Mimesis/Anti-Mimesis
Mimesis: Representation and Aesthetics;
Rituality, the Beautiful and the Sublime;
Performativity and Architecture.
Peter Nesteruk
Mimesis/Anti-Mimesis:
Architecture, the Beautiful and the
Sublime
Contents:
1) Mimesis I (Definitions…).
2) Mimesis II (A
Beautiful Mimesis /Mimesis of the Sublime).
3) Mimesis III (Poetics
& Politics).
4) Anti-Mimesis I
(Architecture and Mimesis).
5) Anti-Mimesis II
(The Promise of Architecture/Architecture’s Promise).
6) Anti-Mimesis
III (Again Aesthetics).
Introduction
Mimesis/Anti-Mimesis:
Architecture, the Beautiful and the Sublime investigates the
misleading role of Mimesis in forming our understanding of representation and
its others, in pretending to explain our relationship to architecture, and in
its underpinning of the concepts of the Beautiful and the Sublime. So occluding
the sense of performativity, or ritual exchange, which offers us an alternative
way of understanding architecture, along with the rhetorical value of a
troubling pleasure coupled with the rhetoric of the outside (the rhetoric of
eternity); a rhetoric associated in a one-sided fashion with the terms
Beautiful and Sublime.
The first section, ‘Mimesis
I’, can safely be passed over by those willing to get straight to architectural
matters (dealt with in Sections 4 and 5, ‘Anti-mimesis I’ and ‘II’
respectively) or to the re-examination of the terms ‘Beautiful’ and ‘Sublime’
from an non-exclusive point of view, which finds their kernel of truth to lie
in their relation to the ritual element in human culture (Sections 2 and 6, ‘Mimesis
II’ and ‘Anti-mimesis III’, respectively). The contents of Section 1 list the
range of the concept of ‘Mimesis’ focusing on three issues, Mimesis and representation,
Mimesis and the performative (in many ways the ‘opposite’ of the mimetic) and
its relationship with the rhetoric of eternity (or the rhetoric of the ‘outside’).
‘Mimesis II’
treats of the terms ‘the Beautiful’ and ‘the Sublime’ as aesthetically
privileged forms of Mimesis, to be superseded by an examination of their constitutive
elements (as but two ‘moments’ from an aesthetic spectrum configured by
comforting and discomforting forms of pleasure and a related opposition, featured
in discussions of advanced rhetoric, that of the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’).
‘Mimesis
III’ treats of a ragbag of attendant theoretical issues broadly concerning
poetics and the political (the copy, the original, Myth, Nature).
‘Anti-Mimesis
I’ the first of the two sections devoted to architecture, seeks to debunk the
relevance of the concept of Mimesis in understanding architecture and suggests
an approach based upon the human experience of architecture as made up of relations
of contiguity, of layers or horizons.
‘Anti-Mimesis
II’, the second section devoted to architecture, is perhaps the most difficult
of the set, arguing for the role of the performative in the understanding of
architecture. Indeed for the re-grounding of the understanding of (the role of
consciousness in constituting) architecture through its performative functions.
Architecture performs identity.
‘Anti-Mimesis III (Again
Aesthetics)’, offers a summary of the fore-going critique of the concepts of ‘Mimesis’,
‘the Beautiful’, and ‘the Sublime’. Suggesting a recasting of the latter two
terms as useful in describing the workings of (the effects of) a broad -that is
inclusive- range of cultural phenomena.
Mimesis
(I)
(Definitions…)
Concerning the art of the copy
from the mirror of Nature to the mirroring of the heavens, the copy of the map
of the stars, the motions of the Hand of God. Where the hand of finite
inscription passes without warning into the inscription of the Infinite Hand.
And we the writers (the readers) find we are the written (and the read).
Mimesis.
Always with a sense of representation, of repetition, of an accompanying,
doubling shadow. A reference to something, somewhere else. Outside of itself
(when identified, as beside itself: when unidentified, as beside the point, as
pointing elsewhere… absolutely elsewhere). In whatever denomination of
reference. Coin of memory. Means of exchange. Currency of communication.
Currency of identification and belief.
Beginning with the temporal
as the source of representation, of our everyday acts of Mimesis, and
proceeding to that which might be thought to be beyond representation, the
a-temporal, the impossible Mimesis of the Beyond. En route finding the
relationship of representation, of Mimesis, to that which is designated the
same and the other; first through the relationship of the (community of the)
Same to the other (to its ‘other’) and then in the relationship of the Same to
the Other (writ large). The latter offering to us an other without a same. A
Mimesis therefore not the same at all. A copy which is not the same…
The
Mimesis of the Temporal (making/copying). The bottom-line in duplication.
Duplicity of word and thing (even down to the echo of thing in word, the
material nature of the word, its phonic, graphic, mental trace). Representation
as it is, as such; relations of similarity
and resemblance, the miracle of the translation of actions into words. More
cogently the degree of evolution of realism;
mimesis here is used for the ‘realistic’ description of events (Auerbach); its
degree of correspondence to its object. Then (or on the other hand) there is
(this) representation as divisible into mimesis and diegesis, a matter of the
directness of the relation between speaker and spoken (not word and thing), the
division into showing and telling, citing and describing (at one remove),
direct and indirect speech (Plato). Making the words of drama and the images of
film (and their interpenetration in realisation) into mimetic arts: leaving
poetry and verbal/textual narrative (citation aside) to diegesis. Then finally
we have the degree of mixture, or co-reliance of both (of the overt or covert
presence of a narrator) in the tug-of-war between citation and description, in
the poetics of verbal narrative, the poetics of the word.
Showing (showing the words
spoken) and telling (paraphrasing the words spoken or describing an event) as
mimesis and diegesis; but these terms may also, and very quickly, be inverted:
‘showing’ is, of course, shown through representation (be it repeated words or made
images and not a matter of witnessing the original event)they are thus
re-shown, and so retold; and ‘telling’ as the showing of the telling; leading
us, not least through their convertibility, their aporetic ambiguity, to the
world of the text where the text is the world (Derrida).
Mimesis and Metaphor. At first
sight, metaphor is the mimicry at the heart of Mimesis (whose relation of
similitude is spelt out in simile, but offered up without apology -if
sometimes in disguise- in metaphor). This replication of the elements that make up the similarity, the parallel
parts that make wholes similar, may also be read as resolving themselves in a double
synecdoche (the Liege group). Yet the strings of words themselves offer no real
mimicry (unless we pass them by the route of the image) rather the mimetic
element is built up out of reconstructing the events (real or imaginary, actual
or fictive) from the flow of symbols, as one would unravel a code. Unless we
pass by the image (the image of the thing represented), then the word is
related (as it is in life) to the thing only by convention, as a symbol, or
better, as a signifier (material or mental inscription) and signified (mental
picture or meaning) to its referent (Saussure). Language is only indirectly mimetic. Language
is only mimetic in relation to itself. Reality, putative source of Mimesis, is
always, and quite literally, a different order of things.
The
real victory of Mimesis will be digital (when all aspects of an object-event
will be stored and replicated, not just the light bouncing from it, but its
weight also, so that it may interact realistically with other such stored
data/object-events in a virtual environment). The ends of Mimesis: the virtual
copy.
Anti-Plato. The copy is not less
(as Plato maintained) but more. Mimesis is more? We, here before it, sense it
is more. Why? (And how on earth?) First, it has or represents or indicates more
than itself if it has, or has had, or is believed to have had, contact with
something more – its referent (and because of the looseness of this
connection, to many other possible referents). And most especially if it represents a link to something beyond, something larger, beyond
even its referent - the beyond (not on earth). Likewise, a similar aura may obtain if we perceive in it an echo of a copy of
something beyond (again, over and above the literal field of reference),
something apparently not of this earth (the something that also transforms the
genres of Landscape and Still Life) the power of which still hovers around it,
although a mere copy. Yet could it be that this power is in some part bestowed
upon it by its presence as representation? For it is the ideal, or unanchored,
nature of representation itself (its presence as a copy, a stand in) that is
found conferring this effect. An aggrandisement which is the most basic source
of a sense of the sacred. This glow is further magnified if the representation
is present in, or presented through, a means of expression such as a precious
metal. The stamp of an everyday object or creature is transformed by being
stamped onto, by being moulded in precious metal; as in the case of a plate, a
broach, or of coins (or vice versa, as with the shroud of
Mimesis and the Performative
(between Ritual and
the Word). Where x is said to be the same as y (to represent or to ‘be’ y for
the purposes of communication) and believed to be so, this act of union
constitutes, not only a sign (the relation of representation), but also a
performative (the act of identity): x is y if and only if we say so (we believe
so) and when we say so (when this event is performed). This is the agreement that
underlies the union of words and things (in this way there is a trace of the
performative in all meaning, in all words, in all identity, the identity of
words and meaning). As when we promise… a promise to others or to ourselves about
the nature of something. Like the meaning of a word. An unspoken compact. A
promise ‘understood’. A social contract on the meaning of words, without words.
