ASSIGNMENT WORK             

             

          

           COURSE TITLE              :         CRITICAL TRANSACTIONS

            

             COURSE CODE              :          LEC 5104

            

              TOPIC                              :          MIMESIS

                

  PREPARED BY :       MUHAMED SHEHIN T.V

                                           IST SEMESTER ECL

                                 CENTRAL UNIVERSITY OF KERALA

 

  SUBMITTED TO :      SHALINI MADAM

                                   ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR

                               CENTRAL UNIVERSITY OF KERALA

    DATE             :          07-09-2015         

  

INTRODUCTION

Approaching Mimesis

Mimesis is among the oldest terms in literary and artistic theory. Most often translated from the Greek as ‘imitation’, mimesis defines the relationship between artistic representations and reality: art is a blueprint of the real. But this definition hardly accounts for the range and significance of the idea. Mimesis can be said to imitate a plethoric array of originals: nature, truth, beauty, mannerisms, actions, situations, examples, ideas. The word has been used to describe the imitative relationship between art and life, as well as the relationship between a master and a disciple, an artwork and its audience, and the material world and a rational order of ideas. Mimesis takes on different forms in different contexts, masquerading under a variety of related terminologies and translations: emulation, mimicry, dissimulation, doubling, theatricality, realism, identification, correspondence, depiction, verisimilitude, resemblance. No one definition, and no one interpretation, will suffice to encompass its complexity and the tradition of commentary it has inspired. Mimesis is always double, at once good and bad, natural and unnatural, necessary and dispensable. It is the sincerest form of flattery as well as the trade of pirates and plagiarists, the signal behaviour of great artists as well as apes, parrots and children.

Mimesis has been a recurrent, even obsessive, concern for the western artists and philosophers for thousands of years. The very concept of art, for Western culture at least, is inconceivable without the theory of mimesis. For the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, who introduced the term into literary theory over two thousand years ago in his dialogue the Republic, art ‘merely’ imitates something real. It is an illusion, he argues, and thus needs to be distinguished from truth and nature. Subsequently, the entire history of literary theory has turned upon challenges to, and modifications or defences of, this definition. As the twentieth-century French philosopher Jacques Derrida has written, ‘the whole history of the interpretation of the arts of letters has moved and been transformed within the diverse logical possibilities opened up by the concept of mimesis. Without a knowledge of mimesis, one simply cannot understand Western theories of artistic representation – or even realize that they are theories rather than facts of nature. But mimesis has always been more than a theory of art and images. From its very origins in Greek thought, mimesis connected ideas about artistic representation to more general claims about human social behaviour, and to the ways in which we know and interact with others and with our environment. More recently, it has informed research in psychology, anthropology, educational theory, feminism, post-colonial studies, political theory, and even neo-Darwinian biological speculation, as well as literary and artistic theory.

The word mimesis originally referred to the physical act of miming or mimicking something. Plato and his student Aristotle carried this common human behaviour over to the realm of artistic production: art imitates the world much as people imitate each other. The ability to create and be moved by works of art they suggest, is an essential part of what it means to be human. Their argument underlies many familiar ideas about art and representation.Take, for example, the claim that great art conveys universal truths. We commonly believe that art, unlike laws, rituals or social structures, is not limited in its value or significance to a particular age or culture, and that it speaks to a transcendent human nature. Or take the equally familiar idea that representations have irresistible effects on human behaviour. Although we know that books, movies and video games are not ‘real’, we nevertheless believe that they have a profound influence on young viewers and readers in particular. Contemporary psychologists call this the ‘Werther effect’, after a novella by the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which is said to have led many readers to imitate the suicide of its tragic young hero.

THE INVENTION OF THE IMAGE

The ancient Greek philosopher Plato provided the first and unquestionably the most influential account of mimesis. The most important discussion of the topic comes in his magnum opus the Republic, a wide-ranging work of political, ethical and literary theory that was probably written around 380 BCE. He redefines art as essentially mimetic, as a representation of something else. The history of literary and artistic theory begins with Plato’s version of mimesis.

