Most readers of the problem of mimesis in the Republic focus on poetry, tragedy, and painting, even while acknowledging the importance, complexity and semantic breadth of ancient Greek mousikē.24 Philological inquiry into the development of the word is often
undertaken as an attempt to account for the polysemy—or rather, dissemination—of the meanings of mimesis in the Platonic text, and especially to explain the relation between books 2, 3 and 10, of the Republic, as well as to understand the nature, reasons, and extent of Plato’s so-called “banishment of the poets” from the ideal State.25
The strategies adopted towards this aim are as varied as can be imagined, and most often rely in making historical or conceptual distinctions about the meanings of mimesis that join or divide the discussions of technē, mousikē and poiesis. Thus, for Stephen Halliwell, one of the most rigorous figures in the discussion, Plato never offers anything like a “doctrine” of
24 The classic work on music in Plato is Evanghélos Moutsopoulos, La musique dans l’œuvre de Platon; See also Edward Lippman, Musical Thought in Ancient Greece (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964). For a more recent account, see Francesco Pelosi, Plato on Music, Soul and Body, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). The relation between mimesis and music has been recently addressed in Séline Gülgönen “La Mimesis Musicale Dans Les Dialogues Platoniciens.” Phoenix 68.1/2 (2014): 97– 111.
25 The discontinuity between the opening and closing books of the Republic is a traditional theme of Platonic criticism, and any reconstruction involves a position between those who argue about continuity, and those who argue about for discontinuity; for a concise account, see Jera Marušič, “Poets and Mimesis in the Republic” in Plato and the Poets, (Pierre Destrée and Fritz-Georg Hermann, eds. Leiden and Boston; Brill, 2011). The one elaborated here draws on, but departs in crucial points to be noted below, from Halliwell, Mimesis, For a reassessment of the so-called banishment, see Stephen Halliwell, “Antidotes and Incantations: Is There a Cure for Poetry in Plato’s Republic?” in Plato and the Poets.
mimesis and all his pronunciations on the matter are to be taken as conditional, progressive elaborations on a concern which, above all, invite—and have effectively
produced—further engagement by subsequent readers.26
For Halliwell, any single statement on the matter has to be contextualized, contrasted with other similar
pronouncements that attest a concern with both the ethical and ontological gravitas of the problem of mimesis.27
Plato’s true legacy in this matter, in short, can be taken as a general demand not to take mimesis lightly. Risking to get ahead of myself, I would venture that this oversight is itself a consequence of the very terms in which our ideas of poetry and music have been programmed by the discussions from the Republic, from an especially Romantic perspective. Thus, to restore the place of music in the dialogue involves working against—without ignoring—centuries of discussions centered around the problematic ideas of “art” and “aesthetics,” a critical balancing act that is almost impossible to perform successfully, as Halliwell’s work itself shows.
If mimesis is primarily a concern with paradigms and copies, with the conditions and ontological status of what is made after something else, and of what it means that something is like something else, then it is crucial to understand what the paradigm is that is being used to understand what mimesis is in general, what it is like. It is Plato’s key strategy, the astounding artistic and philosophical feat of the Republic, to define mimesis mimetically, to exploit the resources of paradigmaticity to expose the difficulties of thinking mimesis in general.28
The logic of the paradigm inverts or interrupts the traditional logic that moves from particulars to arrive to universals (induction) or from universals to particulars
(deduction). Instead, the paradigm moves form particular to particular. For Agamben, it is not deductive knowledge but analogical, where each particular element might be taken up as a representative of the whole. What is more, the logic of the paradigm has a double ontology, or rather a topology, of inclusive exclusion: the paradigm belongs to the group
26 Halliwell, Mimesis, 38.
27 Idem.
28 I draw on the classic work on paradigmaticity in Plato, Victor Goldschmidt, Le Paradigme dans la dialectique Platonicienne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1947) as well as Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things: On Method, (New York, NY: Zone Books, 2009).
The Myth of/at the Origin(al)—Platonic Metamorphoses 73 and is separate from it at once—as exemplar. So, says Agamben, it is never possible to separate its exemplarity from its singularity. Similarly, insofar as the opposition between universals and particulars is neutralized, it suspends any dialectical attempt at sublation or subsumption of one by the other. The tension that remains, given this duplicity, is further complicated when this operation is said to be mimetic, as simultaneous singularity and exemplarity of the paradigm is further posited as a model—when it might have been just as well the copy. What mimetology does, in the end, is deciding upon this duplicity, fixing it and determining one element over the other. From a multitude of singulars, one is posited as being a model in addition to being a paradigm. This does not destroy either its singularity or exemplarity, but redistributes the relation that it has to the other
elements in the paradigmatic group, which are thus defined as copies.
