Mimesis
Mimesis (
The original Ancient Greek term mīmēsis (μίμησις) derives from mīmeisthai (μιμεῖσθαι, 'to imitate'), itself coming from mimos (
One of the best-known modern studies of mimesis—understood in literature as a form of
In addition to Plato and Auerbach, mimesis has been theorised by thinkers as diverse as
Classical definitions
Plato
Both Plato and Aristotle saw in mimesis the representation of nature, including human nature, as reflected in the dramas of the period. Plato wrote about mimesis in both Ion and The Republic (Books II, III, and X). In Ion, he states that poetry is the art of divine madness, or inspiration. Because the poet is subject to this divine madness, instead of possessing 'art' or 'knowledge' (techne) of the subject,[i] the poet does not speak truth (as characterized by Plato's account of the Forms). As Plato has it, truth is the concern of the philosopher. As culture in those days did not consist in the solitary reading of books, but in the listening to performances, the recitals of orators (and poets), or the acting out by classical actors of tragedy, Plato maintained in his critique that theatre was not sufficient in conveying the truth.[ii] He was concerned that actors or orators were thus able to persuade an audience by rhetoric rather than by telling the truth.[iii]
In Book II of The Republic, Plato describes Socrates' dialogue with his pupils. Socrates warns we should not seriously regard poetry as being capable of attaining the truth and that we who listen to poetry should be on our guard against its seductions, since the poet has no place in our idea of God.[iv]: 377
Developing upon this in Book X, Plato told of Socrates' metaphor of the three beds: one bed exists as an idea made by God (the
So the artist's bed is twice removed from the truth. Those who copy only touch on a small part of things as they really are, where a bed may appear differently from various points of view, looked at obliquely or directly, or differently again in a mirror. So painters or poets, though they may paint or describe a carpenter, or any other maker of things, know nothing of the carpenter's (the craftsman's) art,[v] and though the better painters or poets they are, the more faithfully their works of art will resemble the reality of the carpenter making a bed, nonetheless the imitators will still not attain the truth (of God's creation).[v]
The poets, beginning with Homer, far from improving and educating humanity, do not possess the knowledge of craftsmen and are mere imitators who copy again and again images of virtue and rhapsodise about them, but never reach the truth in the way the superior philosophers do.
Aristotle
Similar to Plato's writings about mimesis, Aristotle also defined mimesis as the perfection, and imitation of nature. Art is not only imitation but also the use of mathematical ideas and symmetry in the search for the perfect, the timeless, and contrasting being with becoming.[
Aristotle's Poetics is often referred to as the counterpart to this Platonic conception of poetry. Poetics is his treatise on the subject of mimesis. Aristotle was not against literature as such; he stated that human beings are mimetic beings, feeling an urge to create texts (art) that reflect and represent reality.
Aristotle considered it important that there be a certain distance between the work of art on the one hand and life on the other; we draw knowledge and consolation from tragedies only because they do not happen to us. Without this distance, tragedy could not give rise to catharsis. However, it is equally important that the text causes the audience to identify with the characters and the events in the text, and unless this identification occurs, it does not touch us as an audience. Aristotle holds that it is through "simulated representation," mimesis, that we respond to the acting on the stage, which is conveying to us what the characters feel, so that we may empathise with them in this way through the mimetic form of dramatic roleplay. It is the task of the dramatist to produce the tragic enactment to accomplish this empathy by means of what is taking place on stage.
In short, catharsis can be achieved only if we see something that is both recognisable and distant. Aristotle argued that literature is more interesting as a means of learning than history, because history deals with specific facts that have happened, and which are contingent, whereas literature, although sometimes based on history, deals with events that could have taken place or ought to have taken place.
Aristotle thought of drama as being "an imitation of an action" and of tragedy as "falling from a higher to a lower estate" and so being removed to a less ideal situation in more tragic circumstances than before. He posited the characters in tragedy as being better than the average human being, and those of comedy as being worse.
