Assignment, Mimesis

Assignment

Krishna Darsan S S
I MA ECL

Mimesis

Introduction

Mimesis is one of the oldest and one among the fundamental terms in the literary theory. The term is said to have derived from the Greek term “mimesthai” which in adequately translates to “to imitate” or “to represent”. None of the translation of the word mimesis can encompass the complexity, range of attitudes and tradition of commentary it has inspired. Many    meanings,  attitudes  and  metaphors  that  mimesis  elicits  shows  its  significance  to  the western    literary  thought. The term mimesis was first introduced into the literary theory by the great Greek Philosopher Plato in his dialogue the Republic over two thousand years ago. He used this term to refer to the e physical act of imitating or mimicking something. Plato and his student Aristotle, another notable Greek philosopher extended this term which referred to this common human behaviour of imitation to the realm of artistic reproduction.

The meanings, attitudes and metaphors that mimesis elicits stands for demonstrates its significance n the western thought. The concept of art for at least the western culture is unimaginable without the theory of mimesis. Plato who introduced this term in his work Republic says that art is merely an imitation of reality. The 20^th century French philosopher Jacques Derrida said that,’ 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. The understanding of the Western theories of artistic representation is impossible without knowledge of mimesis.

The definition of mimesis has always been a a topic of discussion among the scholars. Plato and Aristotle distinguish mimesis from reality, but they dosent agree upon its  nature and effects. Plato  attacks  mimesis stating  the  negative  influence  of  artistic works  on  youth  and  links  mimesis with  extremes of human emotions. His  disciple  Aristotle  on  the  other  hand  defends  mimesis  according   to  many  of  the same  criteria  that  Plato  uses to discredit  it. 

Plato’s concept of mimesis

The Greek philosopher Plato gives the most influential account of Mimesis. Plato wrote about mimesis in both Ion and the Republic (Books II, III and X).The Republic also refers o a wide ranging political literary and ethical theories written around that period (380BC). He does not just comment upon the existing notion of mimesis but redefines art as essentially mimetic and as a representation of something else. The use of the word can be traced back to the fifth century but is rare before Plato adopted it in his work in the following century. French classical scholar Jean Pierre Vernant argues that Plato’s use of the word mimesis marks an important point in the history of Greek ideas of art. Prior to Plato, the Greeks believed or regarded the images and statues they used as the actualization of what they actually stood for. But Plato defined them as an illusion or representation of the deity thus putting forth the idea that art is an imitation of something that is real or image or imitation of something else. He thus at once makes and unmakes art.

The concept of mimesis is introduced by Plato as a potential threat to the ideals of justice and reason rather than as an aesthetic category. In the beginning of the dialogue the speaker Socretes proposes the construction of a city, which acts  a canvas for plato to propose and debate on the various theories he put forwards. Mimesis will be introduced in the course of the discussion of this city. The citizens of the city does their task, and Socretes realizes that ‘the healthy’ city he described would become a feverish city if there is no luxury. He introduces mimesis here as secondary and unhealthy. He describes it as a luxury not as a necessity. Plato separates mimesis from the real, rational and essential and equates it with pleasure and emotion. In book three Socrates and his auditors are seen worrying over the possibility of the guardians who are bound to protect the city turning inward and becoming a threat to the city itself. He tries to say that the art though entertains can corrupt the mind of its readers or viewers as it is lacks concern with morality, as it treats both virtue and vice alike. Though it is known that Plato stands against poetry, in the republic it can be noted that the narrator Socrates uses stories in education. The stories used in education are central to the training and thus must be used carefully as Socrates claims that artistic imitation invariably gets behavioural imitation. In addition to influence that mimesis has over the audience Plato continues to point out the effect it can have on the performer as well.

In the book ten he inquires into the oppositions between mimesis and reason. He bases his critiques on three grounds: reality of mimesis; the relationship of mimesis to knowledge; and the effects of mimesis on the emotions. He uses the analogy of mirror to mock the idea that art requires special skills and methods. He uses this analogy to argue that mimesis produces mere phantoms, not real things. He then uses another analogy to show that artist is not a creator of something but only reflects on something that is like the being, but is not being. The analogy of bed says that the artist’s bed is twice removed from that of the truth r the original as the real bed is created by the God, which the carpenter tries o imitate. Further the painter or the artist is inspired by this bed and tries to copy this to his canvas.

