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The Meaning in Mimesis: Philosophy, Aesthetics, Acting Theory

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The Meaning in Mimesis: Philosophy, Aesthetics, Acting Theory The Meaning in Mimesis: Philosophy, Aesthetics, Acting Theory by Daniel Larlham Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2012 © 2012 Daniel Larlham All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT The Meaning in Mimesis: Philosophy, Aesthetics, Acting Theory Daniel Larlham Theatre as mimesis, the actor as mimic: can we still think in these terms, two and a half millennia after antiquity? The Meaning in Mimesis puts canonical texts of acting theory by Plato, Diderot, Stanislavsky, Brecht, and others back into conversation with their informing paradigms in philosophy and aesthetics, in order to trace the recurring impulse to theorize the actor’s art and the theatrical experience in terms of one-to-one correspondences. I show that, across the history of ideas that is acting theory, the familiar conception of mimesis as imagistic representation entangles over and over again with an “other mimesis”: mimesis as the embodied attunement with alterity, a human capacity that bridges the gap between self and other. When it comes to the philosophy of the theatre, it is virtually impossible to consider the one-to-one of representation or re- enactment without at the same time grappling with the one-to-one of identification or vicarious experience. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: The Meanings in Mimesis 1 1. Embodying Otherness: Mimesis, Mousike, and the Philosophy of Plato 18 2. The Felt Truth of Mimetic Experience: The Kinetics of Passion and the “Imitation of Nature” in the Eighteenth-Century Theatre 81 3. “I AM”; “I believe you”: Stanislavsky and the Oneness of Theatrical Subjectivity 138 4. Mimesis with an Attitude: Einfühlung, Lightness, and the Freedom of the Brechtian Body 212 Coda: Beyond the One-to-One 275 i 1 Introduction: The Meanings in Mimesis We cannot escape mimesis. Although we might try to dismiss it as an antiquated aesthetic orthodoxy, a paradigm rightfully discredited by Romantic theories of artistic expression, mimesis is still very much with us. When theory turns to the operations of art or the mechanisms behind contagious social behavior, mimesis keeps re-surfacing, persistently, even relentlessly. There are at least three reasons why this is so. First, mimetic thinking is so thoroughly interwoven into Western philosophy and aesthetics that any turn back to this history of ideas requires grappling with the many meanings that mimesis has carried within it. Second, mimesis terminology has long been associated with certain fundamental human phenomena: acts of mimicry, imitative social behavior, the performance and re-performance of identity, and the summoning of otherness in the medium of the self. These phenomena are basic to social life, and so they will keep happening, and so philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists will keep talking about them, for as long as humankind makes the effort to understand itself. The third reason why the mimesis concept keeps returning to us is that it houses within its core a provocatively simple – and powerfully seductive – conceptual schema: that of one-to-one correspondence. Mimesis is redefined in terms of the one-to-one in Plato’s Republic, where the term comes to describe the correspondence among ideal form, material entity, and artistic image as well as that between the human subject and the behavioral models provided by epic and tragic poetry. (Of course, for Plato, the one- to-one-to-one correspondence between form, object, and image is a progressively deteriorating one, so that the artwork exists at a double remove from the truth of ideal 2 reality). The Republic also introduces the metaphor of the mirror and the analogy between poetry and visual art – two hallmarks of mimetic theory – into discussions of artistic production, so that the overall ontology of art can be better theorized in terms of a duplicative model-to-copy schema. Although Plato’s conception of mimesis will be significantly transformed over the centuries, the one-to-one thinking at its core continues to shape discussions of art in classical antiquity, during the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries (after the rediscovery of antiquity during the Renaissance), and within the theoretical return to mimesis of the early twentieth through early twenty-first centuries. Mimesis, then, is a remarkably adaptable concept, but one that retains its core identity – that provided by the one-to-one schema – across its various manifestations. Mimesis has surely been Western aesthetics’ most successful conceptual “meme” – that is, an entity that has replicated itself within and across intellectual cultures with remarkable efficiency. The