mimesis

http://hum.uchicago.edu/faculty/mitchell/glossary2004/mimesis.htm
Nature creates similarities. One need only think of mimicry. The highest
capacity for producing similarities, however, is mans. His gift of seeing
resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in
former times to become and behave like something else. Perhaps there is
none of his higher functions in which his mimetic faculty does not play a
decisive
role.
--- Walter Benjamin, "On the Mimetic Faculty" 1933
The term mimesis is derived from the Greek mimesis, meaning to imitate [1].
The OED defines mimesis as "a figure of speech, whereby the words or actions
of another are imitated" and "the deliberate imitation of the behavior of one
group of people by another as a factor in social change" [2]. Mimicry is defined
as "the action, practice, or art of mimicking or closely imitating ... the manner,
gesture, speech, or mode of actions and persons, or the superficial
characteristics of a thing" [3]. Both terms are generally used to denote the
imitation or representation of nature, especially in aesthetics (primarily literary
and artistic media).

Within Western traditions of aesthetic thought, the concepts of imitation and

mimesis have been central to attempts to theorize the essence of artistic
expression, the characteristics that distinguish works of art from other
phenomena, and the myriad of ways in which we experience and respond to
works of art. In most cases, mimesis is defined as having two primary
meanings - that of imitation (more specifically, the imitation of nature as object,
phenomena, or process) and that of artistic representation. Mimesis is an
extremely broad and theoretically elusive term that encompasses a range of
possibilities for how the self-sufficient and symbolically generated world created
by people can relate to any given "real", fundamental, exemplary, or significant
world [4] (see keywords essays on simulation/simulacra, (2), and reciprocity).
Mimesis is integral to the relationship between art and nature, and to the
relation governing works of art themselves. Michael Taussig describes the
mimetic faculty as "the nature that culture uses to create second nature, the
faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore difference, yield into and become
Other. The wonder of mimesis lies in the copy drawing on the character and
power of the original, to the point whereby the representation may even assume
that character and that power." [5]

Pre-Platonic thought tends to emphasize the representational aspects of

mimesis and its denotation of imitation, representation, portrayal, and/or the
person who imitates or represents. Mimetic behavior was viewed as the
representation of "something animate and concrete with characteristics that are

similar to the characteristics to other phenomena" [6]. Plato believed that

mimesis was manifested in 'particulars' which resemble or imitate the forms
from which they are derived; thus, the mimetic world (the world of
representation and the phenomenological world) is inherently inferior in that it
consists of imitations which will always be subordinate or subsidiary to their
original [7]. In addition to imitation, representation, and expression, mimetic
activity produces appearances and illusions that affect the perception and
behavior of people. In Republic , Plato views art as a mimetic imitation of an
imitation (art mimes the phenomenological world which mimes an original, "real"
world); artistic representation is highly suspect and corrupt in that it is thrice
removed from its essence. Mimesis is positioned within the sphere of
aesthetics, and the illusion produced by mimetic representation in art, literature,
and music is viewed as alienating, inauthentic, deceptive, and inferior [8].

The relationship between art and imitation has always been a primary concern
in examinations of the creative process, and in Aristotle's Poesis , the "natural"
human inclination to imitate is described as "inherent in man from his earliest
days; he differs from other animals in that he is the most imitative of all
creatures, and he learns his earliest lessons by imitation. Also inborn in all of us
is the instinct to enjoy works of imitation" [9]. Mimesis is conceived as
something that is natural to man, and the arts and media are natural
expressions of human faculties. In contradiction to Plato (whose skeptical and
hostile perception of mimesis and representation as mediations that we must
get beyond in order to experience or attain the "real"), Aristotle views mimesis
and mediation as fundamental expressions of our human experience within the
world - as means of learning about nature that, through the perceptual
experience, allow us to get closer to the "real". [see reality/hyperreality, (2)]
Works of art are encoded in such a way that humans are not duped into
believing that they are "reality", but rather recognize features from their own
experience of the world within the work of art that cause the representation to
seem valid and acceptable. Mimesis not only functions to re-create existing
objects or elements of nature, but also beautifies, improves upon, and
universalizes them. Mimesis creates a fictional world of representation in which
there is no capacity for a non-mediated relationship to reality [10]. Aristotle
views mimesis as something that nature and humans have in common - that is
not only embedded in the creative process, but also in the constitution of the
human species.

