Reflections on our Mimetic Heritage from Plato to Louis Vuitton
Leo Treitler
In The Aesthetic of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems Stephen Halliwell writes of the “still regrettably standard translation of mimesis as “imitation.”[1] Alternatives have been offered-- representation, portrayal, expression, depiction, picturing, evocation, mimicking, copying, sharing or participating with -- which can often give a better sense of the contexts and syntax of the word than imitation which, after all, comes down from the Latin imitatio in an age when that word cannot simply be expected to have had the connotations that imitation has for modern speakers of English .
It isn’t only the inaccuracy or even incoherence of the standard translation that makes it regrettable, it is the epistemological muddle into which it devolves so that one can hardly settle on what is being said. A study that displays this in a way that is confounding from the outset is “Literary Criticism and the Concept of Imitation in Antiquity” by the classicist Richard McKeon[2] who surveys the place of the concept he calls imitation in the philosophies, principally, of Plato and Aristotle. He links imitation to mimesis, but not before writing of the “variety of meanings which [imitation] has assumed in the course of its history,” of its “diversity of meanings,” of the way its use “involves a play on words when it does not involve self-contradiction,” of its “vague, inadequate, primitive nature” in its occurrence in Plato’s dialogues (but of course he means “mimesis,” not “imitation”), of the way it is left as a term “universal in scope and indeterminate in application,” not established in Plato’s use “in a literal meaning or delimited to a specific subject matter (my emphasis)” or given a “fixed meaning.”[3] The link is eventually forged (on the sixth page of the essay) by the textual act of placing the Greek word, in its Greek orthography, in parentheses immediately following the word “imitations,” which has by then been pronounced unstable in so many ways. The arrangement by convention stands for a relationship of synonymity between any two terms that are so arranged. We may wonder, then, what meaning is bestowed on mimesis (this time in the plural mimmema) by this act, and we may wonder, too, whether that does not in fact execute tacitly the “literal” translation that the author has explicitly denied finding in the dialogues of Plato and that he subsequently reconfirms in his persistent use of the word imitation as cipher for mimesis through the remainder of the essay.
After these exercises there is no way for us to know, regarding any occurence of imitation in McKeon’s text, whether it stands for that “variety of meanings which the term has assumed in the course of its history” or that it simply stands in for the word mimesis as its “literal meaning” and could do so just as well if it were written backwards, noitatimi, i.e. as the exact and only counterpart in the English language of the Greek term in a symmetrical relationship. In that case there would be no need for Halliwell’s lament. There is no change to the meaning of a sentence if imitation --or any other grapheme-- replaces mimesis as its “literal” translation. That practice is regrettable only if any of the “variety of meanings which the term imitation has assumed in the course of its history” leaks into the apprehension of mimesis. But then the translation is not “literal. ” What does “literal” mean, anyway?
The tricky questions raised here are not unique to this particular issue of translation. They are fundamental questions about words, meanings, language, translation and the over-used and under-explained concept of “literal.” By the same token, just as imitation has been the default idea of what mimesis is about, as Halliwell laments, the very title of his book represents the default placement of the concept in the domain of the “imitative arts.” He writes “As the very title of my book advertises, the viewpoint I adopt on mimesis will throughout be situated within the framework of what I count as the study (and...the history) of aesthetics.”[4] But further on in his discussion of Plato’s Cratylus, Halliwell considers, as a passing thought, the possibility of “the treatment of artistic mimesis as ‘secondary’ representation, in subordination to the ‘primary’ representation existing in the fabric of human language and thought” [5]. That is indeed the primary concern of the Cratylus, and along with the concerns of epistemology, it is the deep level at which the concept of mimesis lies.
The same questions are forced by the challenge to make sense of the opening sentence of a related essay.[6] “Mimesis,” writes Vivienne Gray “which can be literally translated as imitation, has a wide range of technical meanings in the world of ancient literary criticism.” The indulgent generosity of “can be” is instantly taken back by the imperious constraint of “literally.” Her essay, like McKeon’s, enacts the fixed connection of the two terms despite both authors’ explicit disavowal of it.
A second reversal follows the first in Gray’s opening sentence: making the “literal” translation of mimesis to “imitation” “is often unhelpful.” Presumably that is a nod to the well-known potential of “literal” translations to distort intended meanings owing to their insensitivity to differences of context, usage, and the multivocality of many words. Behind the confusion about the relations among words, meanings, languages, translation, and the bearing on all of them of the power of the “literal,” is an unarticulated conception of those relations: Languages are systems that comprise meanings and words that are their graphic or sonic representations. Translation is the replacement of a representation or representations of a meaning or meanings in one language by representations of the same meanings by their counterparts in another. This is, as we shall see, essentially an Aristotelian conception. Under it the translation of mimesis as imitation is “literal” and it is in fact redundant--whatever meaning they may jointly represent is not altered by the substitution in either direction. But it is hard to be convinced that the baggage that is carried by “imitation” does not affect our understanding of mimesis, nor is it easy to see how whatever content of that baggage spills out onto mimesis can elucidate the meanings which that concept may have had in the culture of its origin.
Gray’s subject is “the use of mimesis to describe what the historian does in creating his history.” Her principal witness is the first-century BC rhetorician Dionysius of Halicarnassus and the principal work of his that she cites is his critical essay “On Thucydides,” which focuses on Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. For example Dionysius writes in chapter 43 of the essay “The defense of Pericles in the second book [of the History] which he made on behalf of himself when the Athenians were exasperated because he persuaded them to undertake the war, I do not approve in its entirety.” Thucydides has Pericles say “This outburst of your anger against me is just what I expected, for I see the reasons, and I have called this assembly for the express purposes of calling to your attention and remonstrating with you if in any respect you are wrong either in being angry with me or in giving way to your misfortunes.” Dionysius comments “Such language as this was suitable for Thucydides writing about [Pericles] in the form of a narrative, but it was not appropriate for Pericles who was defending himself against an angry crowd especially so at the beginning of his defense before he had tempered the anger of men...with arguments of another nature....For orators ought not to stir up but to calm the anger of the masses.” [7] This is a criticism as to the “rhetorical appropriateness and plausibility”, (Halliwell 295) not the accuracy of the report. On the basis of such criteria Gray, engaging the axiom of her opening sentence, formulates her thesis that “by the first century at the latest, and probably much earlier, history was being described as an imitative art.” But as Halliwell writes, “The implication of this for Dionysius’s concept of mimesis is that it is hardly reducible to one of ‘imitation’ or copying.” (p. 294)
Imagine that Erich Auerbach had called his great book Mimesis: The Imitation of Reality.