A social ritual. Without words, the word becomes the Word. The power of
agreement meets the force of belief. Through the force of habit: ritual.
Changing word into act. Proposition into emotion. (Representation) thing into
(some) thing. Something else. (Sometimes…)
(But done invisibly. Like the
other everyday rituals of life. Like the near invisibility of the performative
in the construction of meaning. Whilst at the visible end, the performative
proper loudly announces its intention to create, seemingly ex nihilo, shared
ground between word and event, of word as event – over and above its phonic presence,
its semantic network, its context in syntax and world. Over and above these:
the change of state, of identity, of classification, of being, performed by the
performative. The ritual force of the promissory note, irrevocable, eternal -
or so we would think - the verbal end of the continuum that ends with the grand
events, consumerist or otherwise, with which we construct, conform and
consecrate our collective being.)
Often
embedded in ritual format, we may locate the form of Mimesis that invokes
copying into the self (enacting/copying). Consciously or unconsciously making
of oneself, from the display of external demeanour to the folds of inner being…
a copy. Whether being influenced by Nature (mimicry, by any other name). Or
being influenced by others’ behaviour (from semi-conscious, semi-automatic
protective imitation, like the colouring of insects, to the deliberate setting
up of someone or something as model for emulation). If the ‘others’ are the
Same (our group and its norms, as with the concept of Mimesis in the work of
Girard) then we have our community of identification (imaginary or otherwise –
remembering, of course, that all such communities are in some way imaginary,
facts of the mind). If the ‘others’ in question are in fact of the other (small
case), the other case, the other side of the equation, then we have found our
competition, our equals-as-enemies, those (definitively) not part of the
community of the Same. Copy or die (if you are fortunate enough to be given the
choice, or to be able to choose…).
Mimesis
and the A-temporal. If the Mimesis in question is in relation to the Other
(upper case), then we have the metaphysical relation; the sublime relation to
the Other. Often governed by an edict forbidding the copy (from the varieties
of religious iconoclasm, to philosophical disapproval as in the work of
Levinas). Copying ideals, the ideal, immortals, the mythic, the relation to the
universal as foundational (fictional, axiom-dependant) or society as a model
of, as modelled upon an absent ideal. With ourselves read as already (poor,
degraded) copies of something sublime (Nature, the Gods, the ideal forms of
Plato or some other fundamentalist credo). On the other hand such a mimesis may
be read as the attempt to reverse the trajectory of the Fall (essentialism,
alienation, authenticity, where difference is defined by the negative). Heaven
(and the mode of being of its inhabitants, the angels) realisable here, on
earth. The way of salvation, the narrow route of the righteous, the path of
panacea. Paths requiring a single truth, an undivided (unfolded) map,
sectarianism masquerading as a universal (the ubiquitous rhetoric of part for whole,
‘some’ for ‘all’).
In
another definition, one following on from the a-temporal formula suggested
above, Mimesis is read as the earliest human relation to Nature (the
However it has more recently it
has been suggested (Taussig, writing in the wake of Benjamin, Adorno and… Bataille) that the mimetic
faculty is that capacity in all of us (a species-being) which enables us to use
the other to help make the world signify; to use ‘the nature that culture uses
to make second nature’, to make ourselves, to understand others.
Reprise.
Mimesis in three modalities: Same; other; Other.
(i)
Mimesis of the Same; as recognition; membership, learning, socialisation,
community (if of the same community).
The Same as that which is bigger, successful, surviving – or so we would like
to believe (our hyperbole, as opposed to the unutterable hyperbole of the
Other). Parents. Peers. An ideal, that is, nevertheless, largely an imaginary
community of identification.
(ii) Mimesis of the other… as an
enemy to be either destroyed or incorporated; but to be learnt from first
(whence classified as foe, not just as prey…). It approaches. Bigger again,
than ourselves. A threat. Or almost; we are not sure. Better to copy first… a
safety check! If scared, than take what scares and throw it back. Mimesis.
Learn what it is that gives the other the advantage. And repeat. Mimesis.
Always assuming that the other did in fact intend to scare or to dominate, has
come to steal or control, an assumption made of the similarity of the other to
us, the other as the same (as us), made the same here in order to identify
motivation, intention and rationale, a paranoid assumption made out of the
worst of ourselves, our fears born of collective self-knowledge. A mimesis
whose origin may be ourselves. Mirror mimesis. Potential trap.
(iii)
Mimesis of the Other (unmistakably,
unquestionably, the Other). As fear, as terror; as the Sublime relation - the
very configuration of the Sublime relation. The Pythagorean imitation of the
heavens, the divine made concrete, the world of graven images and universal
formulas. A copying of the highest power, the first term, the last word, the
superior level, of the divinity, of the greater power, of Lord and Master, of
the hand that moves the horoscope, that rocks the cradle - as with a child
before its parents, as with all dependants. Therefore of the relation to the stars,
to ideals, to ideal types, to immortals and other imaginary but crucial
notions. To objects we must copy… on that side, the other-side and so
inaccessible to us… this side, temporality’s side. The sublime relation as the
unavoidable, impossible relation to the eternal. Mimesis in the context of this
shadow play is simultaneously the desire to understand larger matters (matters
larger than ourselves) and to justify the existence of current totems, the
masks of power. The Mimetic paradox.
Copying the invisible. Making
appear the invisible ones. The Beautiful ones; the Angels and Immortals. Copying as calling up,
conjuring. Our compact with the Other. The very origin and rationale of ritual.
The function of its uncanny frame. The beings called up in the centre of the
pentagram. So ritual is ‘as if’…a mimesis without an origin, a real relation to
a ‘fictional’ otherside, to the realm of myth; for all relations to the eternal are
relations to the Sublime, are types of the sublime relation (not least to the
eternally beautiful). The mimesis of these immaterial matters, the ritual
relation; the wafer of community confirmation. The cup of communal blood.
Renewal proceeds via the sublime relation. Mimesis is its handmaiden.
But
Mimesis as fictive.
And
Mimesis as (in the context of) ritual.
Mimesis
as Ritual.
Mimesis
(II)
(A
Beautiful Mimesis /A Mimesis of the Sublime)
Two
historically privileged modes of Mimesis: Mimesis in heightened form, bearing
intensified affect; the Beautiful and the Sublime. Representation as Art.
The Beautiful and the
Sublime… An outworn opposition? Dancing partners who have held the floor for
too long?
And Mimesis? Also an old
tool. But a tool to unpick the pattern of the dance.
When
attempting to go through the notions of the Beautiful and the Sublime (assuming
that they are still of some use and that we may learn something from them,
rather than simply ignore them or go around them) two pathways appear, one
dealing with the notion of the copy as such, one relying upon a particular, and
somewhat strange, form of the copy: the Via
Mimetica and the Via Gothica.
The
Via Mimetica. Via the concept of
Mimesis, of which the Beautiful and the Sublime are sub-sets, even as they may
point beyond it (we ask: what it is that is copied and how does it work; what
is the relationship of sign and affect, and what it is that is supposed to be
happening there…).
And
then from one particularly faded copy, one less dazzling, distinctly (or
indistinctly) darker; we find a mode of copying that makes up a less serious,
‘impure’, even ‘sacrilegious’ – even… ‘demonic’ - genre (also a genre of
hyperbole):
The
Via Gothica. Via ‘Gothic’
representations (the role of a ‘lesser’ or less unsettling content – as
compared with the ideal type of the Sublime as such). The presentation of
unpleasantness. Of discomfort or of the discomforting. Or via the equivalent of
the ‘Gothic’ mixed pleasures that result from an emphasis on form that is no
longer, or not simply, beautiful: that of genre-mixing, introversion and
content or citation-mixing; all capable of calling up uncanny, unsettling
effects (affects) in the reader or viewer.
