one’s own. In his text ‘Please follow me’, which accompanied Calle’s project, Jean Baudrillard argues that the repetition or following of another is an act of both seduction and disappearance, where the original objective becomes (willingly) distracted or erased at the insistence of the double.(13) However the notion of the double offers a dual threat, where the act of repetition harbours the mirrored possibility of reciprocal theft, as the process of following has the capacity to be overturned or reversed.(14) Within all acts of following there exists a peculiar tension, described by art historian Tom McDonough as the “libidinal tangle in which pursuer and pursued los(e) their clear polarities”, and threaten to become indistinguishable.(15) Roles can be switched and joker cards played: ‘acts of following’ bleed into ‘acts of being led’, where the person followed is transformed and appears to be self-consciously leading the unwitting follower whose own identity becomes increasingly disturbed. It is this threat of reciprocity that Calle acknowledges as a “dread (that) is taking hold of me: he recognized me, he’s following me, he knows”.(16) Later when she has been discovered by Henri B., she remarks on how “he’s hiding his surprise, his desire to be master of the situation, as if, in fact, I had been the unconscious victim of his game, his itineraries, his schedules”. (17) It is as if, in fact, he had known all along.

The act of following or inhabiting another’s footprint might then give way to the feeling of one’s own space becoming inhabited by the gestures of the other; for in the end the act of possession is a reciprocal gesture where one might as easily become possessed.918) Mimicry of another is thus transformed into an eerie and involuntary ventriloquism. Calle is seen to be “lost … in the other’s traces” (19), whilst Breton articulates the feeling of haunting another when he asks: ‘Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I ‘haunt’.(20) Following implies an act of disappearance: it demands the abandonment of form in favour of a mode of invisibility or formlessness.(21) The follower becomes a corporeal echo akin to the Surrealist cast shadow: a detached, autonomous ‘ghosting’ that is no longer existentially or indexically anchored to the original referent, merely held by some unwritten contractual bind.(22) The follower occupies the space of the ‘third thing’ or chimera, for in becoming the shadow they momentarily inhabit a hybrid zone that has properties of both self and of the subject followed. Operating in this liminal mode of existence, by following another the boundaries between self and non-self become blurred: duplication renders reality according to the logic of double vision.(23) The process of mimicry or ‘becoming another’ thus affects a crisis of ‘distinction’ or differentiation; a categorical slur or disturbance at the boundaries of form and of classification, a blurring of art and life.

In his analysis of animal mimicry in Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia (24), philosopher Roger Caillois reflects on how the motive for mimesis and camouflage might be understood as being analogous to a form of psychosis or schizophrenia. Caillois proposes a model of involuntary deliquescence where the act of repetition inherent in mimesis results in a form of ‘convulsive possession’. (25) The gesture of camouflage results then, not from a desire for survival, but from what Rosalind Krauss has described as a “peculiarly psychotic yielding to the call of ‘space’”.(26) However in his later writing in Man, Play and Games (1958), Caillois in fact refutes his earlier analysis of mimicry, redeeming or redefining it as a strategic method of ludus; as a category of play alongside agôn (competition), alea (chance), and ilinx (vertigo) , making it possible to recuperate a more critical interpretation of the mimetic act of following.(27) Separated in the realm of play (and perhaps by extension in the space of a practice) the individual might appear as an abstracted and mythologised reflection whose existence serves only the broader narrative or game within which they exist, where the “double … enjoys a coherence and a unity that the self lacks”.(28) Play operates according to its own rules and logic, for as Caillois asserts: ‘the game’s domain is … a restricted, closed, protected universe: a pure space. The confused and intricate laws of ordinary life are replaced, in this fixed space and for this given time, by precise, arbitrary, unexceptionable rules that must be accepted as such and that govern the correct playing of the game’. (29)

In play as in practice, the act of repetition or camouflage remains a ludic force, for as long as the rules of this space are maintained; where the mimetic act of following another is entered into critically as much as compulsively. The desire to “escape … and become another" (30), is recast as the performative spectacle of simulation which;
‘consists in the actor fascinating the spectator, while avoiding an error that might lead the spectator to break the spell … which for a given time he is asked to believe in as more real than reality itself.’(31) Both Nadja and Suite vénitienne are in fact marked by an artificial structure or framework that might indeed adhere to Caillois’ rules of mimicry or simulation as a form of play. However, their ‘spell’ centres upon the tension or gap between the pursuer and the person pursued, which must be protected in order to prevent the game returning to the domain of causal logic and becoming a ‘real’ quest of the purely amorous kind. (32)