In 17th and early 18th century conceptions of aesthetics, mimesis is bound to

the imitation of (empirical and idealized) nature. Aesthetic theory emphasized
the relationship of mimesis to artistic expression and began to embrace interior,
emotive, and subjective images and representations. In the writings of Lessing
and Rousseau, there is a turn away from the Aristotelian conception of mimesis
as bound to the imitation of nature, and a move towards an assertion of
individual creativity in which the productive relationship of one mimetic world to
another is renounced [11].

In 20th century approaches to mimesis, authors such as Walter Benjamin,

Adorno, Girard, and Derrida have defined mimetic activity as it relates to social
practice and interpersonal relations rather than as just a rational process of
making and producing models that emphasize the body, emotions, the senses,
and temporality [12]. The return to a conception of mimesis as a fundamental
human property is most evident in the writings of Walter Benjamin [13] , who
postulates that the mimetic faculty of humans is defined by representation and
expression. The repression of the mimetic relation to the world, to the
individual, and to others leads to a loss of "sensuous similarity" [14]. "In this
way language may be seen as the highest level of mimetic behavior and the
most complete archive of non-sensuous similarity: a medium into which the
earlier powers of mimetic production and comprehension have passed without
residue, to the point where they have liquidated those of magic." [15]

Michael Taussig's discussion of mimesis in Mimesis and Alterity is centered

around Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno's biologically determined model
[16], in which mimesis is posited as an adaptive behavior (prior to language)
that allows humans to make themselves similar to their surrounding
environments through assimilation and play. Through physical and bodily acts
of mimesis (i.e. the chameleon blending in with its environment, a child imitating
a windmill, etc.), the distinction between the self and other becomes porous and
flexible. Rather than dominating nature, mimesis as mimicry opens up a tactile
experience of the world in which the Cartesian categories of subject and object
are not firm, but rather malleable; paradoxically, difference is created by making
oneself similar to something else by mimetic "imitation". Observing subjects
thus assimilate themselves to the objective world rather than
anthropomorphizing it in their own image [17].

Adorno's discussion of mimesis originates within a biological context in which

mimicry (which mediates between the two states of life and death) is a
zoological predecessor to mimesis. Animals are seen as genealogically
perfecting mimicry (adaptation to their surroundings with the intent to deceive or
delude their pursuer) as a means of survival. Survival, the attempt to guarantee
life, is thus dependant upon the identification with something external and other,
with "dead, lifeless material" [18]. Magic constitutes a "prehistorical" or
anthropological mimetic model - in which the identification with an aggressor
(i.e. the witch doctor's identification with the wild animal) results in an
immunization - an elimination of danger and the possibility of annihilation [19].
Such a model of mimetic behavior is ambiguous in that "imitation might
designate the production of a thinglike copy, but on the other hand, it might also
refer to the activity of a subject which models itself according to a given
prototype" [20]. The manner in which mimesis is viewed as a correlative
behavior in which a subject actively engages in "making oneself similar to an
Other" dissociates mimesis from its definition as merely imitation [21].

In Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, mimesis (once a

dominant practice) becomes a repressed presence in Western history in which
one yields to nature (as opposed to the impulse of Enlightenment science which
seeks to dominate nature) to the extent that the subject loses itself and sinks
into the surrounding world. They argue that, in Western history, mimesis has
been transformed by Enlightenment science from a dominant presence into a
distorted, repressed, and hidden force. Artworks can "provide modernity with a
possibility to revise or neutralize the domination of nature" [22].

Socialization and rationality suppress the "natural" behavior of man, and art
provides a "refuge for mimetic behavior" [23]. Aesthetic mimesis assimilates
social reality without the subordination of nature such that the subject
disappears in the work of art and the artwork allows for a reconciliation with
nature [24].

Derrida uses the concept of mimesis in relation to texts - which are nondisposable doubles that always stand in relation to what has preceded them.
Texts are deemed "nondisposable" and "double" in that they always refer to
something that has preceded them and are thus "never the origin, never inner,
never outer, but always doubled" [25]. The mimetic text (which always begins as
a double) lacks an original model and its inherent intertextuality demands
deconstruction." Differnce is the principle of mimesis, a productive freedom,
not the elimination of ambiguity; mimesis contributes to the profusion of images,
words, thoughts, theories, and action, without itself becoming tangible" [26].
Mimesis thus resists theory and constructs a world of illusion, appearances,
aesthetics, and images in which existing worlds are appropriated, changed, and
re-interpreted. Images are a part of our material existence, but also mimetically
bind our experience of reality to subjectivity and connote a "sensuous
experience that is beyond reference to reality" [27].

Michelle Puetz
Winter 2002