Beauty
offers us, is offered to us, by the copying, the representation of actual forms
said to be beautiful (yet already it is as if a further pre-existing harmony
was responsible for transfiguring the presence of these actual forms…). The
Beautiful is present in form. The sublime copies, the representations that call
forth the Sublime, however, are supposed to be of no such existing forms,
rather it is through the presence of the chaotic, unsettling forms represented
we are lead to the hidden presence of the Sublime (the presence of hidden forms
beyond our understanding). The Sublime is always behind something.
Yet
both are actually just representations that call-up differing responses: One
set of signs offer Beauty; the other (or another) the Sublime…If we ignore the
ideological (or even metaphysical) explanation they bear, then both sets of
responses are triggered by things we can see and copy. They are both ‘this
side’, ‘inside’; and even worse (for the binary nature of these two concepts),
Beauty can also be said to have one foot ‘outside’, in the abstractable, pure,
or ideal nature of the forms involved. Furthermore, if all this is the case
then there is nothing to say that these two supposed opposites are not actually
composed of a number of key elements found in combination. As we would expect
when faced with moments of quantitative degree or points along a continuum
rather than of qualitative contradiction.
So
in the copying of unsettling forms, forms said to be Sublime, this aesthetic
relation is already represented in Nature, in mountains, canyons, the sea, the
stars, vistas already felt to be sources of sublime feeling, already said to be
thought of as the representation of the unrepresentable, of the unattainable
Beyond, of religious verities (matters larger than the self) best represented
in poetry or art. It is these absent entities that we feel to be represented
(as symbol, as figure) in art said to be ‘Sublime’. In Chinese traditional
painting (landscape) for example, we have the presence of both the Beautiful
and the Sublime. Combined. Inseparable. Beauty (previous patterns, pre-existing
forms and models, idealised types, moments –spaces- of harmony) and the Sublime
(manifesting an exterior or external, and so religious deixis). As witnessed by
the history of Chinese art. (A history that also suggests to us the
redefinition of our own forms of understanding of effects said to be
‘Beautiful’ or ‘Sublime’.)
Moreover,
the copying of unsettling forms or contents as such, whether small or large
scale, ‘frivolous or ‘serious’, ‘Gothic’ or Sublime, questioning or
overwhelming, puzzling or portentous, whether by showing ghosts or mentioning
the unmentionable (the work of H. P. Lovecraft expoits this ambiguity
shamelessly), all refer in some way to an outside, an inaccessible, invisible
realm. At its most gentle the portrayal of such scenes (unearthly, uncanny)
posses their own beauty - which are sublime by reference, yet beautiful in
form. The modest scale contradicts the grandiose nature of the traditional concept
of the Sublime, yet the content is barely ‘classical’ or ‘pure’ in any formal
way.
So both terms may point beyond.
Leaving the Sublime as the court of terror and awe.
Then
there is the presence of the Sublime as infinite number, as a vastness that would
effect us (or so we like to think not wishing to take responsibility for our
trembling). Unsettling. Only a step away from terror. We before it, before the
presence of something vast (denying that before it we also felt such emotion).
This quantitative scale of discomfort, of inner disturbance, ranging from the
flavour of the ‘Gothic’ all the way to the Sublime (often accompanied with the
suggestion of supernatural content) indicates that this classification, and not
the ‘Sublime’ as such, is logically as well as experientially prior. Indeed the
‘Gothic’ may be read with profit as the hidden or occluded branch of the
Sublime, the unruly relation consigned to the back room when guests arrive (or
hidden in the attic…). Or perhaps the Sublime should even be reclassified as
the art-house branch of the ‘Gothic’. Rather both appear to share their origins
in and recurrent obsessions with, the supernatural - the Other and Beyond so
beloved of human culture. This route proffers access to the sacred in human
culture in all its forms, popular and negative as well as serious, mysterious
and unspeakable.
So
the sublime, like beauty, is also present in the popular, is an important part
of popular culture (witness the popularity of the genres of horror, the
supernatural, science-fiction and fantasy, and the discomforting situations of
the thriller, not to mention the evolution of the melodrama with its familial
and romantic crises). Even the terror and awe of landscape, traditionally the
key to sublime emotion, is to be found in the disaster movie and in all forms
of exploitation of the spectacle (now augmented by CGI). Hence the move of
‘high’ art into the sublime of non-representation…
Therefore
the combination of ‘discomfort’ or ‘non-simple’ pleasure + reference to an
exterior, an ‘outside’, a beyond (via semantics, theme or some other mode of
deixis), these are the two key elements usually found supporting in this area
of aesthetic experience. A definition of the sense of the Sublime (Beauty, as
we have seen, can also point ‘outside’). Number and fear (relation to a greater
power, the disturbing notion of infinity) come second; a quantitative
extrapolation which leads to a form of the ‘Sublime’ (as classically defined in
Romantic thought) where (infinite) number is read as the unthinkable,
invisible, reinforcing the importance of unrepresentability and inner
disturbance in the definition and workings of the Sublime.
Beautiful.
As when all is in its exact place and proportion (it could not be better
arranged). Flowers. The Still Life. Confirmation of our sanity in a sane world.
And confirmation of a Beyond yet more rational, yet more ordered. A form-based
aesthetic + apposite content: a combination which yields the option on ever
greater refinement in the organisation of the chosen content. This same
form-based element will take us into 20th century Abstraction and
Minimalism and the evaporation of this content. Leaving only the Sublime (in
this way behind the Beautiful we find the Sublime). By contrast other 20th
century genres, such as Figurative Expressionism, the ‘Found Object’ tradition,
and Pop Art seem to be impure, materialist, chaotic; a touch of the same
aesthetic as the ‘Gothic’ – perhaps even constituting a ‘kitchen sink’ sublime.
The
‘Gothic’ was anyway the genre that incited the theory of the Sublime in
literature and drama (an inheritance from the uncanny in renaissance and
baroque drama, itself an inheritance from supernatural elements of the late
classical and medieval Saint’s Life). Indeed it is this reference to the
supernatural, a ‘pop’ sacred, or a ‘low’ negative sacred consecrated to
entertainment (a feature as old as the Greek Romances, if not older, see early
Egyptian literature) that defines the ‘Gothic’ as a genre and as a cultural
classification - as opposed to a historical phenomena limited to a specific
period. The ‘Gothic’ therefore will be seen as manifesting a family resemblance
to the ‘Sublime’ in the sense of a relation, a deixis, a topic referring to the
Unseen; perhaps itself requiring a small case ‘sublime’… Anyway a ‘Gothic’,
mixed or unsettling pleasure (an impure pleasure; a pleasure coloured with the
feelings one might well have, enjoy, and not enjoy; would not enjoy at all if
they were real, if they did not happen at one remove, as representation, as
mimesis, as a mimesis of our fears and anxieties; truly a … masochistic pleasure). A pleasure one
suspects to be as old as art (be it the art of image-making or the art of
fiction) and therefore as old as the sacred in art. The nightmare in art. As old as the shadows waiting beyond the
warmth and light of the fire. As old as the cold hand that touches the back of
ones neck.
Mixed
pleasures: this notion also provides a key to today’s post-modern pleasures;
the disturbance caused by genre-mixing, citation, and self-referentiality;
infinite recycling made possible by the use of a knowing irony as a form of
sublime pleasure (the post-modern sublime). Or just by ‘mixing it’, as art
-before modernism- has always done...
It
is this mix of beautiful and sublime (steadying and unsteadying) effects that
is central to the rounded description and comprehension of art; not the
simplistic (and elitist) binary we have inherited from the philosophy of the 19th
century.
A
combination that works for, that works its way through and in, other arts, the
arts of the West’s Others, (the Chinese, Indian, African and pre-Columbian
American art traditions). Therefore why not our own? To escape from the
classical definition of Beauty, and the Romantic concept of the Sublime, to
by-pass their modern appropriation as the parallels to high and low, serious
and popular art, so to inhabit mixed continuums; the more or less beautiful,
the more or less sublime; the sublimity at the base of beauty, the beauty of
sublime effects. A descriptive poetics, as well as a theoretical aesthetics,
that will cover all effects - including the ritual relation in art.