There is a resistance on the part of both Calle and Breton to fix their experience in the flesh, to slip the game and break the rules. Encounters are too true claims Baudrillard, for in such acts ‘reality’ seeps back and corrupts the space of the game. (33) The spell is broken and play must then end. Breton is seen to desperately regret his sexual liaison with Nadja, as for him it marked the end of his game.(34) He asks: “Can it be that this desperate pursuit comes to an end here?”(35) Calle shares this sentiment when she says: ‘Finding him may throw everything into confusion, may precipitate the end … I’m afraid of meeting up with him: I’m afraid that the encounter might be commonplace’.(36) In this game, the pursuit of the other must remain forever unfulfilled. For not only does the act of following in the practice of Breton and Calle, describe the mimicry or repetition of another’s actions; but it also presents a site of reiterated role-play where the process of the search or quest is itself subject to a form of mimesis or simulation. The gesture of following another is emptied of its meaningful intent and occupied as the repeated structure of a game: a model of eternal and endless pursuit where the indeterminate or latent potential of the action is privileged above the finality of closure. Released from its teleological bonds and causal intent, the process of following another is opened out as a space of conceptual experimentation and testing out; through which to repeatedly inhabit possibilities beyond the parameters of one’s everyday reality. The double-step at play serves to liberate or release the act of following itself from its deterministic anchor enabling it to be re-inhabited or reanimated as a ludic strategy of Sisyphean replay or resistance.

Reflecting briefly upon the connections between surrealist and contemporary practice, my intent then is to propose a case where the nature of ‘the blur’ or model of camouflage within the act of following might be seen a paradigm of both criticality and compulsion; a form of psychological disturbance at the same time as a mimetic form of playful inhabitation and role-play that anticipates key motifs within subsequent practices. Errance is thus presented a primary site where life and art become blurred, a site of perpetual double meaning; where the repeated gesture can be interpreted both through a model of involuntary possession or the embodiment of alienation, and yet also as a strategic method that performs to specific ‘rules’, played out under the spell of a conceptual game.

Copyright. Emma Cocker, 2007.

Endnotes
1 In 1923 André Breton, Louis Aragon, Max Morise and Roger Vitrac undertook Le Voyage Magique, a series of journeys to places picked at random. In 1924 the same four protagonists set off on foot from Blois (a town chosen arbitrarily) and wandered haphazardly for several days.The practice of errance - the gesture of aimless wandering that emerged as a particular form of event or occurrence in the late 1920s under the guidance of Andre Breton- has been conceptualized or archived in relation to how it influenced or developed into Breton’s later and more widely known concept of objective chance, or more broadly how it can be seen to form part of a tradition of aimless wandering anticipated in the footsteps of the flaneur, itself anticipating the now ubiquitous Situationist derive. Such readings locate or historicize the practice or event of errance within a particular and static trajectory of ideas. My intent is to approach the term from a different perspective in order to open up new possibilities or interpretations, in order that it might be re-conceived in relation to terms that resonate in a different way with contemporary practices and the ideas of this conference.
2 I am struck by the connection between errance and Kaprow’s description of the Pied Piper kind of Happening, where ‘A selected group of people is led through the countryside or around a city, through buildings, back yards, parks and shops. They observe things, are given instructions, are lectured to, discover things happening to them – all of both an ordinary and extraordinary sort. In this style, the intended focus upon a mixture of the commonplace and the fantastic makes the journey a modern equivalent to Dante’s spiritual one. The creator of this … is more than a mere cicerone; is in effect a Virgil with a high message’, (Kaprow, 1967, 17). The critical connection between Surrealism and the more recent examples cited is based on the relationship (and again the dual irresolution) between action and anecdote, and the predominance of the act of following as a tactical device or ‘borrowed instruction’. The Surrealist quest often operates as a two-part structure: an actual spatial practice and its textual or anecdotal record that might take the form of the Surrealist novel or banal photographic documentation whose “function has always seemed mysterious, eccentric, curious”. Kaprow in fact cited the value of both play and copying as devices through which to affect a crisis of production, as they are the dirty words of practice, low forms of creative production. Both play and copying function as key critical devices within the gesture of following another, which I am suggesting emerges as a critical performative practice within Surrealism.
