29 MIMESIS

Kader Konuk

The concept of mimesis sheds light on reenactment as an aesthetic practice of appropriating past realities and reveals the fundamental link between the past event and its representation in the present.

The debate about the nature and function of mimesis goes back to Plato and Aristotle, who addressed the relationship between the idea, the real, and the represented in visual art, historiography, literature, and performance. Essentially, the debate shows that mimesis is the foundation upon which concepts of reality rest, focusing on the ways in which an object is translated into another medium. While Plato in the 4th century bc treats mimesis (derived from mimesthai, to imitate) as a process that is doomed to fail because it cannot overcome the difference between the original and its copy, his student Aristotle emphasizes the creative dimension of mimesis. To Aristotle we owe the identification of mimesis as a fundamental feature of human behavior, as well as the recognition of mimesis as a creative act. Aristotle defines the product of mimesis not in terms of its deficiency with regards to the original but rather in terms of its potential.

Mimesis is central to understanding how reality is conceived of, interpreted, and represented. The heightened realism of 17th-century trompe l’oeil paintings, for example, aims to create verisimilitude through imitation and perspective; 19th-century realism in literature and art, on the other hand, not only conveys the ideal of mimesis in terms of resemblance and an emphasis on detailed representation but underscores the role of the writer as a mediator of everyday life across different strata of society. Within the context of 19th-century realism in Europe, mimesis expresses a particular ideological approach to literary and visual representation. Literary critic Erich Auerbach points out that the didactic purpose of French realist authors such as Balzac, committed to the serious treatment of everyday life, opened up criticism of the contemporary, bourgeois world ([1946] 2003, p.

490). Auerbach argues that reality is not a given but contingent upon a particular concept of the world. More importantly, however, he argues that the concept of the real is contingent upon a specific concept of time and history. Auerbach’s insight into the narrative dimension of time and history contributed to a decade-long debate among historians and philosophers Hayden White (Metahistory, 1973), Paul Ricoeur (Time and Narrative, 1984), David Lowenthal (The Past is a Foreign Country, 1999), F. R. Ankersmit (2000), and others about the relevance of literary theory for historical writing and theory.

The practice of reenactment reveals various modes of relating to the past as a referent, ranging from imitating what is believed to be an intrinsic reality in the past to an imaginative play with the referent that suggests a less restrictive understanding of the relationship between

Mimesis

historical event and its representation. White's understanding of history as a “certain kind of relationship to the past mediated by distinctive kind of written discourse” (1999, p. 1) may be expanded to include reenactment as exemplifying particular modes of experiencing history and establishing relationships to the past. In a variety of mimetic acts, reenactments bring the past into the presence, thereby revealing diverse ways of approaching the relationship between signi- fier and signified. Hence it is crucial to recognize the particular concepts of the past and the real that inform diverse reenactment practices.

Reenactment employs mimesis via what Auerbach, and later White, identified as figu- ral relationships between the past and the present, or the original and its representation, respectively. For the purpose of analyzing reenactment practices, these relationships may be extended to include reproduction, imitation (creating a mirror image), assimilation (gradually becoming the other), mimicry (creating similarity with a difference), animation (revival of specific elements), masquerade (performing a character), simulacrum (simulating reality), and at the other end of the spectrum, simulation (creating imaginary realities).

Reenactment brings the past into the present via a variety of media, ranging from performances, pageants, living history displays, historical reality television shows, panorama museums, holograms, computer simulations, and games. The analysis of the figural relationships that underscore reenactment practices promises to highlight the means by which temporal relationships are established and history is written. Going beyond a narrow view of mimesis as the imitation of “real-life” events in the past, using mimesis as an analytic lens allows us to reveal not only the concepts of time but the ideological underpinnings that inform the reenactment and interpretation of the past.

Over the course of the 20th century, mimesis has come to be discussed in a variety of critical contexts, particularly within cultural and postcolonial studies. While the debate returned to Aristotle's initial insight that imitation is a fundamental feature of human behavior, it continued to challenge the commonplace assumption of imitation as mere copying. Literary critic Franz Bauml went on to define mimesis as the representation of an imagined but canonically established reality. By the same token, however, he goes as far as to argue that reality does not itself precede mimesis. From a poststructuralist point of view, reality itself is the result of mimetic reproduction (Bauml, 1998, p. 78). In Mimesis and Alterity (1993), anthropologist Michael Taussig engages with the concept of mimesis in yet another broad intellectual context and analyzes how mimesis informs the appropriation and performance of identities. For Taussig, the “wonder of mimesis lies in the copy drawing on the character and power of the original, to the point whereby the representation may even assume that character and that power” (p. xiii). Taussig's definition of mimetic faculty as “the nature that culture uses to create second nature, the faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore difference, yield into and become Other” (p.

xiii) opens up the possibility of analyzing cultural processes and the naturalization of identities on the basis of human's mimetic faculties. Applied in this wider context, the imitation of earlier cultural models can be understood and examined as a form of reenactment. The revival of Greek and Roman learning for the Renaissance is a case in point. The figural relationship Renaissance scholars and writers such as Dante established to the ancient Greco-Roman culture constituted the conditions for transformation in the present. By drawing on Auerbach's Mimesis, White points out that the “later figure fulfills the earlier by repeating the elements thereof, but with a difference” (1999, p. 91). By reviving—not reproducing—an earlier cultural model, Renaissance scholars appropriated elements of the past as an integral part of the present culture and simultaneously strived to transcend the past they admired. When David Lowenthal maintains that the purpose of imitation in the Renaissance “was to assimilate the past for the benefit of the present,” he takes recourse to Petrarch's notion of the “proper imitator” as being engaged in resemblance, not reproduction (Lowenthal, 1999, p. 79). It is this mode of imitation that, according to Lowenthal, makes change possible.