The
ritual relation in art. Found most quickly in the relation of identity to the
aesthetic effects we call the ‘Beautiful’ and the ‘Sublime’ (respectively
reassuring: and destroying/shaking – but only in order to reconfirm… to refound
the self and its supporting cast).
The way to the secret of the ritual relation in art lies through the
sublime relation in art, a relation to the other side, and its attendant
rhetorics…governed by such terms as ‘infinity’ and ‘eternity’. But in
combination with -and not as opposed to- the Beautiful. All in the service of
the most fundamental function of Mimesis: the copying of the self (and its
place in community) that constitutes (self) recognition.
Mimesis
again: copying, representing, self and others; self in relation to others, and
to the Other; the visible and the invisible; combining the two artificially
separated modes called the ‘Beautiful’ and the ‘Sublime’ (or redefining, indeed
refining, their effects according to the interiority or exteriority of their
deixis and the degrees of comfort or discomfort conjured by their forms or
contents). And by means of combining these two (whichever two, Beautiful and
Sublime, or deixis and mode of pleasure) arriving at sublime beauty.
Mimesis
(III).
(Poetics
& Politics)
(Politics)
Foremost there is the realm of the social copy; the
kingdom of the exemplar and the democratic pressure of the equal. The parade of
peers and ideals, comrades and gurus, middle management and the top of the
hierarchy, level playing fields and pyramids (not to mention the base, abject
home of the negative exemplar). All
incorporated into the self through copying and memory; with units of memory
(words, images, sequences/events) as units of mimesis and identity (perhaps as
a special kind of ‘meme’, unit of semiotics). Adding value and morality offers
a division into good and bad forms of mimesis; good and bad collective ideals,
exemplary and problematic roles and identifications. With the memory of such
mimetic formations maintained in our rituals of everyday life as in feasts and
other major ritual exchanges. Two sides of same identity coin: often involving
destructive exchange: memory may even out live the actor, as in the martyr
video, where suicide as identity statement and mode of exchange for that
(posthumous) identity. On the smaller scale, destructive exchange is a feature
of ‘macho’ masculine identities, as in the waste of smoking, etc. Consumption
as imitation and ritual; or as definition against and ritual (employing the
symbolic destruction or sacrifice of the other) – at the same time forming and
remembering. Mimesis guaranteed by ritual.
Concerning other terminologies describing the copying of the ideal
and its relation to social survival, we have the thinking of Max Weber and
Renée Girard on social renewal (via, respectively, charismatic or sacrificial
means). The central concern of both thinkers is the means employed in
alleviating the crisis of identity, and so of social solidarity, a by-product
of the lack of socially effective (shared) affect; result of the crisis of the
belief in traditional authority as the crisis of ‘old’ authority. Such
perspectives therefore are concerned with ritual renewal, and so are
generational in essence (and include defining relations to some designated
‘other’, often in a sacrificial context). Mimesis, in this light, is a matter
of copying exemplars and of mobilising the force that inspires them (and this
is also true of negative exemplars, ‘others’, or scapegoats). Renewal is (like)
ritual. All (prior or would-be) authorities attempt to use a-temporal ideals
(the sublime) to cement their reign; but only the new are believable, are found
to be sufficiently charged with affect. Further sets of distinctions are
particular to religion, region, place and person.
(Poetics)
Sublunary: the poetics of the word as the war between mimesis and diegesis, a
war fought over the soul of narrative (and so history, remembering, reporting,
bearing witness). The chosen battleground is the politics of showing, the
degree of proximity (or illusionism) when confronted with the question of the
real or point of origin. Yet this is a showing that is always (in verbal
matters) a citation, true of both mimesis and diegesis, whether as exchangeable
in terms of their fundamental ambiguity or more finally in terms of their
status as absolute representation (in matters of the image, all this is true of
the copy). Yet in fiction (and in the fictional image) all are without any
possible point of origin (or specific external reference). Yet still
believable, recognisable as if
possessing such an original referent (maintaining a ‘general’ frame of
reference). But as with the ‘actual’ copy, the original is absent. Making both
types of representation (fictional and ‘real’ (sic)) account of themselves
equally before the court of illusion (whence the possibility of Holocaust
denial and of the general re-writing of history, the debate over history as
‘fact’ – in the absence of a time machine only (its) representation and
archives are left). Moreover, the element of each as (re)presentation offers
its presence (regardless of prior connection or genesis) as something more. Mimesis in art reinforces the
notion of mimesis as ‘more’… the copy as more that the original (its presence
alone guarantees this superabundance, this plenitude, when contrasted to the
shadow world that is the abode of the absent original). The original, could
such a thing be said to exist, is it not simply something ‘more’ than its previous copy…
(Politics).
Nature (Object). Mimesis as Mythic, the modern myth of the anchor deep in the
sea of the Real, as the still centre of ideology, as its sanctified and
sanctifying exterior, its transcendent outside, its foundation … (almost
extra-temporal, such is its status, yet this would make it unreal and wholly absent, banished to the realm of eternity, home
of true myth). The always exterior, the foundation, known elsewhere as Nature
(or Matter, Nature’s gift, our homage). Our use of …such as the (our) return on
Nature’s gift: as if we were unaware of the spider that unspins the world,
makes cease the turning of the gyre, of entropy, of the power of waste. No free
lunch; no free gift. Nothing can be treated as absolutely free, without the
debt of responsibility. As if maternal, parental love was extrapolated into all
transactions in, and with, the World, after infancy (Nature as undemanding
Mother, the myth of Mother Nature). Mimetic confusion; misleading Myth. Mimesis
in full subjunctive mode. Once we believed our waste would go away, become
radically (and superstitiously) absent; now we observe our waste products
diverting the course of our civilisation. Mimesis must learn to mimic Nature by
copying ‘her’ cyclicity and contexuality, ‘her’ habit of co-adaptation.
Otherwise Nature in its sublime and threatening guise of extinction will appear
like a dark storm on the horizon. And we find ourselves back with another
variation on the Sublime, now re-robed as Ecology, as the revenge of Nature, as
the unrelenting face of Entropy. (All in capitals signifying their status as
our new and most cogent myths, most proximate forms of Mimesis)
Entropy. One antidote to which is ritual, the art of renewal (and art as ritual, see Monet’s ‘Grainstacks’).
Which may help us find an
apposite, less self-defeatingly destructive form of Mimesis, of mimetic
existence; least we end up following too profoundly that other definition of
Mimesis (favoured by the Pythagoreans) and become, not the copies of the ideal,
the otherworldly, the existence of Beings as they are written in the stars, but
their companions, newly lit stars in the deep, deep blue of the heavens.
(Poetics)
The Rhetoric of the Eternal. Mimesis of the Sublime. The always Other, a
presence guaranteed via myth. Its persistence as a cultural (literary)
attraction offering (as it always has done) the pull of a force not to be
slighted as a source of rhetorical advantage. Providing the pole of gravity
that makes turn the text. But not always as a repetition of the Myth (of the
old myth) rather of its structure, its formula, its abstracted rhetorical
force, renewed in recent clothing, the essence of prior ritual renewed in
modern ritual form, the forms of rituality in representation. Myth masquerading
as Mimesis. The ritual at the heart of the Realist text.
Myth
can be found as surviving in the Modern as the source of (the rhetoric of) the
uncanny effect. This, often realist, detail, which nevertheless admits of a
sublime reference, brings the shadowlands of ritual, the approaching steps of
Fate, unreasoning and beyond comprehension, closer than we might have expected,
or might find comfortable. What we have is quite simply disturbing; as much a
decorative frisson as a meaning-trail
to be followed; part ornament, hidden in mimesis; part intimator of hidden
grand designs. Like the use of suicide, the sacrifice that is also a Saint’s
Life (a martyr narrative) in Goethe’s novel, Elective Affinities, and in films, such as Von Trier’s Breaking the Waves. Also true of the
mimetic use (and so the rhetoric) of coincidence in film and literature in
general.
(Politics). Nature (Subject).