3 I am particularly interested in the similarly between the early Surrealist performances and Kaprow’s articulation of the Happening, when he says; ‘A Happening is always a purposive activity., whether it is game-like, ritualistic or purely contemplative. (It may even have as its purpose, no purpose). Having a purpose may be a way of paying attention to what is commonly not noticed. Purpose implies a selective operation for every Happening, limiting it to only certain situations out of countless options’. Kaprow, 1967. His phrase; ‘Art not only becomes life, but life refuses to be itself’, seems especially pertinent to the nature of the ‘blur’ that takesw place in early Surrealism wanderings
4 It might also be seen as a reaction to or relief from the habitual ‘performances’ or ‘misrepresentations’ of the self that are routinely played out within everyday reality. See for example, Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959).
5 The practice of errance was strategically adopted in 1924 when André Breton, Louis Aragon, Max Morise and Roger Vitrac set off on foot from Blois (a town chosen randomly) and wandered haphazardly for several days. This particular example may however have been preceded by Le Voyage Magique of 1923, in which the same four protagonists undertook a series of journeys to places picked at random. See Alastair Brotchie and Mel Gooding (eds.), A Book of Surrealist Games, (Shambhala Redstone Editions, Boston and London, 1995), p.162.
6 The idea of wilfully inhabiting another’s ‘reality’ can also be seen at play within the practice of automatic writing such as in André Breton and Paul Eluard’s The Immaculate Conception, (1930), where “instead of assuming a passive or ‘receptive’ frame of mind, one can with practice assume an active mental state not one’s own. Given this mental set - for instance, that of a delirious mental “illness” – one attempts to write from within it.” (Brotchie and Gooding, 1995, p.22). There is an implicit connection between the emergence of automatic writing and aimless wandering as strategic practices- both of which practice as kind of delinquency or misdemeanour upon the map or paper, a gesture of spoiling rationalist order in favour of a mode of formless detour or dérive. Tom McDonough notes how the term ‘depaysément’ is often found in early Situationist writings on the dérive, where he suggests, it means ‘taken out of one’s element’ or ‘misled’. See Thomas F. McDonough, ‘Situationist space’, October Vol. 67 (Winter, 1994), p.73.
7 For further writing and research in relation to Breton’s text, Nadja, see for example Margaret Cohen, ‘Qui suis-je? Nadja’s haunting subject’ in Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution, (University of California Press, 1993); Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty, (MIT Press, 1993); Briony Fer, ‘Surrealism, myth and psychoanalysis’, in David Batchelor, Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art Between the Wars, (Yale University Press, 1993) and Ian Walker, ‘Nadja – A voluntary banality?’ in A City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and documentary photography in interwar Paris, (Manchester, 2002).
8 Sometimes referred to as an ‘indicator’ or ‘pointer’, a planchette is a device used during a séance as a tool of inscription through which spirit voices communicate through a form of automatic writing.
9 For example, Vito Acconci’s, Following Piece (1969); Tacita Dean’s, Disappearance at Sea I and II (1996 and 1997) and Teignmouth Electron (1999) where she initiates a filmic following in the footsteps of amateur yachtsman Donald Crowhurst’s fated sea journey; Heather and Ivan Morison’s, Chinese Arboretum (2003/4) where they follow the guidance of tree fanatics in search of rare specimens; or Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie's A Hypertext Journal which retraces the steps of Johnson and Boswell's eighteenth-century tour of Scotland.
