On Mimesis (and Truth) in Performance

Spring 2009 21 On Mimesis (and Truth) in Performance Jon Erickson In the wake of poststructuralism and deconstruction, the notion of truth and its representation has come in for some hard times in the academic establishment. Due to a perception of Nietzsche as having reduced truth to an arbitrary metaphoric order imposed by human beings on the chaos of reality, as well as a reading of Saussure in which the relation between sign and referent is claimed to be arbitrary, the idea of referential truth becomes nothing but the specific efficacies of competing systems of discursive power.1 This way of thinking doesn’t recognize its own performative contradiction: due to its conclusion of truth as arbitrary, it cannot claim for itself a truer depiction of what is than what it hopes to replace. Both the analytical and continental traditions of philosophy involve engagements with how language represents reality. The major difference is that a large part of the continental tradition has more or less made up its mind in favor of the thesis I’ve just described, made more semantically fluid and uncertain by Derrida and materially imposed upon bodies by Foucault; this is taken as axiomatic by anyone working within its theoretical boundaries. Analytical philosophy, from Frege and Russell to Wittgenstein to Alfred Tarski and Donald Davidson, does not share this axiomatic confidence, and continues to ponder how truth works, how reference functions, how we make sense to one another and share meaning.2 Obviously there is an intimate relation between questions of truth and questions of representation, if only in the everyday sense of knowing what to believe when we hear, see, or read something, especially if it is information we need to act upon. But the question becomes more complex when we deal with literary fictions or theatrical performances; at that point the truth we seek or see there is not simply a matter of direct reference. And because what we read or see is a form of makebelieve , willingly entered into if understood as theatre, unknowingly if it is a confidence game, it elicits a level of concern about trusting or mistrusting what we are expected to accept as true in a general sense.3 In theories of the theatre, mimesis or imitation has always been a vexed issue because in the past the enemies of theatre confused the self-conscious use of mimetic illusion or make-believe with lying about reality (hence Sidney’s response about the poet never affirming, therefore never lying). But within the world of the play, theatre artists themselves have shown how easy it is for some to use theatrical means to convey a false picture about what is the case–for Shakespeare the words “art” Jon Erickson is Associate Professor of English at Ohio State University. 22 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism and “seeming” are almost always suspicious signs of pernicious plotting–but also understanding that the same means can be used as tricks to reveal the falsehood of imposture (e.g., Hamlet and Measure for Measure). In more recent times, Brechtian metatheatre has been used as an anti-theatrical weapon against the theatrical illusion of naturalism, intending to reveal the uncritical workings of ideology. In a more aesthetic light, the anti-theatrical aspect of high modernist theatre is explored by Martin Puchner in Stage Fright: “Modernist drama and theater is a Platonist theater, by which I mean not a theater of abstract ideas but a theater infused with types of anti-theatricality first developed in Plato’s closet dramas.”4 Puchner’s reference to Plato’s “closet dramas” gives us a clue as to the real issue: Plato is understood by many to be anti-mimetic, but the irony is that his “closet dramas,” his dialogues, are themselves mimetic productions, with Socrates as the main character.5 In this essay I argue that the notion of mimesis does not have to be automatically consigned to a Platonic idealism or theory of forms, and that Plato–or Socrates, rather–in the Republic is by no means consistently anti-mimetic. It is not simply mimesis in itself that troubles Socrates (though he notes its degraded state with regard to...