← The Observable Unknown
The Observable Unknown
Interlude LXXX: Imitation | How Borrowed Desire, Mimetic Theory, and Story Shape Identity
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Welcome back to the observable unknown. The first self we ever become is borrowed. A child watches a face and tries the expression. They hear a sound and return something like it. They notice how adults greet strangers, respond to anger, receive affection, and behave when someone enters the room. Before identity becomes a declaration, it's an elaborate rehearsal. We like to imagine that the self develops privately, somewhere deep inside of us, and then announces itself to the world. That's not quite what happens. We become recognizable to ourselves through other people. We copy a laugh before we know what humor is. We borrow a cadence before we understand personality. We learn which emotions may be shown, which desires receive approval, and which version of ourselves seems most likely to remain loved more. Much of this happens before we possess the language to call any of it imitation. We don't begin by inventing ourselves. We begin by studying what a person appears to be. The previous interludes have followed the structures we receive before choice becomes fully conscious. Inheritance gives us a world. Lineage gives us recurring patterns. Language gives us names. Myth gives us stories. Ritual gives those stories a body, and belonging tells us where we may safely stand. Imitation teaches us how to move once we're inside the room. At the University of Washington, developmental psychologist Andrew Meltzoff spent decades studying imitation infant development and the earliest foundations of social understanding. His early research with M. Keith Moore, beginning in the late 1970s, helped place infant imitation near the center of debates about how babies connect what they see another person doing with what they can do through their own bodies. Some of the earliest claims concerning newborn imitation have since been debated, refined, and tested, with very mixed results. That scientific argument is an important one. Yet the larger insight remains difficult to dismiss. Infants learn about themselves by watching other human beings. They see a gesture, they attempt it. They observe the response. Through that exchange, the child begins discovering that the body across the room and the body inhabited from within belong to the same general kind of creature. You move, I can move. You make a sound, I can answer. You act on the world. Perhaps I can act on it too. Meltzoff later described this as part of a like me understanding. The child doesn't begin with a mature theory of other minds. The the child begins with correspondence. Your movement resembles something my body can do. Your expression resembles something I can feel. Your attention teaches mine where to go. Imitation is one of the first bridges between self and other. It's also one of the first tools through which culture enters the body. Children don't only copy visible movements. They copy emotional weather. They learn weather mistakes should produce curiosity or shame. They learn whether anger becomes conversation, silence, ridicule or violence. They learn whether love is spoken directly or hidden inside. Worry, criticism, sacrifice and control. No parent teaches all of this deliberately. Much of it is transmitted through repetition. A child notices what the adults around them do when frightened, embarrassed, disappointed, admired or contradicted. Then, years later, the child becomes an adult and calls the repetition personality. That doesn't make the personality fraudulent. It makes the personality historical. Radnair Gerard carried imitation into more dangerous territory. During his years teaching at Stanford University, Gerard developed what became known as mimetic theory. His argument was that human beings don't only imitate behavior, we imitate desire. We often want something because someone else has taught us that it's worth wanting. A profession, a partner, a title, a body, a house, a spiritual identity, a form of prestige, an idea of success. The object may appear to call us directly. Yet another person's attention may have made it luminous. First, we don't only copy what people do. We copy what they notice. Girard said that this creates a peculiar danger. The person who teaches us what to desire may become our rival once we pursue it. The model becomes an obstacle. Admiration becomes competition. Two people may believe they're fighting over an object. When the real force lies in the triangular relationship between the desire, the model, and the thing desired. The object hasn't changed, but the relationship has. This is where imitation begins, producing story. In my latest book, the Story, Secret Scaffolding of Story, narrative architecture, and the strange Machinery Behind Every Tale. I begin with a distinction. Plot is what happens. Story is how. What happens changes relationships. A secret becomes known and trust changes. A stranger is adopted and kinship changes. A ruler is crowned and authority changes. A friend betrays an oath and loyalty changes. An enemy