Mimesis derives from the root mimos, a noun designating both a person who imitates and a specific genre of performance based on the imitation of stereotypical character traits. Very little is known about these performances. In the Poetics, Aristotle mentions ‘the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus’ as a form of ‘imitation by means of language alone’. Other scattered references occur in Greek writing, but there are no surviving examples of these performances. Some scholars have claimed they were religious rituals, but it is now generally accepted that Aristotle refers to a Sicilian dramatic genre in which actors would depict scenes from the lives of commoners. Although it is difficult to discern a clear development in meaning, early uses of mimesis and related words refer chiefly to the physical mimicry of living beings by bodily gesture or voice, and only more rarely to paintings or statues. Yet even in its earliest uses, mimesis never simply meant imitation. From the very beginning it described many forms of similarity or equivalence, from visual resemblance to behavioural emulation and the metaphysical correspondence between real and ideal worlds.

Prior to Plato, Greek culture regarded images as an actualization or ‘presentification’ not simply as illusionistic depictions of a deity but as an actual revelation of a divinity that would otherwise be invisible. Plato transforms mimesis into a far-reaching technical concept that defines the representational arts as such. It is, as French classical scholar Vernant suggests, ‘the first general theory of imitation’ in any Western culture. This theory is hardly neutral in its aim or effect, for Plato’s innovation fundamentally devalues the image. Where archaic Greek thought regarded images as embodiments, Plato classes the image with a group of behaviours and phenomena that had previously been understood as distinct. Miming, emulation, pictures, mirrors, shadows, echoes, dreams, reflections and even footprints are henceforth regarded as ‘semblances’. They are grouped together in their difference from, but resemblance to, real objects . The effect of this transformation is radical, redefining art as mere appearance, not a real thing. Neither craft nor creation, it is now an image or imitation of something else. Plato’s definition at once makes and unmakes art, defining it as a recognizable category of human action, and yet draining it of any independent reality.

ARISTOTLE’S POETICS

SECOND NATURE

Aristotle’s Poetics is the single most influential work of literary criticism in the Western tradition and, along with Plato’s Republic, is a foundational text for the understanding of mimesis. The Poetics has long shaped critical accounts of ancient drama, and was treated by playwrights as a prescriptive guidebook for hundreds of years after its rediscovery and translation into Latin by scholars in the early Renaissance. Aristotle’s chief subject is Greek tragedy, but his account of this form engages far-reaching questions about the nature of mimesis that powerfully revise Plato’s theories. Although it is often said that Aristotle’s account of mimesis in the Poetics is a critical response to Plato’s exile of the poets in the Republic, the relationship between the two philosophers is somewhat more complicated, and remains a matter of scholarly debate. Plato was Aristotle’s teacher, and although he is never named in the treatise, his presence is unmistakable. Aristotle borrows a number of formulations from Plato, and challenges his teacher’s claims about the nature and effects of mimesis, often in terms that seem directed against specific arguments Socrates makes in the Republic. Crucially, however, he does not question Plato’s basic assertion that all art is essentially imitative. Even in his criticisms of Plato, Aristotle reinforces the conceptual hold of Platonic mimesis over Western art theory. Like Plato, Aristotle groups all the arts under the rubric of mimesis. And again like Plato, he contrasts the representational arts with other forms of human inquiry, such as science and history,that are conventionally associated with truth and reality. His defence of mimesis also turns on a fundamentally Platonic concern: reason. Aristotle counters Plato’s assertion that mimesis is opposed to reason, and argues instead that tragedy offers quasi-philosophical insights into human actions. At the same time, Aristotle offers the most persuasive response to Plato’s critique of mimesis. In many ways, the history of Western literary criticism is a repetition in different terms of the fundamental claims about mimesis in Plato and Aristotle. Unlike Plato, for whom mimesis

is a mirror of something else and therefore potentially deceptive, Aristotle defines mimesis as a craft with its own internal laws and aims. The opening sentences of the Poetics establish this premise:

I propose to treat of poetry in itself and of its various kinds, noting the essential quality of each; to inquire into the structure of the plot as requisite to a good poem; into the number and nature of the parts of which a poem is composed; and similarly into whatever else falls within the same inquiry. Following, then, the order of nature, let us begin with the principles which come first.