In 1966 there appeared in the journal Natural History an article “Shakespeare in the Bush: An American anthropologist set out to study the Tiv of West Africa and was taught the true story of Hamlet,” by Laura Bohanan.
The author recounts an aspect of her experience during a residence with a tribe of some hundred and forty people. Story-telling was a principal occupation during the days after the harvest, and the elder in charge urged her to join in and tell a story from her own people. She protested that she was not a story teller, and certainly not up to their skill in the art. When the old man promised that they would not criticize her style she assented, and one evening she set out to tell the story of Hamlet. She began:
“Not yesterday, not yesterday, but long ago, a thing occurred. One night three men were keeping watch outside the homestead of the great chief, when suddenly they saw the former chief approach them.”
“Why was he no longer their chief?” asked one of the elders.
“He was dead,” I explained. “That is why they were troubled and afraid when they saw him.”
.“Impossible,” interrupted a second. “Of course it wasn’t the dead chief. It was an omen sent by a witch. Go on.”
“Slightly shaken, I continued: One of these three was a man who knew things [Horatio] (this is the closest translation for scholar, but it also meant witch; the second elder looked triumphantly at the first). So Horatio spoke to the dead chief saying, ‘Tell us what we must do so you may rest in your grave,’ but the dead chief did not answer. He vanished, and they could see him no more. Then Horatio said this event was the affair of the dead chief’s son, Hamlet.”
“There was a general shaking of heads round the circle. ‘Had the dead chief no living brothers? Or was this son the chief?’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘That is, he had one living brother who became the chief when the elder brother died.’”
The old men muttered: such omens were matters for chiefs and elders, not for youngsters; no good could come of going behind a chief’s back; clearly Horatio was not a man who knew things.”
And so it went on, Bohanan struggling with her narrative, increasingly frantic as her listeners broke in freely, correcting her again and again in accordance with how they knew things should be.
When she had concluded the chief elder said “That was a very good story
and you told it with very few mistakes. Sometime,” he concluded, “you must tell us some more stories of your country. We, who are elders, will instruct you in their true meaning, so that when you return to your own land your elders will see that you have not been sitting in the bush, but among those who know things and who have taught you wisdom.” It was a sense of propriety or decorum, not of recognizable verisimilitude, that was for the Tiv elders, as it was for Dionysius of Hallicarnassus, the criterion of truth in the telling of history.
In the 25th chapter of his Poetics Aristotle provides what could be legitimation for this criterion, declaring that three kinds of things or events can be the object of mimesis: “the sorts of things that were or are the case, the sorts of things people say and think to be the case, and the sorts of things that should be the case.”[8] This is a far broader universe of objects than the link of mimesis to imitation allows.
Such expansion to a concept of inner faithfulness to an artistic or poetic purpose is the subject of Goethe’s short dialogue Über Wahrheit und Wahrscheinlichkeit der Kunstwerke of 1797.The title of an English translation published in 1980, ”On Truth and Probability in Works of Art” by no less distinguished a publishing house than the University of California Press[9] is a symptom of addiction to the force of “literal” meaning. In the Plato-like dialogue that takes place in a theater one participant leads the other into a discussion of differences between “Truth and the Appearance of Truth.” Such would be the title that corresponds exactly to the subject of the dialogue. Modern German-English dictionaries translate Wahrscheinlichkeit as “probability,” a concept that has nothing whatever to do with the discussion. The translator behaved like a translating machine, taking no notice of the nonsense that his “literal” translation makes.
The tyranny of “literal meaning” descends from too much influence of a distinction invented by Aristotle, that between the workings of literal and metaphorical meanings in language and their appropriateness to the opposite intellectual enterprises of physics and poetry, demonstrated in a remark from the Meteorologica: ‘Empedocles’ notion of the salt sea as the sweat of the earth is ‘adequate perhaps for poetic purposes’, but ‘inadequate for understanding the nature of the thing’’. In the Topics he wrote ‘Every metaphorical expression is obscure’.[10]
This insistence on literal language for positive knowledge is backed by aspects of Aristotle’s epistemology and semiology. His treatise De Interpretatione begins with this epistemological doctrine: ‘Spoken words then are symbols of affections of the soul[11] and written words are symbols of spoken words. And just as written letters are not the same for all humans neither are spoken words. But what these primarily are signs of, the affections of the soul, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our affections are likenesses’. He thus posits that affections of the soul or mental images are fixed to the things of the world by way of likeness. That is elaborated in the De Anima: ‘The soul never thinks without an image’ (431b); ‘Actual knowledge is identical with its object’ (431a); ‘The mind which is actually thinking is the objects which it thinks’ 431b; If one thinks of a stone ‘it is not the stone which is present in the soul but its form’ 431b. He posits that mental images are fixed to spoken words as their symbols, and spoken words are fixed to written words as their symbols. He says that the things and the images that are fixed to them are the same for all humans but the spoken and written words are not. This comes down to the proposition that the things of the world and the perceptions that humans have of them are the same for all humans, but that the spoken and written words through which we represent our perceptions are not the same for all, i.e. either that we speak and write different languages or, as Felix Mendelssohn wrote, “The same words never mean the same things to different people”.[12] By this token, languages would be systems of signs, or codes, that refer to the “things” in the world and their mental representations (which are their “meanings”). Then “literal translation” of some sequence of words for the same “things”—some meaning”—from one language to another or paraphrase of one expression in another would require of identifying the signs in the one language or expression that will correspond as symbols to those in the other. The correspondences constitute fixed connections. To say that ‘mimesis’ can be literally translated as ‘imitation’ is to suppose that such a connection was fixed at some time between the Greek mimesis and the Latin imitatio and from that to its derivations. The convention for this translation is backed by no evidence regarding the time and circumstances of such assignments, and especially not for the tacit presumption that the meanings of those derivatives when they were assigned to mimesis are the meanings they have today for those respective language communities.
On the other hand there has been too little influence of a remark such as the following from Aristotle: ‘When the Poet calls old age stubble, he produces a new idea, new knowledge.’[13] In this he anticipated a conception of creative language use that has been described recently in terms of natural language constructions that yield non-obvious meanings; speakers or writers representing, organizing, and using their knowledge in the production and interpretation of language, producing new, non-standard meanings absent from dictionaries, in metaphors, metonyms, hyperbole, understatements, similes, analogies, innuendo, private meaning.[14] It is a heuristic use of language, different from one that aims to mirror or evoke knowledge or experience to which it is fixed by convention .
