Mimesis (; Ancient Greek: μίμησις mīmēsis,
from μιμεῖσθαι mīmeisthai, "to
imitate", from μῖμος mimos, "imitator,
actor") is a term used in literary criticism
and philosophy that carries a wide range of
meanings which include imitatio, imitation,
nonsensuous similarity, receptivity, representation,
mimicry, the act of expression, the act of
resembling, 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.
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 texts, the Odyssey
being Western and the Bible having been written
by a variety of Mid-Eastern writers, 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.
Mimesis has been theorised by thinkers as
diverse as Plato, Aristotle, Philip Sidney,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Adam Smith, Gabriel
Tarde, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Theodor
Adorno, Erich Auerbach, Paul Ricœur, 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, including human
nature, as reflected in the dramas of the
period.
Plato wrote about mimesis in both Ion and
The Republic (Books II, III, and X).
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"
– techne – of the subject (532c), the
poet does not speak truth (as characterized
by Plato's account of the Forms).
As Plato has it, 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 (and poets), or the acting out by
classical actors of tragedy, Plato maintained
in his critique that theatre was not sufficient
in conveying the truth (540c).
He was concerned that actors or orators were
thus able to persuade an audience by rhetoric
rather than by telling the truth (535b).
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 (the Platonic ideal,
or form); 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.
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, nonetheless
the imitators will 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 ===
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, the formal cause, is like a blueprint,
or an immortal idea.
The second cause is the material cause, or
what a thing is made out of.
The third cause is the efficient cause, that
is, the process and the agent by which the
thing is made.
The fourth, the final 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 (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 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 (Greek διήγησις).
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 (c. 373 BCE),
Plato examines the style of poetry (the term
includes comedy, tragedy, epic and lyric poetry):
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 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, 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); "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" (section 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".
=== 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 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 in order to expose and undermine
such stereotypes .
== 
Michael Taussig ==
In Mimesis and Alterity (1993), the anthropologist
Michael Taussig examines the way that people
from one culture adopt another's nature and
culture (the process of mimesis) at the same
time as distancing themselves from it (the
process of alterity).
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 (without acknowledging doing so).
Taussig, however, criticises anthropology
for reducing yet another culture, that of
the Cuna, 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 anthropologists'
perspective while simultaneously defending
the independence of a lived culture from the
perspective of anthropological reductionism.
== René Girard ==
In Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the
World (1978), René Girard posits that human
behavior is based upon mimesis, and that imitation
can engender pointless conflict.
Girard notes the productive potential of competition:
"It is because of this unprecedented capacity
to promote competition within limits that
always remain socially, if not individually,
acceptable that we have all the amazing achievements
of the modern world," but states that competition
stifles progress once it becomes an end in
itself: "rivals are more apt to forget about
whatever objects are the cause of the rivalry
and instead become more fascinated with one
another."
== Notes
