Since the beginning of history humans have attempted to represent nature and culture through mimesis. This article focuses on the teleologicalaspects of mimesis and offers a different perspective that transcends the notion of sustainability into an eco-humanistic metamorphosis of culture and nature.Drawing from semiotics, phenomenology and architectural design the article challenges the polarization of mimetic representations of nature and culture,which are inclusive and homomorphic phenomena, and offers insight into the mutual mimesis of nature and culture. Two different empirical observationssubstantiate the (...) theoretical perspective: 1) a tradition advanced by the Egyptians’ stylization of visual representations of the mimicry of nature and culture; and 2) acurrent architectural design activity that integrates the mimesis of nature and culture. The article makes the case for a theoretical approach that integratesmimetic principles in creating a sustainable environment and an authentic ecoliving. The article concludes with ethical implications on the way we perceive themutual resemblances in nature and culture, and on our semiotic understanding of the teleological aspects of mimesis. (shrink)

Summary The movement of repetition is irrevocably linked to the constitution of the human body and is therefore a human condition. The process of hominisation makes this clear. In the body of Homo sapiens and in his movements a connection between nature and culture is created. The movement of repetition is of central importance. Repetition is essential for the evolution of Homo sapiens, the development of communities and individuals. Repetitions are mimetic; they lead to productive imitations in which new elements (...) and events also emerge. Mimetic movements and the repetitive aspects they contain open up the historical and cultural world to people. Repetitions in rituals lead to the acquisition of an implicit silent practical body knowledge. The emotions arising in mimetic processes are movements through which an orientation in the world takes place. The imaginations based on the eccentricity of the human being and on movements of repetition contribute to the development of a collective and individual imaginary. (shrink)

To a great extent, cultural learning is mimetic learning, which is at the center of many processes of education, self-education, and human development. It is directed towards other people, social communities and cultural heritages and ensures that they are kept alive. Mimetic learning is a sensory, body-based form of learning in which images, schemas and movements needed to perform actions are learned. This embodiment is responsible for the lasting effects that play an important role in all social and cultural fields. (...) A mimetic process creates both similarities and differences to the situations or persons to which or whom they relate. By participating in the living practices of other people, humans expand their own life-worlds and create for themselves new ways of experiencing and acting. Receptivity and activity overlap. In all areas of human existence rituals and gestures are important for the mimetic development of body knowledge. Embodied knowledge is indispensable in religion, politics, economy, science, families, and education. It helps us to deal with difference and alterity and to create a sense of community and social relationships. It also enables us to assign meaning and structure to human relations. Ritual knowledge facilitates both continuity and change, as well as experiences of transition and transcendence. (shrink)

Translated Felicia McCarren. Stanford: Stanford UP and Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995 (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics series). Pages: xxiii + 161. Pb: 0 8047 2385 0; 10.95. Hb: 0 8047 2376 I; 25.00. Originally published in French as Musica Ficta (Figures de Wagner). Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1991.

One of the main characteristics of the contemporary aesthetic debate is the recovery of the concept of mimesis, as a dimension that is originally involved in the foundation of human culture and the processes of cultural learning. This is evident in the aesthetic reflection developed by Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf. For these two authors, mimesis is never a mere reproduction of the given reality, but always 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, Gebauer and Wulf underline the constitutive ambivalence of the notion of mimesis: on the 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 can counter “instrumental reason” and the primacy of identity. (shrink)

Building upon a recent call to renew actor-network theory (ANT) for educational research, this article reconsiders relations between technology and educational theory. Taking cues from actor-network theorists, this discussion considers the technologically-mediated networks in which learning actors are situated, acted upon, and acting, and traces the novel positions of creative capacity and participation that emerging media may enable. Whereas traditional theories of educational technology tend to focus on the harmonization of new technologies with extant curricular goals and educational practices, an (...) educational theory of technology looks to novel forms of technologically-mediated learning experience—from production pedagogies to role play in the virtual—to make visible the surprising relations, techniques, and opportunities that emerging media, and their attendant social contexts, may offer educational research. (shrink)

Children’s lived experiences of movement indicate possibilities for teaching them to be at home in increasingly challenging domains of activity. Especially significant are movements that reflect landscape connection, that carry an intention not confined to individual purpose, and that are enhanced by observational glance. The first rush of movement is described phenomenologically as an essential feature of these movements and of the vital consciousness they engender. The phenomenon of the first rush of movement attests to a mimetic impulse towards otherness (...) that overrides personal motive and moderates an otherwise containing gaze. Its intentionality is evident in an extended, inclusive and progressive range of human movements that affirm a natural, intimate relation with others and the world at large. The embrace, caress and kiss are described as primary, elemental gestures from which movement disciplines sustaining the first rush of moment and its mimetic impulse can be cultivated. Accordingly, this study prefaces a practice of education in which children’s movements, originating in responsiveness to landscape and motivated by a mimetic impulse, can be guided towards enhanced and sustaining world relations. Vital qualities of movement can be sustained from childhood to adulthood and from the most rudimentary contacts with the world to the most refined, skill-based encounters. (shrink)

