I am currently using my stay at home time during the Covid-19 pandemic to do some reading. At the moment I am working through the Adorno on Mimesis in Aesthetic Theory article by Amresh Sinha at the School of Visual Arts in New York, plus other texts in relation to this subject matter that I have come across whilst writing this blog post. The photos of the sculpture trail on Granite Island in this post link back to this earlier post. This reading is research for an essay for the third road-trip section of the Bowden Archive and Other Marginalia book that I am currently working on.
The essay is a defence of realism at a time when the anti-naturalist cast of much modern aesthetics (eg., modernism and postmodernism) was the dominant aesthetic in the art institution. Since the Bowden photos are part of a realistic aesthetic I have been looking for a way around the modernist/postmodernist reduction of realism to a simple copy, reflection or mirroring of reality, and the subsequent dismissal of realism as an outmoded, obsolete aesthetic. A realist aesthetic also underpins photographs of nature in its different forms which have also been sidelined by the art institution.
Mimesis in relation to art or aesthetics is a difficult concept to grasp as well as being an elusive one. It is a concept that I have struggled to understand with respect to expression in modern art. Traditionally ( ie., in Plato's Republic) mimesis has been used to describe the relation between an original object and a representation that attempts to imitate that original, and in doing so produces a kind of pseudo-reality--a mirage (a counterfeit reality) that may deceive. I understood that mimesis refers to a “cognitivist” account of art that was coupled to classical ideals of truth-telling, which in modernity had been replaced by romantic concerns with self-expression and originality, which underpinned the American style formalist modernism celebrated by the Museum of Modern Art in the 1970s-1990s.
What I have grasped so far is that the root of mimesis is imitation (of nature as object) and artistic representation, and that it refers to a tactile experience of the world. Aristotle rejects the Platonic conception of mimetic transparency, and in his Poetics mimesis is held to be a fundamental expression of our human experience within the world. Aristotle links it to children’s mimetic behavior (make-believe or play-acting) and to animals. Mimesis is a natural human propensity toward imaginative enactment of hypothetical realities, with a concomitant pleasure in learning and understanding from mimetic activity.
Rather than being imitation in the sense of a copy, mimesis has a productive dimension (poiesis).The notion of mimesis interpreted as poiesis—as a world-creating activity, opens up the possibilities of the real within the imaginary. Mimesis is a way of doin,- a bringing forth of actions, a bringing to light, bring forth a creative action that is unified within itself. Images, poetically arranged, generate and open up a sense or experience of a world. Moreover, it is in poetic structures, not in their authors, that Aristotle locates the cognitive value of poetry, whilst his concept of mimesis, in the
Poetics and elsewhere, entails the interlocking functioning of
three elements— pleasure, understanding, and emotion.
This interpretation shows us that the traditional interpretations of mimesis along Platonic lines as imitation, representation, copying, similarity, resemblance, etc. (mimesis as simply mirroring reality)
are insufficient on their own for a full and relevant understanding of mimesis. Mimesis in art is not only a "world-reflecting" function but a "world-creating" one. Works of art have a “dual focus,” both as created objects/artefacts in their own right and as images of the patterns of possible realities. Mimesis requires the preexisting intelligibility of action and fife in the world: mimetic art may extend and reshape understanding, but it starts from and depends upon already given possibilities and forms of meaning in our perceptions of the human world. Yet that does not imply, to reiterate an earlier point, that mimetic significance duplicates or mimics the nature of the social world.
In their
Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno and Horkheimer give a historical account of mimesis. They argue that the earliest archaic forms or models of mimesis were mimicry (eg., animals adapting to their surroundings with the intent to deceive or delude their pursuer as a means of survival; and then magic in which the identification with an aggressor (i.e. the witch doctor's identification with the wild animal) results in an immunization - an elimination of danger and the possibility of annihilation.
In the industrial phase of capitalist modernity Adorno and Horkheimer place mimesis in art in opposition to an instrumental rationality that controls nature to
ensure human survival or self preservation. Instrumental reason is understood to be opposed to mimesis itself. Mimesis in Western modernity becomes a repressed, irrational presence--- one that yields to nature (as opposed to the impulse of Enlightenment science which seeks to dominate nature) to the extent that the subject loses itself and sinks into the surrounding world. This conception of mimesis becomes an outmoded pre-historical relic.
Adorno and Horkheimer go on to argue in the Dialectic of Enlightenment that though mimesis in modernity has been transformed by Enlightenment science from a dominant presence into a distorted, repressed, and hidden force, artworks still provide modernity with a possibility to revise or neutralize the domination of nature. This possibility is in the sense that art provides a "refuge for mimetic behaviour". Though the non-conceptual art work is seen as self-contained, incomplete, mute, puzzle-like, and enigmatic, it is deemed to be a form of knowledge, and to that extent as rational.
In the latter
Aesthetic Theory Adorno argues that art is not a refuge for mimesis simply because it does not contain reason; the social/cultural order of late modernity in which art is found assigns to art a privileged sphere in which self-preservation is not immediately pressed as a task. In other words, indolence and behavior that seems irrational is actively socially encouraged in the aesthetic. Mimesis “takes refuge” in the artwork, as it is the one of the sole regions of the social totality in which self-preservation, instrumental reason and total conceptual abstraction is relaxed. However, art serves as a refuge for mimesis only so long as it is prized by the social order as a non-instrumentalized domain. The increasing encroachment of the commodity form into the art-world would therefore on Adorno’s account, increasingly shut-down the critical, mimetic aspect of the artwork.
What I initially found of value in Sinha's paper is the relation between mimesis and subjectivity in aesthetics in that the mimetic moment is not to be found in the artist's intention, mood or subjectivity. Sinha says that for Adorno the mimetic moment in art (which is usually music and literature for Adorno) does not reflect the mood of the artist: it is not a replica or a fuzzy photo of the psychic content. Sinha says that Adorno's theory of mimesis gives precedence to the non-significative character of language over the significative or communicative aspect. The former, or non-significant character of language (the language of expression) refers to mimesis in the sense of artworks as the embodiment of the mimetic impulse.
What is embodied is a kind of knowledge that recalls a state of existence prior to the dichotomy of the subject/object in modernity (eg., in Descartes). This act of recollection acts to negate the influence and shape of the subject/object duality and instrumental rationality. conflict now plays itself out is the structure of the work of art, in the tension between mimesis and rationality, expression and construction, as the immanent dialectic of the material.
