What is mimeticism?

The upside-down realization of mimetic poetics

Before the advent of computerized virtual reality, art was the greatest curator of virtual images. The relationship between the virtual and the real, that is, between the artificial image and the archetype, has been a key poetic issue since ancient Greece. According to Plato, both poetry and art are mimesis of the real, which in turn is merely a partaking of the light of the highest reality, the Idea, and therefore the artistic image, as the "shadow of a shadow," is a double distancing from the truth.[1] Aristotle's art is the most important source of virtual reality. [1] Aristotle's Poetics, on the other hand, asserts that poetry and art are not only imitations, but should also represent (reproduce) perceived reality in accordance with the "laws of necessity and possibility". [2] Plotinus of ancient Rome believed that art could directly imitate the world of ideas in addition to the world of sensibility. From then on, the theory of imitation developed along two paths: some medieval scholars rejected the objective and material elements of the ancient Greek theory of imitation, and St. Thomas believed that the artist imitates nature through the mind because both the mind and nature are God's creations; and Horace, from the point of departure of the "art of freedom", believed that imitation should not be cocooned in a cocoon of similarity, and that the creation of the imaginary and fictional should be permitted. He believed that imitation should not be confined to resemblance, but should be allowed to be created by imagination and fiction. Leonardo da Vinci summarized his painting experience by saying: "The painter should study the universal nature, think a lot about what he sees with his eyes, and make use of the beautiful parts that make up the type of each thing. With this approach, his mind will reflect what is before him as truly as a mirror, and it will become as good as second nature." [3] This is a modern reconciliation of the two ancient views of imitation: after the seventeenth century, neo-classicism demanded that poets study and submit to nature, and that for art to be realistic it must imitate what is "universally rational" in nature: on the one hand, the object of imitation was the civilization of the court and the lives of the great men, and on the other hand On the one hand, the object of imitation is court civilization and the lives of great men, and on the other hand, "to imitate the ancients is to imitate nature". Entangled in the relationship between the natural and the artificial, imitation is at the end of its tether, but its power remains.

Until the period of German classical aesthetics, Goethe converted the traditional imitation from the ancient emphasis on **** sex to the modern emphasis on individuality, which led to the Romantic expression of Wadsworth's "Poetry is the natural outpouring of strong emotions". Contemporary American scholar M. H. Abrams explained this development with the metaphor of "mirror and lamp", and aptly pointed out: "The change from imitation to representation, from mirror to spring, to lamp, to other related metaphors, is not an isolated phenomenon, but a corresponding change in general epistemology," he said. epistemologically an integral part of the corresponding changes that have taken place." [4] The so-called "epistemological changes" here are the modern philosophies of subjectivity represented by Cartesian dualism and Kant's Critique of Reason. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant launched a philosophical "Copernican revolution," pulling "nature" from the level of ontology back to the level of phenomena, thus establishing the absolute epistemological domination of the rational subject over sensible objects. In the "Critique of Judgment", Kant has a profound remark: "Imagination (as the cognitive function of production) is powerful in creating from the material provided to it by true nature a nature that resembles another nature. ...... But this material is transformed by us into something completely different, i.e., something superior to nature. nature." [5] The relationship between artistic fiction and the imitation of natural things seems here to have undergone some kind of radical reversal. Yet Kant does not exorcise the ghost of imitation, but only brings it back in the form of expressionism. Outer nature and inner mind are two sides of the same coin, and so art has merely changed hands: in the virtual world of art there is a new ruler - in Eagleton's words "a more formidable authority",[6] the aesthetic subject's abstract reason. abstract reason. Before it, artistic fiction is merely a form of colonization, sustaining the domination of reason over corporeal impulses and aesthetic representations. Kant's famous saying that "beauty is the symbol of morality" exposes the ascent to another kind of infinity, a priori subjectivity.