10 Prior to Suite vénitienne, Calle had already followed strangers on the street for months. Later projects also involved following instructions such as ‘Where are the angels?’ (1984), in which she asks a stranger for instructions or a clue to follow. See Yve-Alain Bois, 2006, ‘Paper Tigress’, October, Vol.116, Spring 2006, p.35 for full account of this project.
11 Suite vénitienne was initiated in 1980. It was originally exhibited in 1983 as a presentation text, 55 black and white photographs, 23 texts and 3 maps of variable dimensions; with a subsequent artists’ book collaboration published in 1988, where Calle’s texts and images were brought into dialogue with the text ‘Please follow me’ by Jean Baudrillard, which establishes a particular interpretative context through which to consider the work. This paper is based on the 1988 publication, Suite Vénitienne/ Please follow me, trans. Dany Barash and Danny Hatfield, (Bay Press, Seattle, 1988).
12 Sophie Calle, 1988, p.2.
13 For Rosalind Krauss the gesture of copying, or doubling performs a destructive blow, which “produces the formal rhythm of spacing- the two-step that banishes the unitary condition of the moment, that creates within the moment an experience of fission …The double is the simulacrum, the second, the representative of the original. It comes after the first, and in this following, it can only exist as a figure, or image. But in being seen in conjunction with the original, the double destroys the pure singularity of the first. See Rosalind Krauss, ‘The photographic conditions of Surrealism’, October, Vol.19 (Winter, 1981), p.25.
14 Baudrillard suggests, in fact, that the more violent moments within acts of following are: ‘those where the followed person, seized by a sudden inspiration … turns around, making an about-face like a cornered beast. The system reverses itself immediately, and the follower becomes the followed […] shadowing implies this surprise. The possibility of reversal is necessary to it. One must follow in order to be followed’, Baudrillard, 1988, p.81.
15 Tom McDonough, ‘The Crimes of the flaneur’, October, Vol.102, (Fall 2002), p.107. McDonough is in fact drawing connections between Vito Acconci’s Following Piece (1969) and Edgar Allen Poe’s The Man of the Crowd. Poe’s tale follows one man’s irrational pursuit of a stranger, of an unknown man, “whose physiognomy, glimpsed for a split second, has entranced him” and for whom “curiosity has become a fatal, irresistible passion”. McDonough goes on to cite Michel Butor’s assertion that they are, “at bottom identical. The second places his steps in the footprints of the first who remains unaware of him, although the former is without knowing it the initiator, the guide of the second”, Michel Butor, Histoire extraordinaire: Essai sur un rêve de Baudelaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1961) p.33, cited in McDonough, 2002, p.106.
16 Calle, 1988, p.9.
17 Calle, 1998, p.50.
18 Jan Verwoert asserts that to appropriate a temporal occurrence or ‘event’ is different to the appropriation of a ‘dead object’, for here the ‘borrowed’ thing it is invoked rather than possessed. Verwoert goes on to cite Jacques Derrida’s, Spectres of Marx (1994), where he speaks of the inevitable reciprocity of possession: “Is not to possess a spectre to be possessed by it, possessed period? To capture it, is that not to be captivated by it?” See Jan Verwoert, Apropos Appropriation, Why stealing Images Today feels Different Today, Tate Triennial 2006, http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/triennial/essay-apropos.shtm
19 Baudrillard, 1988, p.78.
20 Breton says, ‘Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I ‘haunt’ … Perhaps my life is nothing but an image of this kind; perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten’, Breton, 1928/1999, pp.11-12.
21 For Georges Bataille, the collapse of self or deliquescence is indicative of the condition of informe or formlessness, an operation that functions to breakdown the boundaries of form and effect classificatory slippage. See George Bataille’s original entry for formlessness in ‘Critical Dictionary’ trans. D. Faccini, October, Vol. 60 (1992), pp.25-31, or in Encyclopedia Acephalica, (Atlas Press, London, 1995), p.51-52. First appeared as Dictionnaire Critique in 1929 and 1930, and constituted a separate section of the magazine, Documents.