Aristotle says that he will treat poetry ‘in itself ’, and not primarily as a reflection of something else. The poem, for Aristotle, is much like a natural object. We can study its parts and structure, classify it according to kind and aim, and determine in individual cases whether the object achieves its inherent objectives (whether it is ‘good’). It is an appropriate subject for philosophical inquiry, which conforms to fixed principles and ‘the order of nature’. Poetry might be said to imitate the processes of nature, and not just its physical forms. Aristotle’s metaphors for poetry throughout the Poetics stress the naturalness of mimesis. Whereas Plato’s most common metaphors –mirrors, shadows, optical illusions – highlight the artificiality or unreality of art and literature, Aristotle’s metaphors emphasize their similarity to natural objects. For instance, in asserting that artistic beauty depends on the order and magnitude of the parts, Aristotle draws an comparison between art and animals: ‘As, therefore, in the case of animate bodies and organisms, a certain magnitude is necessary’. Elsewhere, Aristotle compares the unity of plot to that of a body. Good plots ‘resemble a living organism in all its unity, and produce the pleasure proper to it’. In what might otherwise seem an extraneous or overly speculative discussion, Aristotle also offers a natural history of drama. Beginning in mere improvisation, and inspired by different aspects of Homeric epic, both tragedy and comedy evolved according to the natural propensities of the poets drawn to each style. Serious poets wrote tragedies, while more frivolous ones resorted to comedy. The development of tragedy, like that of an animal species, was governed by its inbuilt qualities: ‘Having passed through many changes, it found its natural form, and there it stopped’.

Three Versions of Mimesis

IMITATIO

Rhetorical Imitation

MIMESIS AS A CULTURAL PRACTICE

The theory of mimesis in Plato and Aristotle forges a powerful link between human behaviour and artistic representation. Far more than an account of how art mirrors nature, mimesis entails a complicated set of ideas about how human beings think, feel and understand the world and each other. The  phenomenon of rhetorical imitation ,the imitation of artistic role models, which, for the long stretch of Western history between the height of the Roman empire and the end of the eighteenth century, was a central principle of literary production. In addition to imitating nature and human action, poets also actively sought to imitate exemplary forerunners and the artistic conventions they made authoritative. This theory was designated by the word ancient Latin writers used to translate the Greek term mimesis: imitatio. The key to literary success, it was argued, was the skilful imitation of role models and the ability to make something new out of old traditions. In his verse treatise ‘An Essay on Criticism’ (1711), the English poet Alexander Pope offers an influential summary of this version of mimesis. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Pope’s first and most important rule for the poet is to ‘follow nature’. But his sense of nature turns out to be quite unique and distinct:

Unerring nature! Still divinely bright,

One clear, unchanged, and universal light,                           

Life, force, and beauty, must to all impart,

At once the source, and end, and test of art.

On the surface, this claim seems to resonate with the familiar notion of art that we encountered in Plato and Aristotle. Yet for Pope, artists should not seek directly to imitate the physical world or human actions but should instead look to the exemplary artworks handed down from antiquity for guidance. Raw nature is too wild and hence unsuitable for proper imitation. The ancient works Pope encourages the poet to follow, by contrast, are ‘nature methodized’. They teach a proven set of rules for the representation of nature, rules that encourage lawfulness and restraint. The way to the true imitation of nature, in other words, goes through art and tradition: ‘Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem; / To copy nature is to copy them’. Pope offers the example of the ancient Roman epic poet Virgil (70–19 BCE), who found the proper form for his own work by imitating another author: ‘Nature and Homer were, he found, the same’. Both nature and Homer teach restraint and design, lessons that are better learned in literature than in the landscape. Following nature, in this instance, does not mean trusting instinct or describing flowers. It means following the best human role models and imitating trusted conventions.

Pope’s assertion that great art comes from the imitation of role models and not from the untutored mirroring of nature is poised at the end of a critical tradition that dominated the literary and intellectual culture of Europe for nearly two thousand years. Indeed, there is nothing inherently uncreative about the practice of imitatio, which is responsible for some of the central works of Western art and literature. Artists and audiences from antiquity to the eighteenth century found artistic pleasure in the reconfiguration of traditional materials, in old stories made fresh, in reassuring confirmations of accepted truths, and in the surprising use of a familiar convention.

THEATRE AND

THEATRICALITY

SPECTACLE AND SPECTATOR

In his Confessions, Saint Augustine (354–430 CE) tells the story of a student, Alypius, who was taken to a Roman gladiatorial contest by some acquaintances. Alypius is morally opposed to such spectacles, but agrees to go along, confident in his ability to resist temptation. Although he covers his eyes at first, the sound of the crowd cheering a gladiator’s death rouses his curiosity. When he opens his eyes to look, he is fatally drawn in by the spectacle:

The din had pierced his ears and forced him to open his eyes, laying his soul open to receive the wound which struck it down. . . . When he saw the blood, it was as though he had drunk a deep draught of savage passion. Instead of turning away, he fixed his eyes upon the scene and drank in all its frenzy, unaware of what he was doing. He was no longer a man who had come to the arena, but simply one of the crowd he had joined.