becomes a rescuer. And moral identity. Identity changes. Imitation belongs among this hidden machinery. Because copied behavior and borrowed desire alter relationships before anyone fully understands what's happened. A student admires a teacher, then begins competing with them. A younger sibling imitates an older one, then resents being treated as a copy. A child adopts a parent's ambition, then builds a life around a desire that never felt entirely their own. An admirer becomes a double, and the double becomes a threat. That's story not merely because events occurred, but because imitation rearranged the relations among the people involved. Stories also teach audiences how to imitate. They lend us models of courage, beauty, revenge, loyalty, sacrifice, romance, power and disgrace. They show us which desires are worthy of pursuit and which kinds of suffering supposedly confer importance. A child watching a hero doesn't only learn what the Hero did. The child learns what deserves admiration. An adult watching a love story doesn't only follow whether two people unite. The adult absorbs an idea about what love should feel like and how much pain it should justify. And what must be surrendered to prove it. A tragedy may teach us to recognize pride. A comedy may teach us which pretensions deserve ridicule. A family story story may teach one child to become the rescuer and another to become the disappointment. Narrative doesn't simply entertain identity. It rehearses identity. That's part of the strange machinery behind every tale. Characters imitate one another, audiences imitate characters. And cultures preserve the models that future generations will use to imagine themselves. Stories don't force us to become anyone. They make certain forms of becoming easier to picture and easier to reproduce. This connects imitation to the relational topology of consciousness. The self doesn't form alone and then enter relationship as a finished object. The self emerges through relation, through being watched and watching, through being answered, through trying a gesture and seeing whether the world responds, through borrowing a role long enough to discover whether it fits. Imitation isn't an unfortunate flaw contaminating an otherwise pure identity. Without imitation, there may be no coherent identity from which originality could later emerge. Language itself begins in borrowed sounds. Courtesy begins in copied gestures. Skill begins through demonstration. Art begins with influence. Even rebellion often begins by imitating someone who showed us that refusal was possible. The question isn't whether we imitate. The question is whether we ever know. Notice our models. Who taught you what success should look like? Whose attention made a particular life seem desirable? Whose contempt taught you what to hide? Whose suffering became your picture of love? Which character parent, teacher, rival, lover, leader or stranger gave you a role that you're still performing today? These questions aren't meant to strip identity away. They help reveal how identity was originally assembled. Self knowledge isn't the discussion discovery of a perfectly original creature hiding beneath every influence. It's the recognition of what we borrowed, what we rejected, what we altered, and what we've continued with that examination. Belonging makes imitation especially powerful. We copy the people whose acceptance matters. We laugh when the group laughs. We soften an opinion. When disagreement threatens connection. We adopt the vocabulary, posture, outrage, tastes and certainty that make us legible to the people we need. Sometimes that's ordinary social learning. Sometimes it becomes disappearance. The difference often lies in whether imitation expands our capacity or requires us to amputate something true. A good model gives us movement. We can eventually make our own. A dangerous model requires permanent resemblance. Maturity doesn't mean living without influence. That would be impossible and rather dull. Maturity means becoming more selective about who receives the privilege of shaping us. It means noticing when admiration has become rivalry, when belonging has become mimicry, and when a borrowed desire has begun spending a life that belongs to us. Much of what we call identity began as imitation. That doesn't make identity false, it makes identity relational. The first draft may have been copied from the people around us, but a first draft isn't a final sentence. Imitation gives us a beginning, reflection allows revision. And perhaps freedom begins when we can finally see the model standing behind the mirror, thank them for what they taught us, and decide what kind of person will step away. If this interlude caused you to reconsider the gestures, desires, roles, or stories you may have mistaken for entirely your own, make that known. Leave a rating or a review not for recognition, for signal. So someone living inside a borrowed performance may finally recognize that imitation was the beginning of identity, not its final form. Until next time. Remember, you don't become what you feel you become what you return to. And what you return to returns as you.