Adorno and Benjamin offer us an aesthetic concept, that of aura. The analysis of this has tended to circumnavigate the concept, that is, it has examined the historical dimension to aura, or turned to the texts of Adorno and Benjamin with a view to finding discrepancies between their theses. However, the important conceptual detail has not been explored with suf ficient rigour. My question is a simple one: what is aura? How do we piece together its various features such as (...) 'a feeling of distance', 'pointing beyond a work's givenness' and 'a capacity to look back'? I provide a more in-depth and thoroughgoing analysis of these qualities and their interrelation than has so far been offered. I also argue for the relevance of aura to modernity. Key Words: Adorno • . aesthetic • . aura • . Benjamin • . indeterminacy • . modernity. (shrink)

How can citizens construct the political authority under which they will live? I argue that Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) answers this question concerning the constitutive power of political and normative agency by employing four dimensions of mimesis from the Greek and Roman traditions. And I argue that mimesis accounts for the know-how, or power/knowledge, the general ‘man’ draws upon in constructing the commonwealth. Hobbes revalues poetic mimesis through his stylistic decisions, including the invitation to the reader to read ‘himself’ in (...) the portrait of the general man depicted in the text. Hobbes aims for Leviathan to change the ethical dispositions of its readers, turning them from bad to good men as they witness the general man undergoing this ethical transformation in the transition from the state of nature to the civil state. He emphasizes the anthropological dimension of mimesis to explain political disorder since he argues that men assess the honor others attribute them by observing signs and gestures in others’ behavior. Hobbes employs the linguistic dimension of mimesis to describe how men acting as agents can build a normative consensus out of the state of nature. This article positions mimesis as a key term for understanding the intersection between aesthetics and politics before the term ‘aesthetics’ came into parlance. (shrink)

This paper contends, following Plato and Broekman, that seeing images as images is crucial to theorizing medicine and that considering clinical pictures as images of images is a much-needed epistemic complement to the domineering view that sees clinical pictures as mirrors of disease. This does not only offer epistemic, but also ethical benefits to individual patients, especially in those cases where patients suffer from chronic, debilitating, and terminal illnesses and where medicine provides no, or limited, answers in terms of treatment, (...) intervention, and meaning. By creating room for a theory of clinical pictures that rightfully emphasizes its pictorial nature, patients and doctors alike may be encouraged to consider under what authorship, and with which epistemic tools, alternative, supplemental images may be produced to get at the existential reality of disease and suffering. Ultimately, this paper argues that the epistemic tools provided by aesthetics may offer such glimpses into the reality of disease and suffering, and I conclude by discussing a few artistic renditions of breast cancer to illustrate my point. (shrink)

Through the study of Richard Gruneau and Gunter Gebauer’s respective works, this article examines the social significance and theoretical implications of sport’s capacity to represent social life in a theatrical manner. The drama-like images and representations sporting practices produce, institutions codify, and television programs enhance is considered in relation to ideology’s integrative, legitimating, and distorting functions . Acknowledging the filiations of ‘theatre’ with ‘theory’ – both words stand for ‘to contemplate, to see, to observe’ – this study considers theatricality as (...) a valuable theoretical notion that enables a synthetic and reflexive understanding of athletic practices’ bodily dimension, symbolic representations, and institutional determinants. (shrink)

This chapter argues that the human, all too human vulnerability to mimesis (imitation) is a central and so far underdiagnosed element internal to the Covid-19 pandemic crisis. Supplementing medical accounts of viral contagion, the chapter develops a genealogy of the concept of mimesis – from antiquity to modernity to the present – that is attentive to both its pathological and therapeutic properties. If an awareness of the pathological side of mimetic contagion is constitutive of the origins of philosophy, in Plato’s (...) Republic, and crowd psychology called attention to the mirroring dynamic of affective contagion among crowds and publics in the modern period, the Covid-19 pandemic crisis highlights the pathological implications of hypermimetic conspiracies reloaded by new media, while also revealing the human ability to develop therapeutic patho-logies – that is, critical discourses (or logoi), on the contagious dynamic of mimetic pathos. Like a Janus-faced mirror, then, this genealogy of homo mimeticus calls attention to both the contemporary dangers of affective contagion and to the urgency of transformations or metamorphosis to counter future pandemic and environmental threats that loom large in the Anthropocene. (shrink)

This article revisits the case of Woody Allen’s mockumentary Zelig via Friedrich Nietzsche’s diagnostic of mimicry in The Gay Science. It argues that the case of the “human chameleon” remains contemporary for both philosophical and political reasons. On the philosophical side, I argue that the case of Zelig challenges an autonomous conception of the subject based on rational self-sufficiency by proposing a relational conception of the subject open to mimetic influences that will have to await the discovery of mirror neurons (...) in the 1990s in order to find an empirical confirmation. On the political side, I say that Zelig foregrounds the power of authoritarian leaders in the 1930s to cast a spell on both imitative crowds and publics in terms that provide a mimetic supplement to Hannah Arendt’s account of the “banality of evil”. The philosophical purchase of Zelig’s cinematic dramatization of a mimetic subject is that it reveals how the “inability to think” characteristic of the case of Eichmann rests on unnoticed affective principles constitutive of the all-too-human penchant for “mimicry” the film dramatises. Thus reframed, the human chameleon reflects the dangers of mimetic dispossessions that reached massive proportions in the past century and continue to cast a shadow on the present century. (shrink)