Then there is the survival of the relation of Mimesis to Nature in the guise of
the true and authentic, and more particularly in the gift relation (as a
‘natural’ pre-capitalist, pre-civilised form of exchange and relationship). A
relation writ large in the firmament of capitalist society such that, after its
(putative) disconnection from religion (slighter than imagined by the
Enlightenment) in the epoch of early capitalism, elements of it were still
sufficiently at large to be appropriated by totalitarianism during the crises
of industrial capitalism (and later in those countries going through a similar
phase of economic development and class/national strife). Later still, in the
countries of advanced capitalism, this complex of relations was to be bound to
the commodity (as well as to nation, language and other forms of group
identity). The ubiquity of the commodity relation is re-sacralised, that is,
through the good offices of the gift relation in social life, now part of the
general life of the commodity (on whom it is dependant for its means of
circulation, as, under capitalist market conditions, is everything else). But
who is using whom? Different social forms have different means of circulation:
recognition, social cohesion and community continue. Identity’s proximity to
the gift relation means that the latter is not so easily dispensed with. Better
to say it has been wisely appropriated, even tamed - but then is not the
reverse also true... If the (objective) market transaction does not consist of
a gift relation (in fact it is usually regarded as its opposite) then it is in
the (subjective) decision to purchase that the gift relation now resides. Just
as before when a choice had to be made concerning the apportionment of ones
time and ones labour together with its crystallisation and store: things and
their tokens exchanged according to a rationale whose light is filtered through
the prism of identity. Recognition (our resemblance and the affirmation of that
resemblance to our ‘home’ community, the community of the Same) as the survival
of this form of Mimesis into our everyday (post)modernity. Identity’s ritual
reliance upon Mimeses for its further assertion and continuity.
Anti-Mimesis I
(Architecture and Mimesis)
First
things. Who is copying whom? Or what? (And why? When? Under what circumstances?
Is this copying avoidable or ineluctable, is it voluntary or involuntary?).
Either way there must be an original (a place and time when the process of
copying begins). A first instance. Something or someone to be copied. What is
this Ur-thing? Where is it? And how can we know? Were a passage back to such an
origin possible, what use would it be, what value could we ascribe it, how
could we justify its impact on our lives? What we do know is that the ‘copy’
(or copy of a copy of a…) is experienced, is seen, is felt - and is used.
Experience and appropriation are the two great cures for the myth of origin.
Juxtaposed
here are the two opposing forms of genealogy: a (absolute) origin beloved of
myth and historicism (origin explains and predicts everything); and the
description of the contexts, the uses and appropriations through which a word,
concept, visual style, or object has passed, each of which may have changed its
meaning for its own place and period, and for ourselves since (no origin, only
transformation). On this account there can be no Mimesis, only theft. No
copies, only transmutations.
Relationships,
moreover, can not be copied. Nor can they be shown (although they may perhaps
be performed, as in a film or a ritual, or present as a symbol, present even as
a symbol where the designing consciousness did not place it, but where the
perceiving consciousness sought it out). So…
If
columns occasionally look like people it is because they do (they have been
made to do so: Caryatids). This does not mean that all columns look like people
(they certainly do not). Or that, by some extension of logic (Rykwerts),
buildings look like people (or are understood as being like people, or are
understood because they are taken to
look like people). Furthermore…
If
columns have three parts it is because most buildings (and most parts of
buildings, ie; columns) are (still) experienced as having three parts, and not
the other way round…
For
many, division by three is a logical stage of development in the column
(Gabriel Tarde) as in the building itself (Sullivan, obviously, but even
Gropius). A stage which itself is followed by a further efflorescence of the
decorative, divided even in style by three. A pattern found repeated even in
the frames of windows and doors, the texture of walls, the colour of plaster. A
contrast of experiential zones even made present by the simple presence of
dividing line. Recognition given to the immaterial, uneconomic force of the
demand found in the human gaze. Our desire of architecture answered.
The
notions of experience (perception) and engineering (structure) are essential in
the comprehension of buildings. This is not true of the concept of Mimesis (and
certainly not true of an over-literal humanism in which average -Western male-
height is taken as the measure of all things). The nearest thing to this
understanding of Mimesis is the importance to engineering of human scale and
proportion. That is, regarding buildings, human beings must be able to use them
– but they must also, indeed they have no choice but to, perceive them… to live
with them (as well as within them).
And try as some might to tie function to appearance, the final word, as given
by the public at large, is given by the building’s suitability to its context.
It is this, the degree of appropriateness to its surrounding urban environment
and the perception of this relationship, taken as a whole, which orientates
actually existing responses to the building (and not some limited notion of
function as architectural essence).
Synecdoche,
the relationship of part and whole, the building in question in its setting, is
the means by which most would offer the final word, the final significant
frame, with, or through, which we must judge a building’s suitability.
Synecdoche also governs another crucial way we have of experiencing buildings;
as zones which bear a similarity to one another and which we experience in
similar fashions: the ground level, the middle layers and the topmost story. In
our experience of a street or a square it is these levels, these continuities
(and their interaction) which call from us a set of responses; responses
differentiated according to which level it is that we are experiencing. So, in practise, we live in a world of horizontally zoned parts. Parts that are
transbuilding in character; that are
part, that are the key parts, of the built environment experienced as a whole
and (in the environment as such) that follow the lines of the earth and the sky
and their union in the horizon, rather than the verticals beloved of most
architectural theory.
Private
property as the division of the vertical (not to be confused with the pull of
gravity or the hypsosis of light): public consumption as the division of the
horizontal (the imprint of the watcher in turn reflected back).
Mimesis
as representation (as representing).
Architecture as the thing represented?
Do public toilets resemble
their function, products or other symbols associated with the activities they
contain (taboos, for example)? No.
Do post offices look like
letters or parcels? No.
Decorative elements may
appear themed according to function. Are the things going on inside,
represented outside, represented in the form of the building? Or is this
representation only true of the social functions of which they are a part?
Generally not.
Architecture,
if representing unrepresentable
relations (the Sublime) then brings us back to the symbolic value of
architecture, that is, our consumption and experience of it as ideal, as
deictic, as referencing the unshowable, as symbol, as Solar (a building’s, even
a city’s, relationship, exercised mainly through its uppermost portion, to
society’s ideals and aspiration). There is no mimetic relation.
Test
case (I). The form is the meaning. Openness, regarding the functioning of a
building, its institution, and of democracy as such; all these are to be found
in the use of glass and of open structures (as in the Strasbourg European
Parliament). The connotation is of access to the centre, (rhetorically) on
view, from without. All this is rhetoric, yes; but symbolic, not mimetic. The
open or transparent structure may contain elements of mimesis (the ‘copying’,
or resemblance to other open or transparent structures) but this is the
material, the signifier; the meaning, the signified (if not simply some first
meaning, as ‘building’ or ‘parts of a building’), lies in its existence as a
symbol (or second meaning) for something else, open government, the ideals of
democracy.
Do
buildings even have first meanings (they are not words, although they often
function like images) do we not move directly to the (second) meaning, to its
symbolic value?
Test
case (II). Mimesis/Symbolism. Does the ground floor resemble the foot (‘the
foot of the building’). We may be ‘at the foot of the building’ but it still
does not resemble a foot. Rather it is, first, a world unto itself when
experienced from the outside, from the street, from the inside of the outside,
as it were, in our experience of it as pedestrians, shoppers, transients and
city dwellers. The street level experience. A key part of the lived ‘actually
experienced’ urban environment. Second, this portion of architecture, this part
of a building, of the street, square or city is (even in the most minimal of
Modernisms) differentiated from the rest of the building or buildings in
question (in view) according to physical access (the degree of security
required) and visual access (the degree of display required). These relationships
employ very little Mimesis. Rather it is the symbolism of entrances and exits,
of windows and framed space that play with our memories, our imaginations and
our expectations.
Then
there are the other decorations that mark out the street level, the ground, the
entry-fronting of a building. These markings are in every sense gratuitous, that is, symbolic, a gift to
the viewer, to the reputation of the building, street, or view of which they
are a part. A gift to the city, to its self-image, its self-regard. Free to us;
offered at a cost to the builders/developers. Offered as an act of recognition
of our consumption of the visual, our interaction with architecture; a
recognition of the fact that how we see ourselves is something also refracted
though our sense of our built environment.
