It is in mimetic processes that children discover the sense of gestural actions, a sense that is implicit and often does not even need to be conveyed because it is has already been conveyed by the body. Such gestural actions form part of our vast silent knowledge, which is so very important in human life but which is often accorded little value in comparison with scientific knowledge which society reveres (Kraus, Budde, Hietzge, and Wulf 2017). Ryle clearly identified the different nature of the knowledge that manifests itself in actions of the body in his distinction between «knowing how» and «knowing that» (Ryle 1990). Learning to ride a bike is a good illustration of this. I can read a whole treatise about what you have to do when riding a bike, but it will be of very little help to me when learning. Learning to ride a bike does not involve «knowing that» but «knowing how». I need to be able to do it, and have to learn it practically, by using my body. There is no other way I can acquire this knowledge, that is far more an ability. Here too, learning to ride a bike is the result of mimetic processes, processes that have to relate to other people but above all to the movements of our own bodies. This is a kind of mimesis of ourselves where we develop a mimetic relationship to our own behaviour in order to improve it.
Now to return to the mimetic processes that take place in young children, by means of which they develop their imaginary. Even before they reach the age of one, they are able to understand the intentions of the people close to them. If someone points at something, for example, then they follow the gesture of pointing, not stopping at the finger itself, but grasping that the aim of the pointing is an object and not the finger itself. (Tomasello 1999). It is already apparent in one year olds that they are beginning to use mimetic processes to make sense of the world and gradually transform it into their imaginary. Through mimetic processes the outside world becomes their inner world. As non-verbal actions addressed by subjects towards objects, gestures play an important role in conveying emotional caring and attachment. This is because they are demonstrative and at the same time directed towards the other person. In a mimetic process they convey a positive social relationship and a relationship to the objects of a cultural world. Both of these become absorbed into a child’s imaginary in the mimetic process, resulting in a complex interlinking of a cultural object (a bottle), the adult’s act of caring and the meaning of this interplay for the child.
In his autobiography, «Berlin Childhood around 1900», Walter Benjamin (2006) illustrated how children incorporate their cultural environments in processes of assimilation. In the course of these processes, children assimilate aspects of the parental home, such as the rooms, particular corners, objects and atmospheres. They are incorporated as «imprints» of the images and stored in the child’s imaginary world, where they are subsequently transformed into new images and memories that help the child gain access to other cultural worlds. Culture is handed on by means of these processes of incorporating and making sense of cultural products. The mimetic ability to transform the external material world into images, transferring them into our internal worlds of images and making them accessible to others enables individuals to develop their imaginary and to actively shape cultural realities (Gebauer, and Wulf 1998, 2018; Wulf 2002; Wulf, and Zirfas 2014).