Aristotle’s concept of Mimesis

Poetic’s by Aristotle is often referred to as the counterpart to Plato’s Republic. It is his treatise on the subject of mimesis. He holds an entirely different view on Mimesis. Contrary to Plato’s view on Mimesis Aristotle defines mimesis as a craft with its own internal laws and aims. Aristotle is Plato’s disciple. Though he opposes and challenges Plato’s claims about the nature and effects of mimesis he does not question Plato’s basic assertion that art is essentially imitative. For Aristotle mimesis is a real thing that is worthy of critical analysis which relies on the framework set up by Plato.

Aristotle treats poetry “in itself”, not as a reflection of something else. He treats poetry as a natural object which can be subjected to philosophical inquiry. While the metaphors that Plato uses to prove his points are artificial or unnatural, for example, mirror and couch, the metaphors that Aristotle uses emphasises their similarity to natural objects. Throughout the work Aristotle borrows or modifies what Plato has already said or adds a distinction where Plato fails to make one. According to Plato the imitations made in poetry, painting and tragedy are essentially the same, but Aristotle cuts this argument by saying that they are different by the materials they employ. The painter for example uses figure and colour while the musician melody and rhythm, though these are all mimetic they use same tools in various combinations. Thus he portrays them, the artists as a maker, a craftsperson rather than as an imitator.

Aristotle offers another serious criticism on Plato’s description of the objects of imitation. While Plato treats men in action in poetry according to their good and bad over the audience, Aristotle classifies them as men of a higher or lower moral type. For him each artistic genre and each artist emphasizes one human type and the actions appropriate to it. The epic and tragedy presents people as better than what they really are, on the other hand comedy present them as worse. The third criticism that Aristotle opens upon Plato is on the manner of imitation. He says that the manner of imitation should not be judged on whether it reveals the poet or not but on its appropriateness to the nature on the material.

Aristotle, contradictory to Plato’s view on child’s imitation as a danger of mimesis uses it to affirm the naturalness of mimesis. He argues that poetry springs in a man’s mind from two sources. The first is the natural tendency of man to imitate things around him, which is implanted in him right from his childhood. He argues that man learn his earlier lessons through imitation or mimesis. This is a quality that differentiates him from the animals. He further notes that like children the adults also derive pleasure and knowledge form mimesis. He describes this as the second source of poetry. He observes that men often derive pleasure from viewing repelling and disgusting things around him like the dead bodies. Thus imitation gives us a fictional distance from the actual experience which would help us to learn whereas the in the actual scenario we might act emotionally. It thus provides us with an opportunity to look into human character.

Throughout Poetics one could see Aristotle’s effort to revalue Plato’s arguments and judgements. Similarly in chapter 6 of his Poetics he contradicts the arguments that Plato had against tragedy. While Plato tries to establish that the tragedies tries o play with our emotions at the expense of our rational faculties, Aristotle says that good tragedies are constructed rationally. He argues that even tragic emotions can be made predictable and reasonable. The tragic emotions which are aroused in the minds of the audience in the end are the result of the plot structure, and not just a catastrophic event at the end. Pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune and fear by ‘the misfortune of a man like ourselves’ are two essential tragic emotions that are aroused at the end of a tragic play.

Plato opposes tragedy by saying that the emotions that a tragedy produces are not grounded. Aristotle suggests that tragedy produces emotions rationally. Plato in his work argues that mimesis arouses emotions that are best be suppressed. Aristotle disarms this argument by saying that the tragedy would in turn lead to catharsis or purgation of the emotions. This purgation that man feels has therapeutic effect on him as he can experience them in his life without having to face the crisis for real. It offers them a chance for transformation.

Thus by bringing in the notion of purgation or catharsis which is beneficial Aristotle gives art and mimesis a primary and crucial function along with the arguments that it is natural, rational and educational.

Horace   and   Mimesis

                   Horace’s   conception of mimesis is different   from  that  of  Plato  and  Aristotle. He  shifts  the  object  of  imitation from  nature  to  the  ancient  Greeks   such  as  Homer  and  other  Greek    tragedians.  He makes  himself  clear  on   the  relationship   between  following   the  ancient   tradition  and  making  their  own  invention  in order  to  steer Roman poetry  to  the  eminence  of  that  of  its  Greek  counterpart.