Michael Davis, a translator and commentator of Aristotle writes:
At first glance, mimesis seems to be a stylizing of reality in which the ordinary features of our world are brought into focus by a certain exaggeration, the relationship of the imitation to the object it imitates being something like the relationship of dancing to walking. Imitation always involves selecting something from the continuum of experience, thus giving boundaries to what really has no beginning or end. Mimêsis involves a framing of reality that announces that what is contained within the frame is not simply real. Thus the more "real" the imitation the more fraudulent it becomes.[10]
Contrast to diegesis
It was also Plato and Aristotle who contrasted mimesis with diegesis (Greek: διήγησις). Mimesis shows, rather than tells, by means of directly represented action that is enacted. Diegesis, however, is the telling of the story by a narrator; the author narrates action indirectly and describes what is in the characters' minds and emotions. The narrator may speak as a particular character or may be the "invisible narrator" or even the "all-knowing narrator" who speaks from above in the form of commenting on the action or the characters.
In Book III of his
In his Poetics, Aristotle argues that kinds of poetry (the term includes drama, flute music, and lyre music for Aristotle) may be differentiated in three ways: according to their medium, according to their objects, and according to their mode or manner (section I);[viii] "For the medium being the same, and the objects the same, the poet may imitate by narration—in which case he can either take another personality, as Homer does, or speak in his own person, unchanged—or he may present all his characters as living and moving before us."[ix]
Though they conceive of mimesis in quite different ways, its relation with diegesis is identical in Plato's and Aristotle's formulations.
In
Dionysian imitatio
Dionysian imitatio is the influential
Dionysius' concept marked a significant departure from the concept of mimesis formulated by Aristotle in the 4th century BC, which was only concerned with "imitation of nature" rather than the "imitation of other authors."[13] Latin orators and rhetoricians adopted the literary method of Dionysius' imitatio and discarded Aristotle's mimesis.[13]
Modern usage
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Referring to it as imitation, the concept of mimesis was crucial for Samuel Taylor Coleridge's theory of the imagination. Coleridge begins his thoughts on imitation and poetry from Plato, Aristotle, and Philip Sidney, adopting their concept of imitation of nature instead of other writers. His departure from the earlier thinkers lies in his arguing that art does not reveal a unity of essence through its ability to achieve sameness with nature. Coleridge claims:[15]
[T]he composition of a poem is among the imitative arts; and that imitation, as opposed to copying, consists either in the interfusion of the SAME throughout the radically DIFFERENT, or the different throughout a base radically the same.
Here, Coleridge opposes imitation to copying, the latter referring to William Wordsworth's notion that poetry should duplicate nature by capturing actual speech. Coleridge instead argues that the unity of essence is revealed precisely through different materialities and media. Imitation, therefore, reveals the sameness of processes in nature.
Erich Auerbach
One of the best-known modern studies of mimesis—understood in literature as a form of
Walter Benjamin
In his essay, "On The Mimetic Faculty"(1933) Walter Benjamin outlines connections between mimesis and sympathetic magic, imagining a possible origin of astrology arising from an interpretation of human birth that assumes its correspondence with the apparition of a seasonally rising constellation augurs that new life will take on aspects of the myth connected to the star.[17]
Luce Irigaray
Belgian feminist Luce Irigaray used the term to describe a form of resistance where women imperfectly imitate stereotypes about themselves to expose and undermine such stereotypes.[18]
Michael Taussig
In Mimesis and Alterity (1993), anthropologist Michael Taussig examines the way that people from one culture adopt another's nature and culture (the process of mimesis) at the same time as distancing themselves from it (the process of alterity). He describes how a legendary tribe, the "White Indians" (the Guna people of Panama and Colombia), have adopted in various representations figures and images reminiscent of the white people they encountered in the past (without acknowledging doing so).
Taussig, however, criticises anthropology for reducing yet another culture, that of the Guna, for having been so impressed by the exotic technologies of the whites that they raised them to the status of gods. To Taussig this reductionism is suspect, and he argues this from both sides in his Mimesis and Alterity to see values in the anthropologists' perspective while simultaneously defending the independence of a lived culture from the perspective of anthropological reductionism.[19]
René Girard
In Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978), René Girard posits that human behavior is based upon mimesis, and that imitation can engender pointless conflict. Girard notes the productive potential of competition: "It is because of this unprecedented capacity to promote competition within limits that always remain socially, if not individually, acceptable that we have all the amazing achievements of the modern world," but states that competition stifles progress once it becomes an end in itself: "rivals are more apt to forget about whatever objects are the cause of the rivalry and instead become more fascinated with one another."[20]
Roberto Calasso
In
Calasso's argument here echoes, condenses and introduces new evidence to reinforce one of the major themes of Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of the Enlightenment (1944),[23] which was itself in dialog with earlier work hinting in this direction by Walter Benjamin who died during an attempt to escape the gestapo.[17][24] Calasso insinuates and references this lineage throughout the text. The work can be read as a clarification of their earlier gestures in this direction, written while the Holocaust was still unfolding.