Two other citations in Gray’s essay provide further perspectives on the mimesis-imitation conundrum. First, Dionysius wrote
The good poet and orator must create a mimesis of the events he describes, not only in his choice of words, but in his arrangement of them,” and he gave the following example: “Homer’s description of the labour of Sisyphus was a mimesis of events in that the long syllables predominating in his chosen vocabulary constitute a mimesis [Gray writes “imitation”] of the arduous effort Sisyphus had to make in rolling his stone uphill.[15]
Let’s consider a musical parallel, the opening of Beethoven’s overture to Goethe’s play Egmont, where the music’s (Spanish) Sarabande dance rhythm, played very slowly and in deep, sinister instrumental register, evokes the Spanish colonial tyranny over the Lowlands that is the play’s setting --call it punning or metaphor, or even methexis (see below)—all three as representation or evocation—but “imitation,” if one thinks about it, makes a nonsense.
Second, the first-century BC historian Diodorus of Sicily wrote about the fundamental obstacle to history writing considered as mimesis: Narrative writing is linear and can only record one action at a time, whereas “in life many different actions are consummated at the same time. The written record falls far short of arranging them as they really were.”[16] If this stands in the way of considering history-writing as mimesis, how much more distanced history-writing is from imitation.
The last four words of Gray’s translation of Diodorus, of course, evoke Leopold von Ranke--the last four words of what has been called “the most famous statement in all historiography”[17]Here is the context of those four words:
History has had assigned to it the task of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of ages to come. The present study does not take on such high offices; it wants only to show how things eigentlich were. (From the Preface to “History of the Romanic and Germanic peoples from 1494 to 1514,) 1824.
That statement, and especially its last four words, earned the éclat with which Krieger aggrandized them for their adoption by disciples as the motto of a new tradition of history-writing that was labelled ‘positivist’, just as their author became lionized with such epithets as 'The father of the objective writing of history’ and 'The founder of the science of history’.
I’ve left eigentlich untranslated because there has been some controversy over its usual translation as really or actually, a sense that occupies only a small place in a wide semantic field that includes also “essentially’, ‘immanently’, ‘in itself’. But two more innocent or neutral seeming words in this passage actually have more to say about its portent for the conduct of history under its influence.
Three years before the publication of von Ranke’s book the philosopher, linguist, educator, and diplomat Wilhelm von Humboldt delivered a lecture to the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences on ‘The Task of the Writer of History’ which, he said, is ‘die Darstellung des Geschehende’. There is no single English counterpart of the last word; one would have to say ‘the representation of events as they happen or happened,’ a usage that emphasizes an ongoing present.
Von Humboldt has sometimes been credited with anticipating von Ranke. That misses the profound differences between their conceptions, which turn on their views of the role of the historian and of the subject about which he or she writes. The key words are von Ranke’s ‘zeigen’ as compared to von Humboldt’s ‘darstellen’, and von Ranke’s ‘die Vergangenheit’, ‘the past’, and von Humboldt’s ‘das Geschehende’. The semantic field of darstellen is dominated by the active role of a representing agency, whether that is a person, a picture, a text, or in fact anything or anyone that represents, plays a role, or presents. The darstellende Kunste are ‘the performing arts’. The semantic field of zeigen is narrower: ‘show’, ‘point’, ‘indicate’, ‘demonstrate’, ‘reveal’, ‘display’. The hands of a clock and the teacher’s pointer are Zeiger. The act of showing is transparent to what is shown; the act of representing is more opaque. The representation and the representer--not only what is represented--hold the beholder’s attention. The terms in each of the key pairs are matched. Von Ranke’s historian stands aside and points to a fixed past. His “eigentlich” is of a piece with that. Von Humboldt’s historian gives a representation of an ongoing past’s present.
It was Diodorus’ reservation about the limited possibilities of imitation in the writing of history that brought us to this confrontation of the two German historians. But we ought not to assume that the apparent resonance between the translations from von Ranke’s German and Diodorus’ Latin—‘how [the past] really was’, ‘as [events] really were’— indicates an identity of conception between them. The full sentence in the passage from Diodorus suggests an answer: ‘The written record, while representing the events, falls far short of arranging them as they really were’. With the focus on the form of the representation imposed by the medium of writing the concern is with the mode of presentation, for which the writer has responsibility. Dionysius criticizes Thucydides’ history not for a lack of fidelity to the facts but for a failure to grasp the propriety of what he reports. Both manifest a conception of historiography as an act of representation. It is von Humboldt and not von Ranke who follows in this ancient tradition.
A similar conclusion is reached by Stephen Bann in his book The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth Century Britain and France[18] [my emphasis]. Comparing the dicta of von Humboldt and von Ranke, he writes ‘Darstellen is thus a term whose shades of meaning adhere, for the most part, to a traditional mimetic [not imitative] formula. Zeigen is more appropriately used for direct showing, unmediated by a code or system of transcription’. He reinforces the distinction by citing the qualifying word that precedes zeigen in von Ranke’s expression: er will bloss zeigen [my emphasis], ‘he wants only to show[…]’. Bann, writes ‘Ranke’s statement [...] presents, with eloquent precision, the utopia of historical discourse in the nineteenth century, which is to lie entirely outside the province of ‘poetry’ and ‘style’. He cites Lord Acton’s “Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History”, delivered in 1895 at Cambridge University: “Ranke is the representative of the age which instituted the modern study of History. He taught it to be critical, to be colorless, and to be new”—in effect to be objective [my emphasis]. For confirmation he cites Ranke’s autobiography, in which Ranke relates how he “took the resolution to avoid in [his] works all imagination and all invention and to restrict [himself] severely to the facts”. In this light he associates the slogan that nineteenth-century historians adapted from Ranke’s dictum with parallel nineteenth-century practices, the ‘’true-to-life” taxidermy that came to inhabit the displays of natural history museums, the imposition of an ideal of fidelity on translation, and photography, all representing “a new heterodox, non-mimetic discourse, that swelled by the 1820’s and became a torrent by 1900”. And he laments “the extreme, perhaps excessive value which our culture still places upon the myth of recreating the real on the image of the historian as taxidermist”. For the writer of history ‘true-to-life’ is a false ambition.
