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Ambivalence of the Notion of “Mimesis”

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Ambivalence of the Notion of “Mimesis” Firenze University Press Aisthesis www.fupress.com/aisthesis Ambivalence of the Notion of “Mimesis”: Between the Opening towards the Other and the Citation: Antonio Valentini (2018) Ambivalence of the Notion of “Mime- Repetition of the Same sis”: Between the Opening towards the Other and the Repetition of the Same. Aisthesis 11(1): 193-205. doi: 10.13128/Aisthesis-23283 Antonio Valentini Copyright: © 2018 Author.This is an (Università “La Sapienza” di Roma) open access, peer-reviewed article [email protected] published by Firenze University Press (http://www.fupress.com/aisthesis) and distribuited under the terms of the Abstract. One of the main characteristics of the contemporary aesthetic debate is the Creative Commons Attribution License, recovery of the concept of mimesis, as a dimension that is originally involved in the which permits unrestricted use, distri- foundation of human culture and the processes of cultural learning. This is evident in bution, and reproduction in any medi- the aesthetic reflection developed by Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf. For these um, provided the original author and two authors, mimesis is never a mere reproduction of the given reality, but always source are credited. implies the production of the New, of the Other, of the different with respect to the empirical world, i.e. to the existing categorical order of the world. In particular, Gebau- Data Availability Statement: All rel- evant data are within the paper and its er and Wulf underline the constitutive ambivalence of the notion of mimesis: on the Supporting Information files. one hand, it favors the processes of reification fueled by capitalist society and, on the other hand, it contributes to the affirmation of a critical and “utopian” instance that Competing Interests: The authors can counter “instrumental reason” and the primacy of identity. have declared that no competing inter- ests exist. Keywords. Mimesis, identity, otherness, work of art, critical-utopian function. 1. MIMESIS IN ANTHROPOGENESIS: CULTURE, GAMES, RITUAL In a world characterised by the dissolution of all traditionally nor- mative aesthetic paradigms, and by the tendential juxtaposition or overlapping of new heterogeneous and mutually conflictual paradigms, the philosophical research of Christoph Wulf and Gunter Gebauer, through its original historical-anthropological approach, can be cred- ited with having reaffirmed the crucial importance of the concept of mimesis, mostly over the past thirty years, by supplying the investiga- tion about it with fertile new trans-disciplinary theoretical foundations. This has allowed the notion of mimesis, which has always constituted one of the cornerstones of Western culture1, to undergo a profound conceptual redefinition that is both theoretical and historical2. 1 See Mattioli [1993]; Halliwell [2002]; Desideri, Talon-Hugon [2017]. 2 See Fischer, Perret [1998]; Jeffrey [2011]. Aisthesis. Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell'estetico 11(1): 193-205, 2018 ISSN 2035-8466 (online) | DOI: 10.13128/Aisthesis-23283 194 Antonio Valentini Wulf and Gebauer argue that mimesis «plays (Darstellung), «emulation», «becoming similar», a role in nearly all domains of human action, «miming» in the sense of bodily-performance and representation, speech and thought», as it is «an gesture, «simulating», «expressing» and «mimeti- essential condition of social life» (Wulf [1995]: 9): cally anticipating» (vor-ahmen). every possible act of writing or reading – every Far from supplying a definition that is meta- linguistic act or intellectual process – is found- historical and normative, Wulf and Gebauer ed on a mimetic practice. Their starting point is emphasise that the concept of mimesis cannot be that, taken alone, the empirical world is nothing, determined once and for all, since it escapes any that is to say, nothing that is “already-given”. To systematic, totalizing and all-encompassing effort. understand the world means establishing relation- For them, mimesis is not an univocal and homo- ships between different worlds that are primarily geneous notion, but is one that, in Aristotelian mimetic. Thus our understanding of the world is terms, pollachòs lèghetai, «can be said in many dif- always an understanding of multiple relationships, ferent ways». Moreover, one of the distinctive fea- both of a theoretical and a practical order, that are tures of the notion of mimesis advanced by Wulf established between heterogeneous worlds, each of and Gebauer is the fact that it never results in a which acquires meaning and clarity only in rela- simple reference to something that is already-giv- tion to the others. en and already-structured, that