Horace   gives  more  importance  to  imitation  of  the  ancient  Greek  and  is  less  bothered  about  the  contemporary  writers.  He  doesnot advocate  a  literal  translation  of  the  ancients, but  a  sort  of  re-creation  of  their  works, by  infusing  one’s  own  invention  with  the  tradition.   However  in  Ars  Poetica  he  reduce  the concept  of  mimesis  to  a  technical  process of  either  following  the  tradition  or  making  one’s  own  invention  based  on  literary  principles.

                  To  conclude  with  Horace  is  broadly  concerned  with  craftsmanship  of  writing  and  emphasizes  art  over  genius.

Mimesis in modern theories

The attack on mimesis by Plato begins with the childhood education, and persistently links mimesis with the problem of childhood education, and persistently links mimesis with extremes of human emotion. Aristotle defends mimesis according to many of the same psychological and anthropological criteria that Plato uses to discredit it. This ancient idea about the interrelation of mimesis and human nature has garnered interests in the minds of psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and theorists of race and gender in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Among the most important psychological theorists of mimesis in the later nineteenth century was the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde. In his major work, The Laws of Imitation (1890), Tarde defines imitation as a fundamental life force, one of the three great forms of ‘universal repetition’ that organize physical, biological and social life:

 ‘imitation plays a rôle in societies analogous to that of heredity in organic life or to that of vibration among inorganic bodies’
 (Tarde, 1962: 11).

Tarde has an expansive notion of imitation, which encompasses everything from the use of language to the spread of influential ideas, the institution of manners and even contagious laughter. Memory and habit are also forms of imitation. Tarde also regards imitation as socially progressive. Imitation begins in the family, where the father is a model for his children, but it soon spreads beyond the hierarchical structure of reproduction and inheritance. Everyone is allowed to imitate everyone else, and each individual can imitate different aspects of other groups or individuals. Imitation becomes an invisible and equalizing social bond that provides individuals with the means for greater personal expression:

 ‘the very nature and choice of these elementary copies, as well as their combination, expresses and accentuates our original personality’
(Tarde, 1962: xxiv).

In 17th and early 18th century conceptions of 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.

Freud took up and powerfully developed Tarde’s suggestion that imitation is everywhere in human psychic life. For Freud, even our most deliberate thoughts and actions are governed by unconscious memories and desires. We reproduce aspects of our past in our everyday relationships with others, as well as in our dreams at night. Freud was also a careful reader of Aristotle, and called his earliest therapeutic technique the ‘cathartic method’, because it sought to purge a patient’s painful memories through hypnosis.

Theorists of race and imperialism have offered  similar analysis of the mimetic foundations of identity. The pivotal figure here is the psychoanalyst and anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon. In his book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Fanon explores the formation of racial identity in the context of colonial domination. His specific point of reference is the psychic state of blacks in the French Antilles. Drawing on the Freudian theory of identification, Fanon argues that the colonial relationship is metaphorically akin to that between parent and child: the native is a ‘child’ in relation to the ‘mother country’.

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.

Conclusion

The theory of mimesis formulated by the great Greek thinker Plato and further developed by his disciple created a diverse realm of thought where the later thinkers and artists live and breathe. Even when they do not agree with particular formulations in Plato or Aristotle, they still perform, willingly or not, on the stage these thinkers built. After Plato and Aristotle many popular thinkers have contributed to the theory of mimesis. The arguments and research on this theory is still continuing around the globe. Mimesis is the inescapable conceptual medium of Western thinking about art, artists and audiences, and about their relationship to broader currents in human psychology and collective life.

Bibliography

1. Potolsky, Matthew. Mimesis, New Delhi: Routledge, 2006.

2. Aristotle, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, trans. S. H. Butcher: New York: Dover, 1951

3. Derrida, Jacques.  Dissemination: University of Chicago Press 1981

4. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton: 

Princeton UP, 1953

5. Abrams, Meyer Howard, and Geoffrey Harpham. A glossary of literary terms, New York Cengage Learning, 2011.

5. Benjamin, Walter. Reflections, New York: Schocken Books, 1986