In fact, there is a mimetic strategy involved in Plato’s approach to mimesis itself. Like other words in Plato’s vocabulary, mimesis has a diverse range of pre-philosophical meanings that progressively take on a technical signification in the course of the
dialogues. As with other concepts, Plato discusses mimesis using models, paradigms, to think what mimesis itself is. My first thesis here is that Plato's mimetology is a folding upon itself of mimesis, explaining mimesis with respect to a paradigm that models it, through things that are said to be mimetic. In books 2 and 3 of the Republic, where Socrates and his interlocutors are concerned with evaluating and censoring the types of myths to be used in the education of the guardians and the (mimetic) modes of telling these myths, the paradigm used to understand mimesis is mousikē, which defines mimesis as an affective contagion that works on the body and soul of listeners and performers. In book 10, when the question of mimesis returns, the paradigm is painting and the
productions of craftsmen, whose representations barely approximate the models they attempt to reproduce, while mousikē is not discussed anymore. Consequently, we get a very different concept of what mimesis is in book 10. This is not to say that there are two—or more—essential types of mimesis; rather—and this will be my second thesis— different paradigms produce different ideas of what mimesis is—different mimetologies.
This amounts to saying that the copy precedes and produces the model, and not the other way around.
This “paradigm shift”—from mousikē to the productions of demiourgs and painters—is accompanied, or perhaps based on, the movement from a “restricted” account of mimesis to a “general” one, which, in the Republic is determinant of any successive understanding of mimesis and the mimetology that aims to explain it while reducing it. Even when asking about general mimesis, the discussion is carried out only in terms of a restricted mimesis, which then passes as general. This movement is mentioned explicitly in the text: when the problem of mimesis returns in book 10, Socrates asks: “Could you tell me what imitation in general (mimesis holos) is? For I myself scarcely comprehend what it wants to be” (595c.).29
A crucial question to be asked about this passage and the answers that follow it, in my view, is why, and with what consequences, is mimesis “in general” approached through another form of mimetic production, which is restricted? And if the paradigm defines the idea, then there is a sort of contagion between paradigms and ideas: visual mimesis—a restricted mimesis—becomes mimesis “in general,” which in turn defines the performative mimesis it is supposed to replace, the former determining the latter as its opposite. As visual mimesis is presented as containing the logic of mimesis “in general,” we lose account both of the initial performative mimesis of mousikē and of the general mimesis that (un)grounds both types. General mimesis, as opposed both to restricted mimesis and to mimesis “in general,” names the economy of this contagious conceptual determination, which we encounter in Plato in the form of a mimetology that opposes being and appearance.
This is the logic that we need to understand: a restricted form of mimesis is replaced by another restricted form to elucidate what the general form of mimesis is. Yet the strategy continues to be that of using a restricted form as paradigm for the general
form. The explanation involves the logic it is trying to explain, a folding upon itself of
The Myth of/at the Origin(al)—Platonic Metamorphoses 75 mimesis, explaining mimesis with respect to a paradigm, that entirely opens its definition and exposes its excessive groundlessness.
What makes a visual paradigm better for defining what mimesis (and hence paradigmaticity) is? Why is it “more general,” or what makes the definition “general” when the paradigm is changed? What happens with this originary re-inscription of the visual into the logic of the paradigm? What consequences does this hold for mimesis, music and painting? Is it not the case that to us the reason why visual paradigms seem more appropriate to think mimesis is precisely that Plato himself made the displacement, paradigmatically defining the history of mimesis from this point on, around a visual paradigm?
The move, as Lacoue-Labarthe describes it, is a placing en abyme of the theoretical itself.30
The first move, he says, consists in asking not “who is the mimetician” (as is done in the Sophist, to surprising results), but rather a purely theoretical question: “what is mimesis, in general.” Asking this “theoretical” question means defining mimesis “according to the old habits,” in terms of what is seen and what is not seen, of what appears and of what does not appear, in short, within the visible realm, within the realm of theory.31
Once this is done—which is in fact just the preparation of the turn (the pre- turn)—once one restricts “general” mimesis to the theoretical, that is, the visual, the rest follows easily: The real turn, for Lacoue-Labarthe, consists precisely in redoubling the operation, placing the theoretical en abyme. Socrates’ suggestion is fantastic (and highly ironic): one can fabricate ideas.
“It’s not hard,” I said. “You could fabricate them quickly in many ways and most quickly, of course, if you are willing to take a mirror and carry it around
everywhere; quickly you will make the sun and the things in the heaven; quickly the earth; and quickly, yourself and the other animals and implements and plants and everything else that was just mentioned” (596d).