The spectacle Alypius watches is not mimetic, but Augustine’s account closely follows Plato’s critique of tragedy. Much like Plato, Augustine associates theatre with violence and irrational emotions, with the victory of ‘savage passion’ over reason and orderly thought. Augustine stresses in particular the sensory force of the show. Alypius is roused to curiosity by the roar of the crowd, and is gripped, against all his moral beliefs, by the sight of blood. There is, it would seem, something dangerous about spectacle as such. Alypius goes into the arena a moral man, but leaves it fallen. Augustine’s story belongs to a long tradition in Western thought that Jonas Barish has called the ‘antitheatrical prejudice’. From Plato to current critics of sex and violence in the popular media, the theatre and other performance genres have been subjected to more abuse and official censorship than any other art form. The antitheatrical prejudice entails much more than the criticism of certain plays, though, encompassing what Barish calls an ‘ontological malaise’, a thorough going fear of the theatrical in all aspects of life . This malaise has left its mark on everyday language. As Barish notes, almost every common about theatre is negative. We praise the ‘poetic’ or the ‘picturesque’, but distrust the ‘staged’ or the ‘histrionic’. Theatre also traditionally bears the taint of immorality. Throughout Western history, actors and actresses have been regarded as potential seducers or the moral equivalent of prostitutes. The current tabloid obsession with the love lives of movie stars follows from this ancient link between performers and sexuality. Questions about the morality of performers, notes Mendel Kohansky (1984), have relegated actors and actresses to the social margins in almost every world culture. This marginality can render them pariahs or, as in modern Western media culture, objects of extreme fascination. Whether revered or reviled, though, actors and actresses seem a breed apart, somehow transfigured by their connection to stage or screen. The imagery and associations of the theatre comprise another of the central thematic elements of the theory of mimesis. Theatre is not, strictly speaking, identical with mimesis. But theatre and theatricality have been so central to the theory since antiquity that it is nearly impossible to separate the two ideas. While the fortunes of imitatio rose and fell over time, theatre has rarely been regarded favourably. Plato and Aristotle, for example, both seek to minimize, even dispense with, the most theatrical elements of tragedy. Plato simply banished the tragic poets, while allowing those poets and performers who do not ‘disguise’ themselves to remain. Stories have a useful social function, he implies, but theatricality is problematic. Aristotle’s banishment is more subtle but no less comprehensive. As Samuel Weber has noted, Aristotle defines spectacle as a mere medium, a means of presenting the plot, and not a source of independent effects. Spectacle is the least artistic element of tragedy, Aristotle argues, and does not contribute to the true tragic effect, which, as we have seen, is produced by the plot: ‘For the power of tragedy . . . is felt even apart from representation and actors’. Aristotle ‘saves’ mimesis from Plato by taking it out of the theatre.

REALISM

In his Natural History (77 CE), the Roman writer Pliny the Elder describes a competition between two of the greatest painters in ancient Greece, Zeuxis and Parrhasius. Zeuxis took the first turn, and produced a picture of grapes so successful that birds flew up to the place it was hung. Parrhasius then painted a picture of curtains, which was so realistic that Zeuxis, confident that he would win the competition, called out for the curtains to be drawn and Parrhasius’ picture displayed. Having recognized his error, Zeuxis declares Parrhasius the victor, noting that ‘whereas he had deceived birds, Parrhasius had deceived him, an artist’. This story is among the most famous fables about realism in Western literature, and it tells us a great deal about how the theory of mimesis has been understood. Much like Plato, lived at roughly the same time as the two painters, Pliny assumes that the purpose of art is to mirror nature. Zeuxis believes himself to have succeeded when he fools birds with his painted grapes. Success for him means erasing the boundary between art and reality. Parrhasius’ painting has no other aim than fooling Zeuxis. Both painters embody Plato’s fear about the confusion mimesis sows in the soul of the viewer or reader. But they also epitomize the fascination of Western critical theory with the idea of artistic realism.