In short, the theory of imitation, as a powerful poetic tradition, has long guided artistic activity and has become an almost unchanging golden rule. Regardless of which variant it appears, the theory of imitation insists on the dichotomy between the prototype and the copy: the prototype is the real and the first; the copy is the imitation and reproduction of the real prototype, and thus is subordinate and second. The relationship between image and reality due to imitation leads to a marked distance and difference - the image is not the real itself, but represents a certain absent reality. According to Jameson's interpretation of Plato, the latter expelled the artist from his ideal state because he feared that art would become a simulacrum. If the mind is surrounded by fictional simulacrums, it is like being in a room full of mirrors, and loses its judgment of the real in the infinite feedback of self-mapping. Jameson says, "However one reads Plato, I think postmodernist culture is characterized by this. The image, the photograph, the photographic reproduction, the mechanical reproduction, and the reproduction and mass production of commodities, all of this is mimesis. So our world is, culturally at least, devoid of any sense of reality, because we can't be sure where reality begins or ends." [7] For contemporary culture, mimesis, produced through mass reproduction, has increasingly infiltrated to the point of replacing the image of the real object due to the widespread exchange of aesthetic representations in everyday life, increasingly eroding, deconstructing, and even inverting the relation of reproduction and aesthetic distance in the sense of mimeticism. While Jameson, Baudrillard, and others were concerned about this "hyper-reality" of virtual images, Plato was arguably the first thinker to oppose it: he opposed the artist's paintings and depictions, and of course he would have opposed all forms of reproduction such as photography, cinema, television, etc., not to mention the digital simulation of contemporary computer multimedia and the virtual reality of cyberspace. virtual reality in cyberspace. How, then, does virtual reality subvert and even invert the old poetic principle of mimicry?

Baudrillard attempts to solve this great mystery with the key of "symbolic exchange". In Symbolic Exchange and Death, he developed Marx's theory of spiritual production and commodity exchange into the theory of "symbolic exchange", pointing out that things in the living world are not only objects but also symbols, that cultural values are determined by symbols with symbolic meanings, and that social activities are in fact a kind of symbolic exchange. And the imitation of things and symbols is simulation (simulation), facsimile is simulation (simulacrumy). In traditional feudal societies, symbols were associated with aristocratic privilege, and there was no fashion or social mobility but only social distribution; symbols were protected by injunctions in such societies. [8] But in the Renaissance, with the dismantling of the feudal order, there was open competition for symbolic possession - symbols began to be emulated, natural science contributed to the "demystification" of symbols, and people began to emulate things they were once forbidden to possess (e.g., statues of gods). idols) that were once forbidden to possess. With the Industrial Revolution came a whole new generation of objects, in which the symbols contained in these objects had no tradition, and which were converted into imitations of each other rather than originals or counterfeits, but whose value could be measured by the prestige and social power they symbolized. What we are now living in is a new type of simulation: the development of computer technology has made simulation no longer just a copy of an archetype, but a copy without an archetype - "simulacra" (also translated as imitation, analogous to the image). At this point the simulacrum is derived entirely from the symbolic model, and its value is no longer determined by the fidelity of the imitation or the exchange value of the product, but by the symbolic code and the associations and substitutions (operations) between the codes. According to the paradigm provided by Baudrillard, since the Renaissance, human cultural values have gone through three phases of "emulation": (1) from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution in the classical period, whose dominant form was "counterfeit"; (2) in the industrialization era, whose dominant form was "imitation"; (3) in the industrialization era, whose dominant form was "imitation"; and (4) in the industrialization era, whose dominant form was "imitation". (2) in the industrialized era, the dominant form is "production"; (3) in the current stage dominated by the information code, the dominant form is "simulation" (in the narrow sense). Image production in the three cultural orders follows the laws of natural value, commodity value, and structural value, respectively. [9] It is clear to Baudrillard that the world has become anthropomorphic due to the large-scale emergence, typification and serialization of images and simulacra, by which the real and the archetypal have been replaced.

The relationship between computerized virtual reality and the theory of artistic mimesis from the point of view of "mimesis" is an extremely enlightening one. Symbolic exchange theory reveals a logical chain of imitation->copying->virtualization that ultimately annihilates art, and even the real world itself, which has become a brilliant artistic fiction. In The Perfect Crime, Baudrillard exposes the beginning and end of the crime of the virtual world's murder of the real world: the increasing alienation of the symbolic from the real, and the increasing replacement of the real by simulacra, more real than the real. The external world, which people believed in and which was not subject to human will, suddenly becomes unrecognizable. The relationship between human beings and reality becomes questionable, and the virtual world is so "hyper-real" that it becomes a perfect crime - "the perfect crime is to change all our behavior by making all data real, The crime of realizing the world unconditionally by making all data real, by changing all our actions, all the events that are purely informational - in short: the ultimate solution is the premature disintegration of the world by cloning the real and eliminating the real by copies of the real." [10] In the universal production and exchange of symbols, the image no longer allows one to imagine reality because it is itself reality; nor does the image allow one to fantasize about what is real because it is its virtual reality. "It is as if all these things have greedily looked in the mirror and thought themselves to have become transparent, all taking their place within themselves, to be reproduced in real time, unflinchingly, in the full light of day." [11] The ancient theory of mimesis is here realized upside down, with the clarity of the avatar no longer below but above the thing it represents: "The highest clarity of information corresponds to the lowest clarity of the event - the highest clarity of sex (erotic epigraphy) corresponds to the lowest clarity of sexuality --the highest clarity of language corresponds to the lowest clarity of ideas ......"[12] If the "virtual" is the murder of the material world from the spatial If "virtual" is the murder of the material world in terms of space, "real-time" is the obliteration of the mental world in terms of historical memory: "Just as the illusion of the image disappears in the virtual reality, the illusion of the body disappears in the text of its genetic description, the illusion of the world disappears in its technological artifacts, so the illusion of the world disappears in its technological artifacts, in the same way that it disappears in the virtual reality. disappears in its ersatz images, it is the world's (super)natural intelligence that disappears in this way in artificial intelligence, like a game, like a trick, like a conspiracy, like a crime, and not the machines of logical mechanism or reflexive cybernetics, for the human brain would be their mirror and model." [13]