I wonder whether there is not also a non-cognitive, perceptual factor contributing to the perpetuation of the default linking of mimesis with ‘imitation’, whether that initiated the association in the first place, or supported an association that was formed on other grounds. I mean the clang association of the two words which can give a tacit intuitive impression that they belong together naturally. That impression may be reinforced by the resonance of both words in both sound and meaning with ‘mimic’ and ‘mime’. This speculation opens out to two items in the background of the discussions about mimesis. First, a theory elaborated from the likely etymology of mimesis from mimos. Second, a much-discussed remark of Aristotle’s: ‘The Pythagorians named mimesis what Plato named methexis. ’[19]
The classicist F. M. Cornford has written ‘[The] meaning of mimesis goes back to the original meaning of the word. Mimos means an actor.[20] A whole succession of actors may embody or reproduce a character, say Hamlet; but none of them is identical with Hamlet. Each represents the character, which yet is not used up by any impersonator. The actor was, in the earliest times, the occasional vehicle of a divine or legendary spirit. In Dionysiac religion this relation subsists between the [...] group of worshippers and the god who takes possession of them. “Blessed,” say the chorus in the Bacchae [of Euripedes] “is he whose soul [...] is merged in his group,” when the whole group is possessed by one spirit [... ] which can alike penetrate the whole group and dwell in each of its members. At that stage “likeness to God” amounts to temporary identification. Induced by orgiastic means, by Bacchic ecstasy or Orphic sacramental feast, it is a foretaste of the final reunion.[21] In Pythagorianism the conception is toned down, Apollinized. The means is no longer ecstasy or sacrament, but theoria, intellectual contemplation of the universal order, whereby the microcosm comes to reproduce that order more perfectly and becomes kosmios, attuned to the celestial harmony’, which is ‘the formula of that identical structure which is repeated in the universe and in its analogous parts. It must be such that the nature of the whole can be reproduced in each subordinate whole or analogous part’. ‘Individuals reproduce the whole in miniature; they are not mere fractions, but analogous parts of the whole which includes them. ‘This relation of the many analogous parts to the included whole [...] is implied in the term mimesis, by which, as Aristotle remarks, the Pythagoreans meant the same relation that Plato called “participation”.
If my speculation about the possible role of clang association in the evolution of the mimesis word family arouses scepticism, the ancient dogma of alphabetism is nothing other than a claimed (natural) clang association between the sounds fixed to letters arraigned in written words and the succession of sounds fixed to the words that comprise them. Putting it the other way about, the written letters are signs for the constituent sounds of words which would have been derived through analysis of those sounds. In short, this is to say that the letters of the alphabet are the notations through which writing represents speech. As Roy Harris has written, ‘The ideal alphabet envisaged [under this conception] is thus one in which each letter would stand for just one individual sound [...] and there would be no redundant letters, no reduplication, and no need to represent any individual sound by a combination of letters. In short, the alphabet and the sound system would be mirror images of each other’.[22] It is another dogma resting on the axioms of imitation and literalism. ( Two writing systems that nearly approach this description are those of the Korean language and the International Phonetic Alphabet.)
There are really two conceptions entailed in this idea,
1) That writing imitates speech.
2) A kind of atomism of speech sounds, for which the letters of the alphabet constitute a phonetic notation.
The two conceptions can be recognized in a number of writings ranging from antiquity to the twentieth century. Plato’s Cratylus:
Just as painters, when they wish to produce an imitation, sometimes use only red, sometimes some other colour, and sometimes mix many colours, as when they are making a picture of a man or something of that sort, employing each colour, I suppose, as they think the particular picture demands it. In just this way we, too, shall apply letters to things, using one letter for one thing, when that seems to be required, or many letters together, forming syllables, as they are called, and in turn combining syllables, and by their combination forming names and verbs.
Plato, Phaedrus 276: ‘The written word may justly be called the image of the spoken word’. Aristotle, the beginning of De Interpretatione: ‘Written words are symbols of spoken words’. Priscianus, Institutiones grammaticae 1.2.4, ca. 500 AD: ’Just as atoms come together and produce every corporeal thing, so likewise do speech sounds compose speech as it were some bodily entity’.[23]
Early writers on musical notation justified an atomist conception of melody and the possibility of notating its elements by analogy with the atomist conception of speech and its writing down. Anonymous, Musica enchiriades, ninth century: ‘Just as letters are the elementary and indivisible parts of articulated speech, from which syllables and in turn verbs and nouns are formed to create the text of finished speech, so too the pitches of sung speech, which the Latins call sounds, are themselves basic elements’.[24] Hucbald, De harmonica institutione, ninth century. ‘As the sounds and differences of words are recognized by letters in writing, in such a way that the reader is not left in doubt, musical signs were devised so that every melody notated by their means, once the signs have been learned, can be sung even without a teacher’.[25]
The image is scattered about medieval literature in abbreviated form: voces paginarum (Isidore of Seville); sonus litterarum (St. Ambrose, 4th century); vox antiqua chartarum (Cassiodorus, 6th century); pagina canit (Paul the Deacon, 8th century ).[26] John of Salisbury seems to have picked up Isidore’s image in his Metalogicon (12th century): ‘Letters, however, that is figures, are in the first place indications of sounds, then of things, which they bring to the mind through the windows of the eyes; and frequently they speak voicelessly the sayings of the absent’.[27]
The image is still alive in this beautiful sentence by the 16th-17th century Spanish poet Francisco Gomez de Quevedo:
Hiding in the peace of these deserts with few but wise books bound together I join in conversation with the departed, and listen with my eyes to the dead.
And in a passage from the late-nineteenth-century play Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand Cyrano has been selflessly writing her love letters daily over Christian’s signature, and Roxane is ravished by them. She says ‘The true you made itself known in a voice, but then that voice sang to me every day’.