Bad
architecture pains us because it is part of our collective being, part of our
self-image. Because it is at once intimate and social, so a jewel or a nail in
our being. Because it immediately symbolises a lack of care for ourselves (for
our home) and so a pollutant in that which touches our experience. Not because it copies something bad or
painful.
Test
case (III). From function/symbol to symbolic function. The most symbolically
cogent parts, the most visually arresting, most meaningful parts of a building
are those which contain the least inspiring human activity – if any… the top.
From the inside, an attic: from outside, the sublime reference of the Solar.
The fire of the horizon and the blue infinity of the sky.
The
place where Mimesis takes the form of the statue; the rest is a matter for the
sky, of matter reaching for the sky. A matter for us. What makes the building matter for the skyline.
Matter for us.
And
so to other forms of Mimesis …or other definitions. Most appropriately (and
most distantly), the notion of
Mimesis as an imitation of forces only to be found in the heavens (School of
Pythagoras) and so reflecting the relation to the larger set, the Sublime (in
the Frankfurt School, including Walter Benjamin and the recent work of Michael
Taussig, as that which indicates our relationship with Nature, including human
nature). On this reading Mimesis is one aspect of a symbol that stands for a
community, a society, for its ideals, for any ideal. All this, however (outside
of the statue that decorates the
building and is itself a symbol of such relations, a personification, a
prosopopoeia) has nothing to do with human form. Rather it is a matter of the
forms best calculated to reference the super human, the supra-human, the
inhuman and even the post-human… (All) for us; (us) still all-to-human. The
sublime relation in architecture does this. An experiential category which
leads our eyes upwards, as it does (as it is supposed to) our souls…
collectively (if possible). A hypsosis,
or eye-raising, first governed by the demands of natural light, of our raising
our eyes to the light, to the Solar regions of the built environment (the
topmost of the three parts). In this way determining the architectural features
that will in turn aid and abet this process, whether they were designed with
this effect in mind, or become marshalled by our expectations into such a
relationship - regardless of the architect’s intentions… (the aesthetics of
architecture is the death of the architect).
A
distant mimesis is indistinguishable from the most distant of allegories.
This
is anyway to use ‘Mimesis’ at the end of its stretch. Where nothing is copied
there is no Mimesis. We remain lost in the land of the Symbol. Awash amid a sea
of signs.
Mimesis (its positing); our desperate
attempt to find an anchorage.
Anti-Mimesis
II
(The
Promise of Architecture/Architecture’s Promise).
Is
there a performative in Architecture (…is there a performative effect in visual
culture)? In order to understand
the role of the performative in architecture it will be necessary to examine
the different degrees of subjectivity and objectivity that obtain in two
relations to the performative: constative and performative; and mimetic and
performative (or stating and doing, and copying and doing). One relation begins
from the point of view of language (the word) the other from the point of view
of the visual field (the image). The
constative as a linguistic relation is given an initially subjective position
as against the objective action of the performative: the mimetic as a form of
reproduction is given a initially objective position as against the more
subjective emphasis on identity in the performative. Both, of course, in the
end are types of sign, modes of representation.
On
one level a sign may be constative or performative (description or action; a
‘this is x’ as opposed to an ‘I promise’). The latter is both the word and the
action/event simultaneously (it performs what it says) and includes ‘felicity
conditions’ that are necessary for its successful performance (for example, we
are the kind of person who may do this, that the time, place and manner are
right). An identity statement is combined with the proper context constituting
the ground of performance and resulting in an event with ritual force - often
involving a renewal of self (promising to be better, to be or become the kind
of person who may act in such a way). The action that results from a
performative leads from word to reality, from discourse to event. Whilst
constituting the objective pole of the process, this kind of verbal sign also expresses a subjective
desire of, or identity proposition about, the speaker/performer (as described
above). This proposition (implied or otherwise) is itself a verbal description
of an event, and so a constative relation. However this subjective moment is
also a statement about reality, indeed it offers the best statements we have
(the only statements we have) it is the royal road to reality (and so
objective). Moreover the constative also has further implications; insofar as
it implies a point of view (whether imaginary, ideological, or actual) which is
repeatable and identifiable, it, like all repeated actions, bears more than a
trace of ritual (functioning as a reinforcement of subjectivity).
On
another level the sign may be mimetic or performative.
If
we place the emphasis in the mimetic relation, the iconic sign copies, is objective and indicates ‘Reality’. By
contrast the performative is itself an action, and so leads to ritual, to
identity confirmation, and so to the realm of subjective experience. As
architecture the sign taken as mimetic offers an image of the matter, of the
building in question, of reality (objective): as a performative it offers a
symbol, performative of identity propositions, conferring identity; identity as
specific, sexed, believing, consuming, recognition-seeking identity
(subjective).
Furthermore:
the mimetic relation offers recognition of the building, or slice of the urban
environment in question, or even of a specific detail (objective), albeit from
a point of view carrying memory, an iconic sign (albeit all but inextricable
from language) referring back to previous experience (and so in this sense,
subjective). Whilst the performative pole of the architectural sign offers
recognition as an existential, identity-founding pre-condition, as the aspect
of the sign which offers meaning, which places the building’s meaning in a
broader context, of one’s place, of belief, of values, of pleasure.
Architecture as symbol only makes sense in the context of a way of life, a
culture (or in the eyes of many contesting cultures, if we take today’s plural
social manifold as given). Architecture is the sign of a culture (and so
objective).
*
Architecture
means itself and us, our relation, together, our co-implication (insofar as it means anything at all).
Q:
Can architecture really be performative?
A:
Could it possibly be constative?
Architecture can not be true:
but it can be… ‘felicitous’.
Architects
and engineers, planners and developers, shop-keepers and politicians may or may
not intend various effects to be the case concerning a given building
(illocution); the perception and effect (affect) of a building for those who
gaze upon it is another matter (perlocution): buildings and parts (sub- and
super-sections) of the built environment generally only have perlocutions. (As
does landscape…).
The performative again (reprise). The
performative is a word or image or some other symbol, artefact or thing that
functions, or can function as such (that is performative, that performs). A
sign that can be read (at the same time) as an action (an ‘expression of
activity’). An action which is also an event of binding, a binding event; to
say it is thus is for it to be, and only to be, thus, a (putative) exclusion of
contingency; and so in touch with the beyond, a ritual - home of eternal
binding, of infinite application. Such as a promise, a declaration that
henceforth some thing will be identifiable as a particular thing (and not, or
no longer, as it had been before). The performative is the word’s attempt to
change the world.
The
social meanings, symbolic associations, of architecture are ‘performed’ even as
we perceive it. At the same time as one says something, utters a performative,
its action also takes place, likewise, at the same time as one sees something,
that is reproduces an image within oneself, the other meanings and (interior)
events also take place, their effects on identity performed (both kinds
carrying ritual force). These kinds
of meaning may be carried by parts of buildings or by parts of the built
environment, sections through the urban landscape – meanings above and beyond
the obvious message of an advertising hoarding or a statue.
Architecture
as performance. Performing… the relations we have with it… its material form as
frame and receptacle of the social relation: its ability to reflect the
relation of the self to others; the desire for recognition and belonging as
much as the solace and ecstasy of the flesh - and finally in its intimation of
the relation of the soul to the stars. If the meaning of the word (its
signified) may be immaterial, or transient (its performative echo launching the
process that will outlast it), then the artefact, architecture, appears as if
it may last forever, although its social meaning will of course change with the
ebb and flow of the cultural tide (poetry moreover usually survives most
architecture; out of so many fragments, one at least may outlive the monolith).
Performatives: a key to understanding ritual. Where a (repeated action) has ritual significance: where its performance means more, confirms and prolongs (as well as restates) our identity… Little rituals often occur in words alone (or in small everyday repeated actions). Big rituals perform our need for bigger meanings. In between, the regular rituals of life bear witness to the regular renewal of belief and our place in the universe through culture (through art and music as rituals that return us to the matters of the infinite). But the most persistent repository of all of our meanings, available to all (interpretable and renegotiable by all – at least in private, or within the counsels of a small community) is that of architecture. Matter for the infinite.
