Mimesis on the Move: Theodor W. Adorno's Concept of Imitation

204 Pages·1990·5.554 MB·English

by  Karla L. Schultz

Karla L. Schultz
Mimesis on the Move
Theodor W. Adorno’s Concept
of Imitation
PETER LANG
Berne • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Paris
/ ?/ ?/ CIP-Titelaufnahroe der Deutsches BibUothek
Schultz, Karla L.:
* r j ^ (^/ Mimesis on the move: Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of
imitation / Karla L. Schultz. - Berne; Frankfurt am Main;
^ New York; Paris: Lang, 1990
~ - (New York University Ottendorfer series; N.F., Bd. 36)
r> S) ISBN 3-261-04208-7
)
/ NE: New York University: New York University ...
© Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., Berne 1990
All rights reserved.
Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as
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5 1
( %
For Nani andNico,
my young mother and son

Table of Contents
Introduction i
Notes 9
L From E nactm ent to Aggression: Five H istorical Scenarios 15
The Argument 17
The Perspective 22
Rationality’s Double Agent 25
Preparing the Stage 28
First Scenario: The Sorcerer and the Demon 29
Second Scenario: The Hero and His Gods 31
Third Scenario: The Libertine and Nature 35
The Contemporary Results 41
Fourth Scenario: The Consumer and His Goods 42
Fifth Scenario: The Nazi and His Jew 47
Types and Tbpoi 51
Notes 53
II. Homer and Sade: Desire For the Other 6i
Odysseus’ Travels 63
The Defeat of the Sirens 65
The Land of Idle Dreams 67
One-eyed Polyphemus 69
Circe’s Magic 71
The Visit to Hades 75
Form as Remembrance 77
The Tbrtures of the Libertine 79
Juliette and Justine 82
Perverse Love for the Other 87
The Sadian Tableau 90
Notes 92
III. H O ld erlin an d B eck ett: From Song to S ilence 97
Ontology’s Abuse of HOlderlin 99
The Language of Separation 105
“Der Einzige” 108
Language as Song 110
The Grammar of Utopia 114
Endgame 118
Making Sense of Non-Sense 119
The Communication Game 122
Language at a Standstill 128
The Polemics of Silence 133
Notes 136
IV. E ro s O bjectified: A d o rn o ’s A esth etic T h eo ry 143
The Pleasure of the Tfext 144
In Pursuit of the Fragment 149
Punctuation 153
Of Names and Titles 158
For the Love of Words 161
Asthetische Theorie 167
The Form of the Content 169
The Content of the Form 171
Memory Tteces 174
The Image as a Model 178
Notes 182
Works Cited 187
I
ntroduction
These petrified conditions must be made
to dance by singing to them their own melody.
Karl Marx1
What does mimesis, the art of imitation, imitate? Does it mime
or make present, reveal or conceal, lie or speak true, reflect or
detect? Is it basic or incidental, spontaneous or contrived? Is it farce
or force, ploy or play? Is it anything at all?
These and similar questions run through the history of Western
aesthetics and continue to be raised today. The present study
concentrates on the response given by the philosopher and theorist
of modernism, Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969), a response that
contains the vicissitudes and vitality of the phenomenon in a multi­
dimensional concept. We will situate it first.
The mimesis of the artist, Plato warns in his Republic, is fraught
with danger for the well-governed state. It is misleading and in fact /'
superfluous. The identifications it invites through dramatization
undermine the moral education of the young, and the likenesses it
produces through depiction represent nothing but mere appear­
ances. Artistic imitation is thrice removed from the truth of eternal
forms, which is perceived conceptually by philosophy, obscurely
present to the senses in matter, and even more obscurely repres­
ented by art. A copy of a copy, it is distra£tiy£-at best, subversive
2 Mimesis on the Move
at worst, because it “awakens and nourishes and strengthens the
feelings and impairs the reason.”2 Its main perpetrators, the poets,
are liars. They««teet!ra“besbanned to the outskirts of the city.
[ His pup^Aristotle’sijwre integrative philosophy defines mimesis
as man’s prodtietive^mitation of nature’s creativeness. His artistic
making of things by means of color, shape, rhythm, speech and
melody expresses a drive that is natural to him, “is implanted in man
from childhood . . . being that he is the most imitative of living
creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons.”3 Mimesis
is both natural and artful, generative and dependent. Its result is
not truth but plausibility.
These two ancient authorities on the concept represent opposing
i albeit related views. Mimesis-as-imitation stresses its derivative,
; secondary aspect in regard to an original, which in Plato’s case are
eternal forms, while mimesis-as-production emphasizes its means and
craft. It is a species-specific technique in regard to a model, the
I ways of nature. One alludes to the idea of (ultimately useless)
•. repetition contained in the prefix of the word we traditionally use,
j representation, the other implies an empathic kind of making
I associated with the word’s body: presence.
Much debated, the notion of imitation gained or lost currency
depending on contemporaneous metaphysics. It gained in classicist
theories upholding a universal truth to which art works, through
symbolic representation, allegedly aspire; and it lost in romantic ones
attached to a relative truth, which the work (or process) of art