We perpetuate the imagery in giving ‘voice’ a principal focus in the analysis of literature, probably without being conscious of this history. Authority for this conception was offered by the Encyclopedia Britannica.[28] ‘Writing: the use of letters, symbols, or other conventional characters, for the recording by visible means of significant sounds’. And again by Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics: ‘A language and its written form constitute two separate systems of signs. The sole reason for the existence of the latter is to represent the former’.[29] The imagery, with memory replacing writing, of conversation with the absent, may derive from a figure of Aristotle’s—a memory image which is ‘like an imprint or drawing in us’ can also cause us to remember ‘what is not present’.[30] De Memoria, echoed by St. Augustine: ‘When we speak of anything not immediately in our presence we do not speak of the things themselves but of images impressed from them on the mind’.[31]
Better wisdom on the ‘two forms of language’ was displayed by Thomas Sheridan, an eighteenth century actor and teacher of elocution in this pragmatic statement: ‘We have in use two languages which have no affinity between them but what custom has established, communicated through the eye by written characters, and through the ear by articulate sounds and tones. But these two kinds of language are so early in life associated, that it is ever after difficult to separate them; or not to think that there is some kind of natural connection between them’.[32]
What counts in Sheridan’s insight is that if it is believed, albeit mistakenly but consistently and by general agreement within the language community, that there is a natural connection, then that belief is a convention. This is demonstrated by vocal expressions used conventionally to imitate the sounds made by animals in different language communities, always in the belief of a determinate likeness between the animal sounds and their particular imitations: The rooster says cock-a-doodle-doo in English, co-co-ri-co in French, ki-ki-ri-ki in German, and kiao-kiao in Chinese. The donkey says hee-haw in English and an-an in Arabic. Sheridan’s observation anticipates E.H. Gombrich’s conclusion that ‘The likeness that art produces exists only in our imagination’.[33]
Sheridan’s observation offers a way of understanding the persistent conviction about the alphabet as notation of or for speech. The undisturbed life of words like ‘through’, ‘thorough’, ‘Thoreau’, ‘tough’, ‘cough’, ‘weigh’, ‘way’, ‘wey’, ‘so’, ‘sew’, ‘sow’ (wild oats), ‘sow’ (female pig), ‘smidgen’, ‘pigeon’, ‘judgment’, ‘acknowledgement’ in spoken and written English is sufficient indication of its persistence.
The distinction between a natural and a conventional basis for the relationship between signs and what they signify in the case of language is the subject of Plato’s Cratylus, a complex discussion among Cratylus himself, who is certain that the appropriateness of names (of things as well as persons) to the things that they refer to is, or should be, based on the likeness between them, which is to say that the association is a matter of mimesis; Hermogenes, who insists that names are conventional and are linked to meanings for those who are agreed about the linkages; and Socrates, who seems to squirm through his moderation of the discussion because he recognizes the appeal of Cratylus’ conviction, as we can tell from his granting—like it or not—that mimesis is second nature to human beings. As Aristotle put it in Book IV of On Poetics ‘[...] mimesis is natural for human beings from childhood (and in this they differ from the rest of the animals in that they are the most mimetic)’. Cratylus says (434a) ‘Representation by likeness, Socrates, is infinitely better than representation by any chance sign’. Socrates had already seemed to prepare a premise for that assertion with his allusion to painting (‘pictures would not be like anything at all unless there were pigments in nature which resemble the thing imitated’). But then he is forced to conclude on empirical grounds that ‘The correctness of a name turns out to be convention, since letters which are unlike are indicative equally with those which are like, if they are sanctioned by custom and convention’. And he concludes regretfully with an admission of his dilemma: ‘I fear that this dragging in of resemblance [i.e. for a natural connection], as Hermogenes says, is a kind of hunger, which has to be supplemented by the mechanical aid of convention with a view to correctness, for I believe that if we could always, or almost always, use expressions which are similar, this would be the most perfect use of language’ [my emphasis]. Implicit in this wonderfully rich imagery, ‘dragging in’ resemblance with the urgency of a ‘hunger’ and supporting it with the ‘mechanical’ (i.e. artificial) aid of convention is the priority of the ancient belief that words are—ideally—fixed as signs to meanings or referents.
This hunger, which evokes “the extreme, perhaps excessive value which our culture still places upon the myth of recreating the real on the image of the historian as taxidermist” that Stephen Bann lamented, and whose recognition was Hermogenes’ insight, was long thought to be assuaged by what has come to be known as the ‘picture theory of language’, after Ludwig Wittgenstein’s dictum ‘A proposition is a picture of reality’.[34] It is a conception of an exact and fixed natural correlation between language and the world according to which every meaningful sentence has a logical structure that corresponds to a logical structure of the world and is either an elaboration of another simpler sentence or a concatenation of simple names. Every sentence is a picture of a possible state of affairs, which must, as a result, have exactly the same formal structure as the sentence that depicts it.
Norman Malcolm, in his book Memory and Mind[35] finds an anticipation of this theory in Aristotle’s doctrine that “the soul never thinks without an image”(De Anima 431b). ‘Aristotle asserts in De Anima [...] that “actual knowledge is identical with its object” (431a) “The mind which is actually thinking is the objects which it thinks” (431b)’. [36]If one thinks of a stone ‘it is not the stone which is present in the soul but its form’ (431b). This Malcolm compares to Wittgenstein’s notion in the Tractatus that ‘when I think of something my thought has, or is, a structure [...], and if my thought is true or accurate, the thought-structure and the structure of the objects of thought are identical. Thus in thinking and knowing our minds take in, or take on, the structure or “forms” of the objects of thought or knowledge; in doing this our minds model or picture those objects.’ This is consistent with Aristotle’s announcement of his epistemology at the beginning of De Interpretatione. Once more, rephrased and abbreviated from the citation on p. 8: ‘Spoken and written words are [conventional] symbols of states of mind [“affections of the soul”].’ These are likenesses of the things of the world which are brought to mind through the senses, and which are the same for all humans, hence the states of mind, or likenesses, are also the same for all humans.
This is Aristotle’s working out of the conundrum of the Cratylus, finding a way of seeing the relationship between word and thing as a function of both convention and likeness and locating the place of each in the epistemological transaction. Against that background we can make sense of this otherwise puzzling prescription by the 14th-century music pedagogue Jehan de Murs in his Notitia artis musicae: ‘Although signs are arbitrary, yet since all things should somehow be in mutual agreement, musicians ought to devise signs more appropriate to the sounds signified’.[37]
I wonder whether Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘family relations’, which he posed as an alternative to such rigid bonding of words and meanings—the word ‘game’ cannot be circumscribed to yield a single meaning; all of its possible meanings are related through their participation in a family resemblance, underlying which there must be some central idea, of which each is a representation or embodiment.[38] I wonder whether that concept should not be thought of in the same light as Plato’s methexis concept. In the sense of that concept they have in common the virtue of loosening the rigidness that has sometimes been associated with the idea of mimesis.
