Mimesis, Rationality, and Dialectical Image

Mimesis is an ancient concept that has had plenty of time over the last two millennia to accumulate contradictory meanings. The aim of this introductory paper is twofold. In Part 1, which is very brief, I identify the main historical differences that still surround the concept – that is, Platonic notions of imitation, copying, and representation of a world of absolute ideas, contrasted with Aristotelian notions of mimesis as poiesis, metaphor and praxis. Part 2 focuses on the Aristotelian position – that is, mimesis as characterized by mime, mimicking and “identifying with” fundamental to creating something that was not there before. It is this position that comes to the fore in the work of Adorno and Benjamin, and others like Caillois and Ricoeur. Seen in this context the concept can be regarded as an embodied impulse, a pre-rational subjective mode of behaviour that seeks affinities with the objective world and desires to re-enact its processes, albeit non-conceptually. This raises the question of how to understand mimesis in the context of music as a non-representational and non-conceptual art, and leads to a consideration of Adorno’s case for a dialectical relationship between mimesis and rationality in the creation of music. This also involves a discussion of Adorno’s concepts of musical form, performance, expression, and dialectical image.