Coordination project

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Bernhard Siegert
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies ; General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies ; Art History
• Term: from 2013 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 213948042

The research group aims to study the cultural technology of mimesis in light of recent developments in media studies. The project goes beyond the aesthetic and epistemic consideration of mimesis that has prevailed up to now in cultural and literary studies as well as in philosophy. It questions the notion that the historical and philosophical self-understanding of modernity is essentially an a-mimetic cultural and social formation. Mimesis and imitatio are no longer to be seen as a prehistory to be overcome – a prehistory to the idea of creative man and his sovereignty over this creation. Rather than opposing mimesis to modern technology and the modern civilization based upon it, and in lieu of assuming its fundamental irreconcilability with the constructivist self-understanding of modernity, the project aims at revealing, on various levels, mimetic practices as constitutive functions of culture and sociality. The research project examines mimesis as a cultural technology of pictorial representation, of accessing and using symbolic forms (manifested in cross-media processes as diverse as copying, citing, paraphrasing, sampling, serializing, and montage and remake) as well as anthropotechnical and intercultural transfers and appropriations.Contrary to the principle of extension and outsourcing (of ‘human’ abilities to technical artefacts) preferred by cultural and media studies the research group sees the inevitability of ‘mimetic’ dependencies as evidence of the undaunted effectiveness of a recursive reorganization of human abilities. From this perspective, mimesis is not the counter-concept to invention and innovation, but turns out to be their very precondition. Thus, objects, techniques, and symbolic forms do not include and store a program that is culturally codified and binding once and for all, but rather are continually subjected to diversions and seizures through which they are fed into different cultural operation chains than the particular contexts of their emergence, invention or conception. For this reason, we will not conceive mimesis as a principle of ‘assimilation’ (homoisis) and identity preservation, thereby associating it with a past ‘world of resemblances’ and of universal analogies. Rather we see it as a mechanism of cultural diversification. Thus, the research group will focus on the strategies of producing and regulating mimesis that attempt to contain the various procedures of acquisition and creative adaptation. This perspective reveals the relationship between media and culture to be one between mimetic operations, their stimulation, and their suspension or encoding by specific epistemic, aesthetic or legal programs.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 1867: History and Theory of Mimetic Practices