supposedly incorporates. Conversely, the notion of production was
less favored by a world view sure of being directly connected to
Truth than by a view unsure of such linkage.4
Twentieth century debates address mimesis in terms of art’s
realism, itself a controversial term, as the argument over expression­
ism during the Thirties demonstrates.5 The Fifties and Sixties gave
the word renewed currency. Erich Aueihach!s-3/im«is (1946), a
humanist study of “the interpretation of reality through literary
representation or ‘imitation,’”6 holds that figurative language accu­
rately captures the everyday human condition. It conveys historical
truth without needing to be legitimized by a metaphysical referent.
Introduction 3
Similarly, though from a different ideological position, Georg
Luk£cs, in Die Eigenart des Asthetischen (1963),7 conceives of mime-
sis as the aesthetic endeavor to incorporate the typical in concrete
and sensuous form. Mimetic reflection (Widerspiegelung) makes the
objective world present not only in its social totality but also as it
appears to the senses directly. Both attribute to mimesis a truth-*1
✓
revealing function. Neither queries its literary medium, asks “how I
/th e sheer fact of reproducing the world as sign, the world as lan-
( guage, may expose and call into question precisely those conven-
v tions meant to systematize and objectify representation.”®
This question has been at the center of the post-modernist
debate. Current post-structuralist discussions of mimesis focus on its
implications of hierarchy, the uneven relationship between original
and copy, model and reproduction that is inscribed in the concept.
In the spirit of deconstruction the very term, its doubleness and
elusiveness, is problematized:
Although it has variously been translated as imitation, representation,
reproduction, resemblance, identification, simulation, mimicry, analogy, it is
J
also inextricably involved with presentation/presencing, production, appropri­
ation, the original, the model and the authentic. And ultimately it overflows
all these concepts and remains untranslatable, “foreign,” ^appropriable.9
In particular Jacques Derrida makes “mimesis” an undecidable
term. As the in-between posted between literature and philosophy,
the go-between commissioned to guard the split between meta­
phorical and conceptual language, mimesis is neither true nor false,
good nor bad but an intriguing, powerful device to install one thing
(truth/fiction) to disinstall the other (fiction/truth). It flickers be­
tween word and meaning, plays signifier against signified witjiout }
being anything but ambivalent ploy in a system of difference^.10 {
This view of the world as a play of textual strategies and tactics
unsettles the truth-notions of referentiality and plausibility attributed A
to mimesis. It signals a crisis of representatior^^f_“shcwin g, ” makingV
sense of reality of/many form
One response to the crisis is Rene Girard’s concept of_acquis[1 i
tive/antaponistic mimf^i* F ic anthropological theory foregrounds the r
4 Mimesis on the Move
aggressive behavior of mimetic identification, which reaches for the
object (truth) impelled by violent competition and contest. It in fact
determines “truth,” is an instinct anterior to representation. It
makes for (and thus can undo) the coherence of cultural systems
through a rivalry of desires directed at a scapegoat: “The represen­
tations that describe an episode of collective violence taking place
I at the height of a social crisis are made more rather than less
trustworthy for being juxtaposed to the most fantastic accusations
against the victims.”11 For Girard, the competition of and within
texts exceeds the problematics of signification. As the fiction of a
real event, representation points toward the extra-textual truth of
victimage—of which Christ’s passion is the exemplary instant. By
attaching ourselves to this figure in an imitatio Christi, conflictual
mimetic desire will turn into its opposite: cooperative, non-violent
love.
Ultimately, the entire history of the concept of mimesis revolves
around the form and meaning of the artful text in relation to actual
“raw” experience: whether and how it misleads or prefigures, wheth­
er it has/can have any meaning at all. The artistry of mimesis is
undisputed—but is it instinctual or rational, desirous or cognitive,
mobile or fixed? Pre-Platonic uses of the verb mimesthai, from
'which mimesis derives, seem to suggest mocking, bodily perform­
ances that congeal, with the advent of nominal language, into fixed
representations:
mimesthai seems to denote originally a “miming” or mimicking of a person
or animal by means of voice and/or gesture ... Out of this primaiy idiom,
whose vigor we still find unimpaired in Aristophanes, there developed a
second, more colorless one: to “imitate” another person in general, to do
as or what he does. At the same time or not much later, and particularly
in the secondary derivative mimema, the concept of mimicry was trans­
ferred to material “images”: pictures, statues, and the like.12
This trajectory from the dynamic to the inscribed character of
the mimetic appears historicized in Adorno’s work. His theory of
mimesis, which permeates his writings yet is nowhere (and for good
reason) systematically articulated, is the most provocative yet. Subtle