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Mimesis

Mimesis (/mɪˈmsɪs, mə-, m-, -əs/;[1] Ancient Greek: μίμησις, mīmēsis) is a term used in literary criticism and philosophy that carries a wide range of meanings, including imitatio, imitation, nonsensuous similarity, receptivity, representation, mimicry, the act of expression, the act of resembling, and the presentation of the self.[2]

The original Ancient Greek term mīmēsis (μίμησις) derives from mīmeisthai (μιμεῖσθαι, 'to imitate'), itself coming from mimos (μῖμος, 'imitator, actor'). In ancient Greece, mīmēsis was an idea that governed the creation of works of art, in particular, with correspondence to the physical world understood as a model for beauty, truth, and the good. Plato contrasted mimesis, or imitation, with diegesis, or narrative. After Plato, the meaning of mimesis eventually shifted toward a specifically literary function in ancient Greek society.[3]

One of the best-known modern studies of mimesis—understood in literature as a form of realism—is Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, which opens with a comparison between the way the world is represented in Homer's Odyssey and the way it appears in the Bible.[4]

In addition to Plato and Auerbach, mimesis has been theorised by thinkers as diverse as Aristotle,[5] Philip Sidney, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Adam Smith, Gabriel Tarde, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin,[6] Theodor Adorno,[7] Paul Ricœur, Luce Irigaray, Jacques Derrida, René Girard, Nikolas Kompridis, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Michael Taussig,[8] Merlin Donald, Homi Bhabha, Roberto Calasso, and Nidesh Lawtoo. During the nineteenth century, the racial politics of imitation towards African Americans influenced the term mimesis and its evolution.[9]

Classical definitions edit

Plato edit

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 Platonic ideal, or form); one is made by the carpenter, in imitation of God's idea; and one is made by the artist in imitation of the carpenter's.[v]: 596–599 

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 edit

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.[citation needed] Nature is full of change, decay, and cycles, but art can also search for what is everlasting and the first causes of natural phenomena. Aristotle wrote about the idea of four causes in nature. The first, the formal cause, is like a blueprint, or an immortal idea. The second cause is the material cause, or what a thing is made out of. The third cause is the efficient cause, that is, the process and the agent by which the thing is made. The fourth, the final cause, is the good, or the purpose and end of a thing, known as telos.

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 edit

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 Republic (c. 373 BC), Plato examines the style of poetry (the term includes comedy, tragedy, epic and lyric poetry):[vi] all types narrate events, he argues, but by differing means. He distinguishes between narration or report (diegesis) and imitation or representation (mimesis). Tragedy and comedy, he goes on to explain, are wholly imitative types; the dithyramb is wholly narrative; and their combination is found in epic poetry. When reporting or narrating, "the poet is speaking in his own person; he never leads us to suppose that he is anyone else;" when imitating, the poet produces an "assimilation of himself to another, either by the use of voice or gesture."[vii] In dramatic texts, the poet never speaks directly; in narrative texts, the poet speaks as himself or herself.[11]

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 ludology, mimesis is sometimes used to refer to the self-consistency of a represented world, and the availability of in-game rationalisations for elements of the gameplay. In this context, mimesis has an associated grade: highly self-consistent worlds that provide explanations for their puzzles and game mechanics are said to display a higher degree of mimesis. This usage can be traced back to the essay "Crimes Against Mimesis".[12]

Dionysian imitatio edit

Dionysian imitatio is the influential literary method of imitation as formulated by Greek author Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the 1st century BC, who conceived it as technique of rhetoric: emulating, adapting, reworking, and enriching a source text by an earlier author.[13][14]

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 edit

Samuel Taylor Coleridge edit

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 edit

One of the best-known modern studies of mimesis—understood in literature as a form of realism—is Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1953), which opens with a famous comparison between the way the world is represented in Homer's Odyssey and the way it appears in the Bible. From these two seminal texts Auerbach builds the foundation for a unified theory of representation that spans the entire history of Western literature, including the Modernist novels being written at the time Auerbach began his study.[16]