Performativity
as ritualistic. So conveying ritual force or carrying the functions of
rituality (and so carrying reality itself, our human reality, the reality of
quality and value carried by a culture, by a language, a reality beyond
measure, beyond quantification). The basic unit of ritual in language is the
hinge linking word and event. Performativity is the join, not only between the
orders of language (representation) and the material world (event), but also
(as the means of cementing this relation) of the temporal order with the
eternal and so of cementing all
relations. This is equally true of
universals and laws that are, by definition, also reliant on the force of
eternity, of being put beyond the reach of the merely contingent, for their
cohesive effect. The infinite reach of the promise, as of other
performatives, declares it to be a model ritual. A model also found in our
relations with the shape of our built environment and in our reflections upon
architecture. The promise of
architecture.
Part ritual. Parts in
Performance. Three theses on rituality in architecture:
(I)
The delimitation/separation of a certain quality,
experience or flavour of space/time may occur with the perception,
delimitation, even highlighting, of a feature on a ground. A detail, aspect (or
part) of a building, or the sense of part of the built environment, may be
found to be saying something more than that attributable to the sum of a given
configuration of glass and stone.
(II)
The time suggested by a building or, more usually,
by its parts, may be found to connote past or future time (trigger for memory
or speculation), or even the outside of time (the relationship to bigger
things); we may find ourselves caught unawares in the epiphany of the eternal
moment.
(III)
And so the exchange,
the sacrifice that makes possible the return on our identity, which appears to
seal it, to guarantee it ... the gift of our time (a time removed from the
everyday). Yet happening everyday – an everyday part of our urban lives. The consumer’s return on his or her
investment of time and energy, as on the investment of finance, labour and
material (actual and congealed time) by the producers.
(For all cause and effect relationships, not
least after their demolition by Nietzsche, their privileging and relating
moments in a process, may equally be conceptualised as exchanges, as
investments and returns – indeed this point of view is more human than the
would-be scientific notion of cause and effect…)
Parts
in Exchange. Concerning our everyday relation to the key phenomenological parts
of architecture (the parts of human experience). Three zones of operation;
three zones over which these theses can range. If the vertical is the natural
unit of ownership and engineering, then the horizontal is that of experience.
For each part of our own inner experience (making-sacred, desiring,
recognition-seeking) a part of the built environment, a part of architecture
(top, middle, bottom) one part of the architectural experience. Part exchange.
Top.
The long top, the sky-touching strip, the continuous edge of architecture. As
much a relation with the sky (the skyline) as a material zone (as a material
recognition of the existence of this relation). A relation with light, with the sun, an
eye raising, invitation to gaze heavenwards and sense the place of demarcation,
separation between worldly and otherworldly (ideal) realms, of the role of
these in our concerns; a solar relation. The place of the Solar as ritual… as
made up of an object (the top and its proximity to the sky, the sun, the
heavens) and our gaze, our veneration. As a sacrificial exchange dedicated to
our social, communal and personal meta-set; to first and last things
(putative), infinite in application, and range (eternal…). The proof of this
relation lies in the existence of the top as a (now) renewed and continual
sacrifice (economic, objective) to our collective religious desire. Of our gaze
as sacrificial (objective) of our time. Eye-raising is performative of the
truth of our indebtedness to our most fundamental (but always obviously
religious) belief structures. Beyond functionality, and so beyond rationalism
and economics as the logic of material return (objective) this ritual exchange,
the performance of an identity, or of the desire for that identity,
re-implicates the identity of the watchers, the community of the participants
in the building’s collective public life. The return is there, but translated
onto the level of identity (subjective). Such a return is hated by all
(material) functionalists (who refuse to understand symbolic functionalism)
where absence or brute minimalism is the performance of this relation
(subjective). To them the return as subjective is inconceivable.
Middle.
The tall façade of the middle as ritual; fired by the question: what do they do
there…behind the glass wall? Zone of the lives and the stories of lives, of the
stories of others as centering on sex. Insofar as sex is constitutive of the
self, of personal identity, the thought of sexual ecstasy as bearing a trace of
infinity and eternity (a trace of the sublime) an imaginary exchange. An
imaginary sacrifice throughout, of thoughts, motion of the eyes, motion of our
thoughts, performative of our desire, of our eternal (lifelong) obsession with
sex as the secret of the lives of others….
Bottom.
The long corridor of the bottom, the ground, procession of doors and windows as
ritual (place of suture of the relationship of identity exchange with commodity
exchange, key relation of our social form, key relation to our identity). An
exchange for self, a self mirrored in shop-front windows as in the mind’s eye,
the eye of the self, the self that forms the I. Constantly self-aware in its
eternal present. Infinity and eternity are found in the belief that this self
will last… forever. Through the exchange of possessions or money (materialised
time, time in lieu, exchangeable time, stored therefore) in exchange for a new
self (image). This exchange, this promise, too, thought, in advance; the lure
of commodity exchange, lure of a new start, a new self (image). Subjective
until actualised, objective in impact; but then remaining subjective to the
end. The return takes place in the imagination (but is nonetheless real for all
that), of the self in its relation to others, to its inclusion in the desired
peer group and of an exclusive position (putative) within such. This is the
true return on expenditure - on our spending of cash and time.
Time
given, in exchange, stopping and looking, a part of one finite life, a
percentage of ones allotted time. Attention given, ones senses, ones mind,
filled by one thing rather than another. Recognition given, community or
priority acknowledged - or withheld (a dangerous exchange, if we remember the
force of ‘honour’ codes). And a fraction of a second is enough to renew an
already established meaning (‘looking up’, recognising, having ones sense of
place confirmed, with ones sense of self as one who is not lost, a feature of
speedy city life). An instant of ritual exchange. Given time.
The
subject of architecture. Who sees? Who feels? First, the collective subject;
the implied subject as collective (unitary, so largely fictional or ideal, an
average or majority). Part fiction of theory. Second, the mediated relationships
as informed by the key binary divisions in society (brutal, ideological, fixed)
such as male/female, boss and worker, blue and white colour, native and
migrant, adult and child, and so on. All aspects of our identity, but not
exhaustive of it. Third, our (real
or imaginary) membership of communities (plural, differential, fluid). Actual
groups in relation to their environment, the true collective aspect of human
experience (to which we owe plural membership, often in tension with our other
loyalties, and identifications – the stuff of narrative, fiction and tragedy).
Finally, we have the level of concrete individuals together with their
individual appropriations of the architecture that encompasses them. Some of
which may be dissenting from those of the implied collective or the (real)
communities to which they belong (a relation itself fluid, particular to time
as well as the relation of place, of an individual with place…in time,
contingent and subject to mutability, in studies, quantifiable as to time/place
and participant).
Architecture
as home to many imaginary exchange relations. As many as it takes (to
constitute our selves). Mutating to infinity: fixed as ourselves.
(Do I dare suggest that
this argument offers a starting point for the re-theorisation of architecture
and the built environment in the 21st century?)
Anti-mimesis
III).
The critique of Mimesis
offers the following gains. An understanding of how the world makes us,
influences us, confirms us, as read through our on-going experience of things
(from object to subject) – from the experience of urban and ‘natural’
landscape, and most especially that of ‘art’ as a special (intense) case. With
the self as contingent and requiring support from its environment in a perpetual
sequence of exchanges. Whence the potency of ‘culture shock’ when dislocation
occurs (including such ‘little’ things as arrival at the office to find ones
table has been moved, the subject of much literature). Suddenly we are no
longer at home in the world. The self itself is threatened here, where the
world is no longer ‘ours’ (…and so become the sole possession of the other,
with oneself also the terrified possession of the other). Therefore the link of
the Sublime to the sense and concept of the Other (capital ‘O’ already
indicating a sublime, metaphysical relation) and of the sacrificial exchange of
the other, in fact or in symbol, as the cure for this dispossession. If
rituality is the cure for the disease of the loss of self, then rituality in
art, or as art, is perhaps our most frequently found form of this medicine.
Just which modality of rituality, ‘Beautiful’ or ‘Sublime’, affirming or
threatening, confirming or shaking, depends upon the given art work or even on
the given reader….
A
critique of Mimesis is also a critique of our mode of seizure of objects (from
subject to object). Our experience of things as the appropriation of things (as
through the nomination and constitution of the art object, the role of the
reader). But not as if on a tabula rasa.