Calasso's earlier book The Celestial Hunter, written immediately prior to The Unnamable Present, is an informed and scholarly speculative cosmology depicting the possible origins and early prehistoric cultural evolution of the human mimetic faculty.[25] In particular, the books first and fifth chapters ("In The Time of the Great Raven" and "Sages & Predators") focuses on the terrain of mimesis and its early origins, though insights in this territory appear as a motif in every chapter of the book.[26]
Nidesh Lawtoo
In Homo Mimeticus (2022) Swiss philosopher and critic Nidesh Lawtoo develops a relational theory of mimetic subjectivity arguing that not only desires but all affects are mimetic, for good and ill. Lawtoo opens up the transdisciplinary field of "mimetic studies" to account for the proliferation of hypermimetic affects in the digital age.[27]
See also
- Similarity (philosophy)
- Man, Play and Games (Roger Caillois)
- Anti-mimesis
- Mimesis criticism
- Dionysian imitatio
References
Classical sources
- ^ Plato, Ion, 532c
- ^ Plato, Ion, 540c
- ^ Plato, Ion, 535b
- ^ Plato, Republic, Book II, translated by B. Jowett.
- ^ a b c Plato, Republic, Book X, translated by B. Jowett.
- ^ Plato, The Republic, Book III, translated by B. Jowett. (Also available via Project Gutenberg):
You are aware, I suppose, that all mythology and poetry is a narration of events, either past, present, or to come? / Certainly, he replied.
And narration may be either simple narration, or imitation, or a union of the two? / [...] / And this assimilation of himself to another, either by the use of voice or gesture, is the imitation of the person whose character he assumes? / Of course. / Then in this case the narrative of the poet may be said to proceed by way of imitation? / Very true. / Or, if the poet everywhere appears and never conceals himself, then again, the imitation is dropped, and his poetry becomes simple narration. - ^ Plato, 360 BC, The Republic, Book III, translated by B. Jowett. (Also available via Project Gutenberg).
- ^ Aristotle, Poetics § I
- ^ Aristotle, Poetics § III
Citations
- ISBN 9781405881180
- ^ Gebauer and Wulf (1992, 1).
- ^ Halliwell, Stephen. "'The Shifting Problems of Mimesis in Plato' [Author's MS] in J. Pfefferkorn & A. Spinelli (eds.) Platonic Mimesis Revisited (Academia Verlag, 2021)".
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(help) - ISBN 069111336X.
- OCLC 3354067.
- OCLC 10931256.
- )
- OCLC 26719038.
- S2CID 144657276.
- ^ Davis (1993, 3).
- ^ See also, Pfister (1977, pp. 2–3); and Elam (1980):
"classical narrative is always oriented towards an explicit there and then, towards an imaginary 'elsewhere' set in the past and which has to be evoked for the reader through predication and description. Dramatic worlds, on the other hand, are presented to the spectator as 'hypothetically actual' constructs, since they are 'seen' in progress 'here and now' without narratorial mediation. [...] This is not merely a technical distinction but constitutes, rather, one of the cardinal principles of a poetics of the drama as opposed to one of narrative fiction. The distinction is, indeed, implicit in Aristotle's differentiation of representational modes, namely diegesis (narrative description) versus mimesis (direct imitation)." (pp. 110–111).
- ^ Giner-Sorolla, Roger (April 2006). "Crimes Against Mimesis". Archived from the original on 19 June 2005. Retrieved 17 December 2006. This is a reformatted version of a set of articles originally posted to Usenet:
- Giner-Sorolla, Roger (11 April 2006). "Crimes Against Mimesis, Part 1". Retrieved 17 December 2006.
- Giner-Sorolla, Roger (18 April 2006). "Crimes Against Mimesis, Part 2". Retrieved 17 December 2006.
- Giner-Sorolla, Roger (25 April 2006). "Crimes Against Mimesis, Part 3". Retrieved 17 December 2006.
- Giner-Sorolla, Roger (29 April 2006). "Crimes Against Mimesis, Part 4". Retrieved 17 December 2006.
