Mimesis, from μιμεῖσθαι, "to imitate," from μῖμος, "imitator, actor") is a
critical and philosophical term that carries a wide range of meanings, which include imitation,
representation, mimicry, imitatio, receptivity, nonsensuous similarity, the act of resembling,
the act of expression, and the presentation of the self.
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, and its use has changed and been reinterpreted many times since then.
One of the best-known modern studies of mimesis, understood as a form of realism in literature,
is Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 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 Western 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. In art
history, "mimesis", "realism" and "naturalism" are used, often interchangeably, as terms
for the accurate, even "illusionistic", representation of the visual appearance of things.
The Frankfurt school critical theorist T. W. Adorno made use of mimesis as a central philosophical
term, interpreting it as a way in which works of art embodied a form of reason that was
non-repressive and non-violent. Mimesis has been theorised by thinkers as
diverse as Plato, Aristotle, Philip Sidney, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Adam Smith, Sigmund
Freud, Walter Benjamin, Paul Ross, Theodor Adorno, Erich Auerbach, Luce Irigaray, Jacques
Derrida, René Girard, Nikolas Kompridis, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Michael Taussig,
Merlin Donald, and Homi Bhabha.
Classical definitions Plato
Both Plato and Aristotle saw in mimesis the representation of nature. Plato wrote about
mimesis in both Ion and The Republic. 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" of the subject, the poet does not speak truth. As
Plato has it, only 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, or the acting out by classical actors of tragedy, Plato maintained
in his critique that theatre was not sufficient in conveying the truth. He was concerned that
actors or orators were thus able to persuade an audience by rhetoric rather than by telling
the truth. 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.
In developing this in Book X, Plato told of Socrates' metaphor of the three beds: one
bed exists as an idea made by God; one is made by the carpenter, in imitation of God's
idea; one is made by the artist in imitation of the carpenter's.
So the artist's bed is twice removed from the truth. The copiers 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 art, 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.
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.
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 formal cause is like a blueprint, or an immortal idea. The second
cause is the material, or what a thing is made out of. The third cause is the process
and the agent, in which the artist or creator makes the thing. The fourth 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 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 in order to accomplish this empathy by means
of what is taking place on stage. In short, catharsis can only be achieved 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: Contrast to diegesis
It was also Plato and Aristotle who contrasted mimesis with diegesis. 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, Plato examines the style of poetry: All types narrate events,
he argues, but by differing means. He distinguishes between narration or report and imitation
or representation. 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 any one else"; when imitating, the poet produces an "assimilation of himself
to another, either by the use of voice or gesture". In dramatic texts, the poet never
speaks directly; in narrative texts, the poet speaks as himself or herself.
In his Poetics, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle argues that kinds of poetry may
be differentiated in three ways: according to their medium, according to their objects,
and according to their mode or manner; "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". Though they conceive of mimesis in quite different
ways, its relation with diegesis is identical in Plato's and Aristotle's formulations; one
represents, the other reports; one embodies, the other narrates; one transforms, the other
indicates; one knows only a continuous present, the other looks back on a past.
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".
Dionysian imitatio
Dionysian imitatio is the influential literary method of imitation as formulated by Greek
author Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the 1st century BCE, which conceived it as technique
of rhetoric: emulating, adaptating, reworking and enriching a source text by an earlier
author. Dionysius' concept marked a significant depart
from the concept of mimesis formulated by Aristotle's in the 4th century BCE, which
was only concerned with "imitation of nature" instead of the "imitation of other authors".
Latin orators and rhetoricians adopted the literary method of Dionysius' imitatio and
discarded Aristotle's mimesis. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Mimesis, or imitation, as he referred to it, was a crucial concept 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 middling 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:
[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.
Luce Irigaray The Belgian feminist Luce Irigaray used the
term to describe a form of resistance where women imperfectly imitate stereotypes about
themselves so as to show up these stereotypes and undermine them.
Michael Taussig
In Mimesis and Alterity, the anthropologist Michael Taussig examines the way that people
from one culture adopt another's nature and culture at the same time as distancing themselves
from it. He describes how a legendary tribe, the "white Indians", or Cuna, have adopted
in various representations figures and images reminiscent of the white people they encountered
in the past. Taussig, however, criticises anthropology
for reducing yet another culture, that of the Cuna, for having been so impressed by
their exotic technologies of the whites, that they raised them to the status of gods. To
Taussig, this reductionism is suspect, and he argues thus from both sides in his Mimesis
and Alterity to see values in the anthropologists' perspective, at the same time as defending
the independence of a lived culture from anthropological reductionism.
See also Illusionistic tradition
Life imitating art Girard's mimetic double bind
Notes
References Auerbach, Erich. 1953. Mimesis: The Representation
of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP. ISBN 0-691-11336-X.
Coleridge, S.T. 1983. Biographia Literaria. v.1 eds. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. ISBN 0-691-09874-3. Davis, Michael. 1999. The Poetry of Philosophy:
On Aristotle's Poetics. South Bend, Indiana: St Augustine's P. ISBN 1-890318-62-0.
Elam, Keir. 1980. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. New Accents Ser. London and New
York: Methuen. ISBN 0-416-72060-9. Gebauer, Gunter, and Christoph Wulf. 1992.
Mimesis: Culture—Art—Society. Trans. Don Reneau. Berkeley and London: U
of California P, 1995. ISBN 0-520-08459-4. René Girard. 2008. Mimesis and Theory: Essays
on Literature and Criticism, 1953–2005. Ed. by Robert Doran. Stanford: Stanford University
Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-5580-1. Halliwell, Stephen, The Aesthetics of Mimesis.
Ancient Texts and Modern Problems, Princeton 2002. ISBN 0-691-09258-3.
Kaufmann, Walter. 1992. Tragedy and Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton UP. ISBN 0-691-02005-1.
Miller, Gregg Daniel. 2011. Mimesis and Reason: Habermas's Political Philosophy. Albany, NY:
SUNY Press. ISBN 978-1-4384-3740-8 Pfister, Manfred. 1977. The Theory and Analysis
of Drama. Trans. John Halliday. European Studies in English Literature Ser. Cambridige: Cambridge
UP, 1988. ISBN 0-521-42383-X. 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. In: Semiotica. Vol. 2010, Issue 182, S. 375–96.
Sörbom, Göran, Mimesis and Art, Uppsala 1966.
Snow, Kim; Crethar, Hugh; Robey, Patricia & Carlson, John. 2005. "Theories of Family
Therapy". As cited in "Family Therapy Review: Preparing for Comprehensive Licensing Examination."
2005. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ISBN 0-8058-4312-4. Sen, R. K., Mimesis, Calcutta: Syamaprasad
College, 2001 Sen, R. K., Aesthetic Enjoyment: Its Background
in Philosophy and Medicine, Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1966.
Tatarkiewicz, Władysław. 1980. A History of Six Ideas: An Essay in Aesthetics. Trans.
Christopher Kasparek. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ISBN 90-247-2233-0.
Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. London
and New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-90686-5. Tsitsiridis, Stavros, "Mimesis and Understanding.
An Interpretation of Aristotle’s Poetics 4.1448b4-19", In: Classical Quarterly 55 435-46.
External links Plato's Republic II, transl. Benjamin Jowell
Plato's Republic III, transl. Benjamin Jowell Plato's Republic X, transl. Benjamin Jowell
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
Mimesislab, 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