Table Of ContentThe 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 to Social Science (2005) look at imitation as a form of
brain activity, a mode of learning in children, a mechanism for behavioral contagion, and
a driver of cultural evolution. Cognitive neuroscience’s “mirror neuron” theory – which I
will touch upon in the coda to this study – speculates that a correspondence in neural
activity between observer and agent may enable us to understand the intentions and
emotions of other human subjects. The diverse efforts of the above theorists,
philosophers, and scientists suggest that the mimesis concept can still be put to
productive use – but that, in making use of it, we may need to get beyond its historical
formulations, or to excavate their neglected complexities, in order to build additional
layers of nuance on the solid but potentially reductive foundation of the one-to-one.4
Mimesis has also made a relatively recent and highly significant re-appearance on
the scene of theatre scholarship. Elin Diamond sets out to “unmake” mimesis with the
tools provided by feminist theory and Brechtian thought. The mimesis Diamond
deconstructs is, essentially, that of Plato’s Republic X: a way of seeing and knowing that
forces otherness into self-sameness.5 Martin Puchner also re-engages with Plato by
taking up the Republic’s distinction between mimesis and diegesis (“telling,” “narrative”)
in his influential account of modernist anti-theatricality, Stage Fright (2002). Graham
3 See Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene (1976).
4 The twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have also seen several historians of ideas
take a retrospective look at mimesis. See, for example, Arne Melberg’s Theories of
Mimesis (1995), Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf’s Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society
(1992), Stephen Halliwell’s The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts, Modern Problems
(2002), and Matthew Potolsky’s Mimesis (2006). The twentieth century’s many efforts to
revise mimesis have also produced a need to review these revisions – a need met by
collections like Mihai Spariosu’s Mimesis in Contemporary Theory (1984).
5 See Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on feminism and theater (London and
New York: Routledge, 1997).
6
Ley, who begins his selective survey of theatrical theory from Plato to performance
studies with classical mimetic theory, notes that the mimesis concept holds an enduring
fascination for criticism even as theory often takes the concept for granted. For Ley,
unconsidered invocations threaten to turn mimesis into a “desperately exhausted
philosophical concept” like “representation” (Ley 1999:295). Joseph Roach has very
recently made a call to renovate mimesis, asking that theater and performance scholars
take up Auerbach’s notion of the “figura” to consider how performance unfolds as a
reciprocal process of expectation and retrospection, of pre-signification and
actualization.6 Thinking about mimesis as an embodied process of “imitation by
substitution” (Roach 2010:1083) extends Roach’s influential discussion of performance
as “surrogation” in Cities of the Dead (1996).
Let us hope that Roach’s call to re-open “the question of mimesis” – rather than to
uncritically recycle mimeticist orthodoxies – will be taken up by the field of performance
studies, which has tended to view mimesis as a dangerous bugaboo. “Mimetic theater”
(Schechner 1988:63) has often been posited as the “other” that performance is not.
Under this view, cultural performance and performance art are actual, transformative, and
performative – that is, performance actually does something – while “mimetic theater”
must be content with a modus operandi of illusory re-duplication. Mimetic theater may
give its audiences some cheap thrills, but has no transformative impact on their lives or
the lives of its actors. We find an attack on mimeticism in Peggy Phelan’s Unmarked
(1993), which champions performance as a mode of “representation without
reproduction,” a “representational economy” in which “the reproduction of the Other as
6 See Joseph Roach, “Performance: The Blunders of Orpheus,” PMLA 125.4 (October
2010): 1078-86.
Description:The Meaning in Mimesis: Philosophy, Aesthetics, Acting Theory. Daniel Larlham. Theatre as mimesis, the actor as mimic: can we still think in these