What makes a work of art or literature seem realistic to us? And why is realism so often held out as an ideal? Artistic realism is probably the most familiar element in the thematic complex of mimesis, but also one of the most controversial. ‘At no time in the history of Western aesthetic theory’, writes the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg, ‘has there been any serious departure from the tendency to legitimize the work of art in terms of its relation to reality’. But this does not mean that the relationship between art and reality is static. Artists and writers since ancient Greece have, with few significant exceptions, struggled to provide an increasingly exact representation of reality, to improve both the medium of imitation and the techniques used to achieve it. At least that is the story Western art tells itself. The early advocates of perspectival techniques in the Renaissance claimed to provide an advance over the unrealistic productions of the ‘dark ages’. Nineteenth-century novelists claimed to tell the truth about common people for the first time. Photography was presented as an advance over painting, motion pictures as an advance over still photography and virtual reality as a quantum leap over film. Each technique has doubtless improved our ability to reproduce the world we see and experience. Yet this relentless artistic and technological quest for better ways of depicting reality is strangely fixated on traditional ideas about mimesis. Indeed, why should any art seek merely to reproduce the world we know through our senses? The realism of photography and film is not an inevitable development, but the product of the Greek ideas about images that we have been tracing out in this book. We might go so far as to suggest that it is only because Plato defined art by its more or less accurate reproduction of the real that linear perspective or photography or virtual reality can be understood to mark progress in art, rather than just a change in medium or style.3

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Mimesis in

Modern Theory

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 PSYCHIC MIMESIS

Mimesis has always been at once a theory of art and an explicit or implicit theory of human nature. Accounts of mimesis in art rely on ostensible truths of human nature, and art is commonly regarded as an exemplary instance of an inherent human tendency towards imitation. The focus here is on psychoanalytic theories of identification, a term that describes the unconscious imitations of others that shape human identity. The concept of identification is central to the work of Sigmund Freud, the Viennese psychologist whose theories had a profound impact on Western thought in the early twentieth century and continues to inform current discussions of race and gender identity. Nearly all of the theorists regard mimesis as a primary aspect of human life, not a secondary or derivative imitation of something else. They uncover the mimetic origins of identity, and compare human collective life to the instinctual imitative behaviour of insects and animals. These theories reanimate a powerful set of questions about human nature that Plato first raised in the Republic, what Lacoue-Labarthe calls, in his essay ‘Typography’ (1975),the problem of ‘fundamental mimetology’. This term describes the possibility that there is no single human nature, no unified self, but only a ‘pure and disquieting plasticity which potentially authorizes the varying appropriation of all characters and all functions. Human existence is but a series of copies without a true original. As Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe notes, Plato begins his discussion of mimesis by noting the remarkable malleability of a child’s mind, its ability to take on whatever ‘stamp’ one wants to give it, but he soon narrows the discussion to the nature of mimesis in art and poetry. The tradition of commentary that Plato inspired tends to start where Plato leaves off, assuming the close relationship between mimesis and human nature without taking up the potentially disturbing implications about identity that Plato raises and then seeks to curtail. Although, as Lacoue-Labarthe reminds us, the return to the psychology and anthropology of mimesis among twentieth-century thinkers is entirely consistent with the Platonic tradition, it has its immediate origins not in aesthetic theory but in a renewed interest in scientific and sociological theories of imitation among nineteenth-century thinkers. Inspired by Charles Darwin’s writings on evolution from the 1850s, and by a contemporary fascination with hypnotism and other forms of psychological influence, many of the leading social theorists of the period came to define imitation as a foundational human behaviour. No less pivotal were the writings of Karl Marx (1818–83) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who explored the unconscious forces and unquestioned assumptions that shape everyday life. Although neither Marx nor Nietzsche makes mimesis a central category of his work, both of them identify the myriad ways in which human actions repeat patterns of behaviour inherited from the past or absorbed from the larger social context. For both philosophers, our lives are governed by conventional imitations that pass for facts of nature. As we shall find, this notion underlies nearly all of the important twentieth-century approaches to mimesis. Modernity presents itself as a liberation of the individual from tradition and social constraints, but in a striking variety of ways the theory of mimesis in the twentieth century implies that what look like autonomous actions and choices are really forms of imitation.8

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                                                    BIBLIOGRAPHY

1 .POTOLSKY MATHEW. MIMESIS. NEW YORK AND LONDON : ROUTLEDGE TAYLOR AND FRANCIS GROUP . 2006

2. www.wiki.in