FOR 1867:  History and Theory of Mimetic Practices

• Subject Area: Humanities ; Social and Behavioural Sciences
• Term: from 2013 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 213948042

In the reporting period the Research Group (RG) and its seven projects studied mimetic regimes as productive forces in philosophical discourse, art history, film, TV series, digital media, popular media practices, colonial history, literary history, economics, and architecture. In doing so, the RG's point of departure was to transgress an aesthetic and epistemic concept of mimesis, which still dominates philosophy and literary studies and to question the historico-philosophical self-concept of modernity as a basically a-mimetic cultural and social formation.It turned out that within mimetic regimes invention and imitation only rarely oppose each other; rather innovation, by virtue of the forces that prompt medial transfer, transmission and assimilation, is oftentimes inherent in processes of imitation. All projects came to the conclusion that in many cases the effectiveness of mimetic figuration does not aim at meaning production but at a transformation of being itself, which concerns features by which subject and object, master and servant, Europeans and Non-Europeans, sign and thing distinguish themselves. Finally, it turned out that the concept of mimetic regimes itself has to be considered in a recursive way, since different mimetic practices turn mimetic themselves in certain empirical situations and perform transformational compulsions onto each other (mimesis^2).Based on the assumption that media re-mediate and transform participative, affective and viral modes of mimesis, the aim of the RG in its second funding period is to bring into the open the transformation-ontological modes of figuration which inhere the concept of mimesis as a cultural technique. Against this backdrop the former key aspects embodiment, alterity and identity, and excessiveness will be converted into the new key aspects of (1) mimetic existences, (2) mimetic economies and (3) mimetic artifacts.By the term mimetic existences we express that mimesis is not only a practice to master alterity but has to be conceived of as a mode of existence, a concept which will be unfolded systematically and historically with reference to the history of the concept of the milieu. Mimetic economies is the title of the project to engross the examination of recursions between the imitated and its imitation in artistic, social, and economic contexts with regard to value generating circulations in economical and literary productions. The object oriented approaches of the RG will be developed further under the headline of mimetic artifacts, especially with reference to historicizing design practices in architecture, the transformational action potential of the diorama, and to hybrid and quasi-objects, the mimesis of which presents itself as social and political forces of attachment.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• International Connection: Switzerland

Projects

• Coordination project (Applicant Siegert, Bernhard )
• Embedding, Unfolding, Attaching. Mimesis of the Hybrid Object. (Applicants Lutz, Helga ;  Siegert, Bernhard )
• Mimesis of the Space-Image: The Diorama as serial and immersive Mimesis (Applicants Engell, Lorenz ;  Voss, Christiane )
• Mimesis tropical (Applicant Gregory, Stephan )
• Mimetic Modes of Existence (Applicants Balke, Friedrich ;  Muhle, Maria )
• Mimetic Practices in Recent European Architecture. (Applicants Meier, Hans-Rudolf ;  Ruhl, Carsten )
• Productive Imitations: Forms of Knowledge and Technologies of Mimetic Economies (Applicant Dommann, Monika )

• Partner Organisation: Schweizerischer Nationalfonds (SNF)
• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Bernhard Siegert