Imitation as the ground of human action rather than a technique within it — the term McLuhan took from Aristotle's Poetics and that this archive uses to connect his earliest training to his last positions. It appears first as a phrase on Bob's chart and only later as the thing the chart was about. The best entry point is dialogue 67, where Cameron makes it the constant that every variety of tactility varies, and where the Android meme is respelled as the Android mime.
Across the dialogues
Arrives as a chart label rather than a subject — "co-evolutionary anticipatory mimesis" sits at the top of Bob's formula chart, a technical term for effects preceding causes
The term's first use is diagrammatic — a chart heading for the way media archetypes anticipate political form, with the imitation running forward in time rather than backward.
"Co-evolutionary anticipatory mimesis equals how the media archetypes fit the Battle of Jericho in American politics."
Cameron's gloss quietly relocates the term from prophecy to method — anticipatory mimesis is not foresight but the capacity to act on effects already legible in their causes.
"So by anticipatory mimesis, I think what he's talking about is knowing the effects of causes and being able to act knowing those"
Promoted from label to substrate — miming stops describing one media effect and becomes the constant beneath every variety of tactility, which lets the whole McLuhan lineage be re-read as a single question inherited from the Poetics
Posed as a question, this is the session's pivot — imitation is proposed not as something humans do but as something they are subject to, which makes every later media effect a special case.
"Can we say that human beings are driven to mime?"
The concept is given a documented origin in McLuhan's own training, which converts a thematic reading of his work into a biographical claim about where his first question came from.
"one of the great things that happened to McLuhan when he went to Cambridge is that he studied Aristotle's Poetics with the professor that was called Q, who was sort of the dean of the Cambridge English School."
Placing mimesis at the "formal beginning" makes the whole later career a single sustained answer, which is the strongest continuity claim the series has advanced about McLuhan's development.
"So at the sort of the formal beginning of McLuhan's thought is this question of what miming is in human action as first to be seen in Greek tragedy."
Bob supplies the mechanism the concept had been missing — miming is not steady imitation but an oscillation between approach and withdrawal, which is why it can govern relationships as well as media.
"there's blocking and there's merging. So humans like to merge, but not too far. So they block."
The identification that makes the term load-bearing — the merging-and-blocking dynamic is not analogous to pre-tribal awareness but the same structure under another name.
"notice, Bob, how that is exactly what we've been talking about in terms of pre-tribal awareness."
Stated as an invariant, this is what lets tactility become the variable — the varieties of experience are varieties of how miming is done, never of whether.
"miming is a constant in human experience."
The pun is an argument — if consciousness is itself a miming, then Bob's Android meme was always naming a mimetic process, and the homophone records a discovery rather than a joke.
"The Android meme must be the Android mime because what human consciousness turns out to be is a miming."
Joyce's project stated as a paradox that only this concept makes sayable — the attempt to imitate the very ground of imitation, which is why the result had to be Finnegans Wake rather than a novel.
"He was trying to mime something that can't be mimed."
Bob supplies the historical trigger — Joyce could see the substrate because electricity had begun performing it at scale, which dates the availability of the insight rather than the insight itself.
"he became aware of it because the electric environment was doing that. The electric environment is the underlying mimesis."
Connections
The term enters McLuhan's thought through the Poetics, read at Cambridge in a two-person tutorial.
The merging-and-blocking dynamic of miming is identified as the same structure as pre-tribal awareness.
The Android meme is re-read as the Android mime, since what human consciousness turns out to be is a miming.