I was asked to put a spotlight on Spain in the course of this talk. I do so now with an account that could be a a parable about much that is under discussion here. The Spanish matter I refer to concerns the once spectacularly famous recordings by the monks of the Benedictine Abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos, Las Mejores Obras del Canto Gregoriano, issued in 1993 by the international recording company, EMI. By the mid-nineties the recordings had become an enormous international commercial success. At one point they were second on Variety magazine’s list of record sales, just below a recording of Michael Jackson’s. As the recordings were originally made and distributed locally in very small numbers some ten years earlier, this success was a triumph of packaging and promotion and seizing the opportune moment by the producers. People who had paid no attention to Gregorian Chant before were suddenly finding it music perfectly adapted not only to devotional practice but also to meditation, sleep inducement, and love-making. Gregorian chants were recorded with Rock and electronic New Age backgrounds.. The cover artwork on one edition of newly packaged Silos recordings shows Monks floating in a Magritte sky. What is at work in these images is itself a kind of mimesis that is now called appropriation. Against the background of a similarsky on the cover of another chant recording is a group of pigs reverently holding candles. This is the cover of a parody of the Silos recordings issued in 1996, the title: Grunt: Pigorian Chant from Snouto Domoinko de Silo (rhymes with Milo), Performed by the Ad Hog Camerata, “intoned in the original Pig Latin.” I was asked by the New York Times to write an article about this whole phenomenon, but it had flared and flamed out so quickly that the article was not published.
In view of the great commercial success of the Silos recordings a law suit was entered in Spain against EMI by two former members of the abbey who had prepared and directed the original performances, which they now claimed as their intellectual property. As the recordings in the 1993 set were copies of their originals, they claimed, they were entitled to a share of the royalties. They were joined as co-plaintiffs by the Madrid music publishing house Sintonia which issued an edition of transcriptions that they had made of all the chants in the 1993 album as bona fides of their intellectual property: Las mejores obras del Canto Gregoriano (Madrid: Sintonía, 1994). Sintonia filed successfully for copyright for the edition and it was this copyright that they argued was violated by EMI’s sale of the recordings that correspond to it. If the edition was to serve its purpose it was essential that it be as exact a copy as could be made--we might say a literal translation. It was to give an opinion about the degree to which that was achieved that I was engaged as an expert witness. In that role my task was only to give my opinion as to the likeness between the recorded performances and the edition, but when it came time to give a deposition to the court I was inevitably entangled in issues about the ontology of Gregorian chant which must have enchanted the judge, the lawyers, and the EMI executives.
The position of the defense, which as it turned out also became a partnership was the claim of a decisive likeness between the Silos performances and the performance style of the monks of the secluded Benedictine Abbey of St. Pierre de Solesmes in France, a likeness sufficient, they argued, to establish the Solesmes performances as originals and the Silos performances as copies. It was the Solesmes Abbey that that joined the giant international corporation EMI in what was perhaps one of the strangest partnership that has ever been joined in the history of intellectual property litigation. They were joined in this claim by the giant international recording corporation EMI. Whether or not the legal defense incorporated it, it has long been the further claim of the Solesmes establishment that their performances, based on rules laid out in the Preface of their chant edition Liber usualis,[39] carry the ultimate authority of divine inspiration that the melodies as notated in the book and particularly the rules given in the Preface for rendering them represent the restoration of an original tradition that goes back through the holy Fathers, who received it from the Angels and the Holy Spirit. I quote from the Preface:
The above rules have been drawn from the holy Fathers, some of whom learnt this way of singing from the Angels, while others received it from the teaching of the Holy Spirit speaking to their hearts in contemplation.
When I encountered Dom Daniel Saulnier, then the director of research at Solesmes, a few years later I asked him about the outcome of the case and he said proudly and with a big smile, “We won.” It’s hard to imagine that his jubilation was over the fact that EMI did not have to surrender any of its earnings to the plaintiffs. What did he win?
All the participants in this litigation were circling about a Platonic conception, as indeed are participants in any intellectual property litigation. But staying with the present case, the conception is that a melody, like a poem, a painting, a sculpture, a bed, is a mimesis of the Idea of such a thing, yet far removed from the truth or the reality of it (Republic X). But our reading of “mimesis” and the derivatives of “imitatio,” having taken on a sense of “replication” or “duplication”, gives a distorted sense of Plato’s conception . The Solesmes “restoration” of Gregorian chant, with its claim of returning to the “truth” or “reality” of what was received from the higher realm of the Angels and the Holy Spirit, can be seen in the sense of both an embracing of and a challenge to a Platonic ontology--a challenge because of the belief that their tradition represents the authentic originals whereas Plato would have predicted they could produce only distorted counterfeits.
This difference is significant for our whole view, ultimately, of music history. The litigation turned on concepts that are commonly thought to be central to the understanding of at least all Western music, beginning with “work,” then “original,”, “copy,”, “unity,” “structure”, “playing as written” and so on. Intellectual property laws depend on such concepts. (Martha Woodmansee has shown how closely the adoption of such laws coincided with the emergence of an aesthetic informed by such concepts.[40]) But they simply do not work for Gregorian chant, and they do not work as dependably as has been thought for much other music. And so the perpetuation of a music concept that turns on such concepts, as in the new Oxford History of Western Music, which admits to that category only the “literate tradition,” unfortunately denies readers familiarity with traditions that open to other conceptions--not excluding music of the “literate tradition” itself.
The judgment of the Spanish court in the case can be understood as an endorsement of the claim of Solesmes, whether or not it was thought out in just those terms. Dom Saulnier’s Jubilation can be understood as rejoicing over his establishment’s claim to agency in the restoration of the authentic tradition that was in effect challenged by the litigation.