success of mimesis has been both a good and a bad thing. At its worst, the mimesis concept provides a restrictive template for thinking, which either closes down thought – for example, when eighteenth-century aestheticians uncritically recycle the “imitation of nature” formula ad infinitum – or invites a perverse kind of ingenuity, as philosophers of art endeavor to invent – in the realm of theory – the ideal or empirical originals that art is purported to “imitate.” For those of us writing in the twenty-first century, there is another danger: that we take up mimesis as a vague placeholder term, chosen over “representation” for its pleasingly antique ring, and use it to ward off difficult questions about the fundamental human processes that sustain artistic production and reception. On the other hand, when it functions at its best, the mimesis concept challenges us to grapple with how artistic practices – and particularly the 3 performing arts – produce meaning by making otherness present in the here-and-now. This otherness made present may come in the form of a “representation” of another time or another place, of a memory or association sparked in the mind of an observer, or of qualities of alterity summoned in the person of the artist. Over its long and varied history, the mimesis concept has both opened up and closed down avenues into these crucial areas of inquiry. Re-thinking mimesis in terms of a relationship between identity and alterity has in many ways been the most important shared concern of the various theoretical returns to the concept over the past century. Walter Benjamin imagined the human capacity to perceive and produce resemblances – even the “nonsensuous similarities” between language and experience – as “a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else.” Benjamin goes so far as to propose that “there is none of [mankind’s] higher functions in which his mimetic faculty does not play a decisive role” (Benjamin 1978:333).1 In The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer approach “mimetic behavior” as an “organic adaptation to others” that emerges from humanity’s “biological prehistory” (Adorno and Horkheimer 1972:180), but which has since been repressed by civilization’s rationalizing impulse and co-opted by fascist mass movements. Of course, the theme of the self’s adaptation to otherness is by no means an invention of early twentieth-century mimetic theory: this concern is already integral to Plato’s Republic, motivating the banishment of poetry from his ideal 1 Many of the ideas presented in “On the Mimetic Faculty” are either restated or given more extensive treatment in “Doctrine of the Similar” (also written in 1933). For example, in the latter essay, Benjamin writes that the “gift of seeing resemblances is nothing but a weak rudiment of the formerly powerful compulsion to become similar and also to behave mimetically” (Benjamin 1979:69). 4 polis and standing behind the famous discussion of mimesis as artistic image-making in Book X. Mimesis also functions as a key concept in important works of literary criticism during the twentieth century: Eric Auerbach re-thinks mimesis as a schema of figuration and fulfillment in his Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), and Paul Ricouer’s three-volume Time and Narrative (1983-85) takes Aristotle’s Poetics as its departure-point but divides mimesis into a tripartite model of narrative emplotment. In the latter half of the twentieth century, however, mimesis as a narrative principle co-exists with various conceptions of mimesis as a psychic, behavioral, or cultural phenomenon: literary theorist René Girard uses the term “mimetic desire” to describe a subject’s unconscious adoption of another’s desire for an object; feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray encourages women to “play with mimesis” (Irigaray 1985:76), taking up the performance of gendered identities to expose these as roles rather than biological norms; and postcolonial theorist Homi Bhaba examines the colonial subject’s mimicry of the colonizer as an ambivalent, subversive, and even menacing form of imitation.2 Mimetic thinking has also entered a new vogue within the social and natural sciences. Taking imitation as an operative principle of human culture (as did Aristotle), the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has coined the term “meme,” used earlier in this introduction, to describe a unit of cultural replication that reproduces ideas, beliefs, and behaviors in a fashion akin to the way genes transmit human traits across 2 See Girard’s Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961), Irigaray’s This Sex which Is Not One (1977), and Bhaba’s The Location of Culture (1984). 5 generations.3 Recent collections like Nick Chater and Susan Hurley’s Perspectives on Imitation: From Neuroscience
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