Walter Benjamin edit

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 edit

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 edit

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 edit

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 edit

In The Unnameable Present, Calasso outlines the way that mimesis, called "Mimickry" by Joseph Goebbels—though it is a universal human ability—was interpreted by the Third Reich as being a sort of original sin attributable to "the Jew." Thus, an objection to the tendency of human beings to mimic one another instead of "just being themselves" and a complementary, fantasized desire to achieve a return to an eternally static pattern of predation by means of "will" expressed as systematic mass-murder became the metaphysical argument (underlying circumstantial, temporally contingent arguments deployed opportunistically for propaganda purposes) for perpetrating the Holocaust amongst the Nazi elite. Insofar as this issue or this purpose was ever even explicitly discussed in print by Hitler's inner-circle, in other words, this was the justification (appearing in the essay "Mimickry" in a war-time book published by Joseph Goebbels).[21][22] The text suggests that a radical failure to understand the nature of mimesis as an innate human trait or a violent aversion to the same, tends to be a diagnostic symptom of the totalitarian or fascist character if it is not, in fact, the original unspoken occult impulse that animated the production of totalitarian or fascist movements to begin with.

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 edit

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 edit

References edit

Classical sources edit

  1. ^ Plato, Ion, 532c
  2. ^ Plato, Ion, 540c
  3. ^ Plato, Ion, 535b
  4. ^ Plato, Republic, Book II, translated by B. Jowett.
  5. ^ a b c Plato, Republic, Book X, translated by B. Jowett.
  6. ^ 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.

  7. ^ Plato, 360 BC, The Republic, Book III, translated by B. Jowett. (Also available via Project Gutenberg).
  8. ^ Aristotle, Poetics § I
  9. ^ Aristotle, Poetics § III

Citations edit

  1. ^ Wells, John C. (2008), Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (3rd ed.), Longman, ISBN 9781405881180
  2. ^ Gebauer and Wulf (1992, 1).
  3. ^ Halliwell, Stephen. "'The Shifting Problems of Mimesis in Plato' [Author's MS] in J. Pfefferkorn & A. Spinelli (eds.) Platonic Mimesis Revisited (Academia Verlag, 2021)". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  4. ^ Auerbach, Erich. 1953. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 069111336X.
  5. ^ Aristotle (1968). Poetics. D. W. Lucas. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0198141750. OCLC 3354067.
  6. ^ Benjamin, Walter (1970). "On the Mimetic Faculty". Illuminations. London: Cape. ISBN 0224618253. OCLC 10931256.
  7. ^ Horkheimer, Max (2002). Dialectic of enlightenment : philosophical fragments. Theodor W. Adorno, Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Stanford, California. ISBN 978-0804788090. OCLC 919087055.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  8. ^ Taussig, Michael T. (1993). Mimesis and alterity : a particular history of the senses. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415906865. OCLC 26719038.
  9. ^ Wilson, Kirt (2003). "The Racial Politics of Imitation in the Nineteenth Century". Quarterly Journal of Speech. 89 (2): 89–108. doi:10.1080/00335630308178. S2CID 144657276.
  10. ^ Davis (1993, 3).
  11. ^ 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).

  12. ^ Giner-Sorolla, Roger (April 2006). . 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.
  13. ^ a b c Ruthven (1979) pp. 103–104
  14. ^ Jansen (2008)
  15. ^ Coleridge, Samuel T. [1817] 1983. Biographia Literaria, vol. 1, edited by J. Engell and W. J. Bate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0691098743. p. 72.
  16. ^ Auerbach, Erich. 1953. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-11336-X.
  17. ^ a b Benjamin, Walter (1986). Reflections : essays, aphorisms, autobiographical writing. Peter Demetz. New York: Schocken Books. pp. 333–335. ISBN 080520802X. OCLC 12805048.
  18. ^ See [1].
  19. ^ Taussig, 1993, pp. 47–48.
  20. ^ Girard, René (1987). Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. Stanford University Press. pp. 7, 26, 307.
  21. ^ Calasso, Roberto (2019). The unnamable present. Richard Dixon. New York. pp. 137–139. ISBN 978-0374279479. OCLC 1036096585.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  22. ^ Goebbels, Joseph (1941). "Mimicry". research.calvin.edu. Retrieved 4 November 2021.
  23. ^ Adorno, Theodor (1944). Dialectic of Enlightenment. Verso. pp. 9–20 et al. ISBN 1784786802. OCLC 957655599.
  24. ^ Benjamin, Walter (1968). Illuminations. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books. pp. 141–147, 217–265. ISBN 0-8052-0241-2. OCLC 12947710.
  25. ^ "The Celestial Hunter by Roberto Calasso review – the sacrificial society". the Guardian. 9 May 2020. Retrieved 4 November 2021.
  26. ^ Calasso, Roberto (2020). The celestial hunter. Richard Dixon. New York. pp. 3–28, 97–156. ISBN 978-0374120061. OCLC 1102184868.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  27. ^ See [2].