I am stretching somewhat to interpret this recent legal drama in the framework of a conception that we have inherited from antiquity. But I want to suggest how appropriate Plato’s mimesis conception, properly understood, is to the kind of mimesis by which the transmission and composition of Gregorian chant from its original sources as we’ve come to understand it occurred, and to our understanding of the ontology of chant. It requires only a moment’s reflection to recognize that there can be no better exemplification of Plato’s concept of mimesis/methexis, and no greater aid to our understanding of the concept, than the way we understand the relationships among the chants in the taxonomies we make according to modal properties, motives, melodic formulas, formal arrangements. Individual members of such groups--we refer typically to “melody types”-- participate in them, represent them. And there can be no better exemplification of the distorted common sense of “mimesis” as “imitation” than the theory of “centonate chant,” which pictures melodies as having been patched together of formulas picked from a fixed repertory.[41]
What Solesmes achieved in partnering with EMI and what the plaintiffs failed to achieve, was the endorsement by the Spanish court of what would nowadays be called their brand. The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines a brand as a "name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of other sellers.” The differentiation is the key. The etymology of the term is of course recognizable from its cognate connection with Anglo-Saxon words all denoting some kind of burning, and is nearest in usage to the branding of domestic animals to identify the owners. I don’t know when the AMA published their definition, but the extension of the concept has since spread from the token to the goods and services themselves and then to the person or persons offering them and ultimately to the individuals themselves, whether or not they are selling anything. “Branding” has come to mean the creation of a unique identifiable persona image--business and/or personal--for the “marketing” or self projection of the individual in either or both identities; the individual as brand. The paradoxical juxtaposition of a vogue for developing a unique persona is a characteristic condition of our culture now. It is like the contrast between the prevalence of copying--Aristotle’s dictum, “mimesis is natural for human beings from childhood” still holds--and the tokens of guilt and discomfort about copying and the constraints placed upon it--children crying “copycat,” the taboos on plagiarism from early school time to the publishing industries, the intellectual property laws that have been instituted at major junctures in the firming-up of national legal systems.[42]
This phenomenon was manifested before it was named in a radical change in the taxonomy of clothes and other personal display items in the stores in which they were sold. In the early 90s one could see in Stockholm’s elegant NK department store a “Marlboro Boutique” where clothes--male, female, and unisex-- dominated by corduroy, denim, and leather in colors of beige and a smokey blue evocative of cigarette smoke were on sale. The style-signification of the clothing was amplified by the decor of the boutique: rope, unfinished wood, saddles (not for sale) and on the wall panoramic photographs of horses on vast plains with majestic mountain backdrops. What does this all add up to? A style, a brand, in which all the items on sale in the boutique participate, a relationship that is well characterized by the Platonic concept of methexis. The boutique constitutes a signifying practice that defines a pretend reality as a focus for the customer’s identity-formation, but with only phantom referents that have been assimilated from TV images and advertisements. The reality is a fictive virtual reality, and the identity formation passes from the sellers to the consumers who are meant to identify themselves with the style of that virtual reality. Paradoxically this system, which evolved from an aspiration toward establishing the uniqueness o the individual, eventually dissolves the individual in fashion groupd. It was a sharp break from what had been the normal taxonomy of clothing in department stores: departments for men and women, within each the general function (sport or casual, dress or formal...), then the type of item--dresses or suits, sweaters, blouses, shoes, etc. About the same time one could find at Macy’s Department Store in Manhattan a brand boutique identified by logos on the items on offer as Compagnie Générale Aéropostale. It is a virtual stage set with photographs of begoggled aviators in leather caps and jodhpurs carrying mail pouches on board their biplanes, and a pepsi-cola sign bearing the price tag 5 cents to identify the time-period of the image. Life as charades. The availability of such a range of realities that individuals may connect to from time to time has made possible a protean existence. The style, or feeling, of the brand and the life-style that it evokes may be more or less well articulatable; the two just identified are fairly well circumscribed.[43]
Here is an attempt at capturing in words the ineffable character of the brand of one commercial enterprise that is less marked. On its website are listed the following items that are on offer: Leather goods and accessories (a photograph shows handbags labelled “Monogram essentials”); Shoes, women; Shoes, men; Ready-to-wear, women; ready-to-wear, men; Jewelry; Sunglasses. Here is an effort, cited from an on-line shopping guide, to give the reader a feeling about whether it resonates with her sense of herself, or perhaps can project onto her a sense of herself that she lacks:
Classic tan-on-dark brown canvas dominates the line, as does the familiar "LV" logo stamp--an instant status symbol--on luxurious purses of all sizes, suitcases, wallets and key chains [note the investment of status and glamour in such normally trivial items as wallets, key chains, and above all sunglasses. (A website offering second-hand goods identifies itself as “Fashionphile: America’s most trusted source for pre-owned authentic luxury handbags” advertises a “Louis Vuitton vintage luggage tag, price $105.”) The contemporary multicolored monogram attracts a younger generation of loyalists--think Jennifer Lopez and Paris Hilton. Leather and canvas travel gear, including vintage steamer trunks, is suited for refined travel--the kind where a limo driver carries the bags. An upscale selection of shoes, clothing and accessories is also available.
The commercial enterprise that is described in the shopper’s guide is the Louis Vuitton store on fifth avenue in New York. The Louis Vuitton phenomenon reaches the extreme of a virtual reality, in which the concepts “original”, “copy,” “authentic,” “fake,” and the boundaries between them, are unstable, as Marcus Boon observes in his book In Praise of Copying (2010)[44]. It is an instance of a general compromising of language across a wid range of domains, not excluding our field. On the internet a firm with the address Basicreplicas.com advertises “Louis Vuitton replica handbags...authentically original imitations of the real originals.” But as this advertisement shows, the “original” and the “imitation” are dependencies of one another. Boon reports images on the internet of Louis Vuitton handbags bearing the word “FAKE” on one side.[45]. He reports on factories producing handbags on contract with the Louis Vuitton company during the day, and at night, as “ghost factories”, producing them for the markets of fakes in Manhattan, Mexico City, Hong Kong, and the like.[46]
In 2008 a Danish artist created an image showing an emaciated black boy with a chihuahua on one arm and a Luis Vuitton bag on the other. She called it “Darfurnica” (to rhyme with Guernica), explaining it was meant to show that our celebrity-obsessed media were failing to address crisis situations such as Darfur. The Louis Vuitton firm sued her in a Dutch court (she lives in the Netherlands), claiming copyright infringement. The court held that “It is perhaps inevitable that branded goods which, through the brand owners’ relentless marketing efforts, acquire symbolic value, will be used by artists for their symbolic value.” It ruled against the firm, and ordered them to pay the artist’s costs, assessed at 15,000 Euros.
As of 2009 there were 43 Pizzerias in New York City with the name “Ray’s Original Pizza”. This is not like MacDonald’s--the individual Pizzerias do not have franchises with a central company. The word “original” is used in a semantically empty sense. In an illocutionary sense it signifies “copy”; but not copy of any original. A film “Original Original” was made about the phenomenon around 2000.
Some time ago I acquired at a country auction in Vermont traces of a musical parallel from the nineteenth century.[47] In the United States at least seventeen independent publications were made before 1870 of a composition entitled Le Desir: Favorite Waltz by Beethoven. No two are exactly alike. Its first two sections comprise more-or-less the second of Schubert’s opus 9 Waltzes, commonly known as Sehnsuchtswaltzer--Le Desir. A third section is based on F.H. Himmels Favoritenwaltzer--”Favorite Waltz”. In 1950 an edition was published in Sao Paulo, Brazil under the title Le Desir/Sehnsuchtswaltzer. “Beethoven” is listed as the composer in the heading, but a footnote confides that the piece is really by Schubert.