is, to something Mimesis presents itself to us as the foundation whose mimetic image would constitute a simple of processes of socialisation, civilisation and the doubling or mirroring (according to a semiotic construction of thought. It appears as a decisive and denotative paradigm). Rather mimesis creates instance capable of rendering an account of modes the qualitatively “new”, in the sense that it produc- and forms in which our collective life is histori- es difference, alterity, and the non-identical with cally realised, but also of all of those actions, prac- respect to the existing categorical order of the tices, and symbolic-cognitive strategies through world, and therefore with respect to the forms that which the processes of the elaboration and inter- already effectively obtain within a given empirical subjective organisation of sense are always and reality. again renewed. Thus mimesis is to be understood In this perspective, the surprising cogni- as an original principle capable of in some way tive and inventive power of mimesis consists in rendering an account, in historical-anthropologi- its capacity to create something «original» (Wulf cal terms, of the very genesis of culture, as well as [1995]: 11), that is, something that «cannot be of the various modes of its effective transmission, explained with reference to something given» reception, and dissemination (cf. Jeffrey [2011]). (ibid.). What is produced is an unexpected and Wulf and Gebauer start from the assump- nondeterminate horizon of possible meanings tion that mimesis cannot be reduced in any way that was not there before. Understood in this to a mere practice that reproduces what exists. way, mimesis is always the carrier of a «surplus of The idea of mimesis, that is, cannot be naively and sense» (cf. Wulf [2014]) that cannot be precise- banally reduced to Nachahmung, which holds that ly foreseen, and that attests to the lack of rigid- the imitative act consists in the pure and simple ity of the life of culture: the non-calculability of repetition of a pre-existing model, whether exter- its incessant transformations. Thus the surplus of nal or internal to the mind of the subject that sense that qualifies every mimetic practice can be imitates. On the contrary, the notion of mimesis understood as an «anthropological constant» and simultaneously holds in itself a vast multiplicity of it is exemplary of the «eccentric» character of the meanings, valences, and semantic connotations. human condition, i.e. of its constitutive incom- Upon the idea of imitation as nachahmen (as pro- pleteness, and therefore of the possibility of con- duction of an image-copy or Abbild) are superim- tinually renegotiating its relationship with the posed ideas such as «bringing to representation» world in new ways. Ambivalence of the Notion of “Mimesis”: Between the Opening towards the Other and the Repetition of the Same 195 From the historical-anthropological perspec- strategy for self-preservation, but one that results tive of Gebauer and Wulf, mimesis and ritual- in the rigidity and alienation of the human being. ity are intimately connected dimensions (cf. Wulf At work here is what Freud called the «death [2003]; [2004], [2005], [2014b]). Every symbolic drive», understood as a drive to restore a previ- and cognitive practice takes on a ritual form, ous state, «repeating it» (and this occurs mimeti- which always implies processes of inclusion and cally), with the goal of re-establishing a tensionless exclusion, i.e. acts of differentiation. And at the condition that – precisely in its lack of tension – is base of this ritual a mimetic process is always experienced by the subject as «pleasing». discernable. Mimesis is involved in every process Nonetheless, even at this level mimesis puts concerned with the formation of our social identi- into play an element of difference, even as it pro- ty, every process concerning self-representation or duces assimilation (and therefore identification) self-presentation that is carried out within a social with something outside the self. Mimesis means and communitarian horizon, and every process of that the human being does not dissolve without sense production and of the shared participation residuals in nature, but that it has set itself up of such sense. alongside nature as something different, as a Self From this point of view, mimesis can be under- that attempts to assert and legitimate itself. Hence stood as a partial exemption (Entlastung) from in the “pre-civilised” phase of human evolution, an otherwise pervasive sense of fragility and human beings “formed” themselves by giving insufficiency, i.e. as a compensatory and adap- themselves over to the external environment and tive strategy able to defend and protect us from subjecting themselves in some way to its unspeak- the non-sense of reality. In
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