Bibliography edit

  • Auerbach, Erich . 1953. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature . Princeton: Princeton UP. ISBN 069111336X.
  • Coleridge, Samuel T. 1983. Biographia Literaria, vol. 1, edited by J. Engell and W. J. Bate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. 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.
  • Girard, René. 2008. Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953–2005, edited by R. Doran. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0804755801.
  • Halliwell, Stephen. 2002. The Aesthetics of Mimesis. Ancient Texts and Modern Problems . Princeton. ISBN 0691092583.
  • Kaufmann, Walter . 1992. Tragedy and Philosophy . Princeton: Princeton UP. ISBN 0691020051.
  • Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. 1989. Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, edited by C. Fynsk. Cambridge: Harvard UP. 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.
  • Tatarkiewicz, Władysław . 1980. A History of Six Ideas: An Essay in Aesthetics , translated by C. Kasparek . The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ISBN 9024722330.
  • Taussig, Michael . 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses . London: Routledge. ISBN 0415906865.
  • Tsitsiridis, Stavros. 2005. "Mimesis and Understanding. An Interpretation of Aristotle's 'Poetics' 4.1448b4–19." Classical Quarterly (55):435–446.

External links edit

  • Plato's Republic II, transl. Benjamin Jowett
  • Plato's Republic III, transl. Benjamin Jowett
  • Plato's Republic X, transl. Benjamin Jowett
  • 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 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.