The guarantee of trust that is given by the company that offered the luggage tag at $105 has as its background the possibility of deception that worried Plato. Of the 153 museums in Paris one is a kind of monument to the deception that arose from the mimetic tradition, Le Musée de la Contrafaçon. It isn’t intended as a monument but as an alert to the public about the fakes that are foisted upon us. It was established for this purpose in 1951 by the Union des Fabricants. Some 350 items are displayed in pairs, always one vrai and one faux. The range of items is very broad, well beyond the expensive luxury items that one assumes would motivate the industry--Swiss Army knives, children’s toys, pharmaceuticals, household tools, cleaning fluids.
Whether or not we believe in Plato’s world view, we have created a world that matches it in a way, as we have developed through the reduction of the rich concept of mimesis our addiction to imitation and the ability to tolerate a life in virtual reality. It hardly matters to us any longer that we can’t distinguish the vrai from the faux among handbags and pizzerias. But we in the U.S. having tolerating the refusal of our government to distinguish between vrai and faux in warfare by way of evading our laws on the subject. A law enacted in 1973 by the American Congress requires the President to notify Congress within 48 hours of committing armed forces to military action and forbids armed forces from remaining for more than 60 days, with a further 30 day withdrawal period, without an authorization of the use of military force or a declaration of war by the Congress. This is usually known as the War Powers Act. It is consistent with the U.S. Constitution, under which only the Congress has the authority to declare war and to provide funding of the cost of war, and it was passed in reaction to the Vietnam War and has been ignored or resisted by nearly every president since. On June 3, 1911 the U.S. House of Representatives approved a resolution calling on President Obama to give a justification for US military actions in Libya in accordance with the War Powers act. The President responded in a letter to the Congress that since the US military role in Libya is subordinate to NATO’s command the US action does not qualify as a war. Determined members of the House of Representatives drew the logical consequence and proposed a resolution withdrawing funding for the action. The resolution was rejected by a majority, which did not see fit to defend its own action of the first resolution.
We have been here before. On January 11, 1991, the English newspaper The Guardian published an article, “The Reality Gulf,” by the French Sociologist/philosopher Jean Beaudrillard, author of the book Simulations (1983). In it he wrote “The Gulf war will not happen.” Governments had invented replacements for the reality of war: cold war, deterrents, ultimatums, “contraceptives against the act of war, first safe sex, then safe war.” On February 27 (the first) President Bush announced the “suspension of combat operations”--not the end of the war-- and on March 29 Baudrilliard published in the French journal Liberation an article with the title “La guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu.” Consigning “the war’s ravages to another level” he wrote
“The true belligerents are those who thrive on the ideology of this war...through faking, through hyperreality, the simulacrum, through all those strategies of psychological deterrence that make play with facts and images, with the precession of the virtual over the real...[T]o reestablish some criterion of truth...we lack the means. But at least we can plunge all that information and the war itself back into the element of virtuality from which they took rise.”[48]
Well, after all, Plato wrote about the hazards of mimesis in The Republic.
[1] Princeton: Princeton Universty Press, 2002. page 13
[3] Halliwell affirms this: “Plato’s approach to mimesis is neither static nor monolthic but subject to dynamic development.” p. 48
[4] pp. 6-7.
[5] pp.47-48
[6] Vivienne Gray, “Mimesis in Greek Historical Theory,” The American Journal of Philology 108 (1987) 467-486
[7] W. Kendrick Pritchett, Dionysius of Halicarnassus: English translation, based on the Greek text of Usener-Radermacher / with commentary. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975) p. 37
[8] Halliwell p. 155
[9] Goethe on Art: Selected, edited and translated by John Gage, 1980.
[10] See my book Reflections on Musical Meaning and its Representations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2011) p. 271 notes 12 and 13.
[11] Richard Sorabji, in his Aristotle on Memory (Providence: Brown University Press, 1972 ) p. 48 et seq. uses the phrase “states of mind.”
[12] See my Reflections on Musical Meaning and its Representations, p. 5 for Mendelssohn’s letter containing that comment.
[14] Seana Coulson, Semantic Leaps: Frame Shifting and Conceptual Blending in Meaning Construction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001).
[15] Gray, p.475.
[16] Gray pp. 481-2.
[17] So called by Leonard Krieger, in Ranke: The Meaning of History Cicago:University of Chicago Press ,1974) p. 4.
[18] Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
[20] ‘Mysticism and Science in the Pythagorean Tradition’, The Classical Quarterly 16 (1922) pp. 137-150. My citations are from pp. 142 and 143. I have somewhat rearranged the order of the contents, but have not changed any that I have cited. Göran Sörbom, Mimesis and Art (Uppsala: Appelbergs Boktryckeri, 1966) pp.53-57 identifies and discusses the known occurrences of this word before Aristotle. Cornford’s essay is not mentioned in either the bibliography or the index of Sörbom’s book. His presumption about the etymology goes back to Koller (see note 9), to whose book I do not have access.
[21] Hermann Koller, Die Mimesis in der Antike. Nachahmung, Darstellung, Ausdruck. Dissertationes Bernenses, Ser. 1, 5, claims further that mimoi were ‘participators in orgiastic cult dances’. Sörbom (p. 54 n. 30) and Halliwell (p. 15 n. 32) reject this specific detail as unfounded. However Cornford’s essay, which antedates Koller’s book identified mimos more generally with performance or representation—whether of a religious nature or not—and essentially laid the groundwork for both the preferred understanding of mimesis in the sense of ‘representation’ and of Plato’s methexis in the sense of ‘participation’, does not appear in the bibliography or the index of Halliwell’s book either. Halliwell, in a number of footnotes, is unsparing in his flat rejection of any such suggestion about the background of the term and the concept “mimesis.”
[23] Harris 1986, pp. 114-15.
[28] 11th edition, 1911 Vol. 28, p. 852.
[33] E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial representation Second Edition Revised (Princeton: Princeton University Press) p. 191.
[35] Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977, p. 143.
[36] See the discussions on pp. 9 and 19.
[37] Strunk’s Source Readings in Music History Revised Edition, p.264.
[39]Tournai: Desclee & company, 1952
[40]Th Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994)
[41] See Treitler, With Voice and Pen, chapter 7.
[42] See note 40.
[43] See my essay “Postmodern Signs in Musical Studies,” The Journal of Musicology 13, 1995.
[44] Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
[46] Boon, p. 12.
[47] See Treitler, With Voice and Pen: Coming to Know Medieval Song and How it was Made (Oxford: University Press, 2003) pp. 235-237.
[48] See note 41.