Mimesis as dance, music and performance (Aristotle)

Right at the beginning of his book, Sennett attests to Trump being a “skilled performer”⁶¹ . But what exactly does it mean to be a “performer”—a performer, actor, Latin actōr or mīmus, Greek ὑποκριτής [hypokritēs] or μῖμος [mîmos]?⁶² Here, too, it is worth looking back to tradition, namely Plato’s and Aristotle’s theories of mimesis. A glance at the past reveals that Plato and Aristotle already contain the critical evaluations and misunderstandings of language that lie behind the criticism of Trump’s language discussed above.

As I have argued, language is not the only medium in which one can express oneself politically or poetically. Like Trump on October 15, 2024, you can “make music”—“He was a musician prevented from making music” (Wolff)⁶³ — and dance. Poetry, music and dance: these are precisely the three artistic ‘techniques’ ‘τέχναις’ [téchnais] to ‘τέχνη’ [téchnē]: art, skill, artistry⁶⁴ ) that Aristotle speaks of at the beginning of his “Poetics” (1447a).⁶⁵ He subsumes all three ‘techniques’ or ‘arts’—poetry, music and dance—under the terms ‘μίμησις’ [mímēsis] or ‘μιμέομαι’ [miméomai], which have long been translated as ‘mimicry’, ‘emulation’, ‘imitation’ or ‘aping’.⁶⁶ Hermann Koller and Jürgen Petersen have extensively criticized this translation tradition and found that the German verb ‘darstellen’ is almost always the better translation. In a passage from Aristophanes, Koller even once translates “μιμήσομαι” [mimḗsomai] as “to perform”, i.e. entirely in the sense of Sennett’s concept of the performer, by explicitly “free[ing] himself from dictionary knowledge”.⁶⁷

This is remarkable, and it is important to understand why. In this concept of mimesis—if you like: as music, dance, performance—, a truth or a meaning ‘behind’ or ‘under’ the performance plays no role at all, or more precisely: no role yet.

Notes

1. ⁶¹Sennett, The Performer, p. xi.
2. ⁶²“The mimus (μῖμος) was an imitative performance or performer.” “mime”, in: The Oxford Classical Dictionary, Oxford 4/2012, www.oxfordreference.com
   (6/6/2025).
3. ⁶³Wolff, All or Nothing, p. 240.
4. ⁶⁴Cf. ‘τέχνη’, in: Griechisch-deutsches Schulwörterbuch, p. 782; see also ‘τέχνη’, in: Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott-Jones), www.perseus.tufts.edu, Greek Word Study Tool (6/6/2025).
5. ⁶⁵Cf. Aristotle: Poetics. Greek/German. Translated and edited by Manfred Fuhrmann, Stuttgart 1996, pp. 4 and 5 (1447a).
6. ⁶⁶This is also the case in the Greek-German School Dictionary, p. 519. Liddell-Scott-Jones, on the other hand, translates ‘μιμέομαι’ as “imitate, represent, portray”; Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott-Jones), www.perseus.tufts.edu, Greek Word Study Tool (6/6/2025).
7. ⁶⁷Cf. Hermann Koller: Mimesis in der Antike. Nachahmung, Darstellung, Ausdruck, Bern 1954, pp. 11-21; Jürgen H. Petersen: Mimesis–Imitatio–Nachahmung. Eine Geschichte der europäischen Poetik, München 2000, pp. 11-17 (“Introduction: Martin Opitz und die Nachahmungsproblematik”). On the history of the word, Koller writes on p. 13: “The word μίμησις [mímēsis] and its derivatives are attested peculiarly late. Homer, Hesiod, the Aeolian poets do not yet know it. [...] The earliest attestation of μιμεῖσθαι [mimeîsthai] comes from the Delian hymn, and it is in connection with the dance, from a fragment of Pindar (dance) and from Aeschylus (μῖμος [mîmos] = actor, actor of a bacchanalian cult).” Koller rejects the idea of ‘imitating’ “realistic dances” (p. 13); cf. on exceptions to Koller’s rule of mimesis “always: bring to representation; never ‘imitate’!” (p. 66) ibid., p. 108.—The following Koller quotation on “Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusen 850ff.” ibid., pp. 11f.