mimesis, mimetic, redirects, here, confused, with, mimetic, muscles, memetics, mimetic, theory, other, uses, disambiguation, ancient, greek, μίμησις, mīmēsis, term, used, literary, criticism, philosophy, that, carries, wide, range, meanings, including, imitati. Mimetic redirects here Not to be confused with Mimetic muscles Memetics or Mimetic theory For other uses see Mimesis disambiguation Mimesis m ɪ ˈ m iː s ɪ s m e m aɪ e s 1 Ancient Greek mimhsis mimesis is a term used in literary criticism and philosophy that carries a wide range of meanings including imitatio imitation nonsensuous similarity receptivity representation mimicry the act of expression the act of resembling and the presentation of the self 2 The original Ancient Greek term mimesis mimhsis derives from mimeisthai mimeῖs8ai to imitate itself coming from mimos mῖmos imitator actor In ancient Greece mimesis was an idea that governed the creation of works of art in particular with correspondence to the physical world understood as a model for beauty truth and the good Plato contrasted mimesis or imitation with diegesis or narrative After Plato the meaning of mimesis eventually shifted toward a specifically literary function in ancient Greek society 3 One of the best known modern studies of mimesis understood in literature as a form of realism is Erich Auerbach s Mimesis The Representation of Reality in Western Literature which opens with a comparison between the way the world is represented in Homer s Odyssey and the way it appears in the Bible 4 In addition to Plato and Auerbach mimesis has been theorised by thinkers as diverse as Aristotle 5 Philip Sidney Samuel Taylor Coleridge Adam Smith Gabriel Tarde Sigmund Freud Walter Benjamin 6 Theodor Adorno 7 Paul Ricœur Luce Irigaray Jacques Derrida Rene Girard Nikolas Kompridis Philippe Lacoue Labarthe Michael Taussig 8 Merlin Donald Homi Bhabha Roberto Calasso and Nidesh Lawtoo During the nineteenth century the racial politics of imitation towards African Americans influenced the term mimesis and its evolution 9 Contents 1 Classical definitions 1 1 Plato 1 2 Aristotle 1 3 Contrast to diegesis 1 4 Dionysian imitatio 2 Modern usage 2 1 Samuel Taylor Coleridge 2 2 Erich Auerbach 2 3 Walter Benjamin 2 4 Luce Irigaray 2 5 Michael Taussig 2 6 Rene Girard 2 7 Roberto Calasso 2 8 Nidesh Lawtoo 3 See also 4 References 4 1 Classical sources 4 2 Citations 4 3 Bibliography 5 External linksClassical definitions editPlato edit 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 Platonic ideal or form one is made by the carpenter in imitation of God s idea and one is made by the artist in imitation of the carpenter s v 596 599 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 edit 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 citation needed Nature is full of change decay and cycles but art can also search for what is everlasting and the first causes of natural phenomena Aristotle wrote about the idea of four causes in nature The first the formal cause is like a blueprint or an immortal idea The second cause is the material cause or what a thing is made out of The third cause is the efficient cause that is the process and the agent by which the thing is made The fourth the final cause is the good or the purpose and end of a thing known as telos 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 Mimesis 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 edit It was also Plato and Aristotle who contrasted mimesis with diegesis Greek dihghsis 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 Republic c 373 BC Plato examines the style of poetry the term includes comedy tragedy epic and lyric poetry vi all types narrate events he argues but by differing means He distinguishes between narration or report diegesis and imitation or representation mimesis Tragedy and comedy he goes on to explain are wholly imitative types the dithyramb is wholly narrative and their combination is found in epic poetry When reporting or narrating the poet is speaking in his own person he never leads us to suppose that he is anyone else when imitating the poet produces an assimilation of himself to another either by the use of voice or gesture vii In dramatic texts the poet never speaks directly in narrative texts the poet speaks as himself or herself 11 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 ludology mimesis is sometimes used to refer to the self consistency of a represented world and the availability of in game rationalisations for elements of the gameplay In this context mimesis has an associated grade highly self consistent worlds that provide explanations for their puzzles and game mechanics are said to display a higher degree of mimesis This usage can be traced back to the essay Crimes Against Mimesis 12 Dionysian imitatio edit Main article Dionysian imitatio Dionysian imitatio is the influential literary method of imitation as formulated by Greek author Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the 1st century BC who conceived it as technique of rhetoric emulating adapting reworking and enriching a source text by an earlier author 13 14 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 editSamuel Taylor Coleridge edit 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 edit One of the best known modern studies of mimesis understood in literature as a form of realism is Erich Auerbach s Mimesis The Representation of Reality in Western Literature 1953 which opens with a famous comparison between the way the world is represented in Homer s Odyssey and the way it appears in the Bible From these two seminal texts Auerbach builds the foundation for a unified theory of representation that spans the entire history of Western literature including the Modernist novels being written at the time Auerbach began his study 16 Walter Benjamin edit 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 edit 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 edit Further information Cultural appropriation and Appropriation sociology 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 Rene Girard edit In Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World 1978 Rene 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 edit In