This article engages the considerations of imagination in Kierkegaard and Ricoeur to argue for a moral dimension of the imagination and its objects. Imaginary objects are taken to be mental representations in images and narratives of people or courses of action that are not real in the sense that they are not actual, or have not yet happened. Three claims are made in the article. First, by drawing on the category of possibility, a conceptual distinction is established between imagination and (...) fantasy, (1) I claim that imagination has a moral dimension because it is engaged in considering real-life possibilities. Second, (2) drawing on Kierkegaard and Ricoeur, it is argued that mental representations of selfhood in imagination have a moral dimension because they essentially allow people to understand the development of agency in human selfhood by means of representations of would-be selves and narrative figurations of the self. Third, (3) mental representations of human selves have a moral dimension because they form important points of reference for moral orientations in the field of human praxis (moral pointers). (shrink)

The viscerally Freudian elements of Adorno's use of the concept of mimesis interweave with readings of Kafka in which certain thoughts about childhood play an important role. The first section of this article links biological mimicry with critical theory and art: both mimic what they criticize, while also conserving a repressed and childlike mimetic relationship with otherness and sexual difference. Adorno criticizes both the civilized repression of the mimetic impulse and its subsequently distorted return, a dialectic neglected by direct appeals (...) to mimesis. Good art tries to extricate itself from these distortions. Conversely, the second section of this article explores Adorno's suggestion that fascistic psychology is a refuge for a twisted mimesis of mimesis, which gratifies the worst side of repressed nature while ideologically appealing to the best. Anti-Semitic humour shows how the fascist mimics his own aggressive fantasy of natural law, while secretly envying the closeness to nature he thinks he detects in other races. The final section uses Freud's theories on sympathetic and sadistic comedy to unpack Adorno's readings of Kafka and Mörike. Adorno's critical recuperation of mimetically childlike moments of ridiculousness in art clarifies his differentiation of the varieties of mimesis, as well as countering the gloomy stereotype of the humourless intellectual. But the black side of Adorno's use of laughter dialectically maintains his commitment to painfully remembering the victims of history. (shrink)

This essay defends that mimesis is an inherently agonistic and paradoxical human practice. The divergent views on mimesis by Plato and Aristotle, as well as by Adorno and Benjamin, are the philosophical manifestation of an agonistic tension of human mimesis that is not resolved in the exclusive truth of one of the positions, but remains as a permanent possibility to create alternative paths in history.

Nowadays, although our aesthetic ideas are based on modern theories and perspectives that have pervaded the art, the root of western tradition of art dates back to Greek and Roman art tradition. Theory of form in art tries to emphasize the materiality of artistic object, though in later theories, it has been more flexible and proposes issues such as content and function, as well as attributing concepts such as composition, color, technique etc. to the artwork. Plato by proposing mimesis theory (...) and expanding its scope considered a pattern and framework for attitudes and thoughts in static arts such as painting, literature and dynamic performance arts such as drama and music, and managed to regulate and organize them. For Plato, in this process, ēthos functions as a determinant factor. This present study is an attempt to discuss this question with descriptive-analytical approach: “will artistic form in Plato's theories be important after proposing the representational attitude toward art?” The results demonstrated that Plato's samples of beauty, in addition to descriptions and implications about the features of artistic form in some conversations can be considered equal to artistic form and due to the reflective theory in its revolution process, artistic form development into transcendence ethical form. (shrink)

Excavates the experiential structure of Habermas’s communicative action.

_Excavates the experiential structure of Habermas’s communicative action._.

The special issue Doing Memory, Doing Identity: Politics of the Everyday in Contemporary Global Communities draws on anthropological theory, performance studies, feminism, post-colonial studies and other theoretical traditions for an insightful examination of the everyday practices of doing memory. A series of ethnographies and qualitative studies from locations as diverse as Italy, Norway, Greece, France, Brazil and China complement profound theoretical analyses to investigate the multiple links between individual and collective pasts, futures and identities, especially focusing on emotions, embodiment, the (...) senses, difference and power relations. Taking a critical stance in regard to current social-scientific and socio-political debates, this special issue reflects on the political and ethical aspects of day-to-day memory practices and examines issues related to identity, imagination and otherness. (shrink)

Music theory has to reinvent itself. Century-long paradigms have to be revisited, and recent terminologies and concepts coming from other fields of music have to find room within the traditional frameworks, particularly in connection with electronic music. In this work, I make an attempt at depicting a framework that might turn useful to further advancements in music theory, by representing the relation between electroacoustic and traditional musics within a scenario dominated by the Philosophy of Language. The Philosophy of Language is (...) herein proposed as a possible philosophical asset to counterbalance some limits of Phenomenology, which has dominated the field of electroacoustic music since its appearance. Within this scenario, the work suggests the notions of "mimesis" and "cadence" as two valid terms to help creating a common ground between the two genres, discussing them in detail and proposing new interpretations for both concepts. (shrink)