A different culture may erase (refuse) all previous meanings in its own
appropriation (commercial or otherwise) of another culture. Its own identity
propositions will then be stamped on objects and their exchanges, replacing
those of previous or originating cultures, leaving them as a shadow, a ghost at
the table, proposing guilt, and memory, if only as a demi-presence, as past to
presence’s present, the black and white photograph that stands forgotten at the
back of the sideboard. And so readable as an augur of the future, a sign of
guilt, of a dawning awareness of the return of the obliterated culture as
(imaginary) threat. A sublime move in the ‘home’ world.
Negative
aspect of appropriation; at once bringer of enablement to all and so affirmative
of the identities enacting this re-definition: and wanton destruction of old
meanings; the symbolic destruction of those identities once (or in any way)
connected with them. Leaving only the memory of an exorcism (or the exorcism of
a memory).
Therefore
the criticism of the concept of Mimesis that as a description of a relationship
to the world it is too simple given our embedding in the world, given our
fraught relations with the object (not least of which, ourselves). That is to
say; we do not just copy ‘it’ (there is more to life than the mirror) we form
‘it’ and ‘it’ forms ‘us’. This exchange is a ritual relation in embryo, a
performative relation: as it happens so we are made, as the signs are exchanged
so we too are transformed… A site is set up, which in turn ‘sets us up’ for the
next part of our lives (the more crucial the stage the more formalised the
event). At each exchange we emerge reformed; from the short conversation that
refreshes our memory as to our ties to someone, to community events which enact
our debt to society in general and to a given cultural grouping in particular.
As we ourselves are events, are process and action, so there is an
understandable emphasis upon the performative as opposed to the simple mimetic
relation. Not least in the experience of architecture (where our social
meanings may be refreshed, but where we do not imitate the inorganic).
Mimesis, ‘in’ and ‘out’,
shows us the state of the temporal or refers to eternity, with the latter
pointing outside, or to what comes from outside (from religion and its
imitators to ‘the Gothic’) and is often paired with a mimesis of contents
‘comfortable’ and ‘uncomfortable’
(copying matters pleasant and unpleasant). The former combination
confirming self/community through comfort, the known as predictable: the latter
re-confirming, renewing the self together with self/community relation, after
‘shaking’ the self, after a disturbance of order. This latter constituting a
fundamental mode or affect of narrative as can be seen in the prevalence of the
thriller, adventure and Gothic genres (or in the problem/solution aspect of
narrative).
Leading to the abandonment
of the contradictory term ‘Mimesis’, for a variety of types of representation.
The copying of the seen and unseen now being a matter of the disposition of the
values of ‘in’ and ‘out’; a question of deixis, of metaphysics, and so of
politics (of the difference between fundamentalist and conditional thought) a
matter of the disposition of the rhetoric of eternity.
*
If the question of Mimesis
resolves itself into modalities of representation, then the thinking of the
Beautiful and the Sublime has long since been subsumed by the heirs to the
aesthetic tradition, a variety of language-based and sociological-pragmatic
discourses. However ritual returns some validity to these categories (outworn
not least in the comparative aesthetics of the international historic area
which returned them to us reformed, and much less easily segregated). These
‘returns’ remind us of what was lost in the over-hasty abandonment of the
Beautiful and the Sublime, or their equally over-eager conversion into just
another form of high art distinction (sublime or difficult high art versus
popular or easy beauty). Namely the two basic ingredients that made these terms
at once so ubiquitous and so profound, ingredients also found in the art of all
other cultures: the distinction, or relative association, of pleasure and
displeasure and the metaphysical distinction of inside and outside. In the case
of the Beautiful; the role of unproblematic pleasure and the role of
unambiguous presence: for the Sublime; the role of discomfort in art and the
role of an exterior to which the art work may point. Two sets of indices
configure the range of operations: gradations of pleasure from positive to
negative, the latter refined by displeasure experienced but not depicted
occasioned by an event depicted but not experienced; and the sense of an
internal or external reference point, the later offering the metaphysical
hidden or absent foundation, a move found in all cultures, all belief systems
and even in systematised thought as such (witness the role of axioms in the
formation of artificial languages). This is the aesthetic-descriptive approach
which provides a demystified method of description of a wide variety of
cultural practices previously deemed ‘low’ or ‘high’, ‘art’ or ‘popular’, and
can be married with profit to the ritual-functional approach which further
elucidates the relationship between art and identity, art and community.
Thus we have two modalities
onto the object or event deemed of aesthetic or cultural import: one
formal-descriptive; one functional. The first, aesthetic-descriptive
(pleasure/pain and in/out) together with comparative study, collapses the old
categories. The second, ritual, in the form of simple or complex confirmation,
order and identity as beauty everlasting or as to be renewed after being shaken
by the presence of the sublime, returns them in transmuted form. Together they
combine as, in the case of ‘the Beautiful’, the pleasure of recognition, the
joy of certainty (accompanied by a reference to beauty’s hope or ideal as
putatively eternal), and, in the case of ‘the Sublime’, the displeasure
occasioned by a lack of recognition, where an initial uncertainty is soon
rewarded by the return of recognition and order (accompanied by the return of
pleasure that signals a work of art in its ritual aspect).
So
the Beautiful and the Sublime, the two privileged modalities of Mimesis, are
part of the remit of ritual. Both terms but two moments of ritual effect.
Representing two kinds of ritual affect. These two lauded forms of Mimesis, an
immediate positive and a mediated positive (a positive mediated by a moment of
negation), two forms of what is good, worldly and otherworldly, are now found
inextricably intertwined - always already sharing both semantic and deictic
space. Yet in anthropological terms two kinds are still to be distinguished;
consisting of simple confirmation and confirmation after an initial shaking of
identity. Two kinds which underpin and maintain the existence of the aesthetic
forms which bear the names, ‘the Beautiful’ and ‘the Sublime’, no longer
functioning on the aesthetic level, but on the anthropological plane of function.
Reminders of the origin and persistence of the artwork as ritual. Even of
vision, of the visual itself, as ritual – as containing the possibility of
ritual force. Also true, therefore, of visual culture in general, be it in the
form of cities, landscape or art, all may now be read as ritually interpreted,
as inflected for ideals, for important meaning-making, for the repair and
(re-)placing of the individual and therefore of his or her relation to a
variety of types of identity, to community making and to the crucial work of
social reproduction and maintenance.
It is this way that the
mobilisation of the concept of rituality, the idea of performative exchange
relations taken from anthropology and critical theory, and the notion of
temporality as the description and critique of the rhetoric of eternity, allows
for the analysis of identity and community (of what is exchanged for these,
how, and under what conditions?). In short a description of how the artwork and
its values are constituted (and reconstituted) in a nexus of exchange
relations.
The insights accruing to
this innovation work on two fronts, poetics (description) and function (social role). So it is that we
have a visual poetics which dissolves the Beautiful and the Sublime into
various combinations of pleasure/pain, inside/outside, and a critical
functionalism which focuses upon their performative role, on the ritual
exchange which rescues them. It is in this way that the Sublime can still
maintain its explanatory power as to the role of the Beyond, as a tool or
rhetorical mainstay of ideology, and as a ritual, dependant upon the value of
eternity or an exchange made at its behest. Yet does this new configuration of
concepts do the work of the old that they would replace, explain what previous models
once explained… and more? Furthermore, can they heal the rift between the ‘torn
halves’ of human culture, ‘popular’
and ‘art’ cultures, (themselves, as much abstracted, ’reified’ poles of a
continuum of identity-forming cultural events, as manifestations of the
division and gradation of labour ‘by hand and by brain’)? On the level of
methodology, we have the application of concepts across the field without
exception; traversing differences and allowing comparative work to be done. On
the level of critique and judgment we have a means of by-passing yesterday’s
elitisms and their reactive mirror images (co-founding and mutually sustaining
as always) yet still permitting critical discrimination. So dissolving the
contested terms (‘the Beautiful and the Sublime’) as but another two moments
(two extremes, two particular cases of identity exchange and investment) in a
sea of cultural practices. If on the aesthetic level the difference between the
Beautiful and the Sublime has become increasingly blurred, then on the
functional level the difference between the ritual affects we once called
Beautiful and Sublime becomes more important.
Dr. Peter Nesteruk lives and works in
Contact information:
Email: pjnesteruk@yahoo.co.uk
Website: http://www.peternesteruk.com/
Follow on Researchgate.