The Unnameable Present Calasso outlines the way that mimesis called Mimickry by Joseph Goebbels though it is a universal human ability was interpreted by the Third Reich as being a sort of original sin attributable to the Jew Thus an objection to the tendency of human beings to mimic one another instead of just being themselves and a complementary fantasized desire to achieve a return to an eternally static pattern of predation by means of will expressed as systematic mass murder became the metaphysical argument underlying circumstantial temporally contingent arguments deployed opportunistically for propaganda purposes for perpetrating the Holocaust amongst the Nazi elite Insofar as this issue or this purpose was ever even explicitly discussed in print by Hitler s inner circle in other words this was the justification appearing in the essay Mimickry in a war time book published by Joseph Goebbels 21 22 The text suggests that a radical failure to understand the nature of mimesis as an innate human trait or a violent aversion to the same tends to be a diagnostic symptom of the totalitarian or fascist character if it is not in fact the original unspoken occult impulse that animated the production of totalitarian or fascist movements to begin with 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 amp 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 edit 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 editSimilarity philosophy Man Play and Games Roger Caillois Anti mimesis Mimesis criticism Dionysian imitatioReferences editClassical sources edit 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 edit Wells John C 2008 Longman Pronunciation Dictionary 3rd ed Longman ISBN 9781405881180 Gebauer and Wulf 1992 1 Halliwell Stephen The Shifting Problems of Mimesis in Plato Author s MS in J Pfefferkorn amp A Spinelli eds Platonic Mimesis Revisited Academia Verlag 2021 a href Template Cite journal html title Template Cite journal cite journal a Cite journal requires journal help Auerbach Erich 1953 Mimesis The Representation of Reality in Western Literature Princeton Princeton University Press ISBN 069111336X Aristotle 1968 Poetics D W Lucas Oxford Clarendon Press ISBN 0198141750 OCLC 3354067 Benjamin Walter 1970 On the Mimetic Faculty Illuminations London Cape ISBN 0224618253 OCLC 10931256 Horkheimer Max 2002 Dialectic of enlightenment philosophical fragments Theodor W Adorno Gunzelin Schmid Noerr Stanford California ISBN 978 0804788090 OCLC 919087055 a href Template Cite book html title Template Cite book cite book a CS1 maint location missing publisher link Taussig Michael T 1993 Mimesis and alterity a particular history of the senses New York Routledge ISBN 0415906865 OCLC 26719038 Wilson Kirt 2003 The Racial Politics of Imitation in the Nineteenth Century Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 2 89 108 doi 10 1080 00335630308178 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 Coleridge Samuel T 1817 1983 Biographia Literaria vol 1 edited by J Engell and W J Bate Princeton NJ Princeton University Press ISBN 0691098743 p 72 Auerbach Erich 1953 Mimesis The Representation of Reality in Western Literature Princeton Princeton University Press ISBN 0 691 11336 X a b Benjamin Walter 1986 Reflections essays aphorisms autobiographical writing Peter Demetz New York Schocken Books pp 333 335 ISBN 080520802X OCLC 12805048 See 1 Taussig 1993 pp 47 48 Girard Rene 1987 Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World Stanford University Press pp 7 26 307 Calasso Roberto 2019 The unnamable present Richard Dixon New York pp 137 139 ISBN 978 0374279479 OCLC 1036096585 a href Template Cite book html title Template Cite book cite book a CS1 maint location missing publisher link Goebbels Joseph 1941 Mimicry research calvin edu Retrieved 4 November 2021 Adorno Theodor 1944 Dialectic of Enlightenment Verso pp 9 20 et al ISBN 1784786802 OCLC 957655599 Benjamin Walter 1968 Illuminations Hannah Arendt New York Schocken Books pp 141 147 217 265 ISBN 0 8052 0241 2 OCLC 12947710 The Celestial Hunter by Roberto Calasso review the sacrificial society the Guardian 9 May 2020 Retrieved 4 November 2021 Calasso Roberto 2020 The celestial hunter Richard Dixon New York pp 3 28 97 156 ISBN 978 0374120061 OCLC 1102184868 a href Template Cite book html title Template Cite book cite book a CS1 maint location missing publisher link See 2 Bibliography edit Auerbach Erich 1953 Mimesis The Representation of Reality in Western Literature Princeton Princeton UP ISBN 069111336X Coleridge Samuel T 1983 Biographia Literaria vol 1 edited by J Engell and W J Bate Princeton NJ Princeton UP 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 Girard Rene 2008 Mimesis and Theory Essays on Literature and Criticism 1953 2005 edited by R Doran Stanford Stanford University Press ISBN 978 0804755801 Halliwell Stephen 2002 The Aesthetics of Mimesis Ancient Texts and Modern Problems Princeton ISBN 0691092583 Kaufmann Walter 1992 Tragedy and Philosophy Princeton Princeton UP ISBN 0691020051 Lacoue Labarthe Philippe 1989 Typography Mimesis Philosophy Politics edited by C Fynsk Cambridge Harvard UP 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 Sorbom Goran 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 Tatarkiewicz Wladyslaw 1980 A History of Six Ideas An Essay in Aesthetics translated by C Kasparek The Hague Martinus Nijhoff ISBN 9024722330 Taussig Michael 1993 Mimesis and Alterity A Particular History of the Senses London Routledge ISBN 0415906865 Tsitsiridis Stavros 2005 Mimesis and Understanding An Interpretation of Aristotle s Poetics 4 1448b4 19 Classical Quarterly 55 435 446 External links edit nbsp Look up mimesis in Wiktionary the free dictionary 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 amp 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 Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz for the Dictionary of History of Ideas Mimesis 2021 an article by Maria Antonia Gonzalez Valerio for the Online Encyclopedia Philosophy of Nature doi mimesis Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Mimesis amp oldid 1218323909, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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