- ^ a b c Ruthven (1979) pp. 103–104
- ^ Jansen (2008)
- ISBN 0691098743. p. 72.
- ISBN 0-691-11336-X.
- ^ OCLC 12805048.
- ^ See [1].
- ^ Taussig, 1993, pp. 47–48.
- ^ Girard, René (1987). Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. Stanford University Press. pp. 7, 26, 307.
- OCLC 1036096585.)
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link - ^ Goebbels, Joseph (1941). "Mimicry". research.calvin.edu. Retrieved 4 November 2021.
- OCLC 957655599.
- OCLC 12947710.
- ^ "The Celestial Hunter by Roberto Calasso review – the sacrificial society". the Guardian. 9 May 2020. Retrieved 4 November 2021.
- OCLC 1102184868.)
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link - ^ See [2].
Bibliography
- ISBN 069111336X.
- ISBN 0691098743.
- Davis, Michael. 1999. The Poetry of Philosophy: On Aristotle's Poetics . South Bend, IN: St Augustine's P. ISBN 1890318620.
- Elam, Keir. 1980. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama , New Accents series. London: Methuen. ISBN 0416720609.
- Esposito, Mariangela (2023). The Realm of Mimesis in Plato: Orality, Writing, and the Ontology of the Image. Leiden; Boston: Brill. ISBN 9789004533110.
- Gebauer, Gunter, and Christoph Wulf. [1992] 1995. Mimesis: Culture—Art—Society, translated by D. Reneau. Berkeley, CA: U of California Press. ISBN 0520084594.
- ISBN 978-0804755801.
- Halliwell, Stephen. 2002. The Aesthetics of Mimesis. Ancient Texts and Modern Problems . Princeton. ISBN 0691092583.
- ISBN 0691020051.
- Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. 1989. Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, edited by ISBN 978-0804732826.
- Lawtoo, Nidesh. 2013. The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious. East Lansing: Michigan State UP. ISBN 978-1611860962.
- Lawtoo, Nidesh. 2022. Homo Mimeticus: A New Theory of Imitation Leuven: Leuven UP. ISBN 978-9462703469.
- Miller, Gregg Daniel. 2011. Mimesis and Reason: Habermas's Political Philosophy. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. ISBN 978-1438437408
- Pfister, Manfred. [1977] 1988. The Theory and Analysis of Drama , translated by J. Halliday, European Studies in English Literature series. Cambridige: Cambridge UP. ISBN 052142383X.
- Potolsky, Matthew. 2006. Mimesis. London: Routledge. ISBN 0415700302.
- Prang, Christoph. 2010. "Semiomimesis: The influence of semiotics on the creation of literary texts. Peter Bichsel's Ein Tisch ist ein Tisch and Joseph Roth's Hotel Savoy." Semiotica (182):375–396.
- Sen, R. K. 1966. Aesthetic Enjoyment: Its Background in Philosophy and Medicine. Calcutta: University of Calcutta.
- —— 2001. Mimesis. Calcutta: Syamaprasad College.
- Sörbom, Göran. 1966. Mimesis and Art . Uppsala.
- Snow, Kim, Hugh Crethar, Patricia Robey, and John Carlson. 2005. "Theories of Family Therapy (Part 1)." As cited in "Family Therapy Review: Preparing for Comprehensive Licensing Examination." 2005. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ISBN 0805843124.
- ISBN 9024722330.
- ISBN 0415906865.
- Tsitsiridis, Stavros. 2005. "Mimesis and Understanding. An Interpretation of Aristotle's 'Poetics' 4.1448b4–19." Classical Quarterly(55):435–446.
External links
- Plato's Republic II, transl. Benjamin Jowett
- Plato's Republic III, transl. Benjamin Jowett
- Plato's Republic X, transl. Benjamin Jowett
- The Infinite Regress of Forms Plato's recounting of the "bedness" theory involved in the bed metaphor
- The University of Chicago, Theories of Media Keywords
- University of Barcelona Mimesi (Research on Poetics & Rhetorics in Catalan Literature)
- Mimesislab Archived 23 February 2020 at the Wayback Machine, Laboratory of Pedagogy of Expression of the Department of Educational Design of the university "Roma Tre"
- "Mimesis", an article by Władysław Tatarkiewicz for the Dictionary of History of Ideas
- "Mimesis", 2021, an article by María Antonia González Valerio for the Online Encyclopedia Philosophy of Nature, doi: mimesis.