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Mimesis (; , mīmēsis) is a term used in literary criticism and philosophy that carries a wide range of meanings, including imitatio, imitation, similarity, receptivity, representation, mimicry, the act of , the act of resembling, and the presentation of the self.Gebauer and Wulf (1992, 1).
The original Ancient Greek term mīmēsis () derives from mīmeisthai (, 'to imitate'), itself coming from mimos (, '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.
One of the best-known modern studies of mimesis—understood in literature as a form of realism—is Erich Auerbach's , which opens with a comparison between the way the world is represented in Homer's Odyssey and the way it appears in the Bible.Erich Auerbach. 1953. . Princeton: Princeton University Press. .
In addition to Plato and Auerbach, mimesis has been theorised by thinkers as diverse as Aristotle, Philip Sidney, Jean Baudrillard (via his concept of Simulacra and Simulation), Gilles Deleuze (via his "event of sense"
Literary Worlds and Deleuze Expression as Mimesis and Event Zornitsa Dimitrova Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Adam Smith, Gabriel Tarde, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Paul Ricœur, Guy Debord ( via his tract,The Society of the Spectacle ) Luce Irigaray, Jacques Derrida, René Girard, Nikolas Kompridis, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Michael Taussig, 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.
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. Plato, Republic, Book II, translated by Benjamin Jowett.
Developing upon this in Book X, Plato told of Socrates's 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.Plato, Republic, Book X, translated by Benjamin Jowett.
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, 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, the imitators will nonetheless still not attain the truth (of God's creation).
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'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 the 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 empathy 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:
In Book III of his Republic (c. 373 BC), Plato examines the style of poetry (the term includes comedy, tragedy, and epic poetry and lyric poetry):Plato, The Republic, Book III, translated by Benjamin Jowett. (Also available via Project Gutenberg): 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."Plato, 360 BC, The Republic, Book III, translated by Benjamin Jowett. (Also available via Project Gutenberg). In dramatic texts, the poet never speaks directly; in narrative texts, the poet speaks as himself or herself.See also, Pfister (1977, pp. 2–3); and Elam (1980):
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);Aristotle, Poetics § I "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."Aristotle, Poetics § III
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". This is a reformatted version of a set of articles originally posted to Usenet:
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." Latin orators and rhetoricians adopted the literary method of Dionysius' imitatio and discarded Aristotle's mimesis.
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.
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 ' perspective while simultaneously defending the independence of a lived culture from the perspective of anthropological reductionism.Taussig, 1993, pp. 47–48.
Calasso's argument here echoes, condenses, and introduces new evidence to reinforce one of the major themes of Adorno and Max Horkheimer's Dialectic of the Enlightenment (1944) , which was itself in dialog with earlier work hinting in this direction by Walter Benjamin who died during an attempt to escape the gestapo. 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.
Roberto Calasso earlier book The Celestial Hunter, written immediately before The Unnamable Present, is an informed and scholarly speculative cosmology depicting the possible origins and early prehistoric cultural evolution of the human mimetic faculty. In particular, the book's first and fifth chapters ("In The Time of the Great Raven" and "Sages & Predators") focus on the terrain of mimesis and its early origins, although insights on this motif permeate every other chapter of the book.
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