30 Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography, 92. Halliwell, on his part, says that “the mirror analogy stands for the threat, not the final assertion, of a reductive conception of visual mimesis.”. The Aesthetics of Mimesis, 139.
As Lacoue-Labarthe says, this is not just any mirror, it is a false mirror or a two-way mirror. What the mirror shows, first and foremost, is not what it reflects (the ideas it creates) but what the mimetician is presumed to do. The mimetician has become perfectly visible. That is, his operation, his “work,” has been revealed to be as working in and with the visible. It is indeed a magical trick by Socrates the sorcerer. The mirror, moreover, is an apotropaic object: just as it turns the medusa into stone, it immobilizes the mimetician, turns him into an image of himself (or the inverse, perhaps, animating him, turning him into a puppet. In any case, it is a turn or trick (they are same in French) of conjuring and illusionism: theorization, Lacoue-Labarthe says, is a thaumaturgy, but one in which the illusionist himself is the victim. If the mimetician is said to be an illusionist himself, this mirror is “an anti-thaumaturgic thaumaturgy (a mise-en-abyme that neutralizes the mirror) destined to contain the thaumaturge.”32
The trope of the mirror consists in revealing that mimesis rests in simply turning a mirror around, a play of mirrors, and therefore nothing.
This latter would consist in doing everything without doing anything, in
pretending to know how to do everything when one does not work and is content to imitate or ‘double’ (or, in the language of the theater, stellvertretung) the one who does something by fraudulently substituting oneself for him and by using, in order ‘to produce the illusion,’ a material that lends itself to this in advance (or that others have already prepared in advance) and that one need only divert from its own proper use, or use generally and improperly. In the face of the
Unheimliche, theimproper-mastery becomes possible only by taking it still further, by outdoing it with the Unheimliche. This is what speculation is.33
32 Idem., 94. Lacoue-Labarthe’s reading of this passage occurs during his questioning of Heidegger’s ontotypology in the 1936 lectures on Nieztsche, where Heidegger turns to the Republic to demonstrate how Nietzsche failed to accomplish the overturning of Platonism. Lacoue-Labarthe, on his part, questions whether Heidegger was able to overcome Plato’s mimetology and did not reaffirm it instead. Although I cannot reconstruct his demonstration here, Lacoue-Labarthe shows that one crucial omission in both Plato and Heidegger’s reading is precisely the problem of work—which Heidegger reinscribes as pro-duction, her-stellen, as his way of “dealing with Marx”) as if “it was a question to prevent worker from being heard within “demiurge”; that is to say, as we will see in a moment, a problematic of work within the question of poiesis and mimesis.” Idem., 83.
The Myth of/at the Origin(al)—Platonic Metamorphoses 77 But there is another turn that concerns us. What happens to the definition of music, or
mousikē, when it is used to define mimesis and is defined by mimesis in turn? That Plato does not take up the relation of mousikē and mimesis “in general” at the end of the
Republic is a telling symptom of the pervasiveness of the abyssal logic of mimesis. Should we assume that everything that is said about mimesis in book 10 applies
retrospectively to book 3? In it the case, as it often is with concepts in the Republic and other dialogues, we would be tempted to reread the opening with respect to what has been accomplished in the end. We could read back the ontological arguments about mimesis into the legislation that organizes the disposition of mousikē in the polis and that disposes of poets, modes and rhythms. Why is this task left for the reader? Are the consequences of this rereading necessary and univocal?
This is the logic, rather the magic, of contagion that un-grounds mimesis:
whatever is used as paradigm to define mimesis ends up itself being defined mimetically. Plato’s strategy consists in out-doing mimesis by assigning to mimesis the means of specularization (“the trick of the mirror”), by reducing mimesis to a “theoretical” practice that operates on the visible. From here on, mimesis is defined as re-presentation,
reproduction, imitation, and so on. There is no escape from this. But this epistemic epidemic continues: since there is no origin, no original definition, either of mousikē or mimesis, then the (restricted) visual paradigm that defines mimesis “in general” folds back to define mousikē as well. We lose any account of the “original” meaning of
mousikē, we cease to be able to talk about mousikē without defining it with respect to this mimesis “in general” which is visual.
There are broader consequences, since with the Republic we are not talking simply about mousikē—or painting or poetry—as artistic forms that correspond to a specific sensorial field (for lack of a better word for aisthesis). Rather, we attend to a re- definition of the sensorium in general, to what it means for something to be sensible, as opposed to the intelligible, and with respect to differences between sensorial fields, between the visible and the audible etc. Mimesis is involved in the description and prescription of our modes of hearing and seeing, seeing and touching, touching and
hearing, the hierarchy and relations between them, as much as it uses our aesthetic experience of them (in music or painting) to define mimesis itself.