Other processes of modernization and social transformation correspond to the way in which the Renaissance was established. Perhaps most importantly, nationalist narratives invoke historical events in order to constitute a national legacy and construct a linear heritage. Historian Benedict Anderson famously points out that national identity cannot be “remembered,” it must be narrated (1992, p. 204). National discourses hence enact heritages based on ethnic, racial, linguistic, or territorial claims. Westernization processes—whether under colonial, imperial, or autochthonous rule—similarly appropriate and reenact elements of another cultural (not necessarily earlier) model via a series of mimetic acts in order to establish a new cultural and political order.

The reforms that followed the foundation of modern Turkey in 1923, for example, represent a state-orchestrated reenactment on a national scale. At the height of the Westernization reforms, Turkish cultural politics tried not only to emulate the achievements ofWestern Europe but revive the ancient Greek heritage in Anatolia as a method of appropriating the origins of European culture and constructing a notion of Turks as Europeans. The state-imposed reform of dress codes, educational and political institutions, script, language, and music was intended to enable the citizens ofTurkey to embody, not merely imitate, Europeanness (body and embodiment). Cultural mimesis was going to ensure the metamorphosis of the Ottoman Empire into a new Turkey while creating a figural relationship between the ancient Greek past and the Turkish present (Konuk, 2010, p. 18).

Almost a century later, the humanist reforms of the 1930s have lost their force. In its place, the Turkish state and stakeholders are funding projects to establish a relationship to the Ottoman imperial past, something hitherto unthinkable under Kemalist Turkey. A new phenomenon has emerged in popular culture leading to the revival of the Ottoman Empire on Turkish movie screens, in soap operas, museums, and entertainment parks. The soap opera Muhtefem Yuzyil (Glorious Century) (2011—2014) on life at the 16th-century Ottoman Porte became one of the most successful television series in Turkey and in the Middle East. Faruk Aksoy’s 2012 movie Fetih 1453 (Conquest 1453) which glorifies the conquest of Constantinople, set another precedent for the visualization of Ottoman history. Museums such as Panorama 1453 provide new sites of identification for an ambitious Islamic middle class that yearns to root itself in a glorious past. The museum Panorama 1453 presents the story of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 3D, heightening the all-encompassing experience through the use of Ottoman military music. Following this example, another panoramic museum celebrating the conquest of Bursa in 1326 was erected in 2018 to give a wide-angled view of Ottoman victory.

Istanbul is home to other examples of such popularized approaches to the representation of Ottoman history. The theme park Miniaturk and adventure park Vialand offer an avowedly entertainment-oriented approach to the past. In Istanbul’s Eyup district (the historic entertainment district during Ottoman times), an Ottoman theme park allows visitors to relive the conquest of Constantinople in the form of a “Fatih (Conquerer) Dark Ride.” In the “History Zone”—a replica of an Ottoman street—visitors are invited to participate in Ottoman life. Animating certain aspects of everyday life and inviting visitors to masquerade in an entertainment setting exemplify ways of consuming, rather than critically engaging with the past. This relatively new phenomenon of reenacting Ottoman history invokes a lineage that the republican reformers of early Turkey tried to suppress by substituting the Ottoman past with a Westernized national narrative. Arguably, neo-Ottoman reenactment feeds a popular mania for glorious roots in a long-lost empire. Overcoming the ambivalence that early reformers felt at the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, a growing number of venues in the new millennium disseminate an idealized view of Ottoman achievements.

Figure 29.1 Panorama 1453, History Museum, Istanbul. Source: DGPHTD, ImageBroker, Alamy.

Figure 29.2 Panorama 1453, History Museum, Istanbul. Source: KGE1H6, Zhanna Tretiakova, Alamy.

The simulation of the Conquest in a panoramic setting is designed to conjure up the splendor of the Ottoman past as a spectacle and invokes emotions such as nostalgia, pride, and religious belonging. Since Panaroma 1453 is not constructed as a cylinder but has a dome, the experience falls between “visiting a mosque and viewing a motion picture” (Tureli, 2018, p. 30) (Figures 29.1 and 29.2). Reenactment, it turns out, is an effective strategy to establish a neo-Ottomanist view of history devoid of any critical engagement with the imperial past. It precludes the possibility of employing reenactment as a vehicle for rigorous historical inquiry (Agnew, 2004, p. 335) because it heightens the feeling of glory and fosters identification with the Ottoman conquerors and rulers by intensifying a feeling of religious belonging. The analysis of the kinds of imitation that underscores reenactment—be it imitation, assimilation, mimicry, animation, masquerade, simulacrum, or simulation—enables the interpreter to expose the temporal and ideological structures materialized in a range of venues. This is not to say that all reenactments are instruments of either clearly identified ideological approaches or tools of critical inquiry. Ambiguous, paradoxical, as well as investigative approaches toward the past can coexist in a single reenactment setting while employing a variety of mimetic practices. As an analytical lens, however, mimesis helps reveal the ways in which the relationship to the past is established in a reenactment setting.

29 MIMESIS

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