22 Denis Hollier describes this phenomenon within Surrealism as the transformation of the shadow from index into icon where: “Shifting from causality to resemblance, from metonymy to metaphor, these doubles, in addition to being the effect of their cause, merge with it in order to resemble a third thing.”Denis Hollier, ‘Surrealist Precipitates: Shadows Don't Cast Shadows’, October Vol. 69 (Summer, 1994), p.118. Hollier disrupts the reading of the cast shadow as “the very exemplar of a non-displaceable sign: rigorously contemporary with the object it doubles, it is simultaneous, non-detachable” (Hollier, 1994, p.114), with a form of shadowing that emerges in certain photographic and surrealist representations where the shadow appears as a separate, disembodied manifestation. He describes the moment as one of both liberation and horror as the “cast shadow gains iconic autonomy; it is separated and liberated from the object that causes it”, and “enters the realm of ambiguity and survives its cause”, (Hollier, 1994, p.118).
23 The notion of the shadowy ‘third thing’ that haunts or inhabits another, recalls Guy de Maupassant’s, L’Horla, (1887), a tale which describes the haunting and subsequent descent into madness of its central character, who experiences a feeling of possession: “I am lost. Somebody possesses my soul and governs it. Somebody orders all my actions, all my movements, all my thoughts. I am no longer anything in myself, nothing except an enslaved and terrified spectator of all the things I do”.
24 Roger Caillois, ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’, trans. John Shepley, October, Vol.31, (Winter, 1984), p.30. Originally published in Minotaure, Vol.7, 1935. Caillois presents an account of various contemporary theoretical explanations for animal mimicry and a host of examples from the natural world, before presenting a case against the idea of mimesis as an adaptive method of survival.
25 ‘To these dispossessed souls, space seems to be a devouring force. Space pursues them, encircles them, digests them … It ends by replacing them. Then the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put. He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar, Caillois, 1984, p.30. There is perhaps an interesting connection to Frederick Jameson’s analysis of the schizophrenic moment arising through the postmodern condition of mimesis inherent in the act of appropriation, which results in a collapsing, not of space, but of time, that prevents the individual from being able to ‘make sense’ of themselves in the temporal continuum, where order or organisation is lost in favour of a perpetual present.
26 Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, 1994, p.155.
27 In a footnote to Man, Play and Games, Caillois states that his earlier study “ treats the problem with a perspective that today seems fantastic to me. Indeed I no longer view mimetism as a disturbance of space perception and a tendency to return to the inanimate, but rather, as herein proposed, as the insect equivalent to games of simulation”. See, Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, (1958) trans. Meyer Barash, (University of Illinois Press, 2001) pp.177-8. However, it is interesting that the ‘disturbance of space perception’ persists in the form of games within other categories of play that demonstrate the desire for the sense of psychological deliquescence and loss of self or alternatively a disruption of a moral order. This ‘promise’ of disruption is specifically at play in the processes of both mimicry and ilinx, where both practices emerge from a form of carnivalesque or ritualism.
28 Ilana Shiloh, Paul Auster and Postmodern Quest: on the Road to Nowhere, (New York, Peter Lang, 2002), p.42.
29 Caillois, 1958/2001, p.6-7.
30 Caillois, 1958/2001, p.19.
31 Caillois, 1958/2001, p.23.
32 Baudrillard reflects on this wilful deferral when he says: ‘This game, as any other game, has its basic rule: Nothing was to happen, not one event that might establish any contact or a relationship between them. This is the price of seduction. The secret must not be broken, at the risk of the story’s falling into banality’, Baudrillard, 1988, p.78.
33 Baudrillard asserts, “The encounter is always too true, too excessive, indiscreet … Quite different is the secret (and following someone is equivalent to the secret in the space of a city”, p.84. In all forms of play there is also the risk of ‘corruption’ that might threaten to blur the boundaries between the game and ‘real life’ and return play to its chaotic and primal origins.
34 Mark Polizzotti describes, as a footnote, the erasure or ‘stylistic amendment’ that took place in 1963 when Breton revisited the manuscript and removed the reference to the night he and Nadja spent together in Saint-Germaine, in the Introduction to Nadja, 1928/1999, p.xxii.
35 Breton, 1928/1999, p.108.
36 Calle, 1988, p.16.