When the virtual is more real than the real, the real becomes a shadow of the virtual instead. In The Strategy of Predestination Baudrillard presents his "postmodern metaphysics". He argues that traditional Western metaphysics is a metaphysics of subjectivity that prioritizes the subject over the object, but with the advent of a postmodern society based on symbolic consumption, the "object" as the mass, information, media, and commodities has formed a simulated flux free from the control of the subject, constantly transcending the boundaries and "seducing" the subject. The "object" as mass, information, media and commodities, forms a stream of simulation that escapes from the control of the subject, constantly transcends the boundaries and "seduces" the subject to "innovate" and "simulate". He pointed out extremely pessimistically that in the new high-tech society, the object has taken the place of the subject and dominated the unfortunate subject, and that the only way out for the subject is to surrender to the world of the object, to learn the schemes and strategies of the object, and to give up the domination of the object.[14] This kind of foundational work is very important to the subject, but it is also very important to the subject, and it is also very important to the subject. [This image of the object, which is based on the real world and yet is more real than the real world, makes the structuring principle of society no longer "production", but rather the domination and control of computation, information processing, the media, and the organization of society on the basis of anthropomorphic symbols and models. The symbols themselves are no longer just symbols, but have taken on a life of their own, and a new social order has been constructed. In such a mimetic society, people's experience is entirely constructed by models and symbols, eroding the difference between the model and the real. Borrowing McLuhan's concept of implosion, he claimed that the boundary between the imaginary and the real has now imploded, people's previous experience of the "real" and the basis of the real have disappeared, data models have become the determining factor in the creation of the real, and the boundaries between the hyperreal and everyday life have been erased. Baudrillard, in his famous account of his travels in the United States, said that Disneyland is more real than the reality of American society, and that American society is becoming more and more like Disneyland.[15] In this way, contemporary life is becoming more and more like Disneyland. [15] In this way, contemporary life has become a completely symbolic illusion - movies, advertisements, soap operas, fashion magazines and life guides of all shapes and sizes not only do not need to imitate reality, but can produce it: they shape our aesthetic interests, our eating and dressing habits and even our entire way of life. The traditional ontological concepts of "reality", "essence", and "truth" are radically subverted, and everyday life becomes a process of imitating models: from architecture, clothing, and homes to hidden secrets. Everyday life has become a process of imitating models: from architecture, clothing, home to hidden sexuality, all are increasingly designed by "idealized" technological models. In the contemporary worldscape of digital virtualization and real-time feedback, the imitative relationship between the virtual and the real is radically inverted.

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[1] Plato, Collected Dialogues on Literature and Art, translated by Zhu Guangqian, People's Literature Publishing House 1983, p. 21.

[2] Aristotle, Poetics, translated by Luo Niansheng, People's Literature Publishing House 1982, p. 92.

[3] Wu Li Fu and Hu Jingzhi, editors, Selected Masterpieces of Western Literary Theory, Peking University Press 1985, p. 161.

[4] Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, Peking University Press 1989, p. 81.

[5] Kant, Critique of Judgment, supra, p. 160.

[6] Eagleton, The Ideology of Aesthetics, translated by Wang Jie et al, p. 133.

[7] Jameson, Postmodernism and Cultural Theory, Shaanxi Normal University Press 1986, p. 200.

[8] Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, in Wang Min'an et al. edited Philosophical Discourse of Postmodernity, Zhejiang People's Publishing House 2000, p. 317.

[9] Ibid, p. 328.

[10] Baudrillard, The Crime of Perfection, p. 28.

[11] Ibid, p. 8.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid, p. 37.

[14] Kellner, Best, Postmodern Theory, Central Compilation and Translation Press 1999, p. 189.

[15] Xu Chenliang, "Who's Afraid of Jean Baudrillard", Zhongguo Xuebao (China Reading News), December 22, 1999